On February 9, 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Mikhail Gorbachev that if the Soviet leader would cooperate with German unification, NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” This was just one of many assurances of Soviet security made by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991.
On December 12, 2017, the National Security Archive at George Washington University declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents about these assurances. As the National Security Archive reported at this time:
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.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
As we now know, the U.S. broke these assurances—a decision characterized by George Kennan, America’s chief architect of Soviet containment policy during he Cold War—as “A Fateful Error” in his Feb. 5, 1997 New York Times editorial.
Hellbound and Down 