NATO's expansionism
idea that the cold war ended with the break up of the Soviet Union is incorrect. The cold war was over ideologically and practically at least two years before the Soviet Union broke up. And second, the idea that we were winners and losers in the cold war that somehow the United States and the West won and Russia lost is quite incorrect. We negotiated an end to the cold war to the interests of both countries and everybody else for that matter. and that was a negotiated in without victors. That in occurred because Gorbachev actually abandoned what had been the ideology that had caused the cold war in the first place, and that is the communist ideology which was totally incompatible with our political system and ways of life in the west. The idea was that there was going to be a worldwide proletarian revolution which would bring about a society that first was communist but would become first was socialist but would become communist and that the state would actually wither away. Of course, what happened in the Soviet Union and the other communist countries was that the state took control of everything and instead of what they called in a socialist system it was for all practical purposes a state of a condition of state monopoly capitalism and but that was being abandoned. Now at the same time of course Gorbachev was trying to bring the Soviet Union into you might say the European system. And I remember that when we were negotiating on such issues as German unification he would say at times by the way we assured him that if he allowed Germany to unite on the terms that West Germany had set that there would be no expansion of NATO to the east. Even earlier when President Bush and Gorbachev met in Malta and announced the end of the Cold War officially, one of the conditions there was that the Soviet Union would not use force in Eastern Europe to preserve the system there and the United States would not take advantage of that. And that was announced and in writing. As a matter of fact, that commitment President Bush reiterated in a letter to Gorbachev that I delivered when we got back from that meeting. So the idea that the cold war was a defeat for the Soviet Union or that the Soviet Union broke up because of the pressure of the Western Alliance are simply incorrect. The Soviet Union broke up because of internal pressures and probably would not have broken up if the cold war had been continued.
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not only did I testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that would be eventually a catastrophe if we started expanding NATO and continued it. and I was joined in a statement by I think more than 30 of the senior people who negotiated the end of the cold war. Now the reason we said that was that the NATO had been conceived as a defensive alliance in order to make sure that the Soviet Union could not successfully invade uh Western Europe. There was a great fear that that was their intent. And indeed, if you thought of the Soviet Union and its then East European allies, they had military forces that in quantity were superior to those in the west. I might say that later when all the documents have become available, it is clear that the Soviet Union never intended to invade the West. Their policy was that if the West started a war, they would respond and try to push to the English Channel. But that was planned as them as a response to what they would have considered aggression from the West. But what I'm trying to say now is that the idea of bringing more countries into NATO would turn it from a defensive alliance to an offensive alliance if these forces were used particularly outside Europe.
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whether or not there was an agreement and certainly we were given asurances that we wouldn't expand NATO, but whether or not that is true it was a huge mistake to start expanding NATO. Another point I would make is that it was not so much uh the sort of article five of the NATO of the NATO treaty that worried the Russians. I know the Russian ambassador to Washington whom I had dealt with many times when he was deputy foreign minister at the Soviet Union. He told me sort of in the mid 90s, he said look you know we don't worry about your your article five we're not going to obviously attack these countries or any others. What we worry about is bases. If you if you then put your basis in it, that is going to be very worrisome to us. And in fact, in the 2+4 agreement, though there was no mention of NATO expansion, there was a provision that the territory of the former East Germany would not be used to base any foreign troops or any nuclear weapons.
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NATO in the '90s was used in an offensive way against Serbia. All but a declared war was declared against Serbia which had not attacked any NATO member. In fact, we were extending NATO protection to others as Yugoslavia began to break up. That was one of the first things that created, I would say, extreme tensions in between the United States and then Russia.
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one of the conditions for recognizing the independence of Ukraine and others was that they relinquished their nuclear weapons. I know this has become an issue later and the most of these by the way were scheduled to be eliminated under arms control treaties we had with the Soviet Union. And as a condition of recognizing their independence, they had to agree to abide by these agreements. In other words, those weapons that were in Ukraine, first of all, were never under the of the control of Ukraine politically and practically, the codes and so on were in Moscow and passed on to Gorbachev to Jeltzin.
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I was in Moscow in 1961 during what we call the Cuban missile crisis. And let's recall what that was all about. The United States had attempted to invade Cuba unsuccessfully and Cuba had asked the Soviet Union to supply nuclear weapons. Now it was under traditional international law. That was not a violation of international law particularly since the United States had nuclear weapons poised in Turkey and also in Italy that could reach the Soviet Union. This was before neither of us had intercontinental missiles. These were intermediate range of course. President Kennedy considered this totally unacceptable and ordered a quarantine he called it, of Cuba and we came very close to a nuclear exchange. I was sitting in Moscow then and translating some of Khrushchev's comments, but finally Khrushchev backed down, agreed to take those weapons out. And in effect Kennedy declared victory, although he had agreed that we would remove the missiles in Turkey, but that could not be published. In other words, he forced Khrushchev to make it look as if he had backed down when in in fact there was a deal. But having seen that, having been through that, it was very clear to me that trying to influence the internal politics of Ukraine against the wishes of Russia was not a good idea to put it mildly. And in fact when the United States insistence that NATO declare that someday Ukraine and Georgia would be members. This was in 2008. It was clear to me that this was going to create very great difficulties and so at that time poll showed that two thirds of Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO. This country was increasingly divided and increasingly the politics were pushed by those in western Ukraine, the areas that traditionally had never been part of Russia but had been in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and then in Poland. And I might say that the current borders of Ukraine, which the current government is trying to recover were borders created by Hitler and Stalin. So any effect, the Ukrainians and the West Europeans who are supporting this are ironically trying to enforce something created by Hitler and Stalin.
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one of the great dangers now when people talk about needing regime change in Russia is that if President Putin is removed by force, you are probably going to get something even worse because there are forces there that are already arguing that Russia has to use its nuclear forces to defend itself. And when the west Europeans start sending weapons to Ukraine that they use to attack Russia, I think already former President Medvedev has said that, you know, we will consider any of the factors that make these weapons legitimate targets.
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I'm not a Catholic, but right now I do think that our American Pope, the first is telling the world something it needs to hear.
