Over the years, people have tried to put the nations of Europe and of the Alliance into different categories: The “free world” versus “those behind the Iron Curtain”; “North” versus “South”; “East” versus “West”; and I am told that some have even spoken in terms of “old” Europe versus “new.”
All of these characterizations belong to the past. The distinction I would draw is a very practical one—a “realist’s” view perhaps: it is between Alliance members who do all they can to fulfill collective commitments, and those who do not. NATO is not a “paper membership” or a “social club” or a “talk shop.” It is a military alliance—one with very serious real world obligations.
The reaction in Europe and at home to my speech was uniformly positive. I received a note from Sir Charles Powell, who had been Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s national security adviser, that captured the general view. I had “struck absolutely the right note of wicked humor in swatting Putin and put him in his place,” he wrote.
When I reported to the president my take on the Munich conference, I shared with him my belief that from 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, had badly underestimated the magnitude of Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War and then in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which amounted to the end of the centuries-old Russian Empire. The arrogance, after the collapse, of American government officials, academicians, businessmen, and politicians in telling the Russians how to conduct their domestic and international affairs (not to mention the internal psychological impact of their precipitous fall from superpower status) had led to deep and long-term resentment and bitterness.
What I didn’t tell the president was that I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush 41 left office in 1993. Getting Gorbachev to acquiesce to a unified Germany as a member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake. Including the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary quickly was the right thing to do, but I believe the process should then have slowed. U.S. agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation (especially since we virtually never deployed the 5,000 troops to either country). The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (limiting the number and location of Russian and NATO nonnuclear military forces in Europe) was understandable. It had been negotiated when Russia was weak, and the provisions limited Russia’s freedom to move troops from place to place in its own territory. As I later told Putin directly, I would not stand for restrictions on my ability to redeploy troops from Texas to California.
Throughout my career, as I said, I had been characterized as a hard-liner on the Soviet Union. Guilty as charged. Many of the problems between post-Soviet Russia and the United States grew out of Russian leaders’ efforts to seek domestic political advantage by portraying the United States, NATO, and the West more broadly as a continuing threat to Russia; bullying their neighbors, particularly those that had once been part of the Soviet Union; using oil and gas supplies as a means of politically pressuring and extorting money from the nations on their periphery and in Europe; crudely abusing human and political rights at home; and continuing to support a number of thuggish regimes around the world. But during the Cold War, to avoid military conflict between us, we had to take Soviet interests into account, maneuvering carefully wherever those interests were affected. When Russia was weak in the 1990s and beyond, we did not take Russian interests seriously. We did a poor job of seeing the world from their point of view, and of managing the relationship for the long term. All that said, I was now President Bush’s secretary of defense, and I dutifully supported the effort to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO (with few pangs of conscience because by 2007 it was clear the French and Germans would not allow it). On missile defense, however, I did look for ways to accommodate Russian interests and persuade them to become partners. Still, I was always clear that we would move ahead, with or without them.
The relationship between the United States and Russia during my time as secretary under George W. Bush would be dominated by the president’s decision to emplace missile defenses against Iran in eastern Europe, U.S. efforts to expand NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine, and Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Our commitment to missile defenses in Europe would also dominate U.S.-Russian relations during Obama’s first term.
Russian opposition to the United States developing missile defense capabilities has deep roots. During the first strategic arms limitation talks under President Nixon, the Soviets ultimately sought to prohibit only the development and deployment of missile defenses, which they believed the United States could build and they couldn’t—thus giving us a significant advantage in the strategic nuclear relationship. The result was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed in 1972, along with an agreement limiting offensive strategic weapons essentially to the programs both countries already had planned. President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in 1983 and calling for a nationwide missile defense using very sophisticated technology, both angered and, I believe, terrified the Soviets. As I joked at the time, there appeared to be only two people on the planet who actually thought SDI would work—Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets were under enormous economic pressure by that time and knew they could not compete with such a system.
President Bush’s 2002 abrogation of the 1972 ABM treaty (thereby allowing the United States to develop any kind of missile defenses it wanted), and our subsequent development of ground-based interceptors and radars based in Alaska and California, our efforts to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and our support for the independence of Kosovo (which the Russians strongly opposed), taken together with Russian opposition to the United States in Iraq and elsewhere, all had brought the bilateral relationship to the low point of Putin’s February 2007 tirade in Munich. The personal relationship between Bush and Putin, however, remained civil.
I made a difficult situation with Russia worse by signing off—the day after I was sworn in as secretary in December 2006—on a recommendation to the president that the United States locate ten long-range missile defense interceptors in Poland and an associated radar installation in the Czech Republic. Construction would, we hoped, begin in the second half of 2008. The system would provide significant protection from Iranian missiles for the United States and many of our European allies, although I acknowledged that the negotiations could be difficult: Poland would want significantly greater military assistance, and the makeup of the Czech government was uncertain. The Russians saw the proposed deployments as putting their nuclear deterrent at risk and as a further step in the “encirclement” of their country. The president approved my recommendation a few weeks later.
I took up the invitation to visit Russia and landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on a Monday morning in April. My first meeting was with the new Russian minister of defense, Anatoly Serdyukov, who had been in the furniture business, had run the Russian tax service, and was personally and politically well connected. The meeting was at the Russian Ministry of Defense, a massive building with no distinguishing features, characteristic of Soviet architecture. The conference room was also nondescript. Serdyukov knew little about defense matters and had been brought in to reform the Russian military—a daunting, even dangerous, proposition. In our meetings, he was tightly scripted and chaperoned by the chief of the Russian general staff, General Yuri Baluyevskiy. Our meeting, like the others I would have in Moscow, focused almost entirely on missile defense.