As Russian and US officials sit at a negotiating table in Geneva on Monday to discuss another war in Europe, a US diplomat will be present invisibly, although he will not be in the negotiating room, according to The New York Times.
It has been nearly 30 years since James Baker resigned as US Secretary of State. But the current confrontation over Ukraine stems in part from a long-running dispute that he made promises to Moscow at the end of the Cold War and that the United States is not keeping them.
President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials say that when he was President George W. Bush's chief diplomat, Baker ruled out NATO's eastward expansion. According to the Russians, the West has not kept its promise, and this is the real reason for the crisis that has engulfed Europe and during which Putin is urging the Alliance to refuse to accept Ukraine into its ranks and says an invasion is inevitable.
However, documents show that this is a very selective approach to what happened, which has been used for many years as an excuse for Russian aggression. Yes, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was indeed a discussion between Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about limiting NATO's jurisdiction in the event of a reunification of East and West Germany. But no one included these provisions in the treaty signed by Americans, Europeans and Russians.
"Ultimately, this is a ridiculous argument," Baker said in an interview in 2014, months after Russia's conquest of Crimea and the beginning of its intervention in eastern Ukraine. "Indeed, in the early stages of the negotiations, I said 'what if,' and then Gorbachev himself supported the decision to expand that border to include the German Democratic Republic in NATO." Baker then asked: to rely on what I said a month before? It's pointless."
Putin accuses the United States of violating an agreement that does not exist. At the same time, Russia is violating the agreement it reached on Ukraine. In 1994, when the Soviet Union no longer existed, Russia, along with the United States and Britain, signed the Budapest Memorandum, according to which independent Ukraine renounced 1,900 nuclear warheads and in return received a promise from Moscow to "respect independence, sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine. "and" to refrain from using and threatening to use force "against it.
Russia trampled on Ukraine's sovereignty when it annexed Crimea and began supporting its puppet forces in the war against the Ukrainian government in the east. And now he is threatening to use force again, concentrating a group of 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border and seeking assurances that Ukraine will not join NATO.
This controversy began in the later years of the Cold War, when East and West were discussing a mechanism that Bush would call a new world order. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, led to the beginning of negotiations for the reunification of Germany, which was divided after World War II.
The Bush administration was determined to reunite a reunited Germany in the North Atlantic Alliance, but Western officials tried to reassure the Soviets, who were concerned about their own security concerns. On January 31, 1990, the then West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher declared that there would be no "expansion of NATO territory to the east or, in other words, approaching the borders of the Soviet Union."
He spoke about whether NATO troops would be stationed in what was then East Germany, but not about whether other countries would join the alliance. However, Baker used Genscher's wording during a visit to Moscow on February 9.
According to a declassified record of the talks, as a reward for agreeing to reunify Germany, Baker offered "iron guarantees that NATO's jurisdiction and troops would not move east."
"NATO's jurisdiction and NATO forces will not advance one inch to the east," Baker told Gorbachev during the talks, repeating the statement three times.
And in Washington, National Security Council officials were seriously concerned. The word "jurisdiction" may mean that NATO's doctrine of collective defense applies only to part of German territory, and this limits German sovereignty. It is one thing to agree not to transfer troops east immediately, it is quite another to accept Germany as a whole into NATO. "The National Security Council was quick to contact him and said that this wording could be misinterpreted," said Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's adviser to the Soviet Union and secretary of state to Bush Jr..
Baker understood this and removed the word "jurisdiction" from all subsequent discussions. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl also rejected Genscher's wording.
"I was a little hasty with that, but they changed it, and he knew they had changed it," Baker told Gorbachev. - In all the following months, he never raised the issue of extending NATO's jurisdiction to the east. And then he signed documents that show that NATO has indeed expanded its jurisdiction.
When Baker returned to Moscow in May, he offered nine guarantees, including allowing Soviet troops to remain in East Germany for a transitional period and not having NATO troops there until the Soviet withdrawal. This can hardly be called a promise not to expand NATO to the east. But Baker told the Soviets that was the maximum the United States could agree to.
Over time, Gorbachev agreed. Under the final agreement on German reunification in 1990, foreign troops were banned from stationed in East Germany, but German troops could be transferred there after the withdrawal of the Soviet army in 1994. There was nothing more in that treaty. for NATO enlargement.
"Look now. At that moment, no one knew that the Soviet Union would fall apart," Rice recalls. "Nobody knew that the Warsaw Pact would fall apart. It was about German reunification. NATO enlargement in 1990-1991. "It just wasn't on the agenda."
Such an important witness as Gorbachev agrees. "The issue of 'NATO enlargement' has not been discussed at all, it was not raised in those years," he said seven years after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. At the time, the issue was foreign troops in East Germany. According to Gorbachev, Baker's statement that "NATO will not move an inch to the east" must be understood in this context: "Everything that could and should have been done to ensure this political commitment was done. And observed.
But at the same time, Gorbachev said NATO enlargement was an unnecessary and provocative step. "This was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and promises made to us in 1990," he said.
It so happened that one of the people who proposed a different approach was Baker. In 1993, when NATO was considering the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Baker in The Los Angeles Times proposed the inclusion of Russia itself in NATO.
The intention of such a statement was to bring about democratic change in Russia before accession, and also to make it clear that it is not an enemy. "As far as our relations with Russia are concerned, this will facilitate reforms and will be a guarantee for us that we will not return to authoritarianism and expansionism," Baker wrote. But that did not happen.
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