Russian diplomats later accused the United States of breaking a promise, but the fact remains that no one ever unequivocally promised Moscow that NATO would not start taking new members.
The newly independent Eastern European countries demanded NATO membership loudly and emotionally, openly referring to Russia as a threat. In April 1993, the presidents of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary approached President Clinton in person to ask for admission. Their strongest advocate in NATO was German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who argued that NATO could not tell Eastern Europeans they were not welcome “after what they did to survive communism.” But in a private conversation with President Clinton’s adviser Strobe Talbott in January 1997, Kohl admitted that for Germany NATO expansion was “not just a moral issue,” and that it was in Germany’s “self-interest to have this development now and not in the future.” According to Talbott, Kohl’s reasoning amounted to blackmaiclass="underline" as long as Germany sat on the frontier between East and West, he allegedly said, it would be tempted to relapse into extreme nationalism, but if the European Union expanded eastward, making Germany the middle of Europe, not its fringe, all German insecurities would be gone. But the E.U., Kohl stressed, could not expand unless NATO led the way.[14]
If Talbott’s rendering is correct, then in buying this logic, the Clinton administration agreed to subsidize European economic dreams with U.S. military clout and American taxpayers’ money.
Among the few staunch enthusiasts of NATO enlargement was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. To promote the unpopular cause, in February 1997 she published an essay in The Economist called “Enlarging NATO: Why Bigger Is Better.” “Those who ask ‘where is the threat?’ mistake NATO’s real value,” Albright wrote. “The alliance is not a wild-west posse that we trot out only when danger appears. It is a permanent presence, designed to promote common endeavors and to prevent a threat from ever arising.” She claimed that NATO enlargement was not taking place because of a new Russian threat, yet at the same time insisted that Russia could not be allowed to “look at countries like Poland or Estonia or Ukraine as a buffer zone that separates Russia from Europe.”
Albright assured readers that “poll after poll has shown that few ordinary Russians express concern about an alliance that many of their leaders concede poses no actual military threat to Russia.” Her claim was unsubstantiated, if not outright false. “It would not be in our interest,” Albright argued, “to delay or derail enlargement in response to the claims of some Russians that this constitutes an offensive act. Doing so would only encourage the worst political tendencies in Moscow. It would send a message that confrontation with the West pays off.” The latter was a mistake in judgment: it was not appeasement, but NATO enlargement, that eventually brought about the “worst political tendencies in Moscow.”[15]
The president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, seemed to regard Clinton’s public endorsement of NATO expansion as a personal betrayal. Repeating what Russian analysts across the whole political spectrum had been saying, Yeltsin warned that “the security of all European countries depends on Russia feeling secure.” It was not necessary to add that the incorporation of Eastern Europe into NATO did not help Russia feel secure.[16]
Initially, NATO expansion was a hard sell. French president Jacques Chirac complained that it did not take into account “Russian sensitivities.” In Washington, outside Clinton’s White House almost no one liked it. The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were apoplectic. General Barry McCaffrey warned that if the United States was not careful, Americans would “get ourselves sucked into some godforsaken Eurasian quagmire” that could result in a “shooting war with Russia.”[17]
George F. Kennan, the ninety-three-year-old patriarch of U.S. foreign policy, came out of retirement to denounce the plan as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era,” in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. He predicted that NATO enlargement could be expected to “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”[18] In May 1998, after the Senate vote affirming Clinton’s NATO plan, Kennan saw the “beginning of a new cold war.” “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely,” he told Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, “and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. …Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”[19]
To another influential thinker, Samuel P. Huntington, creating a “new dividing line through Europe” looked logical, justified, and historically inevitable. The “logic of civilizations,” he argued, dictated that Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Baltic republics, Slovenia, and Croatia should join the European Union and NATO. The region thus defined by these organizations “would be coextensive with Western civilization as it has historically existed in Europe.” But he opposed extending the alliances to the territories “where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin”—including Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and, of course, Ukraine.[20]
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Boris Yeltsin and his cabinet protested but were not really in a position to argue. Post-revolutionary Russia was in the throes of deprivation: the economic collapse due to Gorbachev’s misconceived perestroika coupled with the inevitable hardship of a socialism-to-capitalism transition had resulted in an ineffectual and highly exploitative economy run by oligarchs and organized-crime dons, all but indistinguishable from one another. The price of oil was so low that it had stopped being a substantial revenue source. If Russia was to stay afloat, it needed American money, and therefore Bill Clinton’s friendship.[21]
In May 1998, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times: “There is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990s. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992—the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. …And what was America’s response? It was to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia’s borders.”[22]
15
Madeleine Albright, “Enlarging NATO: Why Bigger Is Better,”