The Original Sin of Post-Cold War Western Foreign Policy

by Philippe Lemoine

This is a very detailed and extensive analysis of explicit and implicit commitments voiced or written during and after the reunification of Germany. Lemoine summarises:

– Did the US and its allies promise the Soviet Union that there would be no NATO expansion at the end of the Cold War?

– Most scholars have sided against Russia in arguing that no such pledge had been made during the negotiations on German reunification and more generally that the West didn’t have any obligation not to expand NATO as a result of the commitments made at the end of the Cold War.

– Most influential of these is probably a paper by Mark Kramer published in 2009, where he argued that the idea that Western officials had pledged not to expand NATO if the Soviet Union agreed to allow reunified Germany to stay in NATO was a “myth”.

– Lemoine says that Kramer often misinterpreted the available evidence, and in some cases even distorted it: “after quoting the exact same part of the transcript as Zelikow and Rice (without the next sentence that clarified the scope of his assurance that NATO would not expand “towards the East”), he [Kramer] added a gloss on that comment that completely changed the meaning of what Genscher had actually said”.

– Overall, Lemoine argues that although they often overstate it, the Russians nevertheless have a strong case for a weak version of their claim, but that it’s not for the case defenders of their position typically make. Conversely, critics of the Russian position are right that US and West German officials were only talking about the GDR (with one important exception about which they misrepresent the evidence), but it’s not for the reasons they claim.

– Gorbachev consented to German reunification in NATO, but he also accepted because he was assured repeatedly by Western officials that it would be followed by the creation of an inclusive post-Cold War European security order. NATO expansion, which instead created a NATO-centric security architecture that excluded Moscow, was a violation of those assurances.

– The most significant aspect of this controversy, however, is not so much whether the US and its allies violated a pledge not to expand NATO made at the time, but the decision by the Bush administration to preserve NATO’s primacy in the post-Cold War era instead of pursuing a pan-European security agenda.

– Lemoine concludes by reflecting on the road not taken at the end of the Cold War (pursuing a pan-European security agenda) and argues that the Bush administration’s decision not to follow it, which was made for both good and bad reasons, made the subsequent deterioration of relations between Russia and the West and a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, while by no means inevitable, much more likely.

He quotes US State Secretary Baker’s prescient statement:

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This point was made very clearly by none other than Baker a decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union:

One sad lesson of the twentieth century is that refusing to form alliances with defeated adversaries is more dangerous than forming such alliances. The Treaty of Versailles solved the “German problem” in exactly the wrong way— by sealing the defeat with territorial and economic retribution. This resolution certainly demoralized Germany in the immediate aftermath of war, but the resulting grievances fueled something unimaginably worse and more dangerous. One hesitates to stretch historical analogies too far, but little imagination is required to see something similar happening in Russia. The end of the Cold War was certainly not settled by anything like Versailles, but from Russia’s perspective, the results have been much the same—a humiliating loss of territory, prestige, and power. Russia’s economic and political problems have stemmed largely from Russia’s own failure to implement the necessary reforms to encourage the creation of a market economy, but it would not be difficult—indeed, it has not been difficult—for Russian demagogues to blame the West for the troubles ordinary Russian men and women have experienced during the past decade. Couple all these developments with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s doorstep and the use of NATO as an offensive (as opposed to defensive) alliance to bomb Russian allies, and you have a recipe for disaster. By continuing to treat Russia like a potential adversary, we may encourage it to become our enemy, the very thing we fear. The best way to find an enemy is to look for one, and I worry that that is what we are doing when we try to isolate Russia. The same principle would apply, of course, if we were to embark on a policy to try to isolate China.

Philippe Lemoine is a research fellow at Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI).

Lemoine is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Cornell University. He has a Science Po MA in international relations and a Panthéon-Sorbonne MA in philosophy.

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