[Peace-discuss] On NATO's moving "not one inch eastward"

[J.B. Nicholson]

NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard | National Security Archive

 From 
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early 
which starts:
> Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous
> “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet
> leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances
> about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet
> officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991,
> according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents
> posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University
> (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
> 
> The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting
> Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991,
> that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990
> were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that
> subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion
> were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
> 
> 
> The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing
> ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others
> were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the
> documents, is “led to believe.”
> 
> President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in
> December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and
> down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet
> interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at that point (or for that matter, West
> German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the collapse of East Germany or
> the speed of German unification.[2]
> 
> The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31,
> 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding
> with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S.
> Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear
> “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not
> lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule
> out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the
> Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East
> German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in
> NATO.[3]
> 
> This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final
> German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four
> foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet
> borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation
> between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl,
> Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering
> assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security
> interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two
> issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the
> two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents
> published below show clearly that it did.


[1] See Robert Gates, University of Virginia, Miller Center Oral History, George H.W. 
Bush Presidency, July 24, 2000, p. 101)

[2] See Chapter 6, “The Malta Summit 1989,” in Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas 
Blanton, The Last Superpower Summits (CEU Press, 2016), pp. 481-569. The comment 
about the Wall is on p. 538.

[3] For background, context, and consequences of the Tutzing speech, see Frank Elbe, 
“The Diplomatic Path to Germany Unity,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 
46 (Spring 2010), pp. 33-46. Elbe was Genscher’s chief of staff at the time.