2/27/2023 0 Comments Abridge too far![]() In a meeting the day after Baker’s, Kohl asked Gorbachev if he agreed “that the Germans themselves must now decide” all questions about unification. Remarkably, though, Gorbachev gave up the one strong card in his otherwise meager hand. Bush, German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and other Western leaders worried about what they might have to concede in order to win his consent to keep a unified Germany in NATO and to get the Soviet troops and weapons out. The Soviet Union-which at this point hadn’t yet dissolved-had thousands of troops and hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons in the eastern part of Germany, which gave Gorbachev leverage to undermine any effort to establish a new order in the heart of Europe. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” Baker never mentioned “not one inch” again.īut the dilemma couldn’t be sidestepped so easily. ![]() “To hell with that!” President Bush exclaimed, dismissing the notion of letting the Soviets have a say on the fate of the new German state. But upon returning to Washington, Baker was upbraided. Gorbachev said that, put that way, he preferred the latter Baker said he did too. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? He asked, according to a transcript of the meeting: ![]() Baker replied that a unified neutral Germany might not be in anyone’s interest, that it might even build its own nuclear arsenal. It might be better, Gorbachev said, to keep the new Germany neutral. For the reunified German state to be a part of NATO would rub defeat a bit too harshly in the Russians’ faces. West Germany had been a member of NATO since 1955 East Germany was a member of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact. The Soviet leader had no illusions that he could prevent the unification of East and West Germany, but he wanted assurances that the new German state would not be part of NATO, the US-led military alliance that was created in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union. Bush’s secretary of state, met with Mikhail Gorbachev. On February 9, 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall fell but before the Soviet Union imploded, James Baker, President George H.W. “They cheated us-vehemently, blatantly.”īut as Sarotte documents, the US made no such promise. “‘Not an inch to the east,’ we were told in the 1990s,” Putin said in a December 2021 speech. ![]() Sarotte, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins, takes her title from Putin’s frequent references to a “promise,” allegedly made by American leaders at the end of the cold war, not to expand NATO into the power vacuums of Central and Eastern Europe. Sarotte’s highly detailed, thoroughly researched, and briskly written chronicle of NATO’s expansion in the first decade after the end of the cold war, leaves the impression that Putin has a case for resenting how the United States and its allies took in the western parts of his country’s erstwhile empire-though not as good a case as he seems to believe. In a sense, it was a backlash waiting to happen. The scope and brutality of his invasion has been shocking yet to many of those old enough to remember the end of the cold war-when the USSR lay supine and a series of American presidents set out to expand (or as their aides put it, in an attempt to avoid accusations of neo-imperialism, “enlarge”) the NATO military alliance to include nearly every nation in Central and Eastern Europe that had been a vassal of the Kremlin for the previous half-century-the attack, at least initially, came as little surprise. ![]() Now suddenly Vladimir Putin, keen to prove Russia’s status as a great power, was hell-bent on reconquering the second-largest republic of the former Soviet Union. The Quad-the alliance of the US, Japan, India, and Australia, designed to contain Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions-was the main focus of Washington’s foreign policy. The last thing Joe Biden must have expected upon fulfilling his dream of becoming president in January 2021 was that a year later he would face a Russian invasion of Ukraine and the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. ![]()
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