WASHINGTON — When officials from Russia and the United States sit down in Geneva on Monday for high-profile discussions of another war in Europe at stake, a US diplomat will hover over the discussions who won’t even be in the room.
Nearly 30 years after James A. Baker III stepped down as secretary of state, the current clash over Ukraine revolves in part on a long-running argument over any commitments he made to Moscow in the waning days of the Cold War and whether the United States have complied with this.
President Vladimir V. Putin and other Russian officials have claimed that Mr. Baker ruled out NATO expansion into Eastern Europe when he was President George HW Bush’s top diplomat. The West’s failure to honor that deal, in this argument, is the real cause of the crisis that now grips Europe, as Mr Putin demands that NATO renounce Ukraine’s membership as the price of canceling of a possible invasion.
But the report suggests that this is a selective account of what actually happened, which has been used for years to justify Russian aggression. While there was indeed discussion in the months following the fall of the Berlin Wall between Mr Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev about limiting NATO’s jurisdiction if East and West Germany were reunited, no such provision was included. in the final treaty signed by the Americans, Europeans and Russians.
“The bottom line is that’s a ridiculous argument,” Mr Baker said in an interview in 2014, a few months after Russia took Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine. “It is true that in the early stages of the negotiations I said ‘what if’ and then Gorbachev himself supported a solution that would expand the border with the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, within NATO. Since the Russians signed that treaty, he asked, how can they trust “something I said a month or so before? It just doesn’t make sense.”
In fact, while Mr Putin is accusing the United States of breaking an agreement they never made, Russia has violated an agreement it actually made regarding Ukraine. In 1994, after the Soviet Union fell apart, Russia, along with the United States and Britain, signed an accord, the Budapest Memorandum, in which the newly independent Ukraine gave up 1,900 nuclear warheads in exchange for a pledge from Moscow “to regain independence.” and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country.
Russia trampled on Ukrainian sovereignty when it annexed Crimea and backed proxy forces to wage war against the Kiev government in eastern Ukraine. And it again threatens the use of force by rallying 100,000 Russian troops along the border to get guarantees that Ukraine will never be admitted to NATO.
The dispute dates back to the final years of the Cold War, when East and West negotiated the framework of what Bush would call the New World Order. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 sparked negotiations for the unification of the two Germanys formed after World War II.
The Bush administration was determined to entrench a combined Germany within NATO, but Western officials tried to allay the Soviets’ concerns about their security. On January 31, 1990, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister, said in a speech that there would be no “extension of NATO territory eastward, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union.” Union. ”
He talked about whether NATO troops would be stationed in territory that then constituted East Germany, not whether other countries would eventually qualify for alliance membership. Nevertheless, Mr. Baker picked up on Mr. Genscher’s wording during a visit to Moscow on February 9.
Understand Russia’s relationship with the West
Tensions between regions are mounting and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.
In urging him to agree to German unification, Mr Baker offered what he called “castle assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move east,” according to a declassified memorandum documenting the discussion.
“There would be no extension of NATO jurisdiction for NATO armed forces an inch to the east,” Mr Baker told Mr Gorbachev, returning to the formula three times during the conversation.
Back in Washington, National Security Council personnel were alarmed. The word “jurisdiction” could imply that NATO’s collective defense doctrine would only apply to part of German territory, thus limiting German sovereignty. It was one thing to agree not to send troops to the East right away, as far as US officials are concerned, but all of Germany had to be part of NATO.
“The NSC grabbed him pretty quickly and said that language could be misinterpreted,” Condoleezza Rice, then a Soviet adviser to Bush and later Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, recalled in an interview for a biography of Mr. . Baker.
Mr. Baker got the message and began to backtrack by removing the term “jurisdiction” from all future discussions. West Germany Chancellor Helmut Kohl also rejected Mr Genscher’s formulation.
“I may have been a little forward on my skis, but they changed it and he knew they were changing it,” recalled Mr. Baker turned from Mr. Gorbachev. He never again questioned whether NATO was expanding its jurisdiction eastwards in the months that followed. He then signed documents in which NATO did extend its jurisdiction.”
Understand the escalating tensions over Ukraine
When Mr. Baker returned to Moscow in May, he offered the so-called nine reassurances, including a commitment to allow Soviet troops to remain in East Germany for a transition period and not to expand NATO forces into that area until they left. This was hardly a promise not to expand the alliance eastward, but he urged the Soviets that it was the best the United States could do.
Mr Gorbachev finally agreed. The final treaty that unified Germany later in 1990 banned foreign troops from old East Germany, but German troops assigned to NATO could be deployed there once Soviet forces withdrew in late 1994. Nothing in the treaty went further than that.
“Remember, it’s not clear that the Soviet Union will collapse at this point,” recalled Dr. Rice himself. “It is not even clear that the Warsaw Pact is going to collapse. This is about the unification of Germany.” She added: “NATO enlargement just wasn’t on the table as an issue in ’90-’91.”
No less a witness agreed than Mr. Gorbachev. “The topic of ‘NATO enlargement’ was not discussed at all, nor was it brought up in those years,” he told an interviewer after the Russian intervention in Ukraine seven years ago. The problem was foreign troops in East Germany. “Baker’s statement ‘about not an inch’ was made in that context,” Mr Gorbachev said. “Everything that could and should have been done to cement that political commitment has been done. And fulfilled.”
That said, Mr Gorbachev agreed that NATO enlargement was unnecessarily provocative. “It was absolutely a violation of the spirit of the statements and commitments made to us in 1990,” he said.
Indeed, one of those who suggested a different approach was Mr. Baker. In 1993, when NATO was considering admitting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, he suggested in an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times that the alliance consider another possible member: Russia itself.
The idea would be to force democratic change before it can join, while also making it clear that Russia is not an enemy. “For our relations with Russia, it can both encourage reform and hedge our bets against a return to authoritarianism and expansionism,” wrote Mr Baker. That clearly never happened.
