Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

They did so in part at the behest of the leaders of the erstwhile Soviet satellites who jettisoned their original reticence and pleaded for consideration of what up until then would have seemed an indecently radical response – admission of their nations to the NATO alliance. Motivations in East Central Europe were sundry, but the irreducible one was to find an international anchor – the same analogy Gorbachev employed with Bush in 1990 – in an environment awash in insecurity and unpredictability.

A majority of the players in the US government, including cabinet secretaries, diplomats, military brass and mid-level political appointees, preferred at the outset to leave the composition of NATO as it was, without recruitment of new members. Changes to NATO, it was argued, would subvert other priorities and be of no real benefit to it as a military organisation. More disconcerting was the chance that enlarging NATO would empower revanchist factions within the Russian polity and weaken Yeltsin. As Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s lieutenant for Russian affairs, expressed it, ‘If NATO adopted an anti-Russian rationale for taking in new members, it could tip the balance of forces in Russian politics in exactly the direction that we… most feared.’[29] The sceptics lost the debate to a handful of pro-change policy entrepreneurs, spearheaded by Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser, and a bit later by Richard Holbrooke, then an assistant secretary of state.

The Russian response was scattershot. Not surprisingly, a sizeable subset of the Moscow establishment wanted nothing to do with an expanded NATO. The Foreign Intelligence Service spoke for them in late 1993 when it published a report warning that admission of former communist states ‘will be taken by a considerable part of Russian society as “the approach of danger to the Motherland’s borders”’.[30] Yeltsin took a middle position, maintaining that NATO’s growth might be acceptable on one condition – that Russia be included in the process, as Gorbachev had hinted at for the Soviet Union several years before. He set this idea down in a letter to Clinton on 30 September 1993, and mentioned it in public on several occasions in 1994.[31] Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, argued that enlargement was unnecessary since all states concerned, Russia included, were learning how to cooperate with NATO, and vice versa. In a December 1993 interview, he seemed to be asking what the fuss was all about: ‘We say to the [East Central Europeans]: why chomp at the bit to get into NATO when there is no need? Russia cooperates with the alliance, and you can do the same thing. But it’s not worth it to enlarge NATO quantitatively.’[32]

It was in large part in deference to Russia that NATO’s first initiative was a soft-edged Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme approved in December 1993, with eligibility for any member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council interested in working with the Alliance. For a time, PfP seemed to push NATO enlargement off the agenda. The US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, had sold PfP to Yeltsin in October as a transitional device, egalitarian in philosophy and of indeterminate duration. ‘There would be no effort to exclude anyone and there would be no step taken at this time to push anyone ahead of others.’ Yeltsin, with the tenet of indivisibility at the back of his mind, was delighted with the project and got Christopher to agree that the affiliation ‘would… be on an equal footing and there would be a partnership and not a membership’. ‘It would have been an issue for Russia’, Yeltsin went on, if the PfP rulebook ‘left us in a second-class status’, but on these terms he was eager to have Russia put in an oar. Christopher added, ‘we will in due course be looking at the question of membership [in NATO] as a longer term eventuality…. Those who wish to can pursue the idea over time, but that will come later.’[33]

Not long thereafter, however, Clinton proclaimed in Prague that the question about enlargement was ‘no longer whether… but when and how’.[34] Within months, ‘in due course’ and ‘longer-term eventuality’ had flown out the window and the NATO capitals were horse-trading over the details. After a breather so as not to jinx Yeltsin’s re-election chances in the 1996 presidential campaign, the admission process accelerated in late 1996 and invitations to the Czech Republic (having separated from Slovakia in 1993), Hungary and Poland were issued in 1997. They were received into the Alliance at a 50th-jubilee summit in April 1999.