Currently, a movie featuring Meryl Streep recreates the dramatic events surrounding the publication, in 1971, of the Pentagon Papers, in a crowing salute to so-called freedom of the American press. Alas, the takeaway is that since the publication of these damning documents about the Vietnam War, freedom of the press has become a fiction.
As Russiagate grows in complexity, nothing better illustrates this state of affairs than the disconnect between the West’s promises to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late eighties and early nineties, and the military situation that followed the demise of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev believed verbal and written assurances that NATO would not move one inch beyond the eastern border of a reunited Germany. But once the Soviet Union dissolved, NATO lost no time in moving steadily from a reunited Germany across all of Eastern Europe, positioning itself along the entire eastern border of Russia, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, while adding insult to injury by accusing Russia of not respecting the postwar European borders!
Last December, all the documents related to the negotiations that took place before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were made public, thanks to the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), however, the revelations they contained were reported neither by the New York Times nor by the Washington Post, the two American so-called papers ‘of record’. If ever anyone needed a stark example of the non-existence of a free press in the United States, this is it. Only the readers of The Nation and listeners to the podcasts of John Batchelor, learned about this momentous event. America’s foremost Russia expert, Stephen F Cohen, professor emeritus at :Princeton University, fluent in Russian and the author of numerous books and articles about the Soviet Union and Russia, revealed their existence — but not without at least one glitch.
Since 2005, Cohen’s wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel has been the editor and publisher of The Nation, a weekly progressive news magazine that has been in existence since 1865. However, when I clicked on Cohen’s Nation article on-line, a big rectangular advertisement literally moved over it, hiding it from view! When this attempt at sabotage was overcome, I was able to click on Cohen’s’ link to the official description of the documents released by the government, before it went dead.
The documents released by the National Archive at George Washington University constitute definitive proof that Gorbachev was not exaggerating about what happened in 1989 and 1990, when Europe was reuniting. Deliberately ignoring the promises made to him by the Western political leaders at the time, NATO not only moved farther than the promised ‘not one inch’ from East Germany’s eastern border. In a steady drang nach osten, it enrolled every European country in its so-called defense treaty, moving men, tanks, and missiles right up to Russia’s eastern border, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Excerpts from the document trove include correspondence and minutes of meetings between Gorbatchev and the highest-level Western interlocutors, including national office holders Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, NATO head Woerner, and others. Throughout 1990 and into 1991 they assured the Soviet President that they would respect his nation’s security interests, and even include the USSR in new European security structures, as alluded to several times in recent years by President Putin.
Once the Berlin Wall fell, totally unexpectedly, in November, 1989, the crucial question for the West was whether the Soviet Union would agree to the reunification of Germany, since that country had invaded it not once but twice since 1914. A flurry of important diplomatic discussions over 10 days in 1990 lead to a crucial February meeting in Moscow between the German Prime Minister, Helmut Kohl and Gorbachev, during which the latter assented in principle to German unification within NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east.
The newly released documents also show that prior Western conversations were focused on how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. On February 6, 1990, when German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record shows Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)
Not once, but three times, President Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in a February 9, 1990, meeting, agreeing with the Soviet leader’s statement that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” (See Document 6)
Baker reported on this meeting to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl who was to meet with the Soviet leader the next day: “ I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? Gorbachev answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real thought to all options [….]adding: ‘Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’”
Notwithstanding this clear statement, Baker added in parentheses, for Kohl’s benefit: “By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable,” suggesting that the US was not giving up entirely on its plan to ultimately extend the military organization to all of Europe.
British foreign Minister Hurd reinforced the Baker-Genscher-Kohl message in his meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow on April 11, 1990, saying that Britain clearly “recognized the importance of doing nothing to prejudice Soviet interests and dignity.” (See Document 15). The East Germans had voted overwhelmingly for the Deutschmark and rapid unification, in March elections, and Kohl had surprised almost all observers with this victory. His claim (first explained to Bush on December 3, 1989) that unification could happen faster than anyone thought possible turned out to be correct. Monetary union took place in July, while the assurances about security kept coming.
These documents are particularly interesting to me because, as I have mentioned elsewhere, on the day the Berlin Wall fell, I was returning from Lyon to Paris with the first copies of my book Une autre Europe, un autre Monde, which foresaw the reunification of Europe as well as the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when I heard the news on a taxi radio. Arriving in my apartment building behind the Sacre Coeur, I bought a bottle of champagne at the corner store and called my neighbors, a couple of German philosophers, he from the East, she from the West to drank to the stunning news. I assured them that Germany would be reunited within a year. They did not believe me, but that is exactly what happened. Germany was reunited on October 3, 1990.
At the Washington summit on May 31, 1990, Bush went out of his way to assure Gorbachev that Germany in NATO would never be directed at the USSR: “Believe me, we are not pushing Germany towards unification, and it is not us who determines the pace of this process. And of course, we have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union in any fashion. That is why we are speaking in favor of German unification in NATO without ignoring the wider context of the CSCE, (the Soviet-led Eastern European Security Organization) taking the traditional economic ties between the two German states into consideration. Such a model, in our view, corresponds to the Soviet interests as well.” (See Document 21)
The “Iron Lady” also pitched in, after the Washington summit, in her meeting with Gorbachev in London on June 8, 1990. Thatcher anticipated the moves the Americans (with her support) would take in the early July NATO conference to support Gorbachev with descriptions of the transformation of NATO towards a more political, less militarily threatening, alliance. I remember seeing the arrival of Gorbachev at London’s Heathrow Airport, greeted by an unusually warm Prime Minister. It turns out that she said to Gorbachev: “We must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured…. CSCE could be an umbrella for all this, as well as being the forum which brought the Soviet Union fully into discussion about the future of Europe.” (See Document 22)
The NATO London Declaration on July 5, 1990 had a positive effect on deliberations in Moscow, according to most accounts, giving Gorbachev the necessary ammunition to counter his hardliners at the Party Congress which was taking place at that moment.
The only Western leader who was out of step was the French President Francois Mitterrand, as evidenced by his telling Gorbachev in Moscow on May 25, 1990, that he was “personally in favor of gradually dismantling the military blocs”. However, he also said that the West must “create security conditions for you, as well as European security as a whole.” (See Document 19) In a letter to George Bush about his conversation with the Soviet leader, he wrote that “we would certainly not refuse to detail the guarantees that he would have a right to expect for his country’s security.” (See Document 20). Following German reunification, Mitterrand continued to drag his feet vis a vis the countries of Eastern Europe’s desire to become part of the European Union, unwilling to give up its traditional enemy, Germany, thus laying the groundwork for what would follow.
Disgusted with being made to wait upon the good will of the West to finally become equal Europeans, the Eastern countries threw in their lot with the US, lining up to join NATO in revenge for the decades of Soviet domination (regardless of the benefits it brought them in terms of development and social benefits). The starkest example of this attitude is to be found today in the Baltic countries, which after being allied with Hitler, were occupied by the Soviet Union. Today, these tiny provinces on the Baltic Sea have nothing to offer Russia that it doesn’t already have in abundance, yet they clamor the loudest for NATO ‘protection’ — and funds.
Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.
