This discussion explores the structure of the North Korean state, its evolving legal system, ideological shifts, and everyday life under Kim Jong Un, including stand-up comedy, sports, pornography, religion, and the ways in which the government has allowed markets to function.

The conversation spends significant time on what may be the most consequential shift ever in North Korean ideology: Kim Jong Un's abandonment of Korean reunification as a goal. For generations, reunification was the animating myth of the North Korean state. Kim has now declared South Korea a corrupted and permanently hostile country, in many ways little different from any other enemy. Ward explains why this happened and how it changes the geopolitical situation. As it turns out, there is both a more optimistic and a less benign interpretation of this change.

Ward talks about the emergence of the category of “unsocialist” behavior, a concept that is increasingly used, surprisingly, to crack down on cultural deviance. What makes this paradoxical, as Hanania points out, is that the regime has simultaneously become more tolerant of markets. He asks about BR Myers’ book The Cleanest Race, and whether it is correct to say that North Korea has moved away from Marxism-Leninism and toward a racialized view of the world.

Perhaps the sharpest edge of the regime's legal apparatus is directed not at "hostile" foreign culture generally but at South Korean culture specifically. Ward explains the legal distinctions: disseminating South Korean cultural content carries harsher penalties than disseminating content from other officially hostile countries. A North Korean caught with American media potentially faces a less stringent punishment than one found watching a K-drama. The regime understands that South Korean culture is uniquely threatening because it comes from a society that shares the same ethnocultural background.

The episode closes with the question of succession. Kim Ju Ae, Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, looks to be his heir apparent. Ward says that whether she is the successor or not, we know that her father wants us to think she is. This at the very least tells us something about the impression the regime is trying to create internally and for the rest of the world. Yet we can only guess whether she actually is the successor, and what exactly the North Koreans believe they are communicating.

Links

Peter Ward, “The Legal Regulation of Unsocialist Activities in North Korea: Over-criminalization, Political Control and Human Rights.”

Peter’s work at the Sejong Institute, NK Pro (NK News), and Google Scholar

Peter’s recent appearance on the NK News podcast

Hanania and Arm disagree strongly about JD Vance, and what he says about the future of the GOP. Recently, Rod Dreher made waves by suggesting that perhaps 30% to 40% of Republican staffers are Groypers. As Arm’s job involves dealing with this class of people, he has particular insight into that issue. Hanania is interested in not only whether they are personally fans of Nick Fuentes, but also what their views are about Ronald Reagan and how they think about political issues more generally.

Arm also explains the dynamics of the recent NYC mayoral race. How did Mamdani end up winning? And why couldn’t the Republicans field a serious challenger? The conversation provides much to consider for those who believe that embracing markets and new technology is the best way to achieve economic growth but feel alienated from both major parties right now. Arm and Hanania also handicap the 2028 Democratic race, discussing how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might rise to the top due to the moderate wing being split, in the same way that Biden had a lane open to him in 2020.

For more articles by Arm and other Manhattan Institute scholars, subscribe to the City Journal Substack.

Related Links

Jesse Arm, “Ezra Klein’s Blindspot”

Richard Hanania, “The Broad Lessons of YIMBY”

Richard Hanania, “Boomer Liberalism Must Be Overcome” (conversation with Derek Thompson)

Richard Hanania interviews State Senator Scott Weiner on the YIMBY victory in California

Timothy B. Lee and Kai Williams, “Waymo’s Next Five Cities Are All in Red States”

JD Vance on the problems of Appalachia

Beginning in the 2010s, the salience of the immigration issue took off. Voters have been flocking to populist candidates as a result ever since. As much as many academics and political leaders would like to deny this fact, this provides the most straightforward explanation for recent trends.

The conversation focuses on what to make of the data. Does this mean that to defeat populism, all politicians have to do is become more restrictionist? How does this square with the rise of populism being a global phenomenon, even in countries where immigration isn’t an issue? What to make of research showing that populism is bad for the economy? Are there examples of European parties that have headed off the rise of populism in this way? Guenther discusses the well-known case of Denmark, but also brings up the surprising example of Hungary, where Orbán took the mainstream conservative party, made it more populist, and has dominated the politics of his nation ever since.

Another perhaps surprising finding is that there is much less of an elite-public gap on economic issues. If anything, politicians are more inclined to support free markets. Hanania asks whether the gap might be even greater than the paper suggests, given the way questions are framed. This helps explain why left-wing populism hasn’t been as successful as its right-wing equivalent, whether in the US or Europe.

Abortion pops up as the one social issue on which there is no notable difference between elites and the public. This is reminiscent of experiences in American red states, where politicians take abortion rights away while voters nearly everywhere support the pro-choice position in referendums. The conversation discusses why this might be.

The rise of right-wing populism is the political story of our time. By grounding the discussion in empirical data, Guenther sheds light on why mainstream parties have struggled to respond, and what strategies may or may not work to blunt the populist surge. This conversation helps provide a clear and evidence-based perspective on one of the defining issues of our era, while providing hints of possible future productive avenues of research.

• Lack of legal basis for martial law: Yoon’s justification — political crisis and opposition party tyranny — did not meet the constitutional or legal criteria.

• Procedural violations: Yoon bypassed required Cabinet deliberation, failed to properly announce martial law details, and did not notify the National Assembly.

• Obstruction of the National Assembly: The president used the police and military to block and remove lawmakers, infringing their constitutional rights and immunities.

• Suppression of political opponents: Yoon ordered intelligence officials to track opposition leaders for possible arrests.

• Misuse of the military for political purposes: Military forces were deployed to interfere with democratic institutions.

• Undermining democracy and the separation of powers: The martial law orders barred political and legislative activity nationwide.

• Violations of civil liberties: Citizens’ political rights, freedoms of assembly and occupation were unjustly restricted.

• Illegal raid on the National Election Commission: Yoon ordered a warrantless military operation against the NEC, breaching its independence.

• Threats to judicial independence: He tracked former justices, creating a chilling effect on the judiciary.

Following the ruling, Yoon was immediately removed from office, thus mandating a new presidential election within 60 days.

Far from resolving the polarizing debate over Yoon’s martial law declaration of December 3-4, the unanimous ruling may have exacerbated it. The dominant progressive Democratic Party (DP) saw the ruling as affirming its view of Yoon and his conservative People’s Power Party supporters as legacies of the nation’s authoritarian past. International media, such as the BBC, reinforced this narrative by interviewing reasonable, younger, English-speaking progressive activists and politicians, and translating the angry Korean outbursts of older, conservative protestors.

Conversely, conservatives saw the ruling as affirming progressive dominance of the nation’s major institutions and marginalizing conservative voices; specifically, conservative lawyers argued, the ruling relied on contradictory and unreliable testimonies that the President ordered the arrest of political leaders or attempted to obstruct the National Assembly, despite Yoon’s claim to the contrary. Others made less-substantiated claims about Chinese and North Korean influence.

What we have then is a mainstream media narrative on the impeachment ruling that selectively highlights certain forms of information that support the progressive party, along with an alternative media narrative that makes both reasonable and poorly founded claims. All of this illustrates a general pattern of what we may term asymmetric polarization in South Korea and other countries, where two sides act in ways that threaten liberal democratic norms and individual rights through different methods, depending on their levels of representation within elite institutions.

In a 2022 Pew Research survey, South Koreans ranked the most polarized among 19 countries, with 49% of respondents endorsing the idea of “very strong conflicts between people who support different political parties.” The US was ranked second, with 41% claiming the same.

Vigorous disagreement among supporters of different ideologies and parties is not necessarily problematic for liberal democracy. What is problematic is when partisans view and treat their opponents as illiberal, harmful actors, who do not deserve the protection of liberal procedural rights and norms (PRN), which include both formal-legal rights such as free speech, due process, and equal treatment under the law, and non-legal norms such as journalistic impartiality and academic objectivity, which are associated with fair procedures in a liberal democracy.

When competing groups of partisans exercise differential power in mainstream bureaucratic institutions, they may violate liberal PRN in different ways. To the extent that supporters of one party or ideology dominate institutionally, and view members of the opposing party as illiberal, they can exercise institutional power to marginalize opposing viewpoints and information. Conversely, to the extent that members of the opposing party view mainstream institutions as biased and oppressive, they reject them and turn to alternative outlets. Non-mainstream media offer both substantive information suppressed in elite institutions, and unsubstantiated information and conspiracy theories that fuel grassroots support for radical disruption.

In America’s post-1960 culture war politics, partisan identity is significantly defined by one’s view of the nation’s political and religious founding, as heroic and inspiring or oppressive. Progressive-leaning Democrats often view the nation’s white, male, Christian-dominated past as problematic and champion its challengers, while conservatives take the opposite position.

In the past two decades, self-identified progressives in the US have gained unprecedented dominance in colleges and universities. From 1989 to 2016-2017, the ratio of progressive to conservative faculty more than doubled from 2.3:1 to 5:1, with 60% identifying as liberal and only 12% as conservative; among campus administrators, the ratio was 12:1, as only 6% identified as conservative. In the latest 2021-22 survey, the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty skewed further to 7:1.

Progressive faculty and administrators often frame conservative viewpoints as illiberal and harmful, and exercise their institutional power to marginalize them. Sixty-three percent of liberal faculty believe it can be acceptable to shout down speakers, compared to 47% of moderates and only 12% of conservatives. Additionally, 31% of liberal faculty think blocking students from attending a speech is sometimes acceptable, while only 16% of moderates and 5% of conservatives agree. One survey showed half of academics in the social sciences and humanities expressing a willingness to discriminate against Evangelical Christians in hiring decisions.

Fearing progressive ostracism, scientists avoid certain issues, especially race and gender, or only allow members of a victimized group to speak on a topic. Cathy Young writes, “Researchers and clinicians who depart from the orthodoxy on youth gender dysphoria have been targeted by intense pressure from activists, leading to severe career repercussions and, in one case, the retraction of a large study of adolescent ROGD [rapid onset gender dysphoria].” Thus, progressive-dominated academia and media ignore or suppress inconvenient information, such as the use of puberty blockers being questionable, data that as many as half of transgender female prisoners are sex offenders, or that key scientists were uncertain about the origins of Covid-19.

To the extent that progressives dominate knowledge-producing institutions and view conservatives as illiberal, they exercise institutional power to marginalize information that can be weaponized by those they consider harmful actors; this violates procedural liberal norms on objective scholarship and nonpartisan journalism. Conversely, to the extent that conservatives view mainstream institutions as biased and oppressive, they turn to alternative news sites and social media accounts that are disconnected from and even hostile to mainstream institutions, with these sources usually lacking traditional journalistic procedural norms and practices used to distinguish between corroborated and non-corroborated claims. Alternative media popular with MAGA Republicans such as X and Truth Social offer both true information suppressed in mainstream institutions, and fake news and conspiracy theories, including those that come from Russian influence campaigns.

Mainstream media also disseminate some unsubstantiated claims such as hidden mass graves of indigenous children, but the dissemination of misinformation, without basic fact checking procedures, occurs at much higher rates in conservative and alternative media.

Finally, to the extent that partisans access mutually isolated information markets, they diverge in their worldviews and policy preferences. If the information market on one side is flawed, partisans advance policies based on false assumptions. Some of the Trump Administration’s steps taken on Ukraine, tariffs, and DOGE budget cuts, among other topics, exemplify reliance on false information, such as that President Zelensky is at a four percent approval rating.

The pattern of asymmetric polarization and diverging (mis)information between the progressive-dominated mainstream and the conservative alternative is replicated in other OECD countries such as Germany. As in the US, the far-right media in Europe disseminates more misleading and uncorroborated claims than do mainstream outlets.

In South Korea, asymmetric polarization is both more illiberal, as conservative and progressive partisans use legislation and judicial rulings to imprison opponents who challenge their favored narratives; and unique, as the progressive-dominated mainstream matches the ‘far-right’ alternative in disseminating unsubstantiated claims, and only the progressive mainstream disseminate such claims from their autocratic neighbor, in this case China, and censor serious academics.

Even more than in the US, the major parties in South Korea divide over the legacy of the nation’s major founding presidents: Rhee Syngman (1948-1960) and Park Chung-hee (1961-1979). Conservatives, led by the current People Power Party, generally laud the founders’ opposition to communism, and communist-party led North Korea and China, and support of the US and free market capitalism. Conversely, progressives, led by the Democratic Party, strongly criticize the human rights violations and social injustices associated with the founding administrations’ anticommunist and pro-capitalist policies, and support those more favorable to labor unions at home and to North Korea and China abroad.

Since South Korea’s first leftist government, that of Roh Moo-hyun (2003-08), the communist-capitalist divide has overlapped with another one based on religion. Many Korean Evangelicals laud the Christian values of founding President Rhee, and oppose same-sex marriage and other challenges to traditional family values. Conversely, progressive Presidents Roh and Moon Jae-in (2017-22) have appointed judges who support the rights of historically victimized groups, including members of the LGBT community.

Before democratic reforms and the political transition of the 1990s, conservatives used their dominance of the government and media to frame their opponents as pro-North Korea leftists and collaborators. They vigorously enforced the 1948 National Security Law’s Article 7 prohibition against pro-communist speech to silence progressives.

Since the 1990s, however, progressive partisans have effectively promulgated an equally Manichaean narrative of the Rhee and Park regimes, and their conservative successors, as pro-Japan collaborators and authoritarian fascists. Korean progressive media producers partner with US providers of content like Apple TV and Netflix to globally disseminate narratives that dramatize or fantasize the evils of the Japanese colonial (1910-45) and anticommunist regimes (1947-1987), which effectively stigmatize pro-Japan or anti-communist viewpoints and justify their legal suppression. Works in this genre include the film Exhuma (2014), and the series Mr. Sunshine (2018-) and Taxi Driver (2021-).

Although progressive icon Kim Dae-jung praised free speech, his successors in the Democratic Party have used their growing political and judicial influence to punish speech that defames former victims of colonial or authoritarian regimes, including obtaining a six-month prison sentence for Song Dae-yup, a professor who suggested that most Korean comfort women had volunteered for the Japanese military and two years for Jee Man-won, a commentator who claimed that North Korea helped direct rioters during the 1980 pro-democracy movement in Gwangju.

In December 2020, the DP-dominated Assembly passed the May 18 Distortion Punishment Act to imprison up to five years those who make false claims about the 1980 movement. If progressives regain the presidency, they promise to extend the Act to cover “false” claims, including those about North Korean agents, in other democratic uprisings.

By suppressing supposedly harmful far-right or pro-Japanese viewpoints and information, progressive-dominated media and schools become an echo chamber of uncorroborated claims, such as that the Japanese military kidnapped as many as two hundred thousand Korean girls and that North Korean government agents did not communicate with democracy activists, and that arguments to the contrary are those of fascists.

Korean academia and media such as the Korea Times and Hankyoreh also partner with government-controlled institutions in China. In 2014, China’s Jilin Provincial Archives provided the South Korean media with 25 documents showing that the comfort women did not sign up voluntarily in order to make money – as Japan claims – but had actually been officially mobilized by the Japanese imperial army. US-based academics and journalists repeat the sexual slavery narrative and ostracize dissenting scholars such as Harvard Law School’s Mark Ramseyer.

Korea- and US-based academics support South Korean legislative efforts to further criminalize far-right speech. They even target creative fiction: in 2021, activists pressured corporate sponsors to drop the Disney plus television show Snowdrop because of its fictional portrayal of a North Korean spy during South Korea’s democracy movement in the 1980s. US-based mainstream media have supported such activists by labeling claims about North Korean involvement as “conspiracy theories”, despite some documented evidence. Kookmin University historian Andrei Lankov writes that he “personally knows [three] people who once commuted to Pyongyang via submarine” (Lankov, The Real North Korea, p. 31).

Shaped by progressive-dominated, knowledge-producing institutions, Democratic Party leaders condemn scholars who challenge the progressive narrative. After Sejong University professor Park Yu-ha published her book, Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire, which won top academic awards in Japan, Democratic Party chief Lee Jae-myong posted the following on Facebook

This professor…
Is she still holding her position as a professor?
How did I end up breathing under the same sky as someone like her… sigh.
These remnants of pro-Japanese collaborators must be cleared away.

Since former conservative President Park Geun-hye’s 2016 impeachment, the Democratic Party has dominated the National Assembly. Yoon, the conservative party candidate, barely won the 2022 presidential election, but the DP parliamentary majority paralyzed the administration with an unprecedented array of budget cuts, along with 22 motions to impeach government officials, before Yoon declared martial law on December 3, 2024.

To justify such paralysis, DP partisans framed the Yoon Administration’s policies of reconciliation with Japan as pro-Japan collaboration. The initial December 4 impeachment motion stated: “Yoon has neglected geopolitical balance, antagonizing North Korea, China, and Russia, adhering to a bizarre Japan-centered foreign policy, and appointing pro-Japan individuals to key government positions.”

Grassroots conservatives, in turn, rejected mainstream media, whose “fake news” defamed their political heroes as pro-Japan collaborators, whether former Presidents Rhee Syngman and Park Chung-hee or current President Yoon. Instead, they turned to social media, especially YouTube, which has become a primary source of information for 53% of South Koreans, including 70% of right-wing rally participants. By disconnecting from mainstream media, conservative media became an echo chamber of uncorroborated theories, such as that progressive lawmakers are secretly collaborating with North Korea or that North Korean hackers infiltrated the National Election Commission.

In the aftermath of the December 3 martial law declaration, grassroots conservatives praised President Yoon for performatively standing up to the Democratic Party and drove out institutional conservatives who disagreed. After resigning as PPP chief on December 16, Han Dong-hoon warned party members, “If we sympathise with extremists like the conspiracy theorists and extreme YouTubers, or if we are consumed by their commercially produced fears, there is no future for conservatism.”

Even as institutional conservatives felt excluded in their party by radicalized conservatives, they felt excluded in mainstream, knowledge-producing institutions by dominant progressives. CM, a female graduate student at a Seoul-based university, criticized the May 18 Act:

Asking a question like “Aren’t they rioters?” is not allowed despite the fact that protesters during the May 18 Gwangju Uprising broke into armories and armed themselves with stolen weapons and ammunition. Some people around me argue that the May 18 Special Act suppresses freedom of expression. I would go further and say that it is a draconian law that also suppresses the freedom to seek the truth.

PJ, a male graduate student, opposed Yoon’s martial law declaration as “too radical,” but also opposed the National Assembly’s swift impeachment of the president, before any police investigation or assembly hearing. PJ preferred the months-long process of investigation and deliberation that led to bipartisan consensus on President Nixon’s resignation. But he declined to openly voice this argument in his university, fearing not just condemnation from progressive faculty and student groups, but also imprisonment from a future DP administration. In his view, DP-appointed judges could interpret existing defamation laws, or legislators might pass a new law (“December 3 Act”) modeled on the May 18 Act, to criminalize statements justifying Yoon’s “fascist” martial law declaration.

Korea-based conservatives such as PJ risk more suppression, including imprisonment, for expressing their views than do American conservatives. But unlike their US counterparts, Korean conservative radicalism was largely limited to supporting President Yoon’s (allegedly) performative, and brief, martial law declaration. They have not yet sought to defund and dismantle mainstream, knowledge-producing institutions (e.g., the education ministry, national research foundations, elite universities), as in the US . Neither do conservative Korean students reject elite universities in favor of conservative alternatives like Hillsdale.

Influenced by Confucian norms, practically all Koreans, conservative or progressive, valorize elite, mostly Seoul-based, universities such as Hanyang and higher-ranked universities abroad. Like the older, Bush-style Republicans in the US, Korean conservatives desire mainstream institutions to be more open to conservative perspectives, not to destroy them. Unlike many MAGAs, most Korean conservatives do not consider reforming the elite universities or the education and scientific ministries to be a lost cause, but a worthy even if difficult mission.

A key difference is that matriculation into elite Korean universities, major newspapers, and government bureaucracies is predominantly determined by standardized exams, not subjective and politicized essays, letters of recommendations, and extracurriculars. Seemingly non-meritocratic, Claudine Gay-style educational elites do not exist in Korea. Therefore, Korean conservatives challenge the progressive majority, but not the core legitimacy of mainstream institutions.

Among OECD democracies, the US and Korea exemplify the challenges of polarization and especially asymmetric polarization. Progressive dominance of mainstream information sources does not justify the self-imposed isolationism and disruptive radicalism of conservatives, culminating in the December 3 martial law declaration in South Korea and the defund, dismantle, and deportation agenda of the second Trump Administration. But it does help us understand that conservatives’ procedural illiberalism and misinformation, and policies based on such misinformation, do not appear in a vacuum, and that any infringements of liberal-procedural norms can polarize and destabilize democracy.

Breaking this cycle requires not more suppression or radicalism, but reaffirming the liberal-procedural norms of open debate and respect for legal rules and customs.

In this conversation, Hanania and Wallach review the historical role of Congress in American politics, focusing on key events from the FDR administration to the present. Wallach explains the important role Congress played in making sure that Roosevelt did not take the country too far down the path of economic statism, a history that Hanania points out is in tension with some of the ideas of Curtis Yarvin.

Throughout the conversation, Wallach emphasizes the importance of Congress in shaping policy and maintaining a balance of power between the branches of government. They explore the impact of significant legislation, the dynamics of the Civil Rights Movement, and changes in Congressional structure during the 1970s. The discussion also touches on the influence of Newt Gingrich, the ongoing challenges of governance in a polarized political environment, the impact of Trump, and the potential for bipartisan cooperation on policy issues. Wallach argues for a more responsive Congress that can find compromises between political factions and effectively address the concerns of the American public.

Hanania plays devil’s advocate, and asks whether it might be better for Congress not to legislate, using European states and the EU as a comparison. Near the end, Hanania asks who the best people are to follow in order to stay informed about Congress. You can find Wallach’s preferred list here.

On December 22, then President-elect Trump announced the appointment of Sriram Krishnan, a successful venture capitalist, as a senior adviser on artificial intelligence. A model immigrant, Krishnan came to the US at 23 to work at Microsoft, later becoming a naturalized citizen. What should have been a discussion of AI policy and a celebration of the success of high-skilled immigration soon turned into a civil war on the right, after nationalist influencers highlighted Krishnan’s past comments endorsing more high-skilled immigration. The H-1B visa program became the focus of the debate, which exposed a deep division among the Trump coalition, between the techno-libertarians led by Elon Musk and the national-populists led by figures like Steve Bannon. Trump eventually came out in favor of the H-1B visa, but it remains to be seen what his administration does on this issue.

At the heart of the objection by the national-populists are arguments based on what economists have called the “fixed pie fallacy,” but in this case can be referred to as the “lump of labor fallacy.” “It’s about taking American jobs,” Bannon has claimed. “A tech company used the H-1B visa to replace [American workers],” JD Vance bemoaned when criticizing the visa as he was running for Senate in 2022. From the other side of the political spectrum, Bernie Sanders chimed in against the program, arguing it replaces “good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad,” forming an unholy alliance of socialists and nationalists.

According to this logic, there is a set, or at least highly inelastic, number of jobs in the United States. This is true in tech, just like it presumably is in other fields like retail or oil extraction. If more people are allowed in the country, then more Americans are going to either be unemployed or expect much lower wages for their work.

This fallacy has long been known to economists. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), challenged zero-sum assumptions prevalent in mercantilist theories. Later, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill further explored how trade, innovation, and productivity could expand the economic “pie.” And in the 20th century, President Reagan’s economic guru Milton Friedman famously taught that “most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”

Yet this is not how the economy works. Newcomers do in a sense compete for jobs within one industry. But they also buy homes, food, clothing, and shelter within the United States. If employers prefer the labor of immigrants, whether due to them being better workers, cheaper, or some combination of the two, then it must mean that firms are likely to become more efficient after hiring them, further stimulating economic growth. If a tech firm pays less money for labor, even assuming no gain in efficiency otherwise, they do not simply burn the money but invest it or put it back into the economy by returning it to shareholders. Even if all the savings go to CEO compensation, and executives spend that money rather than place it in the stock market, this still increases demand in the economy.

The lump of labor fallacy assumes that the demand for labor is static: there is a set number of jobs and that introducing more workers must reduce employment opportunities for those already in the workforce. American history is filled with counterexamples. When the US gradually allowed women into the workforce, it didn’t cause massive job losses among men; when segregation was abolished in the South, black workers didn’t cause mass unemployment among whites; when the 13 colonies established free movement of people among the states with the Articles of Confederation in 1781, this did not cause economic upheaval. The vast majority of native-born Americans are descended from immigrants, including the national-populists vehemently opposed to H-1B visas. Did their ancestors take away American jobs? Or did they contribute to the economy by working with the natives?

Even setting aside their roles as consumers, what restrictionists fail to realize is that high-skilled immigrants not only take existing jobs, but create new ones by becoming entrepreneurs themselves. The most salient statistic is perhaps the fact that 45% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. In AI, a report from the National Foundation for American Policy concluded immigrants also founded or co-founded 65% of the top companies. Elon Musk, maybe the greatest entrepreneur in history, was once on an H-1B visa. All of this has happened in spite of the restrictiveness of the immigration system. In many ways, high-skilled immigrants are the lifeblood of American innovation. Even low-skilled immigrants, by taking the most unglamorous and unpleasant jobs, enable natives to be productive in other ways by lowering the costs of labor. One may have other arguments against immigration, but the economic case based on a fixed number of jobs makes no sense.

The fixed pie fallacy fails not only in the context of the labor market. As alluded to above, immigrants raise demand for goods and services, including those that natives are uniquely positioned to provide, such as education, legal services, entertainment, and management. If the pie were truly fixed, a virus that randomly killed half of Americans would make everyone twice as rich.

Housing is an area where the pie is close to being fixed in many regions, but this is only the result of zoning laws that restrict supply. There are an endless number of reasons why we should make housing easier to build, and the payoffs to doing so are potentially massive. But to restrict immigration on that basis alone would mean responding to one broken policy by hurting the economy in another.

What all this means is that not only are H-1B workers highly-paid, with median earnings at around the 90th percentile of wages, but each H-1B worker is estimated to create 1.83 jobs for native-born Americans. This is not surprising at all. As high earners, H1-B recipients must be a net benefit to the economy. In no other context would anyone argue that workers in the top decile of productivity are making Americans poorer.

Callum Williams, senior economics editor at The Economist, has argued that having a much larger common market goes a long way towards explaining why Americans are so much wealthier than Europeans. In a tiny village where individuals only trade with members of their own community, compared to a large developed country, it is less likely there will be enough demand to make being the owner of a boutique bookstore, a Substacker, or an exterminator a realistic career path. This is why, for example, American restaurants will commonly have different jobs for hostesses and waiters, while in Europe one employee will take on both roles. More people means greater economies of scale. When newcomers are well above average in productivity, as H1-B recipients are, opening the borders to them becomes a no-brainer.

What if you only wanted to focus on wages for tech workers? One might acknowledge that highly productive workers making businesses more efficient are good for the economy as a whole, but can we at least say that a certain class of worker they compete with is worse off?

That is far from certain. Noah Smith has an excellent recent summary of papers arguing that H-1B visas don’t even hurt workers that are in direct competition with new arrivals. We have a strong basis for believing this because H-1B visas are distributed based on a lottery system, so we can treat the process as a random experiment and see what happens to the wages of individuals working for firms that win the lottery versus those that don’t. Workers in the firms that get immigrant labor end up hiring more tech workers and paying them more, because they become more efficient and sometimes scale up.

Of course, immigration policy shouldn’t be determined on the basis of what is good for workers in one industry, but what is good for the nation as a whole. So even if you do not find such studies convincing, you should want more productive workers to come into the country because a welcoming policy still makes society better off. This is not controversial among economists, as the question gets to the basic assumptions of their field. A 2016 poll of economists showed exactly 0% disagreeing with the idea that letting employers hire more immigrants with STEM degrees would raise per person income in the US in the long run.

To be fair, an overwhelming majority also said that such a policy would at least temporarily lower the premium earned by workers with similar degrees. However, it must be noted that this survey was conducted before most of the studies cited by Noah Smith in his recent article. It would be interesting to see what economists who are familiar with the literature that has come out over the last few years think. But, again, even if it is true that immigrants directly suppress the wages of workers they compete with, public policy being designed to help subsets of society rather than the entire country is the path to stagnation. If we try to “protect” the workers in every industry from competition, we will all end up poorer.

Unfortunately, zero-sum thinking tends to be common when individuals consider economic issues. People often misjudge market interactions as win-lose rather than win-win, especially when foreigners are part of the equation. Irresponsible politicians and pundits take advantage of such biases, demagoguing bad policies into existence, to the detriment of society.

Yet letting in more immigrants is not a form of charity on the behalf of Americans. It’s an arrangement that expands the pie, benefiting both newcomers and natives. America is blessed with being the top talent magnet in the world. It would be a shame to waste one of its greatest assets.

One thing that is highlighted in this conversation is the problem with the “just taking questions” posture adopted by the anti-vaxx movement. Most of the questions they ask have been answered. Those that remain do not create enough doubt to suggest a person should not get the vaccines recommended by public health professionals. For more along these lines, see Richard Hanania, “Vaccines and the Tightrope of Progress.” This interview originally appeared here.

The themes touched on here will be familiar to those who have read about the “invisible graveyard” that the FDA is responsible for. Yet even listeners who know about the utter lack of interest in patient well being normally shown by federal agencies will find themselves shocked by the degree to which bureaucratic procedures with few plausible benefits govern the lives of sick individuals who want nothing but to get some extra time on this earth and help move science forward. For dealing with the clinical trial system in its current state, Bess is currently trying to figure out ways to assist oncologists and patients in being able to navigate the process at HelpMeFindAClinicalTrial.com. And hopefully by telling her story, she can help inspire much needed reforms to the system.

Romina joins the podcast to discuss available paths to deal with the coming entitlement crisis. One potential way to get politicians out of making tough choices is to create a debt commission that takes responsibility for unpopular reforms. Romina has written about using the model of the BRAC commission, which was relied on to close down military bases at the end of the Cold War.

The conversation also touches on the politics of debt, how policymakers are thinking about these issues, Paul Ryan as an unappreciated hero of our time, and much more. Near the end, Romina reflects on her career as a DC policy-wonk, and why she is motivated to help ensure that America continues to be the land of opportunity. If we don’t get entitlements under control, it could potentially degrade our entire way of life. For more discussion on this topic and the difficult choices our leaders will soon be facing, see the previous CSPI podcast with Brian Riedl.

Listen to the podcast with Romina here or watch the video on YouTube.

He joins the podcast to discuss why he’s not worried about the alignment problem, where he disagrees with “doomers,” the accomplishments of ChatGPT versus DALL-E, the dangers of regulating AI until progress comes to a halt in the way it did with nuclear power, and more. With his background in computer science, Brian takes issue with many of those who write on this topic, arguing that they think in terms of flawed analogies and know little about the underlying technology. The conversation touches on a previous CSPI discussion with Leopold Aschenbrenner, and the value of continuing to work on alignment.

Brian’s view is that AI doomers are making people needlessly pessimistic. He believes that this technology has the potential to do great things for humanity, particularly when it comes to areas like software development and biotech. But the post-World War II era has seen many examples of government hindering progress, and AFF is dedicated to stopping that from happening with artificial intelligence.

Listen to the conversation here, or watch the video here.

Links

Donate to AFF

AFF manifesto

Brian on diminishing returns to machine learning, and discussing AI with Marc Andreessen

Vaswani et al. on transformers

Limits of current machine learning techniques

• All across the world, there is a negative correlation between IQ and fertility.

• This means that populations are getting less intelligent as time goes on. Through some basic assumptions, across 62 nations for which we have data, one can estimate a decline in IQ per decade that ranges from as low as 0.01 points in Estonia and Switzerland to as high as 0.65 in Panama, Romania, and North Macedonia.

• In general, more developed countries see a weaker decline in intelligence than less developed nations.

• Selection for lower IQ does not appear to be a major long-term problem in the richest countries today. If at some point even 20% of the population uses embryo selection, it would be more than enough to reverse the current trends that we are seeing.

• There may be more reasons to be concerned about developing countries. The fact that the rate of decline is so fast implies that even if IQ differences between nations are completely environmentally determined today, over the coming decades there may still be a significant divergence between them. That said, the data here may exaggerate the scale of the problem if large family size depresses phenotypic IQ in the developing world.

Introduction

In the 2006 film Idiocracy, a young American soldier of average intelligence wakes up 500 years after a botched hibernation experiment and finds himself to be the smartest man in the world. A narrator explains that over the years, humanity got progressively dumber as the less intelligent outbred smarter individuals in one generation after another.

While a work of fiction, it is reasonable to ask whether the dystopia described in the film gets at an issue with real world significance. There is certainly a stereotype that more intelligent people have fewer children, and as we know, stereotypes generally have a basis in fact. Whether this one is true is certainly worth looking into, given how important intelligence is for human flourishing. Moreover, if we are concerned with humanity as a whole, it is important to analyze differential fertility by intelligence not only in United States and other Western countries, but across the world.

Along with some co-authors, I have gathered relevant data on this question from 62 countries. In general, our research shows that humans are likely getting dumber, with the problem being much more pronounced in the developing world. If the data is correct and reflects a decline in genotypic intelligence, it may cause problems for poor states trying to catch up to first world nations, and ultimately threaten their economic health and political stability.

Past Work on IQ and Fertility

Scholars have for generations argued that the fears expressed in works like Idiocracy are supported by empirical data. Early research on the relationship between fertility and intelligence found that the variables were negatively correlated, albeit weakly.1 Subsequent work vindicates these early studies, with a recent meta-analysis finding much the same thing.2 Despite this previous research, there is very little agreement on the magnitude of the decline in IQ per decade, with estimates ranging from 0.14 to 0.64 points.3 In addition, most of the data on fertility and intelligence comes from the USA and Britain, and few studies have been done on other regions.

Other critics of the differential fertility literature argue that the Flynn effect, the global increase in IQ scores of about 2-3 points per decade,4 is evidence against differential fertility resulting in decreases in intelligence in future generations. However, IQ tests do not measure the same construct across time,5 and a portion of Flynn effect increases can be attributed to increases in guessing.6 Besides these issues, genetic predisposition to educational attainment fell in Iceland by about 0.1 standard units, the equivalent of 1.5 IQ points, in the 20th century, confirming the hypothesis that differential fertility leads to changes in a population’s genetic makeup.7

Other researchers have estimated that average levels of intelligence in the West have fallen by the equivalent of 13 IQ points since the Victorian era based on declines in reaction time.8 This is much larger than what could be reasonably inferred based on differential fertility. Instead, the primary cause of this decline is hypothesized to be mutational load. However, this study suffers from certain methodological issues, notably that some of the early samples were not representative of the general population and that only 14 samples were available.9 Woodley et al. (2013) responded to some of these critiques by arguing that the difference in reaction time between 19th century and modern students is similar to the overall decline in reaction time observed from their samples.

Fortunately, there is a better study on this topic that compares secular trends in the number of digits people can remember (the ‘digit span’ test), depending on whether they must be repeated forwards or backwards.10 The authors involved gathered over 1,700 effect sizes in total and controlled for the effect of moderators, so this study does not share the same concerns as the previous paper mentioned. It found that performance increased for forward digit span tasks, but decreased for backwards digit span tasks in recent years. The latter correlates more with IQ because it is a more cognitively complex task, so this is suggestive evidence that general intelligence has fallen with time. This also holds true for corsi tasks, where the test taker is asked to tap a given sequence of blocks forwards or backwards. Using the summary statistics from the previous study, I calculated that, based on the change in backward digit span, the magnitude of the decline in general intelligence is about 2 points per century.

Moreover, a decline in intelligence should result in falls in quantitative and verbal abilities of students if the quality of education has stayed the same over time. Fortunately, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has tracked the achievement of American students in math and reading. Over time, Americans have hardly changed in their reading or mathematical abilities. In 1970, 13-year-old students scored 255 out of 500 in reading and 266 out of 500 in mathematics, and in 2023 they scored 256 in reading and 271 in mathematics. This is confounded a bit by immigration, but one might suspect that if anything that makes the arguments against a drop in IQ among Americans who have lived in the country for generations even stronger, given that most new residents over the past several decades have been low-skilled.

If mutational load had such a large effect on IQ, then we might suspect that there would be stronger evidence for its existence by now. However, trends in mathematical performance, reading comprehension, and backwards digit span suggest that the average IQ in the United States has not fallen by a large amount. Sure, these tests do not measure intelligence directly, but if intelligence really was dropping, then performance on at least some of them would be expected to fall as well.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the literature regarding the exact effect of mutational load on the decline in IQ per decade (95% CI: [0.14, 1.5]), based on statistics taken from Woodley (2015). Also, recent research on mutational load finds an effect that is severely attenuated and not statistically significant after controlling for birth order.11 Based on theory, mutational load should result in decreases in IQ over time, but the magnitude of the effect is difficult to measure.

New Cross-National Data

To add to the literature on this topic, I collaborated with Bryan Pesta, George Francis, and Emil Kirkegaard on a study that assessed the relationship between intelligence and fertility in as many countries as possible, and projected the change in the average IQ of each nation and the entire world based on the available data. We were able to gather 156 effect sizes (n = 419,444) from a combination of the academic literature and public data, in particular the datasets of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), General Social Survey (GSS), Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Not all of these sources directly test IQ  — proxies such as performance in mathematics or reading had to be used in most cases. In some sources, such as the PISA and PIRLS datasets, the IQ of the children was tested instead of the IQ of the adults.

Unfortunately, only 62 countries had data on the relationship between intelligence and fertility, so imputations had to be made for the others. These imputations were estimated using the correlation between educational attainment and fertility, with, depending on the country, national IQ, socioeconomic development, or geographic estimates. For the sake of transparency, all of the figures in this article use data from countries that tested intelligence or a reasonable proxy for it (e.g., mathematical ability, reading comprehension). These projections of the average IQ of each country were then combined with the United Nations’ population projections to estimate the change in the world’s IQ from 2023 to 2100. Note that this analysis does not take into account the possibility that IQ can improve due to socioeconomic development or cultural changes. This may matter in developing nations, but is much less likely to in wealthier countries.

To measure the relationship between intelligence and fertility, we used a statistic called the selection differential: the difference between a reference population and the parents of that population weighted by the number of children each parent has. Then, this number is multiplied by the heritability of IQ to generate a different statistic called the response to selection, which is the expected genetic decline in a trait in one generation. So if the selection differential for IQ is 2 points, and the additive heritability of IQ is 80%, then the response to selection is 1.6, which is the expected genetic decline in that trait in the next generation. As the correlation between the average IQ of two parents and their child’s IQ is about 0.6,12 selection differentials found were shrunk by a factor of 0.6 to estimate the expected decline in genetic intelligence within the next generations. To calculate the projected decline in genotypic IQ per decade in each country, these selection differentials were divided by the average maternal age within each country to calculate the decline per year, and then that decline was multiplied by 10.

This may be an underestimate or overestimate of the true future decline depending on several factors, notably mutational load, environmental shifts, measurement error, and class based differences in generational turnover. Unfortunately, these variable cannot be modeled given the information that we have, so they have not been taken into consideration when projecting the future IQs of different countries.

While I was collecting the data, I noticed that the selection differentials for IQ varied considerably depending on the source. For example, the selection differential for IQ in the USA is about -2.4 based in the NLSY datasets, which were considered the best sources for that country due to the fact IQ was measured very accurately, they are large samples, most individuals were close to completed fertility (ages of 51-64 in NLSY79, 35-38 in NLSY97), and the samples are roughly representative of the nation as a whole. In comparison, the selection differential in the international datasets is -1.2.

It is unclear why this is the case. Perhaps the tests used are of lower quality, or the United States was not sampled in a representative fashion. The NLSY was relied on for the “regional” study of the US, meaning that it did not apply to other countries. It uses a very exhaustive measure of cognitive ability, the ASVAB, while the international datasets only have rough proxies for cognitive ability, which are comprised of 3 subtests in the case of the PISA dataset, one subtest in the case of the PIRLS, and 2-3 subtests in the case of the PIAAC dataset. In addition, the PIAAC dataset had uniquely high estimates of the selection differentials, with the average country having a selection differential for IQ 1.07 points higher than what would be normally expected. The differences in the magnitude of the selection differentials between datasets hold up well between countries, so this effect is not an artefact of different countries being present in each dataset.

To correct for the bias introduced by the international (PISA, PIRLS, PIAAC) datasets, two different methods were considered. One assumed that the bias is multiplicative, that is, the international datasets shrink effect sizes by a factor of 0.5; or that the effect is additive, and the international datasets reduce the selection differentials for IQ by 1.2 points. Because it’s not clear which method is better, the results of both were averaged into one final estimation. Besides this adjustment, the effect of specific datasets was also considered, so the effects of individual datasets wouldn’t bias the estimation of the decline between countries.

If the reason why the international datasets have attenuated effect sizes within the United States is sampling error, correcting for this bias will potentially lead to deflated selection differentials within smaller countries, which are easier to sample. The reasoning is as follows: if sampling error is leading to attenuated effect sizes within the international datasets, then correcting for the effect observed within a large country like the United States will overcorrect for the effect of sampling error within other countries that are not as large.

Based on our data, we found that the average country is expected to decline in IQ by 0.35 points per decade, while the whole world is expected to decline by 1.1 points per decade during this century. The reason that the global decline is larger than the decline within the individual countries is that lower IQ nations are expected have higher growth rates. Fortunately, the rate at which global intelligence is falling is slowing down; by the end of the century the decline will only be 0.8 points per decade.

Countries also vary considerably in differential fertility for intelligence. In Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, and Switzerland, fertility and intelligence are negligibly related, while Latin American and certain Middle Eastern countries have a stronger negative relationship. Part of this is because the latter countries have younger mothers, so selection for intelligence occurs faster independent of the relationship between fertility and intelligence within a generation. But this doesn’t explain the whole relationship, as countries only vary so much in their average maternal ages; the number ranges from 25.7 to 33.4, while the decline in IQ per decade varies much more, from 0.01 in Switzerland to 0.65 in Panama.

Selection differentials for intelligence correlated with both national IQ (r = 0.51) and socioeconomic development (s-factor) (r = 0.48). As s-factor and national IQ are highly correlated (r = 0.8 in this dataset), it is difficult to tell which of these variables is more likely to be driving the relationship.

Prior to conducting the study, I had hypothesized that socioeconomic development past industrialization had a positive effect on selection differentials for IQ, because developed countries have more resources, so a slower life history. In addition, wealthier nations have more variance in years spent in the education system,13 so if education has a negative effect on fertility, the relationship between the two variables should be stronger in developing countries because of lower restriction of range. According to our data, socioeconomic development and the correlation between fertility and education are correlated between countries (r = .27, p < .01), though the relationship is weak and potentially spurious.

Another reason that less developed countries have more negative relationships between intelligence and fertility is that, at the individual level, early births tend to be disproportionately from less intelligent individuals, while later births follow the opposite pattern.14 As developed countries tend to have higher average ages of births (r = .37, p < .001), differential fertility for IQ and socioeconomic development should positively correlate.

The cause of the relationship between national IQ and the selection differential for IQ is opaque — it could be because the average IQ of a nation also measures its social development, or because there is some causal relationship between the two variables.

Alternatively, the relationship between socioeconomic development and the selection differential could be an artefact that arises out of using the IQs of children to estimate the selection differential instead of the parents. If family size has a more negative causal effect on the IQs of children in the developing world, then a positive relationship between the estimated selection differentials and social development will be found, but only because the causality occurs in the opposite direction — that is, larger families cause lower IQs, rather than the other way around. Because the heritability of fertility is very low,15 this environmental effect won’t be transmitted in any large degree to future generations, so the decline in IQ of these nations may be overestimated.

Implications and Conclusion

My main takeaway from the study is probably going to surprise most readers: future reductions in intelligence due to differential fertility for IQ are not going to be a major issue in the developed world. This is because the process is happening too slowly for it to have a significant effect; by 2123, the most concerning drop in the developing world is the US falling from an IQ of 97.5 to 93.7. Most European countries will have hardly budged by 2123, besides a few in the Balkans: Romania, Macedonia, and Albania are projected to drop from 87 to 80.5, 80 to 73.4, and 82.1 to 77.5 respectively. All of this of course assumes that whatever rates of differential fertility by IQ exist now will continue into future generations, which will be true to a greater or lesser extent depending on the country.

Besides the fact that the effect is weak within most developed nations, embryo selection for intelligence, and potentially other technologies, can attenuate secular decreases in intelligence, though I doubt the practice will be adopted by most of the general population. The average member of the public estimates their likelihood of using embryo selection to boost intelligence at 35%, with 30% morally opposed to the practice.16 Data from Pew Research (2018) suggests that favorability among the public may be even lower, with only 19% of Americans saying that selecting embryos for intelligence is an appropriate use of medical technology, while 80% think that it takes science too far. Embryo selection is also very expensive at the moment, with clinics requesting between $4,000 to $20,000 for the service, so some of the population will be priced out.17 Nonetheless, it is historically common for a practice to be rejected by the public at first and then have opinion towards it shift as its availability increases and its benefits become clear. Therefore, polls should be seen as reflecting a lower bound estimate for how many people might use a technology.

Assuming that 20% of Westerners in the future select their embryos for intelligence, half of those 20% only select for intelligence, and 20% of the causal variance in cognitive ability can be estimated with genes, then embryo selection will boost the average IQ of the population by approximately 0.73 points per generation (math done with gwern’s help). This is roughly equivalent to an increase of 0.24 IQ points per decade, which is enough for most developed countries to maintain their current levels of intelligence, assuming that the relationship between intelligence and fertility remains the same. Theoretically, genetic predictors should be able to explain up to 50% of the variance in intelligence, so this may be an underestimate of the impact of embryo selection.

Some commentators like Anatoly Karlin argue that concerns about national IQ will not be as relevant once strong artificial intelligence has been developed, as lots of white collar work will then be automatable. This is true, but there are other reasons why national IQ would continue to be useful in the future; barring rapid technological breakthroughs, manual labor will still need to be done by humans, and job performance and IQ correlate at about 0.4, even within categories like rifleman (r = .59) and military policeman (r = .46).18

Across individuals, low IQ is a predictor of marital instability,19 obesity,20 and criminality,21 and the relationships are likely to be causal as they cannot be ascribed to confounders. This means that declines in national intelligence will lead to lower levels of wealth and social peace, and potentially civilizational collapse if the fall is too severe.

What is most concerning is the strong negative relationship between fertility and intelligence that is observed in some developing countries, like Turkey and Brazil. By the end of this century, these countries will have dropped by 5.5 and 6.4 points respectively. The effectiveness of embryo selection for intelligence drops with genetic distance from the reference population.22 This technique may therefore be effective for populations that are genetically close to Europeans like white Brazilians or Turks, but less so for people from Central America or Southeast Asia. Even worse, countries that are less developed are less likely to adopt embryo selection and similar practices in the first place, and will need to use the technology more to sustain their current levels of intelligence.

Figures for changes in IQ within nations and across the world should not be taken as exact estimates. They depend on many assumptions: for example, that the rate of differential selection by IQ doesn’t shift over time, the heritability of IQ stays constant, and nations do not see a rise or fall in IQ anywhere due to cultural or technological changes unrelated to patterns of fertility. It is certain that not all of these assumptions will hold for all countries indefinitely into the future. Nonetheless, given the importance of intelligence for accomplishing practically all human goals, it is worth undertaking back-of-the-envelope calculations to give us some idea of how worried we should be. The exercise is enough to determine that selection for low IQ is a minor problem in wealthier states, and potentially much more concerning in developing countries.

The conversation begins with a discussion of different counterfactuals regarding ways in which Napoleon might have been able to stay in power, which leads to Roberts explaining his view that the wars of the era could be understood at least in part as resulting from a rejection of free trade. Other topics include:

• Meritocracy as a guiding principle of the French Revolution and a justification for Napoleon’s regime

• Napoleon’s personal magnetism and why men were willing to follow him

• The relationship with Josephine, and whether or not it influenced any of his political decision

• Whether Napoleon was in fact the greatest general of his time

See also Hanania’s audio review of the Ridley Scott film, and Roberts’ reviews in Commentary and The Times. For an edited transcript of this conversation, see here.

He joins the podcast to talk about the financial future of the United States, with a special focus on entitlements. Medicare is projected to run out by 2031, and Social Security only two years later. Because of politicians kicking the can down the road for so long, this will mean that the federal government will at that point have to either implement massive benefit cuts for seniors or significantly raise taxes across the board.

Brian talks about his experience in Washington, the history of negotiations over the debt, and what politicians say when you bring up these facts. We appear to be in an undesirable equilibrium, where everyone’s incentive is to ignore the issues involved, while the status quo is leading us towards disaster. Despite liberals wanting to tax the rich and conservatives calling for a cut to foreign aid and non-entitlement forms of domestic spending, the numbers for such proposals don’t add up. We will either get entitlement spending under control, or become taxed at the level of Europeans.

In one important way, we will actually be worse off than Europe, because their welfare states pay for services and benefits that go to families across a wide section of the population. We are potentially building a US welfare state that will have high taxes primarily to funnel money to the elderly. The fact that older Americans are richer than those who will be supporting them makes the future we are moving towards even more absurd.

Links

Brian Riedl: chart book on spending, report on the limits of taxing the rich, CNN op-ed on interest rates, NYT op-ed on Biden’s promises on entitlements

Brian’s X page, Manhattan Institute website

This was quite an optimistic conversation. The title of the podcast comes from the last thing Niklas said, which was that you don’t actually need attention or to talk about grand projects, but just to show the world what you can do.

Niklas is part of the charter city movement, which seeks to build hubs of innovation and progress while bringing the rule of law and economic development to poorer regions of the world. In this eventful conversation, Richard and Niklas touch on

• The mechanics of governance in Próspera

• Getting around red tape and becoming a hub of medical innovation

• Amenities and quality of life in the city

• Upcoming conferences and events

Despite a new government in Honduras that is hostile to charter cities, Niklas is optimistic that they will be able to continue operating. He and Richard also talk about potential medical breakthroughs that Próspera might help bring about, like bacteria that remove cavities from your mouth, and a currently available gene therapy that may make your muscles and bones stronger.

Links

Niklas on X, his Substack, RSS for his podcast

The Ultimate Guide to Próspera

Alex Ugorji on X

Próspera website

Ciudad Morazán

Infinita Manifesto

Scott Alexander on Próspera, Part I and Part II

Mark Lutter on the CSPI podcast

Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Documentary on medical tourism in Próspera; DW report, with appearance from Niklas

Upcoming Events

Nov 3-5: Crypto Futurism & Legal Engineering 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit

Nov 17-19: DeSci & Longevity Biotech 2023 - A Próspera Builders' Summit

Jan 6-Mar 1: Vitalia - Starting the Frontier City of Life

The winner of the $25,000 prize, and the Salem Center fellowship for 2023-2024, is Jonathan Zubkoff, better known to other participants as zubbybadger. We also had a $5,000 award for the person who most improved their portfolio between February 15 and July 31, and the winner was Malte Schrödl, a college student studying in Aachen, Germany. Winners of the Gold, Silver, and Bronze prizes have all been notified, as have the top 20 finishers, who will be invited to a forecasting tournament taking place at the Salem Center in the fall.

The second place finisher in the tournament was at the end going by the handle “guyin2ndplace.” He’s written a very interesting account of his experience. See Part I and Part II. For other commentary on the tournament, see Astral Codex Ten. One can browse the history of all of the markets here, and get historical data related to activity on the site here.

This report is meant to provide a summary of what we have learned. Part I deals with the issue of calibration. How good were our betting markets at actually predicting the future? The rest of the report looks at the participants themselves. Part II gives summary statistics on their backgrounds and political views. Finally, Part III discusses what variables correlated with being a good or bad forecaster.

Data used for the calibration analysis is being made available at the bottom of this report. Most of the data related to the characteristics of bettors is being kept under wraps due to privacy concerns, but we are open to collaborating with those who would like to explore the results. All of the analysis below should be taken as preliminary. We invite others to look for further insights that can be found in the data.

I. How Good Was the Market?

I start by taking the beginning of day probability for each market and each day, and then finding an average for each market across the entire time period. From that, I calculated a Brier score for each individual market. The average across all markets was 0.133. The biggest misses were on the following questions, listed with their average probability and eventual outcome.

1. Republicans favored in Senate on Election Day?: 34.6% chance, settled YES

2. Paul Vallas mayor of Chicago?: 63.9%, settled NO

3. Biden cancels student debt in 2022?: 38.1%, settled YES

4. Will PredictIt survive?: 38.6%, settled YES

5. Michigan abortion rights landslide?: 57.1%, settled NO

I don’t see much of a pattern here. One might’ve thought that the market would be biased in the direction of the political leanings of participants, which are discussed below. But they are more conservative than liberal, and their biggest miss was not believing Republicans would be favored in the Senate on election day, when in fact they were. I also assume that participants wanted PredictIt to survive, given that they were presumably supporters of prediction markets. Overestimating Paul Vallas could’ve been a mistake based on their political and class orientation, but the upset in the Chicago mayoral race seems to have been something a lot of people missed.

For the next analysis, we take the first probability of each market every day across the whole tournament. This gives us 12,521 observations. Since there were 91 markets, that means each market existed for an average of just under 138 days.

I divide the observations into 99 bins, from 1% to 99%, and then calculate the average outcome. For example, the market on whether California would ban flavored tobacco was at 58% at the beginning of the day on August 23, and that market ended up settling as YES. Thus, the 58% likelihood was one observation and the dependent variable connected to it was 1. That observation was grouped in with all other observations that rounded to a 58% likelihood, and this was done for each observation in the dataset.

The results are in Figure 1 below. Dotted lines show 95% confidence intervals as calculated using the Adjusted Wald Technique developed for data with binomial outcomes.

Before the start of the tournament, it was known that by having prizes given at the end, individuals would have an incentive to bet on longshot probability events. Since there’s no advantage to being at, say, the 50th percentile over the 10th percentile, participants would have been smart to take large risks.

Figure 1 shows that this is exactly what they did. Of the 2,504 datapoints for which the market gave the outcome a 17% chance or less of happening, the market resolved YES exactly 0 times. For outcomes that the market gave a 20% chance of happening, the outcome was YES only 6% of the time.

The orange line in Figure 1 represents perfect calibration. Ideally, the blue line would hover around it. But it doesn’t at any point cross the perfect calibration (orange) line until the predicted probability of events is 47%. For high probability events, at every point on the x-axis beginning at 70% each bin had outcomes that were more likely to settle as YES than what the market predicted.

Basically, the market lets you divide events into four categories. Things that are given a 20% or less chance of happening have close to a 0% chance of happening in the real world. Between 20-45% the market becomes more useful but systematically underestimates the likelihood of events. Only between around 45%-70% does the market behave as one would wish. Anything that is given a higher probability than that is close to a sure thing. The problem with betting on longshots seems to be worse at the left side of the graph. In other words, people like the idea of a longshot YES bet over a longshot NO bet. There is probably a reason for this out there in some psychological literature. Or is this perhaps due to non-randomness in how we framed the questions, that is, which outcomes we chose to call YES and which we called NO?

This is pretty bad relative to real prediction markets. Here’s one study of PredictIt, based on prices one month before resolution.

One sees the same problem, with the calibration line being below the perfect calibration line at low prices and above it at higher prices. Nonetheless, this is clearly nowhere near as bad as our own chart. Markets that are based on prizes, like ours was, are clearly not useless. Since the errors are somewhat predictable, they provide good information. One can assume that things are correctly priced near the center of the probability distribution, overpriced at the low end, and underpriced at the high end. We are therefore left with data supporting the well-established but nonetheless important conclusion that prize markets are better than nothing, with markets based on money, or some adequate substitute that doesn’t over incentivize longshot bets, being much superior for predicting high and low probability events.

II. The Bettors

We had 548 individuals take the survey. Of those, 95.1% were male, compared to 4.3% female, and less than 1% other. It was a young crowd, with 48.8% aged 28-42, and another 35.7% aged 27 or younger. 88.9% were straight, with 5.5% bisexual.

Just under 74% were from the United States, and close to 85% identified as white. The sample was extremely secular compared to the general population, with 53% identifying as atheist or agnostic. 77.8% had graduated from college, and 39.7% had some kind of post-graduate degree.

The most common fields were tech (24.7%), academia (grad student or research fellow) (11.4%), government (7.7%), academia (professor) (6%), entrepreneur (non-tech) (6%), academia (other) (5.8%), nonprofit (5.6%), banking (5.2%), tech (business owner) (5.2%), politics (2.8%), and think tank (2.8%).

Individuals were asked to describe themselves politically on a five-point scale, from very liberal (1), to moderate (3), to very conservative (5). The survey takers rated themselves on average 3.26 on economic issues, 2.79 on social issues, and 3.07 overall. In other words, the sample can be described as broadly libertarian leaning.

More precisely, the field can be described as pro-democratic capitalism, of a techno-optimist flavor.

We know this because we asked respondents to rate 78 different ideas, people, and concepts, from Donald Trump to bringing back dinosaurs to embryo selection to banning pornography.

The four statements and ideas they rated most favorably were “I believe people are better off than at any other point in history” (4.07 on a 5-point scale); “I believe capitalism is a better economic system than all available alternatives” (4.07); “I believe anthropogenic climate change is real” (4.01); and “Democracy” (3.72). The least popular were “There should be no law against a boss pressuring an employee for sex” (1.82); “It is more likely than not that the Democrats stole the 2020 election” (1.85); “I believe humans have made contact with aliens” (1.85) (note this was before that topic started to be in the news); and “I believe people in developed countries should have fewer children” (1.89).

As found in previous studies of this kind, participants were more likely than chance to be first borns. 55.1% of respondents reported having no older siblings, compared to 34% who reported no younger siblings. With a sample size of 492 individuals answering both questions, this result passes all conventional thresholds of significance.

III. What Makes a Good Forecaster?

Figure 3 shows the twenty statements with the strongest correlation, positive or negative, with being a good forecaster, defined as the balance in S$ an individual ended up with. For this analysis, I only included bettors who placed at least S$50 on 5 different markets and answered all item questions, of which there were 192 individuals.

If there’s one takeaway from the chart above, it’s that the best forecasters liked left-wing ideas, people, and movements. The best predictor was agreeing with the statement that liberals are more honest than conservatives. Since I’ve written articles to this effect, this warmed my heart. But that result was just part of a general pattern of liberals being better forecasters than conservatives. A univariate regression likewise shows that those who identified as more conservative on the five-point scale ended up with lower balances, with the result just missing the conventional threshold of significance (p = .056).

There are two plausible theories here, other than the possibility that liberals are just superior at predicting the future. First, since this was a highly selected group, it may have been that liberals who participated in the Salem/CSPI tournament were of a higher quality, because they were familiar with and willing to participate in an event that was coded as being ideologically opposite of them. Recall that the crowd leaned more conservative overall, albeit slightly. For reference, participants rated BLM (2.46) higher than Biden (2.34) and Trump (2.1), but lower than libertarianism (3.21) or DeSantis (2.86). The Democratic Party (2.06) and the Republican Party (2.08) were rated about equally negatively.

The second possibility is that the liberal advantage is explained by the results of the midterms. Of our 91 markets, 18 had to do with the American elections held in November 2022. Imagine if each side tended to bet on how they wanted things to turn out. Then liberals would have ended up doing much better, because Democrats outperformed the conventional wisdom. PredictIt gave Republicans a 74% chance of winning the Senate on the day before the election, and the FiveThirtyEight model ended up at 59%.

This led me to wonder, what happens if you simply take out the 18 midterm markets, and see how people did in the other 73 markets? Figure 4 shows the results for the top 20 items most strongly related to forecasting outcomes not having to do with the midterms, otherwise using the same methodology as described for Figure 3.

Suddenly, conservatives are the better forecasters. If you want someone’s advice, you should look for an individual who thinks theology should dominate public life, incest definitely shouldn’t be legal, and Trump was robbed in 2020. Unless, that is, you want to predict the 2022 midterm results. The results in Figure 3 and Figure 4 are not driven by outliers. Removing the biggest winners of the tournament does not change the pattern of liberal respondents doing better overall and conservatives performing better in non-midterm elections.

For both Figure 3 and Figure 4, there is an obvious potential multiple comparisons issue. When a Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction is applied to the p-values, 7 items remain significant in Figure 3 and 5 in Figure 4.

Is the conclusion that nobody is better than anyone else? Mostly, yes. The relationships found are quite weak, with very few items having a correlation of at least r =+/- 0.2 with forecasting results. Yet I think we do have to give the advantage to liberals. It would be unfair to discount their accomplishment just because much of it was driven by the 2022 midterms. If conservatives were too optimistic about their own side winning, then that is their fault. Maybe Democrats would’ve been too optimistic about their chances in a different year, but we can’t just assume that they would have been. So credit to the left leaning participants, but keep the two caveats in mind that they didn’t do as well in non-midterm markets, and the ones who participated in this tournament are a highly selected group. While the midterm story can explain the overall results, it doesn’t provide an obvious hypothesis as to why conservatives would be better in non-midterm markets.

Data

I’d like to encourage anyone who is interested to explore the data for themselves. Please reach out if you do at contact@cspicenter.org, as we would be interested in hearing about and publicizing your results. All of the analysis in this report was done in Stata or Excel. The spreadsheets to reproduce the data in Part I can be found below, along with the codebook, explaining what’s in each file. As mentioned above, we’re withholding most of the data relied upon in Part II and Part III, as it can be used to identify individuals and gain access to personal information. We are, however, making available the ratings of various items and political self-identification in the file Salemratings below. If you would like to test hypotheses about any other individualized data, contact us and we can possibly discuss some kind of collaboration or non-disclosure agreement.

All files listed below can be found here, in addition to a .json file with all the bets.

Salemcodebook

197KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Salemratings

142KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

Calibration

21.3KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

Allobs

416KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

Does higher education value policy and administrative reforms likely to save black (and ideally other) lives? Or does higher education care more about virtue signalling and promoting a broad leftist agenda to enhance the power and status of academics and their institutions, whatever the impacts on most other human beings?

The genesis of this essay can be found in a 2019 academic conference in which one of us (Maranto) presented a paper, later published in Public Integrity,1 which ranked police departments in 21 of the 25 largest US cities by their success in 2015 in keeping homicide rates low and not killing civilians, while adjusting for poverty rates, since high poverty makes policing more difficult. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) topped the rankings, with very low homicide rates and the lowest rates of police killings of civilians despite the city’s relatively high poverty. (Our 2020 analyses of 50 cities again ranked NYPD first.) As with other attempts at bureaucratic reform, ranking police departments based on their success on these important metrics has the potential to drive improvements by encouraging less successful cities to copy their more successful peers. Since both police killings of civilians and much more common civilian-on-civilian homicides disproportionately take black lives, progress on these indicators would indeed make black lives matter.

Almost any American without a PhD can see the value in this kind of research. But as recounted by one of us in the Wall Street Journal,2 other social scientists at the 2019 conference expressed confusion and at times astonishment as to why anyone interested in Black Lives Matter might study ways to improve policing. Instead, BLM researchers were interested in using the movement to increase progressive power. As of June 2020:

Using Google Scholar, the five most cited research articles and book chapters with “black lives matter” in the title include “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement,” an article on “the evolving role of social media,” another on “mass struggle,” a commentary on racism and public health, and a piece on environmental justice. Other widely cited works study news coverage of the movement, youth activism, and the “migrant crisis” in Europe. Judging by their titles, none of the twenty most cited articles or chapters on Black Lives Matter directly seek ways to reduce police killings of black civilians.3

Similarly, as of May 5, 2022, there was just one Web of Science citation for Franklin Zimring’s 2017 When Police Kill,4 a serious empirical analysis suggesting ways to reduce civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement. This (mis)allocation of research effort reflects the takeover of large sections of the social sciences by critical theory supporting activists seeking power (and grant funding), who are relatively uninterested in seeking to understand and ameliorate social problems like violent crime and police brutality.5

Here we repeat the June 2020 Wall Street Journal analysis in a somewhat different way, focusing not on titles but, instead, on generating rankings by conducting a general keyword search on the Web of Science Core Collection for “black lives matter” and sorting by publications with the most citations as of April 20, 2022.6 The Web of Science is more restrictive than Google Scholar, yielding far fewer citations, in our experience over 95% fewer.

The 25 most cited works listed in the above table have a combined total of 1,704 citations. As in the 2020 search using Google Scholar, the vast majority of the Web of Science citations seemingly have little to do with either studies or commentary likely to save black lives. At least from their titles, the top five works, those with 98 or more Web of Science citations, resemble, and often are, the most influential publications of 2020 using Google Scholar, involving public health, millennial activism, and the migrant crisis in Europe. In addition, the second most widely cited piece discusses how political science as a field treats marginalized communities of color.7 As its authors explain: “Focusing on policing, we seek to unsettle the mainstream of a subfield that rarely inquires into governmental practices of social control and the ways ‘race-class subjugated communities’ are governed through coercion, containment, repression, surveillance, regulation, predation, discipline, and violence.” Such analyses seem unlikely to decrease either homicide or police violence against civilians. They are unlikely to help make black lives matter on this planet in any foreseeable time frame.

Generally, the highly cited articles listed in the table explore social media use and activism (4, including one piece involving Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and BLM), racial activism and white attitudes (3), immigration and migrants (2), anti-Blackness in higher education, “democratic repair,” radically re-imagining law, anti-Blackness of global capital, urban geography, counseling psychology, research on K-12 schools, BLM and “technoscientific expertise amid solar transitions,” BLM and “evidence based outrage in obstetrics and gynecology,” and BLM and differential mortality in the electorate. Again, we see little evidence of author (or citer) intent to save black lives in the works that frequently get cited.

Of the 25 most cited scholarly articles, only one, ranked 19th, from Public Administration Review, presents research that has the potential to save black and other lives in ways that are relatively immediate and related to law enforcement. It is titled “Preventing the Use of Deadly Force: The Relationship between Police Agency Policies and Rates of Officer-Involved Gun Deaths.”8 This fascinating article uses cross sectional data from 1,107 law enforcement agencies over 15 years, standardized by population. The authors, Jennings and Rubado, find no evidence that either community policing or having police officers who demographically resemble their cities reduces the number of fatal police shootings of civilians. In contrast, roughly half of departments require that officers file a report whenever they point their guns without shooting. (Virtually all require such reports when weapons are discharged.) Empirical evidence indicates that this simple reporting requirement substantially reduces police shootings of civilians, while managing not to increase shooting deaths of officers.

Most proper science is tentative, and sometimes reforms have unintended consequences. That said, the paper empirically evaluates practical ways to save lives, prescribing a reform with the potential to do so. This article accounts for just 44 (2.6%) of the 1,704 Web of Science citations of the 25 most cited articles found in the “black lives matter” keyword search. The Bearfield, Maranto, and Wolf9 ranking of large police departments to identify those most successful at preserving life was cited just twice by Google Scholar as of May 2022 and not at all in the Web of Science. We doubt this article will ever rank among the top 1,000 cited BLM-related publications.

One force that sets a positive example other cities could follow is the aforementioned NYPD. Each year, its internal affairs division pushes dozens of officers to resign, retire early, or move to routine administrative duties like vehicle impoundment in which they are unarmed. Others are prosecuted, as longtime NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau Chief Charles Campisi documented in his lively Blue on Blue: An Insider’s Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops.10 An NYPD source indicates that about 300 officers, nearly 1% of the force, are on internal watch lists. When told that NYPD should feel satisfied having so few problematic officers, the source retorted that they had trouble sleeping at night since every one of those officers presented a “potential” George Floyd or Freddie Gray “situation.” In retrospect, Minneapolis and Baltimore might have been better off had more of their police administrators thought this way. Two years after the Floyd murder, observers believed that, along with civil service rules, the Minneapolis police union contract still posed undue burdens on police managers who wanted to hold their officers accountable.11

In short, much can be done to improve policing in ways that would make all lives, but especially black lives, matter. Alas, currently, we cannot much rely on academia to help. If anyone intends research to save black lives rather than merely to promote radical causes and the careers of professors, then we need a major reorientation of social science research, and arguably, of the whole higher education enterprise.

On the morning of February 24, 2022, as Russian troops marched into Ukraine, the world woke up to find out that it had entered a new era. By ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin did not just destroy the lives of countless people in Ukraine and Russia, but also shattered what little was left of the hopes born at the end of the Cold War. Between 1989 and 1991, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe had disappeared almost overnight, while the Soviet Union itself had followed suit shortly afterward. Almost everywhere in the Eastern bloc, communist leaders were replaced by democrats, who organized competitive elections and launched reforms to transition to a market economy. Even before the Soviet Union disintegrated, the communist leadership had started to democratize their country and had effectively put an end to the Cold War through negotiations with the US and its allies, resulting in vast reductions of armament both nuclear and conventional. For the first time in decades, people did not have to fear a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which unless it was stopped in time could have led to a nuclear exchange and the destruction of modern civilization in both Europe and North America. The future seemed bright and people looked ahead to a new era of peace, democracy and cooperation. Unfortunately, thirty years later, we know that it wasn’t meant to be. This vision of a bright future did not unravel all of a sudden but slowly over many years and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, which kicked off the largest war in Europe since WWII, was merely the conclusion of a long process.

Why did this happen? According to the prevailing narrative, the answer to that question is very simple. Unlike Germany or Japan, Russia never truly rejected imperialism and, though after 1991 it was temporarily weakened, it continued to aspire to dominate its neighbors. Out of naivety, and despite being told this repeatedly by Central and Eastern Europeans, the West refused to act forcefully against Moscow’s imperialist tendencies. In particular, after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, the West did not give up the hope that it could reach some kind of accommodation with Moscow and refused to break off relations with it. Neither the US nor the EU took sanctions against Russia in response to the invasion. Instead, the US launched the so-called “reset” in 2009 to improve relations with Russia, which led to various political and military agreements. Meanwhile, Germany and several other Western European countries continued to build the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea in collaboration with Russia, which allowed them to secure a supply of Russian natural gas that bypassed Ukraine and therefore weakened it by reducing its leverage over Russia. Even after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, in violation of several international treaties it had ratified, the West reacted weakly and only adopted limited sanctions. This emboldened Putin and, when Ukraine refused to obey his diktat by adopting a federal constitution and granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk (where Russia was covertly supporting the separatists against the Ukrainian armed forces), convinced him that he could get away with a full-blown invasion.

In a series of essays, I will argue that although this narrative has now become largely uncontroversial, it’s extremely simplistic and in some respects even gets things backwards. That is not to say, of course, that Russia is not imperialist and that this didn’t play a role in the sequence of events that resulted in the invasion of Ukraine. But there is a lot more to this story and, as I will argue, the deterioration of relations between the West and Russia that made the invasion possible in the first place would not have occurred if the West, not just Russia, had not made several mistakes after the end of the Cold War that needlessly aggravated Moscow. Nor does it mean that, as some people think, the US and its allies deliberately provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. Rather, bad luck and policy mistakes not only in Russia but also in the West and Ukraine conspired to create a perfect storm, which led to the events of 2014 and ultimately to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Nobody forced Russia to invade Ukraine, but historical events always have several causes and there is no such thing as a law of conservation of blame, so the fact that Russia bears the bulk of the responsibility for the war doesn’t mean that nobody else is to blame for it. As we shall see, there is an element of Greek tragedy in what happened, as nobody intended their actions to result in that outcome, but that is not to say that it was inevitable. I don’t think it was, but to understand how it could have been avoided, one has to understand how it came about.

The problem is that, in order to understand what happened and how it could perhaps have been avoided, one has to go back all the way to the end of the Cold War and carefully pore over more than thirty years of history, for without this context it’s simply impossible to understand more recent events and one is bound to misinterpret them. This makes it difficult for people who think it’s more complicated than generally understood to make their case effectively, because they have to challenge assumptions that are now deeply entrenched, and this requires launching into long historical explanations that vastly exceed most people’s attention spans. By contrast, proponents of the prevailing view have a narrative that is not only superficially compelling and consistent with people’s prejudices (since it fits the handful of facts they know or think they know about very well), but can be presented very succinctly. As historian Mariana Budjeryn wrote on a related issue, “complicated histories are unpopular, as they do not readily translate into political slogans”.1 Anyone who aspires to challenge this narrative has therefore his work cut out for him, but I shall nevertheless endeavor to do so and ask that you keep an open mind as I present my interpretation of the events I discuss in this work.

In order to challenge the prevailing view, it’s not enough to look at the facts;, the historical analysis has to be informed by clear thinking about morality and foreign policy. As Paul D’Anieri wrote after identifying some normative questions one has to answer to say how the events of 2014 could have been averted:

These are normative questions whose answers depend on further assumptions about the rights of great powers, the inviolability of sovereignty and international law, the boundaries of realpolitik, and so on. How one answers those questions will determine whose claim one believes has greater weight, who should therefore have backed off, and who, in the final analysis, is guilty of not backing off and therefore to blame for the conflict. Even in February 2014, violence could have been avoided as long as each side refrained from shifting to violence. Whether that move to violence should be blamed on protesters in Kyiv, on Yanukovych, or on Russia also falls back on normative assumptions. Thus, rather than history or analysis resolving who is to blame, how one assigns blame tends to shape how one writes or reads the analysis.2

Indeed, it’s not just the historical analysis embedded in the dominant narrative that is simplistic, but also the normative assumptions on which it implicitly rests. As we shall see, once those assumptions are made explicit and critically examined, many common arguments on what happened and who is to blame for it fall apart. I hope that, at the very least, I will convince even the skeptical reader that things are more complicated than they seem. Below you can find the first essay of the series in which I explain why the hopes of 1989 have not been fulfilled and instead Europe is now engulfed in the largest war on the continent since WWII.

Summary

Did the US and its allies promise the Soviet Union that there would be no NATO expansion at the end of the Cold War? This question has caused considerable controversy, as successive Russian leaders have made this claim over the past 30 years and accused the West of breaking their pledge by expanding NATO to Central and Eastern Europe.

As revolutions swept through Central and Eastern Europe and the Cold War drew to a close in 1989, German reunification was the most pressing issue to settle the conflict. But it required Moscow’s approval due to legal rights inherited from the end of WWII and the presence of a massive contingent of Soviet troops in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The central question was whether united Germany would be allowed to stay in NATO after reunification or whether it would have to leave the Alliance and adopt some kind of neutral status. Indeed, with the end of the Cold War, it wasn’t even clear whether NATO should continue to exist.

Most scholars have sided against Russia in arguing that no such pledge had been made during the negotiations on German reunification and more generally that the West didn’t have any obligation not to expand NATO as a result of the commitments made at the end of the Cold War.

The debate has focused on statements made by US and West German officials during preliminary talks held on the issue in February 1990. While everybody agrees that on this occasion they pledged not to expand NATO to the east if Germany was allowed to stay in the Alliance, people disagree about what they meant and what implications those exchanges had.

Critics of the Russian position argue that they were only talking about the territory of the GDR, that Gorbachev didn’t take even this limited no-expansion deal and that it was subsequently retracted anyway. Defenders of the Russian position argue that US and West German officials were talking about Central and Eastern Europe as a whole and that some kind of implicit deal ruling out NATO expansion to that area was in fact struck.

I argue that although they often overstate it, the Russians nevertheless have a strong case for a weak version of their claim, but that it’s not for the case defenders of their position typically make. Conversely, critics of the Russian position are right that US and West German officials were only talking about the GDR (with one important exception about which they misrepresent the evidence), but it’s not for the reasons they claim.

Moreover, they mistakenly conclude that Western officials didn’t make assurances that ruled out NATO expansion because, like defenders of the Russian position, they misconstrue the dynamic of the negotiations on German reunification and focus on the preliminary talks held in February 1990 at the expense of the rest of the negotiations.

I argue that Western officials never proposed a quid pro quo to their Soviet counterparts, at least not the quid pro quo that both critics and defenders of the Russian position have suggested. Gorbachev was not the naive negotiator usually portrayed, but was severely constrained by the fact that achieving his main policy goals required maintaining a cooperative stance with the West.

This led him to consent to German reunification in NATO, but he also accepted because he was assured repeatedly by Western officials that it would be followed by the creation of an inclusive post-Cold War European security order. I argue that NATO expansion, which instead created a NATO-centric security architecture that excluded Moscow, was a violation of those assurances.

The most significant aspect of this controversy, however, is not so much whether the US and its allies violated a pledge not to expand NATO made at the time, but the decision by the Bush administration to preserve NATO’s primacy in the post-Cold War era instead of pursuing a pan-European security agenda.

I conclude by reflecting on this road not taken at the end of the Cold War and argue that the Bush administration’s decision not to follow it, which I explain was made for both good and bad reasons, made the subsequent deterioration of relations between Russia and the West and a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, while by no means inevitable, much more likely.

In 1985, after the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In the years that followed, he launched a series of wide-ranging reforms that undermined the CPSU's monopoly on power, ended the Cold War and eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite widespread misconceptions, Gorbachev decided to end the Cold War not because he had no choice (while the Soviet Union was already in crisis at the time it still had the means to continue to wage the Cold War), but rather because he came to reject the ideological underpinning of the East-West confrontation. Paradoxically, he was able to succeed in ending the Cold War because he found a willing and enthusiastic partner in Ronald Reagan, who then as now was considered the arch-Cold Warrior. Reagan came to power with the conviction that something had to be done to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons, but he was critical of the détente because he thought that it had disproportionately benefited the Soviet Union, so he adopted a policy that combined firmness to force the Soviets to the negotiating table with a genuine willingness to make substantial reductions in nuclear weapons once they did. Although initially skeptical, Reagan came to trust Gorbachev after meeting him and became convinced that he was serious about reforming the Soviet Union and democratizing it, leading to a fruitful cooperation and a transformation of US-Soviet relations that ended the Cold War.3

In 1987, the two leaders signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty (INF Treaty), which closed the Euromissile Crisis started by the Soviet Union's decision to deploy SS-20 missiles targeting Western Europe at the end of the 1970s and was the first arms reduction agreement to eliminate a whole category of weapons. They also resumed the negotiations on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START Treaty), which had begun in 1982 but had stalled after Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, although it would not be signed until 1991 under George H. Bush. Moreover, Gorbachev started to reduce the number of troops that were stationed in Warsaw Pact countries, although hundreds of thousands remained. In December 1988, he made a speech at the UN in which he rejected the use of force in foreign policy and declared that Central and Eastern Europeans should be free to decide what kind of political and economic system they wished to live under, which amounted to a rejection of the Brezhnev Doctrine and made people in the West realize that he was serious about reforms.4 A few months later, his intentions were put to the test when Central and Eastern European countries moved toward liberalization and started the process that would result in the collapse of socialism in the Eastern bloc. But Gorbachev stood firm and, in a speech he gave at the Council of Europe in July, repeated his pledge that the Soviet Union would not use force to stop that process.5

In August 1989, a peace demonstration was held on the Austro-Hungarian border and the border was briefly opened, which set in motion a chain of reaction that resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. By the end of the year, after a series of revolutions, communist regimes had been swept away everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe and replaced by democratic political systems with competitive elections. In September, the Hungarian authorities decided to open the border with Austria, which led to the exodus of thousands of East Germans and further increased the pressure on the German Democratic Republic to open up. Mass protests erupted in East Germany and, by October, Erich Honecker, the leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was forced to resign. On November 9, the spokesman of the regime gave a press conference to announce new travel regulations, but in talking to journalists he gave the impression that East Germans were now free to cross the border in Berlin. The news spread quickly and, a few hours later, a very large crowd had gathered at the Wall and demanded to cross to the West. Since no one was willing to take the responsibility to use force to disperse the crowd, the commander at one of the border crossings yielded and ordered the guards to let people through.6 Almost 40 years after it was erected, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the German reunification, which up until then had seemed but a distant hope, suddenly appeared inevitable.

However, it would require negotiations with the Soviet Union, which still had more than 300,000 troops on the territory of the GDR and legal rights over Germany due to the post-World War 2 arrangements under which Germany was to be administered by the victorious powers. These negotiations took place throughout 1990 and, in the years and decades that followed, have become the topic of a controversy between the West and Russia. Moscow claims that, during the negotiations, Western officials had pledged not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe to convince Gorbachev to allow Germany to remain in NATO after reunification. As we shall see, although today this argument is commonly associated with Vladimir Putin (who frequently brings up this old grievance to justify his actions), it has a long history that started well before he rose to power and did not originate with him.7 It's important to examine this controversy because, although ultimately I will argue that it’s not as important as many people who are sympathetic to the Russian argument believe, I think it illustrates how Russia's complaints are summarily, and sometimes even dishonestly, dismissed in the West even when they have merits. This kind of attitude goes a long way toward explaining why Moscow came to distrust the West in the decades since the end of the Cold War, even if taken in isolation this particular episode didn't matter as much as the importance it has taken in the public debate suggests. This controversy also highlights how key decisions that were made by the US and its allies at the end of the Cold War and, beyond the particular issue of NATO expansion, shaped the relations between Russia and the West in the post-Cold War era.

1 The controversy about the pledge not to expand NATO

As I just noted, the controversy about the pledge that Western officials allegedly made not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War did not originate with Putin. Russian officials have offered several different versions of that argument over the years and it’s not always easy to pin down exactly what claims they are making. A version of that argument was made in 1993 by Boris Yeltsin in a letter that he sent to Bill Clinton:

I also want to call attention to the fact that the spirit of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, signed in September 1990, especially its provisions that prohibit the deployment of foreign troops within the eastern lands of the Federal Republic of Germany precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the east.8

This claim was not only vague but also pretty weak, since in particular he was just talking about the “spirit” of the treaty on Germany’s reunification, but later in the 1990s Russian officials made stronger arguments that referred more specifically to claims made by Western officials at the end of the Cold War.9 More recently, in the speech he made just before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin also referred to the promise that Moscow had allegedly received in 1990 and was more specific:

In 1990, when German unification was discussed, the United States promised the Soviet leadership that NATO jurisdiction or military presence will not expand one inch to the east and that the unification of Germany will not lead to the spread of NATO's military organization to the east. This is a quote.10

As we shall see, the quote he seemed to have had in mind was a statement made by James Baker, who in 1990 was Secretary of State. In 2009, Dmitry Medvedev, then President of Russia, had also accused the West of having broken promises that were made at the time:

After the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, we were hoping for a higher degree of integration. But what have we received? None of the things that we were assured, namely that NATO would not expand endlessly eastwards and our interests would be continuously taken into consideration. NATO remains a military bloc whose missiles are pointed towards Russian territory. By contrast, we would like to see a new European security order.11

It’s interesting to note that, in Medvedev’s version of the argument, NATO expansion was part of a more general complaint about the West’s attitude toward Russia after the end of the Cold War. In order to understand what they were talking about, it’s necessary to go back to what happened after November 8, 1989.

Three weeks after the fall of the Wall, Helmut Kohl, then Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), made a speech in the Bundestag where he presented a ten-point plan to reunify Germany. In this speech, he proposed in particular that, as a first step toward unification, a German confederation be created that would bring together the FRG and the GDR. But he made that proposal without consulting either Gorbachev or his Western allies, which raised concerns both in the Soviet Union and the West that he might try to act unilaterally and present them with a fait accompli. Gorbachev was particularly upset because, after the Wall fell, he’d sent a personal envoy to Kohl enjoining him to proceed with caution and promising that if he did then “anything might become possible”, so he thought that by making that speech without talking to him first Kohl had violated their agreement.12 As a result, he refused to discuss reunification for 2 months after that, which gave Kohl time to reassure his Western allies. They were also concerned that he’d made that announcement without consulting them and, ironically, suspected that he might have made a deal behind their back with Gorbachev. François Mitterrand, the French president, accepted reunification without enthusiasm but wanted to make sure that it would not imperil European integration and that post-WWII borders would not be questioned. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, was opposed to reunification because she feared Germany would go bad again. While eventually she accepted that she couldn’t prevent it and aligned herself with the US position, she secretly hoped that Gorbachev would stop it. As for George Bush, the US president, he supported German reunification as long as it did not threaten NATO, which then as now was the main vehicle of US influence in Europe. In January, the Soviets reached the conclusion that reunification was inevitable, so they agreed to host US and West German officials in Moscow on February 9-10 for preliminary talks on the issue.

The controversy has focused on what US and West German officials told their Soviet counterparts during those preliminary talks in Moscow. As we shall see, they made some assurances that NATO would not expand to the east, but people disagree about what they meant by that. The Russians and people who defend their position claim that, when US and West German officials told the Soviets that if Germany could stay in NATO after reunification the Alliance would not move eastward, they were not just talking about the territory of the GDR but about Central and Eastern Europe in general. Most Western officials, on the other hand, insist that the assurances made in Moscow only pertained to the GDR. For instance, then Secretary of State Baker, who as we shall see played a crucial role in the negotiations over German reunification, repeatedly made that claim and denied that the Russian argument had any merit:

There was a discussion about whether the unified Germany would be a member of NATO, and that was the only discussion we ever had. And the Soviets signed a treaty acknowledging that the unified Germany would be a member of NATO. So I don't understand how they can have these ideas that somehow, now, we promised them there would be no extension of NATO. There was never any discussion of anything but the GDR.13

This is also the view expressed by Philip Zelikow, who in 1990 was on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) dealing with those issues. In a 1995 op-ed, he claimed that “there is no evidence that in late January or early February of 1990 anyone — Mr. Genscher, James Baker or Mikhail Gorbachev — was even thinking, much less talking, about the possibility of NATO expansion even further into East-Central Europe”.14 Rodric Braithwaite and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, respectively UK ambassador to the Soviet Union and foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in 1990, more recently expressed a similar opinion.15

Until a few years ago, this position had also become a near-consensus among scholars. Its most influential defense is probably a paper by Mark Kramer published in 2009, where he argued that the idea that Western officials had pledged not to expand NATO if the Soviet Union agreed to allow reunified Germany to stay in NATO was a "myth".16 Angela Stent, citing that paper among other things, recently summarized that position:

What did the West promise Gorbachev at the time of German unification? This question has riled relations for more than twenty years, reinvigorated as more archival material has become available. Some Western participants in the German unification process insist that the United States promised Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge after Germany was unified and accuse the West of reneging on commitments it made to the USSR. Many Russian officials and experts, including Mikhail Gorbachev himself, subscribe to this view. “According to the Two-Plus-Four Agreements under which Germany was unified,” he has said, “the United States, Germany, Britain and France promised us that they would not expand NATO east of Germany.” Yet a careful reading of the agreements that were signed in 1990 when a united Germany joined NATO reveals that NATO enlargement was not explicitly addressed. Gorbachev and his advisors may have with hindsight believed that promises had been made by the Americans. But the historical record shows that no explicit commitments about NATO not enlarging were made—simply because this issue was not on the table. Secretary of State James Baker had told Gorbachev in February 1990 (before Germany was unified) that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift eastward from its present position, but he was referring to NATO’s jurisdiction over the territory of the GDR, not to NATO’s possible enlargement. In other words, Baker was talking about not stationing NATO troops on the territory of the former East Germany after 1990, not about anything else.17

For a long time, this view was virtually unchallenged in academic circles, but this changed a few years ago when new archival documents emerged and some scholars started to argue that, in light of that evidence, Kramer's position had to be revised.

This actually started in 2009, the same year Kramer published his paper, when Der Spiegel published a piece saying that "after speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia".18 But it took a few years before academics, using the documents cited by Der Spiegel and other recently declassified materials, started to push back against Kramer's view. In 2016, Joshua Shifrinson published a much noted paper in which he reopened the debate and, using recently declassified documents, argued that despite the consensus "this evidence suggests that Russian leaders are essentially correct in claiming that U.S. efforts to expand NATO since the 1990s violate the ‘spirit’ of the 1990 negotiations".19 Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton made a similar argument in 2017, concluding 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".20 More recently, Marc Trachtenberg published a paper in which he defends a similar view, concluding that "the Russian allegations are by no means baseless".21 Previously, Mary Sarotte had somewhat nuanced Kramer’s position, arguing that contrary to what he claims the expansion of NATO not only to East Germany but also to Central and Eastern Europe was briefly discussed in 1990, though in the end Gorbachev never secured a promise that it would not happen and even made concessions on East Germany in the final agreement that undermined the principle that NATO could not expand eastward.22 Kristina Spohr is generally close to Kramer's position, but she nevertheless acknowledges that several Western officials "did make comments to Soviet officials that might have been interpreted as more far-reaching and thus perhaps more consequential in terms of Soviet perceptions than has so far been acknowledged".23

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, those arguments had weakened the consensus in favor of Kramer's position, but since then it has become unpopular to acknowledge that some of Putin's complaints may have merits, so now people tend to talk as if the debate of the last few years had never happened and the view that Russia's position has no merits whatsoever once again goes largely unchallenged. In what follows, I argue against that view and conclude that the conclusion reached by Der Spiegel is essentially correct, while acknowledging that the case for the Russian position has nevertheless been exaggerated. In particular, I show that critics of that position are right about a crucial aspect of that debate (though for the wrong reasons), namely the scope of the assurances made in Moscow during the preliminary talks on Germany’s reunification in February 1990. With one exception, US and West German officials who participated in those preliminary talks were only talking about the territory of the GDR, but I argue that it doesn’t follow that NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe didn’t violate assurances made at the end of the Cold War because the negotiations on Germany’s reunification continued for several months after that and Western officials subsequently made broader assurances that it was very reasonable for the Russians to retrospectively consider incompatible with NATO expansion. But perhaps more importantly, this discussion will highlight a key but largely ignored fact about this controversy, which is that even if the debate has so far narrowly focused on the issue of NATO expansion, what violated the assurances made by Western officials at the end of the Cold War wasn’t so much NATO expansion per se but the gradual exclusion of Russia from the European security architecture it came to imply. In order to understand why, however, it’s necessary to go back to the controversy as it has played out in the literature and the arguments made by critics of the Russian position. In his paper on the controversy, Trachtenberg distinguishes three main arguments that critics of the Russian position have made:

First, they claim that the assurances applied only to eastern Germany, and not to Eastern Europe as a whole, and that even those assurances were superseded by arrangements worked out with the USSR later in the year. Second, they claim that the assurances in any event were not legally binding, and were thus not binding at all, because they were not embodied in any formal, signed agreement. And, third, they insist that whatever impression the Russians took away from what they had been told, western leaders had not deliberately sought to mislead them.24

He goes on to argue, often that each of those arguments is flawed. In what follows, I will also examine those arguments and explain why, though on most points his position is correct and I’m in broad agreement with him, I nevertheless think Trachtenberg sometimes overstates his case or doesn’t frame his position in the right way.

1.1 The assurances made at the beginning of the Two Plus Four process

Everybody agrees that, when he saw Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, Baker told Gorbachev that "if we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east".25 But as we have seen, most former Western officials and scholars claim that this and other similar assurances given by Western officials in the course of the negotiations about Germany's reunification only applied to the territory of the GDR. Moreover, they argue that even those assurances about East Germany were superseded by concessions made by Gorbachev later in the negotiations, as reflected by the content of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Germany or Two Plus Four Agreement by which France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States renounced the rights they held on Germany and allowed reunification between the FRG and the GDR. As Trachtenberg notes, when people claim that assurances made during the negotiations of this treaty only concerned the territory of the GDR and not the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, they actually make two distinct arguments.26 First, they argue that the expansion of the NATO beyond the Oder-Neisse line (which constituted the border between the GDR and Poland) was simply not an issue at the time, because at least when Baker said that nobody envisioned the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. If that were true, then it would settle the question, because if nobody was even thinking about the possibility that NATO might expand to Central and Eastern Europe at the time then Baker couldn't have been talking about this when he told Gorbachev that NATO would not move "one inch to the east". As Trachtenberg points out, the second argument is narrower in scope and says that whatever the participants had in mind at the time, the issue of NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe never came up during the negotiations and the assurances to which people who find merits in the Russian argument refer applied only to the GDR.

1.1.1 The context of the preliminary talks in Moscow between US/FRG officials and their Soviet counterparts

Starting with the first argument, as Trachtenberg and others have pointed out, it's patently false that nobody envisioned that the Warsaw Pact would disappear and that NATO might expand to former members of that organization in February 1990. On the Soviet side, Kramer claims that in February 1990, "Gorbachev was still fully confident that the USSR would continue to ‘work with its allies’ in the Warsaw Pact", but Soviet archives of a Politburo meeting on January 2, the British record of a meeting between Eduard Shevardnadze and Douglas Hurd, respectively Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union and Foreign Minister of the UK, on February 12 and a diary entry by one of Gorbachev's aides for January 21 show that, on the contrary, many people in the Soviet leadership were already predicting the end of the Warsaw Pact by then.27 For instance, in his meeting with Hurd, Shevardnadze is reported as saying:

If [the GDR] ceases to exist, Soviet troops will be pulled out of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Poland also will not want them. What purpose then would the Warsaw Pact have?

He said that at a time when, by everyone's account, the Soviet government had reached the conclusion that Germany's reunification was inevitable and that it would happen soon, so it's obviously not the case that nobody on the Soviet side was thinking about the end of the Warsaw Pact in February 1990. While Gorbachev himself was still talking as if he believed that at least part of it could be saved in a meeting with some of his advisors on January 26, as Trachtenberg notes, he was hardly "fully confident" that it would remain intact.28

In the West, not only had intelligence services been predicting the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact since the end of 1989, but the press was openly speculating that its days were numbered by the beginning of 1990.29 On February 4, just a few days before Baker met with Gorbachev and gave his infamous assurance that NATO would not move "one inch eastward", The Washington Post published a piece whose title was "Warsaw Pact—Endgame: In Eastern Europe, the Military Alliance Is Dead" and in which the author reported that "many top U.S. and European officials confidently predict" that "Soviet troops will be forced to withdraw entirely from Eastern Europe within a few years" and that "Hungary and perhaps Czechoslovakia may formally withdraw from the Warsaw Pact". A bit later in the article, he even added that "the idea of an entire nation defecting from the Warsaw Pact is hardly surprising, given that the alliance has already ceased to function substantively".30 On January 19, The Washington Post had already reported that "Hungarian and Polish leaders said today they want all Soviet troops out of their countries in a year or two, underscoring the increasingly rapid dissolution of the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance".31 During a public seminar organized by a German defense magazine on February 3-4, Gerhard Stoltenberg, the Minister of Defense of the FRG, declared that "we would commit a fatal strategic mistake if, faced with the increasing disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, we negotiated in exchange that of the Atlantic Alliance".32 Recently declassified British and US documents, as well as interviews with former Bush administration officials, also show that by the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990, the White House was already thinking about how to increase US influence in Central and Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union retreated from the region, so obviously they expected this to happen.33 Thus, while nobody at the time expected that it would happen so fast, few people doubted that in the long run the Warsaw Pact would disappear or, at the very least, that it would not survive without undergoing a significant transformation that would open the door to more US and Western influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

But the fact that people expected the Warsaw Pact to disappear and more generally Soviet influence to wane in the region doesn't mean they were already planning to expand NATO. Indeed, while Bush and his advisors were already concerned with making sure to keep their options open when the negotiations over German reunification started, they did not begin to seriously consider offering Central and Eastern European countries the prospect of NATO membership until 1991 and it wasn’t until Bush’s final year in office that a consensus developed that it would have to happen eventually because it was the best way to strengthen the US position in the region and prevent a dangerous standoff between Russia and Germany did not emerge until Bush's final year in office.34 However, in a speech he gave in Tutzing on January 31, Genscher not only endorsed Gorbachev's idea of a pan-European security architecture, but he publicly called for NATO to "state unequivocally that whatever happens in the Warsaw Pact, there will be no expansion of NATO territory eastward, that is to say, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union".35 Immediately before that, he had noted that in “Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary there is a growing demand for the withdrawal of Soviet forces” and that “we cannot say for sure at present what impact this will have on the structure, and on the future, of the Warsaw Pact”, clearly implying that it might unravel. If he had just said that NATO would not expand "closer to the borders of the Soviet Union", this sentence would be ambiguous on whether he was merely referring to the territory of the GDR or more generally to Central and Eastern Europe, but the fact that he prefaced this claim by "whatever happens to the Warsaw Pact" immediately after, strongly implying that it might soon cease to exist, in addition to being more evidence that Western officials already suspected that the Soviet-led alliance would not survive at the beginning of 1990, makes it clear that he meant the latter.

Yet when he mentions that speech, Kramer paraphrases Genscher as saying that “a united Germany would be a member of NATO, but that NATO’s jurisdiction would not extend to the eastern part”, which falsely makes it sound as if he was only talking about the territory of the GDR.36 Nor was Genscher’s wording a mistake or something he’d let slip in the heat of the moment, for he repeated the same thing almost word for word in a speech he made in Potsdam on February 9, just one day before he met with Shevardnadze in Moscow.37 It’s true that just after the passage where he made that non-expansion assurance, Genscher also said explicitly that “any proposals for incorporating the part of Germany at present forming the GDR in NATO’s military structures would block intra-German rapprochement”, but it’s clear that at this point of the speech he’s moved on to a different, though related point.38 To be sure, it’s also possible to interpret Genscher as saying that NATO should commit not to expand to the territory of the GDR even if the Warsaw Pact collapsed (in which case one might think that Moscow would care less about what happened in the territory of the GDR), but this interpretation seems far less natural and, as we shall see shortly, there is more evidence that it’s not what Genscher meant and that he was talking about Warsaw Pact countries. Moreover, even if that interpretation were correct, it wouldn’t really help critics of the Russian position. Indeed, if the Soviet Union was so concerned about NATO that Genscher thought it was important to promise that it would not expand to the territory of the GDR even if the Warsaw Pact collapsed, then a fortiori this assurance would have applied to former Warsaw Pact countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only did the assurances made by Genscher extend far beyond the GDR, but officials in Washington seem to have noticed and were alarmed by it. Robert Hutchings, who in 1990 served as a special advisor to the Secretary of State, later wrote about Genscher’s speech in Tutzing that he was speaking “not about the GDR but about Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary”.39 It would be very surprising if Soviet officials had not also noticed. Indeed, Gorbachev discussed in some detail the range of views that had been expressed at the symposium of the Protestant Academy in Tutzing on January 31 when he met Baker in Moscow on February 9, so it’s hard to believe that he didn’t read Genscher’s speech, which was delivered at the same event.40 Shevardnadze also claimed to have read the speech he made in Potsdam and even to have forwarded it to Gorbachev.41

Moreover, just one week before his fateful meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow, Baker went along with this idea or at least did nothing to suggest that he didn't even when the opportunity to do so came along. Indeed, after he gave that speech, Genscher decided to meet with Baker in Washington on February 2 to make sure they were on the same page and, according to a cable about the meeting sent by the State Department I discuss below, he told him there was a "need to assure the Soviets that NATO would not extend its territorial coverage to the area of the GDR nor anywhere else in Eastern Europe for that matter" and Baker apparently did not express a disagreement with that idea.42 Genscher then went on to repeat that point in the press conference he and Baker gave after their meeting, during which he made the following remarks as Baker was standing next to him:

We agreed that the intention does not exist to extend the NATO defense area toward the East. That applies, moreover, not just to the territory of the GDR, which we do not want to incorporate, but rather applies in general.43

He could hardly have been clearer that, contrary to what critics of the Russian position claim, he was not just talking about the territory of the GDR but about Central and Eastern Europe in general. As Trachtenberg notes, the fact that he used "we" is also significant, because it means that he was speaking for both he and Baker. If Baker had wanted to express his disagreement with that proposal, he could have done so during the press conference, but he did not.

One could argue that Baker may have missed the significance of that point since at the time everyone was still focused on the issue of whether Germany would be allowed to remain in NATO after reunification in the first place, which pushed the question of the conditions under which the Soviet Union might agree to that in the background.44 However, a summary of their discussion sent by the State Department to the US Ambassador to the FRG at Baker's request shows that he, or at least the author of that cable, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada Raymond Seitz, did not miss this part of Genscher's proposal at all:

Genscher confirmed that neutrality for a united Germany is out of the question. The new Germany would remain in NATO because NATO is an essential building block to a new Europe. In stating this, Genscher reiterated the need to assure the Soviets that NATO would not extend its territorial coverage to the area of the GDR nor anywhere else in Eastern Europe for that matter. (He made this point with the press after the meeting.)45

Moreover, in describing Baker's response to Genscher's proposals, the cable does not say that Baker expressed disagreement with that idea at any point during that conversation. As Sarotte explains, the reason why this cable was sent to Bonn is that Baker wanted the US Ambassador to the FRG to inform Kohl, the German Chancellor, of what had been discussed in Washington because he wasn't sure that Genscher, who didn't have a very good relationship with Kohl, would do so and he wanted to make sure that everyone both in Washington and Bonn was on the same page before the negotiations with the Soviet Union started. Vernon Walters, the US Ambassador to the FRG, did as instructed and briefed Horst Teltschik, Kohl's security advisor, the next day.46 Thus, not only was the State Department in Washington aware that Genscher wanted to give Moscow assurances that applied not just to the territory of the GDR but to Central and Eastern Europe in general, but so was the Chancellor's office in Bonn and as far as we can tell neither raised any objections.

Finally, to remove any lingering doubt that US officials may have missed that Genscher's proposal applied not only to the territory of the GDR but to Central and Eastern Europe in general, the State Department official transcript of his press conference with Baker makes Genscher's remarks even more explicit than they already were:

Perhaps I might add, we were in full agreement that there is no intention to extend the NATO area of defense and the security toward the East. This holds true not only for GDR, which we have no intention of simply incorporating, but that holds true for all the other Eastern countries. We are at present witnessing dramatic developments in the whole of the Eastern area, in COCOM, and the Warsaw Pact. I think that it is part (of) that partnership in stability which we can offer to the East that we can make it quite clear that whatever happens within the Warsaw Pact, on our side there is no intention to extend our area—NATO’s area—of defense towards the East.47

So people in the State Department, but probably also in the NSC, had duly noted the scope of Genscher's proposal and, if US officials did not express disagreement with it either publicly or privately, it's not because they had missed it.48

At the time, US officials were not only worried that the Soviet Union might adamantly reject that a reunified Germany remain in NATO, but they also feared that Gorbachev might offer Helmut Kohl a deal he "couldn't refuse" by proposing to allow reunification in exchange for neutrality.49 This would effectively spell the end of NATO and, as a result, of the US military presence in Europe, something US officials were determined to prevent. Thus, it's possible that Baker didn't actually intend to give the Soviet Union assurances that went beyond the territory of the GDR, but thought it best not to raise that issue with Genscher at this time to avoid a split between the US and Germany.50 In fact, this is more or less what James Dobbins, then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, told the British Ambassador in Washington after Baker’s meeting with Genscher:

Immediately after the meeting Genscher announced to a hastily assembled press conference that he and Baker were in ‘full agreement’ that reunification would not involve the extension of NATO to the east. Dobbins said that Baker had not in fact blessed Genscher’s particular formula, even though it was the best available at present. The Administration has made its position clear in December with its four principles, and was now cautious about being too specific, lest it be interpreted by the German opposition as an imperial dictat [sic] or upset the Russians before Baker’s talk with Shevardnadze.51

Thus, it seems that at the time Baker wasn’t ruling out Genscher’s formula, but he may also have not been committed to it and simply remained silent for tactical reasons when Genscher publicly said he had endorsed it. However, it’s also possible that Baker was initially more aligned with Genscher’s position, that he revised his view later after other people in the Bush administration pushed for a less accommodating stance and that Dobbins was engaging in damage control after the fact with allies.52 This might also explain why, as we shall see, Baker remained somewhat ambiguous when he met Shevardnadze and Gorbachev in Moscow. The most important thing for US officials at the time was that Genscher had said that Germany had to stay in NATO after reunification and they wanted to make sure he would not move from this position.

In any case, it's remarkable that even though several critics of the Russian position actually quoted this passage of the press conference during which Genscher talks about the necessity to make clear that NATO would not expand to the east, they omitted the part where he makes clear that he isn't merely talking about the territory of the GDR but about Central and Eastern Europe in general. For instance, Zelikow and Rice claim that "Baker understood Genscher to say that Germany would remain in NATO, but the Soviets had to be assured that NATO's territorial coverage would not extend to the former GDR" and quote Genscher's comment that he and Baker "were in full agreement that there is no intention to extend the NATO area of defense and security towards the East", which comes from the State Department’s transcript of the press conference, but omit the next sentence in the transcript, where Genscher clarifies that it "holds true not only for GDR, which we have no intention of simply incorporating, but that holds true for all the other Eastern countries".53 Spohr wrote that Genscher’s discussion with Baker “left the territories east of the GDR untouched”, but as we have seen that is simply not true.54

Kramer even went further and, after quoting the exact same part of the transcript as Zelikow and Rice (without the next sentence that clarified the scope of his assurance that NATO would not expand "towards the East"), he added a gloss on that comment that completely changed the meaning of what Genscher had actually said:

At a joint press conference after their meeting, Genscher said that he and Baker "were in full agreement that there is no intention to extend the NATO area of defense and security toward the East," meaning eastern Germany. [emphasis is mine] When asked by journalists what exactly this meant, Genscher insisted that he was not talking about "a halfway membership [for a united Germany] this way or that. What I said is there is no intention of extending the NATO area to the East."55

Kramer cites a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article as the source of those quotes, but it doesn't actually contain them and they are identical to the State Department transcript, so either he checked the transcript directly or he found those quotes in another source that was quoting Genscher from the transcript.56 Whether he knew that Genscher had made clear that he was talking not just about the territory of the GDR but about Central and Eastern Europe in general and knowingly altered the meaning of his remarks by adding that gloss or was misled by another source that quoted Genscher partially and added that gloss in good faith, the fact is that he completely changed the meaning of Genscher's remarks in a way that makes them consistent with his view that Western officials never made any assurances that went beyond the territory of the GDR, when in fact they show that view to be false. As we shall see, adding interpolations to ambiguous statements made by Western officials pledging not to expand NATO eastward to make them sound like they support his view that assurances given about NATO expansion only ever applied to the territory of the GDR is part of Kramer's usual modus operandi, but in this case he actually did the same thing with a statement that was not ambiguous at all.57 As we have seen, he had already distorted Genscher’s Tutzing speech in a similar way.

On February 6, Genscher met with Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Minister, in Bonn and told him the same thing. Here is how the latter summarized what Genscher had told him in a cable he sent to Christopher Mallaby, the British Ambassador to the FRG, after their meeting:

Genscher added that when he talked about not wanting to extend NATO that applied to other states beside the GDR. 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.58

A German document summarizing the same meeting says that Genscher told Hurd something very similar, but using the example of Hungary instead of Poland:

The West could do a lot to facilitate the current developments for the SU. Of particular importance was the declaration that NATO had no intention of expanding its territory to the east. Such a declaration should not only relate to the GDR, but should be of a general nature. For example, the SU also needs security that Hungary will not become part of the western alliance in the event of a change of government.59

According to Hurd's cable, Genscher also told him that "the CSCE summit, devoted to the future of Europe, would be an important vehicle for helping the Soviet Union to come to terms with the erosion of the Warsaw Pact", which again show that both the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the possibility that Moscow might worry about the expansion of NATO in that area were very much on the mind of Western officials just before the negotiations about German reunification were set to begin.60

The possibility that NATO might expand to Central and Eastern European countries or at least that Western countries might expand their influence in that region as the Soviet Union retreated from it was certainly on the mind of leaders in those countries. Indeed, on February 4, The Washington Post reported that it was a "hot topic of discussion" among military leaders in the Warsaw Pact:

But the shopworn, bipolar concept of Europe no longer interests military leaders of the Eastern bloc, many of whom have been swept into power within the past two months. In their circle, the prospect of a militarily neutral Eastern Europe, or even one with a web of economic and military ties to the West, is suddenly a hot topic of discussion.61

Gyula Horn, Hungary's Foreign Minister, actually talked about the possibility that his country might join "NATO's political councils" publicly on February 24.62 He had even raised the idea directly to Lawrence Eagleburger, the Deputy Secretary of State, in a private meeting around the same time.63 In the months that followed, as they realized that Gorbachev would not use force to prevent the dislocation of the Warsaw Pact, leaders of Central and Eastern European countries started to be increasingly explicit about their interest in eventually joining NATO. Kramer is right that, in his statement, Horn was not talking about joining NATO's military structures but merely about some kind of political cooperation and that he said that more than 2 weeks after Baker met Gorbachev, but The Washington Postarticle makes clear that Eastern European leaders had already talking about it privately before that. Now, if leaders of Warsaw Pact countries were talking about this even before Baker went to Moscow, it's very unlikely that Soviet officials didn't know about it. Indeed, in a January 26 meeting with his advisors I already mentioned above, Gorbachev explained that unless the Soviet Union worked with "other socialist countries" they'd be "picked up by others", by which he presumably meant NATO.64

Thus, the argument that Western officials couldn't possibly have intended to give assurances about NATO expansion that applied to Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the territory of the GDR in February 1990, because nobody at the time imagined that the Warsaw Pact would collapse and that NATO might expand in the region, is undoubtedly incorrect. To be sure, in both private and public conversations in the days and weeks leading up to the beginning of the negotiations over German reunification, the focus was on the status of the territory of the GDR, but officials in both the Eastern and Western blocs definitely had in mind the unraveling of the Warsaw Pact and the possibility that Western countries might take advantage of it, including by expanding NATO even though nobody was actively planning to do so at the time. As we have seen, Genscher even gave public assurances to that effect that it wouldn't happen on several occasions, including during a press conference where he claimed to be speaking for both he and Baker, yet as Trachtenberg aptly noted neither Baker during that press conference nor the State Department later "issue a clarification pointing out that Genscher had been speaking only for himself when he had made that remark and that the U.S. government did not necessarily share his views in that regard".65 Which brings us to the second, narrower argument that, whatever people were thinking when the negotiations about Germany's reunification started, nothing was said during the negotiations to the effect that NATO would not expand to Central and Eastern European countries and Western officials only gave assurances about the territory of the GDR.

1.1.2 What US and West German officials told their Soviet counterparts in Moscow

Baker went to Moscow on February 9 and first met with Shevardnadze before talking to Gorbachev. He tried to convince both that it would be in the Soviet Union's interest to allow Germany to stay in NATO after reunification, on the grounds that a neutral Germany would probably seek to develop an independent nuclear capability to ensure its security and might even return to the militarism of the past, which would be much less likely if it remained anchored in NATO. He told Shevardnadze that, in that case, "there would, of course, have to be iron clad guarantees that NATO's jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward" and that it "would have to be done in a manner that would satisfy Germany's neighbors to the east".66 This is ambiguous as to whether he just meant the territory of the GDR or Central and Eastern Europe in general, but the reference to the concerns of “Germany’s neighbors to the east” suggests he was just talking about the GDR. Indeed, if he had been referring to a possible expansion to Central and Eastern European countries, it’s hard to see why those countries would have been concerned about it, whereas it makes perfect sense if he was talking about NATO forces moving into the territory of the GDR, since in that case Czechoslovakia would have to deal with NATO’s presence not just on its western border but also on its northern one and NATO would suddenly appear on Poland’s western border. Although the Warsaw Pact was falling apart, nobody thought it would completely disappear so rapidly, so it made sense to worry about the reactions of those countries.

Baker also proposed a mechanism for the negotiations that would associate the FRG and the GDR to the four powers that still had legal rights over Germany, the so-called "Two Plus Four” mechanism, which eventually became the format under which the negotiations were conducted. Later in the conversation, he suggested that such a mechanism could be used to produce "the right kind of outcome" and went on to say that "it might be an outcome that would guarantee that there would be no NATO forces in the Eastern part of Germany" and even added that "in fact there could be an absolute ban on that". Trachtenberg argues that, since Baker had no problem mentioning the territory of the GDR explicitly in that part of the conversation, it's evidence that, when he used the more ambiguous phrase earlier by assuring Shevardnadze that NATO "would not move eastward" if Germany was allowed to remain part of the Alliance, he was talking about Central and Eastern Europe in general. However, one could argue that, on the contrary, this was a clarification of what he'd meant earlier. The truth is that, just based on what was said during that conversation according to the State Department memorandum that I have been quoting, it's impossible to tell for sure what Baker meant, but I think it’s more likely than not that he was only talking about the GDR. What Shevardnadze understood, on the other hand, is harder to determine.

After his meeting with Shevardnadze, Baker met with Gorbachev and, according to both the State Department memorandum of their conversation and the Soviet record of their meeting, made very similar points and was similarly ambiguous when he talked about not expanding NATO eastward. After explaining why he thought that it would be preferable for everyone, including the Soviet Union, that Germany remain in NATO after reunification, he gave the assurance I already quoted above that in that case the Alliance's jurisdiction would not move "one inch to the east":

We don't favorably view a neutral Germany. The FRG says that this is not a satisfactory approach. A neutral Germany in our view is not necessarily going to be a non-militaristic Germany. It could well decide that it needed its own independent nuclear capability as opposed to depending on the deterrent of the United States. All our allies and East Europeans we have spoken to have told us that they want us to maintain a presence in Europe. I am not sure whether you favor that or not. But let me say that if our allies want us to go we will be gone in a minute. Indeed, if they want us to leave we'll go and I can assure you that the sentiment of the American people is such that they will want us to leave immediately. The mechanism by which we have a US military presence in Europe is NATO. If you abolish NATO there will be no more US presence. We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.67

In this part of the conversation, Baker is trying to convince Gorbachev that it would actually be in the Soviet Union’s interest to allow Germany to stay in NATO, because otherwise US troops will have to leave the country and Germany will likely become a military power again, which the Soviet Union doesn’t want. He is arguing that German’s continued NATO membership and, relatedly, the US military presence would be a factor of stability in Europe and would therefore benefit the Soviet Union. Again, the phrase Baker used when he said that NATO would not expand is quite general, which if not for the context would be more naturally interpreted as referring to Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the GDR.

However, the fact that Baker said that immediately after saying that he understood that “countries in the east” would need assurances once again suggests that he was talking about the GDR.68 Indeed, if he was talking about the expansion of NATO to Central and Eastern European countries, then how would ruling out that possibility assuage the security concerns of those same countries? Trachtenberg interprets this passage as evidence that Baker’s assurance was about Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the territory of the GDR, but that doesn’t make sense since he talked about “countries” in the plural and therefore couldn’t have been referring only to the Soviet Union.69 It’s possible that Baker meant that, if some but not all of them joined NATO, expansion would be seen as a threat to those who stayed outside, but this interpretation seems contrived. It’s much more likely that he was referring to the fact that Central and Eastern European countries, especially Poland which at the time was still worried that after reunification Germany might seek to revise the post-WWII border, would be concerned if NATO suddenly appeared on their borders.70 It’s surprising that, as far I know, no critic of the Russian position has ever made that point, even though it’s a very strong argument in favor of their position that despite the ambiguous language he used Baker was only talking about the GDR.

Still trying to convince Gorbachev that it would be in the Soviet Union's interest to allow Germany to remain in NATO after reunification, he returned to that point later in the meeting:

Baker: I want to ask you a question, and you need not answer it right now. Supposing unification takes place, what would you prefer: a united Germany outside of NATO, absolutely independent and without American troops; or a united Germany keeping its connections with NATO, but with the guarantee that NATO’s jurisprudence or troops will not spread east of the present boundary?

Gorbachev: We will think everything over. We intend to discuss all these questions in depth at the leadership level. It goes without saying that a broadening of the NATO zone is not acceptable.

Baker: We agree with that.71

This comes from the Soviet account of their conversation, but although the State Department memorandum of that meeting is redacted after Baker asks Gorbachev this question, they are virtually identical before that. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, a letter that Baker sent Kohl immediately after the meeting that was declassified by Germany confirms Gorbachev’s reply. Again, they used phrases that were quite general, but still ambiguous in the sense that in this part of the meeting they never explicitly refer to either the territory of the GDR or Central and Eastern Europe in general, so I don't think that we can reach a determination about what they meant or understood the other to be saying just based on the content of this part of the conversation. As before, one can interpret the fact that in other parts of the conversation he specifically mentioned the GDR as evidence that ambiguous phrases about not expanding NATO eastward referred to that, but one can also argue like Trachtenberg that it shows that Baker had no problem mentioning the GDR explicitly when he wanted to make a point specifically about it. Nevertheless, as I argued above, Baker’s reference to Germany’s eastern neighbors earlier in the conversation and during his conversation with Shevardnadze suggests that he was only talking about the GDR.

Robert Gates, Deputy National Security Advisor, met with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, the same day and also tried to convince him that it would be in the Soviet Union's interest to allow a reunified Germany to stay in NATO. In order to make that prospect more attractive to his counterpart, he also said that in that case NATO would not move eastward. Here is how a NSC memorandum of their meeting summarized this part of the conversation:

Events are moving faster than anticipated. We might see some GDR initiative after the 18 March elections. Under these circumstances, we support the Kohl-Genscher idea of a united Germany belonging to NATO but with no expansion of military presence to the GDR. This would be in the context of continuing force reductions in Europe. What did Kryuchkov think of the Kohl-Genscher proposal under which a united Germany would be associated with NATO but in which NATO troops would move no further east than they now were? It seems to us to be a sound proposal.72

As Shifrinson noted, this indicates more support for this idea within the Bush administration than previously recognized.73 On the other hand, since in the first part of his argument Gates apparently talked about not moving NATO forces to the GDR specifically (in contrast to Baker's more ambiguous phrasing), it also suggests that US officials only had in mind a more limited assurance restricted to the territory of the GDR. However, he also refers to Genscher's proposal in the next part of his argument, which as we have seen was not limited to the GDR but applied to Central and Eastern Europe more generally. What Gates meant really depends on whether he saw that proposal as the same as the idea that NATO forces would not move into the territory of the GDR after reunification or as a more general proposal that would just entail the latter. We saw that people in the State Department had noted that Genscher's proposal applied to Central and Eastern Europe more broadly, but it's possible that people in the NSC missed that aspect of the proposal and construed it as more limited than it really was. It's important to keep in mind that governments are not unitary actors, so Gates could have meant one thing and Baker another. In fact, as I’m about to explain, there is evidence that regardless of whether they had noticed that Genscher’s proposal wasn’t limited to the GDR but applied to Central and Eastern Europe in general, people in the NSC were more narrowly focused on the former, so it’s likely that Gates was also talking about the GDR.

Before he went to Moscow, Baker had agreed that he would tell Kohl, who was supposed to meet Gorbachev the next day, what had been said during his conversation with the Soviet leader, so he sent him a letter summarizing their meeting before going back to Washington. In that letter, he used the same language that we have discussed above:

And then I put the following question to him. Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US 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.

He answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real thought to all such options, and would be discussing them soon “in a kind of seminar”. He then added: “Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.” (By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.)74

Again, this letter cannot adjudicate the issue of whether this assurance referred only to the territory of the GDR or more generally to Central and Eastern Europe based on this letter, because the language used by Baker remained ambiguous on this point.

In any case, when people in the NSC heard about the question Baker had put to Gorbachev during his meeting with him, they worried that, in his desire to convince the Soviet leader that it was in Moscow's interest to allow Germany to stay in NATO after reunification, Baker might have preemptively made concessions on NATO's future that were not necessary to achieve the US goal of making sure that a reunified Germany would remain in NATO. So the White House drafted and Bush signed another letter to Kohl in which they warned him against making any concessions in advance of express requests by Soviet officials. In that letter, Bush declared himself in favor of a "special military status for what is now the territory of the GDR", but repudiated Baker’s formulation that NATO’s “jurisdiction” would not expand to the east after reunification.75 However, according to Zelikow and Rice, the problem wasn't that Baker's language was ruling out the expansion of NATO to Central and Eastern European countries but that he'd called for no extension of NATO's "jurisdiction" and people in the NSC worried that it would be difficult to reconcile that kind of language with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which commits NATO members to mutual defense in case of attack.76 As we shall see, Bush’s formulation is often presented as a hardening of Baker’s proposal, which is true in the sense that it removed any potential ambiguity as to the fact that NATO’s Article 5 would apply to Germany as a whole, including the territory of the GDR. However, the main issue people in the NSC had with his proposal seems to have been, not that it was overly generous, but that taken literally it made little sense, since it seemed to imply that Germany as a whole would be part of NATO yet Article 5 would only apply to some of its territory. Not only would this have been absurd from a political and strategic point of view, but it wasn’t even clear that it could work legally. In any case, after that intervention by the White House, Baker quickly stopped using that kind of language in negotiations with Soviet officials.77 The fact that, in his letter to Kohl, Bush talked specifically about the territory of the GDR and didn’t mention the rest of Central and Eastern Europe is yet more evidence that, despite the ambiguous language they sometimes used in Moscow, US officials were only talking about the GDR.

Thus, right before he met with Gorbachev to begin the negotiations about Germany's reunification, Kohl had received two discordant messages from the US. While Baker talked of the need to give the Soviets assurances that "NATO's jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward", Bush and the NSC wanted to be clear that NATO would shift to the east of its current position (in the sense that unified Germany as a whole and not just the territory of the FRG would be covered by the Washington Treaty), allowing only for the much smaller concession that after reunification the territory of the GDR would have a "special military status" of some kind. In other words, NATO’s treaty and in particular Article 5 would apply to the entire German territory, even if some restrictions on the Alliance’s freedom of action in the territory of the GDR could be worked out as part of the deal that would allow Germany’s reunification. As Sarotte explains, faced with the choice of which formulation to use in his meeting with Gorbachev, Kohl decided to use "the language most conducive to achieving his goal of German unity" and therefore opted for Baker's formulation.78 As we have seen, this formulation was itself inspired by the language used in the speech Genscher had made in Tutzing and that he'd repeated on several occasions both publicly and privately, but unlike Genscher it seems that Baker never clarified that it applied not only to the territory of the GDR but to Central and Eastern Europe in general and, as I have argued above, it’s very likely that he was only talking about the former.

The Soviet and West German accounts of what Kohl told Gorbachev differ in how specific he was, but according to both, he said that NATO could not expand to the east, instead of using Bush's formulation that NATO would cover even the territory of the GDR, which would simply have a special military status. However, according to the Soviet account of their meeting, Kohl just said that NATO should not "expand its scope of action", whereas according to the West German account he was more specific and said that it "must not extend its sphere to the territory of today’s GDR".79 Kramer claims that "the discrepancy is of negligible importance" since "both transcripts show that Gorbachev would have understood the comment to refer to eastern Germany". Commenting on this discrepancy, Spohr also dismisses it as unimportant, on the ground that "both texts reveal that in delineating NATO’s future boundary the chancellor was referring solely to (eastern) Germany".80 But that is clearly not true, since according to the Soviet but not the German account, what Kohl said was just as ambiguous on that issue as what Baker had said the day before and one cannot conclude that he was only referring to the GDR without begging the question about how to resolve that ambiguity, which is precisely what is at issue here. That being said, since Kohl had read Bush’s letter just before he met with Gorbachev and in that letter the President talked unambiguously about “what is now the territory of the GDR”, I think Kohl likely was only talking about the GDR.

Indeed, while Kohl and Gorbachev were talking, Genscher was having a meeting with Shevardnadze, which Kramer completely ignores, during which he once again gave assurances on NATO expansion that, according to the German memorandum summarizing their conversation, were anything but ambiguous:

Neutralism for Germany as a whole was wrong. We were also thinking of the feelings of our neighbors. It would be better for our neighbors if a united Germany were firmly integrated into European structures. We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east. Of course, the newly elected government of the GDR would also have a say in this. It would then have to come to an understanding with the SU. Perhaps it would then turn out that a solution was not so complicated. If Soviet troops remained in the GDR, this was not our problem. The important thing is that we talk to each other in a spirit of trust. As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this applies in general.81

As you can see, after using the same ambiguous language to assure Shevardnadze that NATO would not expand "to the east", he briefly mentions the GDR to suggest that Soviet troops might be allowed to stay there depending on what the East German government decided, but then goes back to his assurance that NATO would not expand to the east to clarify that it applies "in general".

As Trachtenberg noted, this was the same language that he'd used before to make clear that his assurance that NATO would expand to the east didn't merely apply to the territory of the GDR but more generally to Central and Eastern Europe, both in public such as during his press conference with Baker on February 3 and in private such as during his meeting with Hurd on February 6.82 Spohr argued that, since Shevardnadze was not present at Genscher's meeting with Hurd, he couldn't possibly have known that and Genscher's language must have seemed to apply only to the GDR.83 However, even putting aside that it's hard to see what Genscher could have meant when he said that the non-expansion of NATO "applies in general" if not that it applied to Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just to the GDR, she only says that because she doesn't know that Genscher had also used that language publicly during his press conference with Baker on February 3. Indeed, when discussing that press conference, she cited Zelikow and Rice's book, which as we have seen omitted the crucial passage where Genscher used the same language to clarify that in ruling out the expansion of NATO eastward he didn't just mean the GDR but more generally Central and Eastern Europe.84 Thus, while other US and West German officials used language that, though quite general, was nevertheless ambiguous as to the precise scope of the assurance they were giving Soviet officials in Moscow, Genscher was just as clear that it didn't only apply to the territory of the GDR but to Central and Eastern Europe in general on this occasion as he'd been earlier both in public and private. In fact, on February 21, he publicly repeated this assurance yet again during a press conference.85 In his case at least, there can be little doubt as to what he meant, but as we have seen the same cannot be said about Baker, Gates and Kohl.

Some people on both sides of the debate argue that context definitely shows either that Western officials were only talking about the territory of the GDR or that on the contrary they were talking about Central and Eastern Europe in general, but I think that if we are honest we have to acknowledge that, except for Genscher, it's simply impossible to tell for sure what they meant. For instance, Kramer claims that the context of the negotiations and the expressions used by the participants “leave no doubt” that Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and Baker were only talking about the expansion of NATO into the territory of the GDR.86 However, that is clearly false since not only was the language used objectively ambiguous, but as we have seen the context of the negotiations makes it clear that Kramer is wrong when he argues that NATO expansion to any territory other than the GDR was simply not an issue at the time. He also misrepresents the assurance made repeatedly by Genscher, both in Moscow and before that in public and private, as applying only to the GDR. Nevertheless, as I argued above, a close examination of the record of the conversations that Western officials had with their Soviet counterparts in Moscow strongly suggests that, with the exception of Genscher, they were only talking about the territory of the GDR.

It’s possible that, although other Western officials were only talking about the GDR, Soviet officials were misled by Genscher’s more far-reaching position and interpreted them as making a broader assurance since again the language they used was ambiguous, but there is evidence that it was not the case. Indeed, Valentin Falin, then Chief of the International Department within the Central Committee of the CPSU and a key advisor on German affairs, sent a note to Gorbachev in April warning him against what he saw as a hardening of the position adopted by Western officials in the negotiations. He explains that although until March they had expressed a willingness to commit to “the non-expansion of NATO's sphere of activity to the GDR” they were now trying to reduce the scope of that assurance by saying it should not apply in “crisis situations”.87 Moreover, in that same note, Falin also pointed out that although Genscher still talked about something closer to the Soviet idea of a pan-European structure that would replace Cold War alliances from time to time, he was isolated and few people listened to him “except for the West German Social Democrats and left-wing parties in some countries of the [European] common market”.88 This document shows that, by April at least, not only did the Soviets interpret Western officials as talking only about the GDR, but they also understood that Genscher could not be assumed to talk for his colleagues and that his views didn’t reflect the Western position. It’s possible that Soviet officials interpreted their Western counterparts differently in February, but there is nothing to suggest that. Thus, the evidence strongly supports the view not only that Baker, Gates and Kohl were only talking about the territory of the GDR, but that Soviet officials interpreted them as doing so at the time. While they misrepresented Genscher’s position and the context in which the preliminary talks in Moscow took place, Kramer and other scholars who argued that US and West German officials were only talking about the territory of the GDR in Moscow are right, while on this point at least Shifrinson and Trachtenberg are wrong.

1.2 From Moscow to Moscow

As I will argue shortly, the preliminary talks in Moscow between US and FRG officials and their Soviet counterparts did not result in a deal by which the Soviet Union agreed to allow Germany to stay in NATO after reunification in exchange for the promise that NATO would not expand to Central and Eastern Europe, but they nevertheless had important consequences. During his conversation with Gorbachev, Kohl got him to agree that it was for the German people alone to decide about unification, without securing anything in exchange. It’s likely that Gorbachev didn’t realize the significance of that claim at the time, but Kohl did and he immediately moved to take advantage of that concession by calling a press conference during which he told everyone that Gorbachev had agreed that whether the Germans wanted to live in a unified state was a question for them to decide, making it difficult for the Soviets to walk back Gorbachev’s hastily made remark later. Before Kohl met Gorbachev, it was not clear that Moscow would allow Germany’s reunification to proceed after the elections in the GDR planned for March, but after Gorbachev’s concession and Kohl’s swift effort to publicize it that became a fait accompli. Had Gorbachev not made that concession and Kohl not ensured that Moscow could not walk it back, the Soviet Union could have obtained something in return for giving the green light to reunification, but now it would only be able to secure advantages in exchange for concessions it made, not about reunification itself, but about the conditions in which it could take place and in particular the external aspects of it.

Thus, as other Soviet officials lamented, Gorbachev had weakened his hand for the rest of the negotiations by throwing away a bargaining chip he could have used to secure more concessions from the West later.89 The other consequence is that, a few days later in Ottawa (where NATO and Warsaw Pact states convened for the Open Skies Conference), Shevardnadze accepted the Two Plus Four format to negotiate Germany’s reunification. This mechanism had merely been floated by Baker in Moscow, but Gorbachev had not accepted it, though he also had not rejected it. In Ottawa, Baker took advantage of the fact that the foreign ministers of all six nations concerned were present to mount a concerted effort to pressure Shevardnadze into accepting that mechanism, which the US expected to simplify the negotiations on Germany’s reunification by restricting them to the FRG and the GDR plus the four powers that held legal rights over Germany. Since Gorbachev had inadvertently given the green light for reunification without asking for anything in return, Shevardnadze was not in a good position to resist this effort, so he agreed and the Two Plus Four mechanism was adopted.90 The final agreement was still a long way ahead, but the outline of a deal had already started to emerge in Moscow.

1.2.1 What kind of deal was outlined during the preliminary talks in Moscow?

Everyone in the literature on this controversy agrees that Baker outlined a deal to Gorbachev in February by which the Soviet Union would agree to Germany’s continued NATO membership in return for the promise that afterward the Alliance would not expand to the east, but people disagree about whether he was only talking about the territory of the GDR or about Central and Eastern Europe in general and they also disagree on whether such a deal can be said to have been informally struck in Moscow. I will come back to this debate later, but for the moment the important point is that, on both sides of the debate, people interpret Baker as floating a quid pro quo by which the Soviet Union would have allowed Germany to stay in NATO after reunification in exchange for a restriction on further expansion. The problem is that, regardless of whether one takes Baker to have meant for that restriction to apply only to the territory of the GDR or to Central and Eastern Europe in general (I have just argued that he probably meant the former), this interpretation is flawed and I think has misled everyone in this debate about the logic of the negotiations on Germany’s reunification. Before I go over what happened during the Two Plus Four process, it’s therefore important to understand the nature of the deal outlined by Baker in Moscow, since otherwise one is bound to misinterpret what happened after that and how the final agreement was reached.

In order to understand why, it’s necessary to recall that, at the time, everyone understood that if Germany left NATO it would spell the end of a significant US military presence in Europe and, as a result, would effectively consign the Alliance to history. As we have seen, Baker even said as much during his conversation with Gorbachev in February. Moreover, unlike Baker’s talk of NATO’s “jurisdiction” not expanding to the territory of the GDR, Western officials did not drop that argument after February but on the contrary continued to make it throughout the Two Plus Four process. For instance, Margaret Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, made that point very clearly to Gorbachev during a meeting they had in June:

The American military presence in Europe is a stabilizing factor. But there is only one place where this presence is needed most: in Germany. France is not integrated into NATO's military chain of command, the Netherlands and Belgium are too small to station American troops there, Spain is too far away, and there are already enough American forces on British territory. That leaves Germany.91

So how could Soviet officials have believed that, unless the Soviet Union agreed to Germany’s continued NATO membership after reunification, the Alliance might expand to Warsaw Pact states? The notion that Baker was offering Gorbachev a quid pro quo by which the West would promise not to expand NATO in exchange for allowing Germany to stay in the Alliance only makes sense if, in the event that he refused, NATO could still have expanded. But as Baker himself told Gorbachev in the same conversation, the US would be forced to leave Europe and NATO would effectively be dead if Germany couldn’t remain part of it, so it obviously couldn’t have expanded.

It’s also clear that Gorbachev understood that since, during his meeting with Kohl the day after his conversation with Baker, he complained that the argument made by US and West German officials that without Germany NATO would disappear applied equally to the Warsaw Pact:

They say: what is NATO without the FRG. But we could also ask: what is the WTO [Warsaw Treaty Organization] without the GDR? This is a serious question. There should be no divergence in military matters. They say NATO will fall apart without the FRG. But it would be the end of the WTO without the GDR, too. If we agree about the main things, it is important that we are in accord here as well.92

Thus, in order to interpret Baker in the way both critics and defenders of the Russian argument do (setting aside their disagreement on whether Baker was only talking about the GDR or about Central and Eastern Europe in general, which is irrelevant to the point I’m making here), we’d have to assume that he was offering Gorbachev a completely nonsensical deal, asking him to make a concession in exchange for something that, if he refused to make the concession in question, had essentially no chance of happening. You don’t make a quid pro quo if, by refusing to give the quid, you automatically get the quo. It’s remarkable that, as far as I know, nobody has made this point before.

But if Baker and other Western officials weren’t offering a quid pro quo to their Soviet counterparts, what were they doing exactly? I think it’s clear when you read their conversations that they were trying to convince the Soviets that it was in the Soviet Union’s interest to make sure the US would stay involved in Europe, which in turn required allowing Germany to remain in NATO after reunification. In other words, Baker wasn’t so much proposing a quid pro quo as making the argument that Germany would be less dangerous to the Soviet Union inside NATO than outside of it, because keeping Germany tied to Western security structures would reduce the risk that it might go back to nationalist policies after reunification. Thus, the question he put to Gorbachev was less the outline of a quid pro quo than a way to make that clear by presenting the choice that Moscow faced, now that it was clear that Germany’s reunification was inevitable. The assurance that NATO would not expand to the east was not meant as compensation for allowing Germany to stay in the Alliance, which as we have seen would make no sense, but as a way to make this outcome even more appealing than the alternative of a Germany unconstrained by membership to the West’s security structures by promising that NATO would not take advantage of Germany’s reunification to expand its footprint in that country. More generally, as we shall see shortly, Western officials did everything they could to reassure the Soviets that allowing that to happen would not fundamentally alter the balance of power in Europe. In fact, Baker’s argument was in essence that, by allowing Germany to stay in NATO, the Soviet Union would ensure that reunification would result in as little change to the status quo as was possible under the circumstances.

I think construing Baker’s argument as a quid pro quo is more misleading than helpful, but insofar as the deal outlined by Baker to Gorbachev in Moscow can be described as a quid pro quo, what the West was promising the Soviet Union in return for allowing Germany to stay in NATO after reunification was not that NATO would not expand to the east, but that it would collaborate with Moscow to create an inclusive post-Cold War European order in which the Soviet Union would have a place. As we have seen, the Soviet Union could in theory have ensured that NATO would not expand simply by insisting as a condition for reunification that Germany should leave the Alliance, but in practice things were more complicated. In order to do that, Moscow would have had to play hardball in the negotiations and, although some of his advisers urged him to do so, Gorbachev was not willing to do so because achieving his main policy goals, both internal and external, required that he maintain a cooperative stance with the West.93 Indeed, internally he couldn’t achieve his goal of modernizing the Soviet economy without the flow of Western capital and technology, while externally his goal of building a “common European home” could not be achieved if he adopted a hard line in the negotiations on Germany’s reunification. The internal and external goals were connected, because the Soviet Union could not reform its economy without significantly cutting military expenditures, which in turn was impossible unless tensions with the West were durably reduced. Gorbachev also needed money and knew that the FRG could be induced to provide generous aid if he played nice, but while people often emphasize that point, I think it was very much a secondary issue because the truth is that, even if he’d played hardball in the negotiations, the Germans would still have paid to reunify their country and in fact they would probably have paid a lot more than what they eventually gave.94 But again I think it’s a mistake to construe the deal outlined in Moscow as a quid pro quo. If Gorbachev refused to play hardball in the negotiations, it’s not really because he was consciously thinking about the negotiations as a quid pro quo by which he would get the West’s cooperation with his ultimate policy goals in exchange for allowing Germany to stay in NATO after reunification, but more fundamentally because he thought Western-Soviet relations had moved beyond that and it didn’t fit with his conception of what they should be like going forward. As we shall see shortly, Western officials realized this and they used that fact to their advantage during the negotiations, which ultimately allowed them to settle the German question on their terms.

1.2.2 The Two Plus Four process and the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany

Bush and the NSC feared that, if Gorbachev offered Kohl to allow reunification to proceed in exchange for Germany’s withdrawal from NATO or at least from the Alliance’s integrated military command, Kohl might find it difficult to resist such a deal since it would mean taking the risk of missing a historical opportunity to reunify his country. It’s very likely that if Gorbachev had played hardball and pursued this kind of strategy, he could indeed have driven a wedge between the FRG and its allies. As we have seen, Bush had sent a letter to Kohl right before he met with Gorbachev in Moscow to repudiate Baker’s assurance that NATO’s “jurisdiction” would not expand to the territory of the GDR and advise that instead Kohl suggest to Gorbachev the idea of a special military status for that territory after reunification, but Kohl had opted for a language closer to Baker’s proposal because he deemed it more conducive to obtaining a green light for reunification from Gorbachev, so Bush’s fear was certainly justified. However, as I also argued, Gorbachev couldn’t easily pursue this kind of strategy in the negotiations on Germany’s reunification because, to achieve his main policy goals, he needed to maintain a cooperative stance with the West. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, his National Security Advisor, understood that and, to make sure that Kohl did as well and that Bonn would remain on the same page as Washington during the Two Plus Four process, they decided to invite him to Camp David at the end of February to argue that Germany’s reunification could be secured without compromising on NATO and stiffen his back so he wouldn’t be tempted to cut a deal with Gorbachev to secure reunification on Soviet terms. Kohl and his advisers were convinced, committed to stand firm on NATO membership and kept their word during the rest of the negotiations.95 In particular, they agreed to drop Baker’s “jurisdiction” talk about the GDR in favor of Bush’s “special military status” formula, although it took some time for the West German foreign ministry to do the same.96 In exchange for the promise not to compromise on NATO, Kohl received Bush’s assurance that he would have Washington’s full backing during the Two Plus Four negotiations. On March 18, his position was further strengthened by the victory of the CDU in the East German elections, which showed that he also had the support of the GDR’s population.97

As we have seen, the Soviets eventually took note of those developments and, in the note he sent to Gorbachev in April, Falin not only noted this change of stance and described it as a hardening of the West’s position but also pointed out Genscher’s isolation. As we shall see, this is also how it’s described today by critics of Russia’s claim that NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe violated the assurances that were made during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, which ironically plays an important role in their argument against that position. I will discuss their argument later, but for the moment, what matters is that while in a sense the abandonment of Baker’s “jurisdiction” talk in favor of Bush’s “special military status” formula did represent a shift to a more uncompromising position, as we have seen it was arguably more of a clarification of Baker’s proposal than a hardening of it and, as I will now explain, this was followed in subsequent months by a broadening of the assurances that Baker had made in Moscow. As I argued above, insofar as Baker’s proposal can be construed as a quid pro quo, the idea was not for the Soviets to allow Germany to stay in NATO after reunification in return for a pledge that the Alliance would not expand to the east, but that if they agreed to Germany’s continued membership in NATO the US and its allies would build a post-Cold War European order together with the Soviet Union that would be cooperative and accommodate Soviet concerns. Baker’s somewhat unclear assurance that, in that case, NATO would not move into the territory of the GDR was just meant to convince Soviet officials that Germany’s continued membership in NATO was not intended to fundamentally alter the European balance of power in the West’s favor, but to preserve stability on the continent by allowing the US to stay involved in Europe.

It’s true that after February, Western officials quickly moved away from Baker’s formulation of the restrictions he proposed to place on NATO’s expansion to the GDR and rephrased his proposal in a way that seemed to weaken it, but in other respects they also strengthened it. Indeed, over the next few months, they made a number of more general assurances that played the same function of convincing the Soviets that if the US and its allies insisted that NATO could not be dismantled despite the end of the Cold War and that Germany had to remain part of it, it wasn’t because they were trying to take advantage of the situation to strengthen the West’s geopolitical position in Europe, but because it was the only way to make sure that US troops would stay on the continent and that Germany would remain tied to Western political and military structures, which throughout the Two Plus Four process never ceased to be the rationale presented by the US and its allies for their position. As I argued above, although Baker’s assurance that NATO would not expand to the east referred to the territory of the GDR, the deal he outlined in February can only be understood as part of a more general understanding on the European security architecture that would emerge from the post-Cold War settlement.98 After the preliminary talks in Moscow, Western officials narrowed down the assurance about NATO’s future relationship with the territory of the GDR by abandoning Baker’s “jurisdiction” talk, but they also made clearer the general nature of the deal they were proposing by making a number of broad assurances that went beyond the status of this territory and concerned the post-Cold War European security order as a whole. Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya are therefore correct to argue that the assurances made by US and West German officials in February were not isolated statements but part of a “cascade of assurances” that Western officials made to the Soviets before, during and after the Two Plus Four process.99 Those assurances were instrumental in securing a settlement of the German question on Western terms, because they appealed to Gorbachev’s desire to end bloc thinking and start a new era of cooperation in Europe, yet were compatible with the preservation of Western political and military institutions.

Going into the Two Plus Four process, the Soviet goal was to obtain Germany’s neutrality and the dismantlement of the Cold War alliances, which eventually would be replaced by a new pan-European security architecture based on a beefed-up CSCE, which had produced the Helsinki Final Act in 1975.100 Gorbachev wanted to turn the CSCE, which unlike NATO and the European Economic Community (EEC) included the Soviet Union and its allies, into a permanent organization that would replace NATO and the Warsaw Pact to become the central institution of the post-Cold War European security order. Germany’s reunification could take place as soon as Bonn had recognized the Oder-Neisse border with Poland, but it would have to withdraw from NATO and the four powers would keep troops in the country and only relinquish their rights after this new pan-European structure was in place, at which point both NATO and the Warsaw Pact would be dissolved.101 While Gorbachev had not closed the door on Baker’s proposal during the February talks in Moscow, he continued to insist on Germany’s neutrality and the replacement of Cold War alliances by this kind of pan-European security architecture for several months after that. Some political leaders in other European countries on both sides of the Cold War line, such as the French President François Mitterrand, the West German Foreign Minister Genscher and the Czechoslovak President Václav Havel, expressed interest in a framework of that sort at one point or another, but US officials had no intention of dismantling NATO and were determined to make sure that it would continue to play a major role in Europe after the end of the Cold War. As we have seen, Bush had made sure that Kohl would not compromise on this point by inviting him to Camp David in February to make the case that it would not be necessary to secure Germany’s reunification, but US officials still needed some alternative package to convince the Soviets.

Their general strategy consisted in formally decoupling the negotiations on Germany’s reunification from the broader question of the post-Cold War European security architecture, while informally making assurances on the latter to help secure a settlement of the former on Western terms. Thus, since the Soviets were anxious that a post-Cold War European security order that included the Soviet Union and didn’t leave it on the outside be created after Germany’s reunification, Western officials made repeated assurances to convince their Soviet counterparts that Moscow would not be excluded from the post-Cold War European security architecture. They insisted that, while they agreed with the goal of building a pan-European security architecture, this would take time, whereas it was no longer realistic to delay Germany’s reunification. It was important that NATO be preserved to allow the US to keep a significant military presence in Europe, so as to make sure that in the meantime Germany would remain tied to Western security structures, which in turn would ensure the stability of the continent. Eventually, the CSCE would be strengthened to create the kind of pan-European security structure that Gorbachev had talked about, but it was not realistic to create such a structure before reunification occurred and not desirable to leave Germany untethered to Western security structures while that pan-European system was being worked out. The Soviet approach to the latter problem, which as we have seen consisted in allowing the four powers to keep troops in Germany after reunification until a pan-European security architecture had been created, was rejected on the grounds that the Germans wanted the Soviet troops out. However, in order to make the continued existence of NATO as non-threatening as possible, Western officials insisted that it would become more political.102 In short, Western officials used informal assurances to signal as much agreement as possible with their Soviet counterparts on the ultimate goal (they were merely proposing a different path to reach the same point), so the treaty by which the four powers would relinquish their rights over Germany and allow reunification to proceed would not be tied to the broader issues posed by the post-Cold War settlement in Europe and be narrowly focused on borders, troop withdrawal and the military status of the territory of the GDR.

Those repeated assurances eventually overcame Gorbachev’s reluctance to allow Germany to stay in NATO. The first significant crack appeared during the Washington Summit held from May 30 to June 3, where Bush tricked Gorbachev into admitting that Germany had a right to choose its own alliances, by noting that the Soviet Union had formally recognized this principle by signing the Helsinki Final Act in 1975.103 The Soviets tried to walk it back and continued to resist NATO membership for a while after that, but the truth is that, as I explained above, Gorbachev was not prepared to adopt the kind of hardball tactics that would have been necessary to obtain Germany’s withdrawal from the Alliance. Thus, he eventually relented and accepted the principle during a meeting with Kohl in July, shortly after he was reelected General Secretary at the 28^th Congress of the CPSU and NATO’s heads of state and government issued a declaration that publicly repeated some of the assurances Western officials had made during the Two Plus Four process on how the Alliance would be transformed with the end of the confrontation between the blocs.104 However, it was not over yet, for Gorbachev still insisted that restrictions be placed on NATO’s freedom of action in the territory of the GDR after reunification, so the last stretch of the negotiations was devoted to that question. Specifically, he wanted to bar foreign troops and nuclear weapons from being deployed over there, but while the treaty that was signed in Moscow on September 12 barred nuclear weapons from being deployed in that area it didn’t really forbid foreign troops from entering it.105 Indeed, while Article 5 of the treaty said that foreign troops “will not be stationed in that part of Germany or deployed there”, a written addendum that was included at the insistence of the US stipulated that Germany could decide how to interpret the word “deployed” as long as it did so “in a reasonable and responsible way taking into account the security interests of each contracting party”, which effectively allowed foreign troops to cross the Cold War line. As Bush had predicted to Kohl at Camp David in February, Germany had been reunified on Western terms, without having to jeopardize NATO’s future by taking the country out of it or accepting a French-style membership and withdrawing from the integrated military command.

Besides the assurances they made during the negotiations, which I will examine in more detail shortly, other factors allowed Western officials to secure Germany’s reunification on their terms. First, the FRG promised significant economic assistance to the Soviet Union, in the form of loans, grants and food aid. As early as May 1990, before the treaty was signed or Gorbachev had even accepted allowing Germany to stay in NATO after reunification, the West German government agreed to guarantee a loan to the Soviet Union extended by private banks to the tune of 5 billion DM. Kohl wrote a letter to Gorbachev to inform him of that decision in which he called it “a considerable political effort” on the part of his government and said that he assumed that Moscow would negotiate “in the same spirit” within the Two Plus Four framework to bring about “a constructive solution”.106 In September, to ensure the signature of the treaty, Kohl further agreed to pay 12 billion DM to finance the transfer of Soviet troops out of Germany as well as to extend a 3 billion DM loan.107 But as I already argued, economic assistance was not as important in securing the eventual deal as both contemporaries and historians have claimed, since Germany would almost certainly have paid much more if Gorbachev had played hardball. Another important factor in securing the eventual agreement was the fact that negotiations on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), which resulted in a large reduction of conventional military forces in Europe, were conducted in parallel to the Two Plus Four process. Together with the assurance that NATO would take on a less military character and become more political in the post-Cold War environment, this contributed to reducing the Soviet perception of the threat posed by NATO, which in turn made it easier for Gorbachev to make the concessions that made a deal possible. Finally, the facts that Gorbachev’s program of reforms was approved by the 28th Congress of the CPSU in July and that he was reelected General Secretary of the Party had a similar effect, because it meant that he was less vulnerable to domestic criticisms.108 Indeed, NATO was already a very sensitive issue in the Soviet Union at the time and has remained so in Russia ever since, which made Gorbachev and every Russian leader after him wary of appearing weak in front of the Alliance.109 Thus, many factors played a role in the eventual agreement that allowed Germany to stay in NATO after reunification, but none of the other factors that contributed to that outcome diminish the importance of the assurances that Western officials made on the future of the European security architecture during the negotiations.

1.3 The case for the Russian position

As critics of the Russian position note, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany did not say a word about NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe, but was exclusively concerned with the conditions under which Germany would reunify and the four powers would relinquish the legal rights they still held as a result of the occupation at the end of WWII. They argue that, whatever Soviet officials were told in February, it was superseded by the eventual agreement, so the US and its allies did not make any commitment not to expand NATO since the treaty didn’t include any provision about that. However, it doesn’t follow that the West did not have some obligation not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe as a result of what transpired during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, because the controversy was never about the content of the treaty but about what was said during those negotiations. Indeed, despite the fact that some people sometimes pretend otherwise, nobody is denying that the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany does not explicitly rule out NATO expansion. The debate is and always has been about whether the West made some kind of commitment during the negotiations that, while not written down in the treaty, was nevertheless incompatible with NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe against Russia’s wishes. It shouldn’t be controversial that one can’t settle this debate simply by examining the provisions of the treaty. Indeed, everybody agrees that money was part of the deal that allowed Germany to be reunified on Western terms, yet the treaty doesn’t say anything about financial assistance.110 I will argue that, in addition to promising the Soviets money to ensure that Germany could stay in NATO after reunification, the US and its allies made assurances during the negotiations and more broadly at the end of the Cold War that created some obligation not to expand NATO against Russia’s wishes, although reasonable people can disagree about how binding that commitment was.

Shifrinson argues that the assurances made in February were not superseded by subsequent developments and remained binding because, even if Western officials later changed their position, they had already obtained something from the Soviets in return for those assurances, namely Gorbachev’s assent to let Germany’s reunification proceed and to formally start the negotiations on the conditions under which it could take place, so they were obligated by the assurances made in Moscow.111 Since he also believes that the assurances made in Moscow by US and West German officials did not just concern the territory of the GDR but applied more broadly to Central and Eastern Europe, he concludes that the West had some obligation not to expand NATO against Russia’s wishes. Trachtenberg is somewhat more cautious about the scope of the assurances made in Moscow, but on the whole he agrees with Shifrinson that, in the case of Genscher and Baker at least, they applied to Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the territory of the GDR. His argument that the assurances in question were not superseded by later developments is that, if those assurances pertained to Central and Eastern Europe as a whole and not just the territory of the GDR, then since the Two Plus Four agreement only concerned the latter, the further concessions subsequently made by the Soviet Union and enshrined in that treaty could only have superseded the part of the assurances that were about the GDR and left the rest intact.112

Thus, Shifrinson and Trachtenberg both argue that some kind of informal agreement was implicitly struck in Moscow when US and Western officials met with their Soviet counterparts in February, which did not cease to apply later because of what happened during the rest of the negotiations on Germany’s reunification and in particular was not superseded by the treaty signed a few months later.113 However, they acknowledge that it was not as binding as, for example, the informal agreement struck between Kennedy and Khrushchev by which the former agreed to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey and pledged not to invade Cuba in return for the latter withdrawing Soviet missiles from the island, because the quid pro quo was less explicit. In any case, the argument hinges in both cases on the assumption that the assurances made in February were not just about the territory of the GDR, but about Central and Eastern Europe in general.114 However, as I argued above, the evidence supports the view defended by Kramer and most other scholars in the literature that, with the exception of Genscher, US and West German officials were only talking about Germany in Moscow. Therefore, neither Shifrinson’s argument nor Trachtenberg’s shows that Western countries were under some obligation not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe against Russia’s wishes, at least as a result of the assurances made in February by US and West German officials.115 Yet despite what critics of the Russian position claim, it doesn’t follow that no such obligation existed, only that it couldn’t have been created by those assurances.

Critics of the Russian position argue that, when he met in February with US and West German officials, Gorbachev still hoped that he could obtain Germany’s withdrawal from NATO in return for the Soviet Union’s acquiescence to reunification and therefore didn’t take the deal that Baker floated in Moscow since it allowed Germany to stay in NATO. However, because the West subsequently took a harder stance on the question of NATO’s relationship with the territory of the GDR, he eventually had to sign a less favorable agreement. Baker had already made this argument in 1997, during the debate that preceded the Senate’s decision to approve NATO expansion to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary:

''I got off the word 'jurisdiction' very quickly,'' Mr. Baker said in a telephone interview. ''I do not recall using it with the Soviets. But let's assume I did use it once or twice. We quickly walked away from it. What defeats this whole argument is that we then insisted on the G.D.R. being in NATO, thereby moving NATO eastward.''116

In the scholarly literature on the controversy, it was made in a particularly clear way by Sarotte:

For a moment in February 1990, the Soviet Union could have struck a deal with the United States, but it did not. Obviously any agreement among the Americans, West Germans, and Russians would have needed alliance approval, but in the political climate of 1990 it would have been possible to secure it. Even a written press release would have helped the Soviet cause. But Gorbachev did not secure one, and the window closed. Germany united and NATO began to move eastward.117

In other words, for a commitment not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe to have existed, Gorbachev should have taken the deal that was briefly floated in February, but since he didn’t and eventually signed a treaty that didn’t contain any provisions against NATO expansion to Warsaw Pact members and even authorized NATO to move across the Cold War line, no such commitment existed and therefore Western countries didn’t renege on any promise they had made when they expanded NATO a few years later.118

This argument portrays the deal that was floated by Baker in February 1990 as a quid pro quo by which the Soviet Union agreed to let Germany stay in NATO after reunification in return for restrictions on the kind of relationship the Alliance would have with the territory of the GDR for the Alliance. While in February, so the argument goes, US and West German officials had floated the idea that the restrictions in question might go as far as preventing NATO’s “jurisdiction” from extending to it, whatever this could have meant exactly, Western officials had subsequently revised the terms of the deal by proposing only a special military status for the territory of the GDR and the Soviet Union had ultimately agreed to that. However, as I argued above, this way of interpreting the deal that was first outlined in February and that eventually led to Germany’s reunification within NATO is wrong. The restrictions on the sort of relationship that NATO could have with the territory of the GDR was not something the Soviet Union would get in return for allowing Germany to stay in NATO, which would have made no sense since they could have prevented NATO from having any relationship whatsoever with that territory simply by demanding that Germany withdraw from the Alliance, it was something that was intended to make what it was giving less onerous. What the Soviet Union was supposed to get in return, to the extent that it even makes sense to construe the deal as a quid pro quo, was a general post-Cold War settlement that would be inclusive and not leave Moscow at the door. As I noted above, Western officials made repeated assurances after February to convince their Soviet counterparts that, although the settlement of the German question could not be tied to the more general issue of the post-Cold War European security architecture for both practical and principled reasons, a pan-European system broadly consistent with Gorbachev’s ideas on that issue would eventually be created. Even before the negotiations on that issue started, when they met off the coast of Malta in 1989, Bush had already tried to reassure Gorbachev that the US was not trying to exploit the Soviet Union’s difficulties at home and in Central and Eastern Europe, a point that Baker had stressed again in Moscow when he assured Gorbachev that “the President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in [the German unification] process”.119 This effort to convince Soviet officials that Germany’s reunification and more generally the post-Cold War settlement would not be to Moscow’s detriment intensified after the February talks.

On March 2, during a meeting with Anatoly Adamishin (Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union), Kastrup assured him that Bonn “did not want to derive unilateral advantages from the changes in the East” and that it “wanted to create European security structures with the [Soviet Union], its friends and with [the FRG’s] friends, which would make alliances superfluous”. He also said that “NATO should have an increasingly strong political role”, that it would be “instrumental in developing cooperative security structures that would initially act as an umbrella over the two alliances”, adding that “the alliances would eventually be absorbed into these cooperative security structures”.120 On April 10, during a meeting with Gorbachev, who repeated his idea of a pan-European security structure that would replace Cold War institutions, Hurd assured him that in the future NATO would have “a more political role” and that the UK “recognized the importance of doing nothing to prejudice Soviet interests and dignity”.121 On May 4, according to a report he wrote for Bush on the meeting he had with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Baker told Shevardnadze that the US recognized “the need to adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to develop CSCE” to reassure Shevardnadze that “the process would not yield winners and losers”, but would produce a European security order that is “inclusive, not exclusive”.122 On May 18, in a meeting with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, Baker listed nine points that were supposed to illustrate how the US had taken into account the Soviet Union’s “completely legitimate concerns” in developing its policy on Germany. These included the assurances that “NATO will undergo an evolution to become more of a political organization” and that the US was making an effort to “ultimately transform the CSCE into a permanent institution that would become an important cornerstone of a new Europe”, though he argued that NATO was still needed to anchor Germany into Western institutions after reunification because creating a pan-European security structure based on the CSCE would take time and for the moment was “a wonderful dream, but just a dream”. Moreover, Baker told Gorbachev and Shevardnadze that he and Bush were “always emphasizing that [they were] not seeking unilateral advantages from the changes happening in the Soviet Union”, that US policy was “not aimed at separating Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union” and that Americans were “interested in building a stable Europe, and doing it together with you”.123

On May 25, in a meeting between Mitterrand and Gorbachev, not only did the French President tell his Soviet counterpart that the CSCE should have more weight in the post-Cold War European security architecture and compare his idea of a European confederation to Gorbachev’s concept of a “common European home”, but he also told him that he was “personally in favor of gradually dismantling the military blocs”. Furthermore, he acknowledged that it was necessary to “create security conditions for you, as well as European security as a whole” and claimed that “European security [was] impossible without the USSR”.124 On May 31, during his meeting with Gorbachev in Washington, Bush assured him that “we have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union in any fashion”.125 On June 8, according to a British memorandum summarizing their conversation, Thatcher told Gorbachev that “the CSCE could provide the umbrella for [various security issues they were discussing] as well as being the forum which brought the Soviet Union fully into discussion about the future of Europe” and that given the consequences of German unification “we must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured”.126 On July 6, NATO members issued a declaration at the end of the London Summit, in which among other statements aimed at diffusing Soviet fears they stated their intention “to enhance the political component of our Alliance” and said that the CSCE “should become more prominent in Europe's future” before making several proposals to institutionalize it.127 On July 16, in a speech in front of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner also expressed his support for a larger role for the CSCE in the post-Cold War security order, denied that NATO sought a unilateral advantage from German reunification and claimed that it would not “shift the balance of power in Europe”.128

To be sure, those statements were vague and didn’t specifically mention NATO expansion (I will come back to this point later), but it doesn’t mean that it was unreasonable for the Russians to deem them misleading in light of what subsequently happened. On the contrary, I think that, based on what they were told during the negotiations on German reunification and more generally at the end of the Cold War, Russian officials have every reason to feel that the West didn’t hold up its end of the bargain. The assurances made during the Two Plus Four process were sufficiently vague that one could perhaps argue that each of them individually was respected, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that the Russian position has no basis in fact because in diplomacy the whole is not just the sum of the parts and collectively those assurances painted a picture of a post-Cold War European security architecture that was very different from the NATO-centric order that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union. Allowing Germany to remain in NATO after reunification, Soviet officials were told repeatedly, was not the first step toward creating a post-Cold War European security order dominated by NATO. The Alliance would become a more political organization and, in due time, a pan-European security architecture would be created in which a transformed CSCE would play the central role and NATO would merely be one pillar among others under that umbrella organization. But this would not happen overnight and, in the meantime, it was critical that NATO continue to play a role in Europe and that Germany remain part of it after reunification. Otherwise, the US would be unable to keep a significant military presence in Europe, NATO would become irrelevant or even cease to exist and the US would no longer have any political influence in Europe, which in turn would destabilize the continent.129 Allowing Germany to stay in NATO after reunification would not result, the Soviets were repeatedly assured, in a shift of the balance of power on the continent. On the contrary, it was the only way to preserve the status quo after German reunification and prevent this event from having a destabilizing effect, because a united Germany that was no longer constrained by Western security structures would take steps to ensure its security such as developing nuclear weapons and might go back to the kind of nationalism that caused so much damage in the 20^th century. It was in everyone’s interest, including and perhaps even especially the Soviet Union’s, that Germany be allowed to stay in NATO after reunification.

So it’s unsurprising that, when a few years later the US and its European allies built a NATO-centric European security architecture in which the CSCE played only a minor role (even though as we shall see it was turned into a permanent organization in 1995), from which Russia was largely excluded since it was not part of the Alliance and in which NATO not only remained primarily a military organization but even conducted military operations “out of area” for the first time in history without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council and against a historical Russian ally, Russian officials felt they had been misled. Indeed, not only is it not surprising that they felt that way after what they were told, but it would have been surprising if they had not felt that way. Western officials no doubt believed they had good reasons to subsequently make those decisions, and they may even be right about that (although I will argue that they are not), but this doesn’t make it any less true that, based on the assurances Soviet officials received at the end of the Cold War, the Russians had every reason to expect something very different. This argument doesn’t rest on the assumption that, when they made assurances about NATO expansion in February, US and West German officials were talking about more than the territory of the GDR. As we have seen, except for Genscher, they probably were not. Nor does it rest on the assumption that, at any point during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, Western officials explicitly promised that if the Soviet Union agreed to let Germany stay in NATO the Alliance would not be expanded to Warsaw Pact members. As we shall see shortly, some of them did assure their Soviet counterparts that it wouldn’t happen a few months later, but this doesn’t seem to have happened during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification and in particular it didn’t happen during the February preliminary talks in Moscow because, with the exception of Genscher, US and West German officials were only talking about the territory of the GDR. Nevertheless, given the assurances Soviet officials received from their Western counterparts during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification and more generally at the end of the Cold War, the Russians had every reason to see the European security architecture that was created by the West in subsequent years and in particular NATO expansion as a form of betrayal. As Shifrinson argued, insofar as the West got something of value out of those assurances (which they did since as I have argued they played a key role in convincing the Soviets to allow Germany to stay in NATO after reunification and more generally to settle the Cold War in terms favorable to the West), they were to some extent binding.130 This is a relatively weak claim, whose import the Russians have no doubt exaggerated (especially in recent years), but that is not the same thing as saying they made up the whole thing and pretending they are is just adding insult to injury.

Indeed, it didn’t take long for the Soviets to start feeling they had been misled by those assurances, since they started to express concerns along those lines only a few months after the conclusion of the Two Plus Four process. During this period, the faction that thought Gorbachev had been too conciliatory with the West started to gain influence in the Soviet administration, which among other reasons led to the resignation of Shevardnadze in December 1990 and would eventually result in a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991.131 When John Major, who had replaced Thatcher as Prime Minister of the UK in November 1990, came to Moscow on 5 March 1991, Gorbachev complained to him that the assurances the Soviet Union had received during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification were already being violated:

Against the background of favorable processes in Europe, I suddenly start receiving information that certain circles intend to go on further strengthening NATO as the main security instrument in Europe. Previously they talked about changing the nature of NATO, about transformation of the existing military-political blocs into pan-European structures and security mechanisms. And now suddenly again [they are talking about] a special peace-keeping role of NATO. They are talking again about NATO as the cornerstone. This does not sound complementary to the common European home that we have started to build.132

Major replied that it was a misunderstanding and that Western countries were merely trying to increase coordination between NATO and the Western European Union, but Gorbachev clearly wasn’t convinced.133

According to Braithwaite, during Major’s visit, the Soviet Minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov also expressed his concern that Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary wanted to join NATO, but Major assured him that “nothing of the sort will happen”.134 On March 26, Hurd repeated this assurance a third time when he told Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, the Soviet Foreign Minister, that “there are no plans in NATO to include the countries of Eastern and Central Europe in NATO in one form or another”. This was arguably true at the time, though as we shall see some people in the Bush administration were already thinking about it, but it would not remain true for long.135 Finally, on June 16, Wörner declared that “granting NATO membership to former Warsaw Treaty members would be a serious obstacle to reaching mutual understanding with the Soviet Union”.136 Thus, while it’s true that, except for Genscher, Western officials didn’t explicitly rule out NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, some of them did a few months later. But as I have argued, in doing so, they were just making explicit a commitment that was already implicit in the assurances made during the negotiations on German reunification, which as the concerns voiced by Soviet officials in 1991 show was clearly interpreted by them as having that implication. To be sure, those statements made by Western officials in 1991 to the effect that NATO would not be expanded to Central and Eastern Europe did not constitute a quid pro quo of the sort that is often described by defenders of the Russian position, but rather assurances that no such plan existed. Again, this was true at the time, but as we shall see later this doesn’t mean that Western officials were not somewhat disingenuous in their attempts to mollify their Soviet counterparts.

I think there are several reasons why people resist this conclusion, even when they know about the assurances Western officials made to their Soviet counterparts at the end of the Cold War. First, in part because Russian officials have used their complaint that the West violated those assurances as a justification for some of their most controversial decisions in the past 30 years, people can’t help but conflate the question of whether this complaint has merit with the question of whether it justifies Russia’s subsequent actions. However, even if as I’m arguing the Russian claim that NATO expansion violated the assurances Western officials made at the end of the Cold War is not without merit, it doesn’t follow that Russia’s subsequent actions, such as the invasion of Ukraine, were thereby justified. One can acknowledge that the Russians have good reasons to feel they have been misled while criticizing their recent policy. Another reason is that, while the debate has focused on the narrow issue of NATO expansion, the problem with the West’s post-Cold War policy for Russia was not so much NATO expansion per se but Moscow’s exclusion from the European security architecture. As I will argue later, not only was NATO expansion but one aspect of that exclusion, but if the West had adopted a different approach it may have been possible to expand NATO without excluding Russia from the post-Cold War European security architecture, even though it made that more difficult. Now, the argument I have made above is that, to the extent that the assurances made by Western officials at the end of the Cold War created some obligation not to expand NATO, this obligation stemmed from the promise contained in those assurances to create a post-Cold War European security architecture in which Moscow would have a place and that would not be dominated by NATO. Thus, by focusing the debate more narrowly on the issue of NATO expansion, both critics and defenders of the Russian position have made it harder to see the relevance of those assurances. Finally, because they interpret Baker’s February assurance that NATO would not move “one inch to the east” as a reference to Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the GDR, defenders of the Russian position and sometimes even Russian officials themselves argue that Western officials explicitly promised not to expand NATO if the Soviet Union allowed Germany to stay in NATO after reunification. Since this can be shown to be false, critics of the Russian position naturally concluded that Moscow had no case, but as I have argued the fact that Western assurances did not explicitly preclude NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe doesn’t mean that it wasn’t in tensions with those assurances. Thus, just because the obligation not to expand NATO stemmed from assurances that were less explicit than portrayed by the defenders of the Russian position, it doesn’t follow that Soviet and later Russian officials didn’t have good reasons to expect that NATO would not be expanded against their wishes based on those assurances and that as a result they didn’t have legitimate causes for complaint once the US and its allies started to take steps to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe despite Moscow’s opposition.

1.4 Other arguments made by critics of the Russian position

While they are wrong that every Western official who ever promised that NATO would not expand to the east was only talking about the territory of the GDR, since as we have seen Genscher was clearly talking about Central and Eastern Europe in general, critics of the Russian position are probably right that except for him, US and West German officials present in Moscow during the February talks were only talking about the territory of the GDR. In particular, even though out of context the language Baker used when he assured Gorbachev that if Germany was allowed to stay in NATO after reunification the Alliance would not move “one inch to the east” is more naturally interpreted as referring not just to the territory of the GDR but to Central and Eastern Europe in general, the context strongly suggests that he was in fact only talking about the former and there is evidence that it’s also how Soviet officials understood him. However, I have just argued that in spite of this fact, Western officials nevertheless made several broader assurances at the end of the Cold War that gave Soviet and later Russian officials every reason to expect that NATO would not be expanded to Central and Eastern Europe against their wishes and more generally that a very different European security architecture would emerge than the NATO-centric system the US and its allies eventually created. But in addition to arguing that US and West German officials were only talking about the territory of the GDR during the February talks in Moscow, critics of the Russian position have also made several other arguments that could also be used against the position I defended above, to which I now turn.

1.4.1 The treaty didn’t void the assurances made during the negotiations but arguably strengthened them

As we have seen, critics of the Russian position often argue that since the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany doesn’t preclude NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe, the West can’t have been under any obligation not to expand NATO.137 This argument implicitly assumes that, for the West to have contracted some obligation not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the conditions in which Germany was reunified, the treaty must have contained a provision that clearly prohibited it. In turn, critics of the Russian position often justify this assumption by implying that, unless assurances are explicit and written down in a legally binding treaty, they are not binding in any way. However, although agreements that are codified in a legally binding treaty obviously have more force, the view that informal and non-written assurances have no binding force whatsoever is completely untenable. As Shifrinson and Trachtenberg have pointed out, diplomats make informal assurances all the time and, if their interlocutors couldn’t assume that they have some binding force, diplomacy would become virtually impossible.138 Indeed, unless people could assume that what is said in top-level meetings has some political weight, and that people who take part in such meetings can put some trust in what they tell each other, verbal exchanges could not play anything like the role they do in actual diplomatic practice. Many diplomatic breakthroughs have only become possible because of conciliatory gestures that were not codified in any formal agreement, but created the trust necessary for a political solution to emerge, whether it was codified in a treaty or not. Clearly, if people didn’t assume that such gestures constrained the states on behalf of which they were issued to some extent, this would not be possible. Moreover, there are many cases where such a formal agreement is not possible for political reasons, so political leaders rely on informal and non-written assurances. Indeed, some of the worst diplomatic crises, such as the Cuban missile crisis, were resolved through informal agreements. This argument seems to rest entirely on the obvious fallacy that, since the assurances made by Western officials during that period were not codified in a treaty and therefore were not legally binding, they had no binding force whatsoever.

As Trachtenberg argued, precisely because the treaty was narrowly focused on the direct consequences of Germany’s reunification and in particular on the special military status that the territory of the GDR was to have after reunification, assurances made during the negotiations that were not strictly limited to that question cannot have been superseded by the treaty.139 Since as I have argued Western officials made broad assurances that created some obligation on the part of the US and its allies not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe against Moscow’s wishes, the fact that the treaty did not explicitly prohibit this development can’t have abrogated that obligation, which remained intact. In fact, precisely because the treaty contained provisions that satisfied the Soviet condition that the territory of the GDR have a special military status (even if as we have seen it was somewhat watered down compared to their initial demand), the treaty arguably strengthened the obligation not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, it would make absolutely no sense for the Russians to be very concerned about NATO expansion to the territory of the GDR and demand some kind of special status for it should they allow Germany to stay in NATO after reunification, yet not to care about NATO expansion to Central and Eastern European countries. Thus, the fact that the West consented to such a special military status for the territory of the GDR in the treaty, even if the restrictions on NATO’s freedom of action in that territory were more limited than what Soviet officials had initially envisioned, would naturally have strengthened the Russian expectation, created by the assurances made by Western officials at the end of the Cold War, that the US and its allies would not take the much more radical step of expanding NATO to Central and Eastern Europe a few years later. This made it even more natural for the Russians to feel betrayed when, after being told that we understood their concerns and giving them assurances that although Germany would stay in NATO after reunification there would be restrictions on what the Alliance could do on the territory of the GDR, they woke up a few years later to find that NATO had expanded to most of their former allies and was now on their borders. It’s true that, as Sarotte points out, the added minute of the treaty they eventually signed limited the scope of those restrictions by effectively allowing foreign NATO forces to be deployed on the territory of the GDR if the German government agreed, but it also stipulated that it should only be done “in a reasonable and responsible way taking into account the security interests of each contracting party” and that in any case no such forces should not be stationed over there. This clearly indicated that the FRG, the US, France and the UK acknowledged the security concerns of the Soviet Union and recognized that crossing the Cold War line should only be done in exceptional circumstances.

Thus, while it’s true that expanding NATO to Central and Eastern Europe didn’t violate the letter of the treaty, it’s hard to deny that, as Yeltsin told Clinton in the letter he sent him in September 1993 and as the Russians have consistently maintained since then, it violated its spirit and more generally the spirit that had presided over the multi-pronged negotiations that ended the Cold War peacefully. One cannot seriously claim that Soviet officials insisted that Germany would only be allowed to stay in NATO after reunification on the condition that restrictions be placed on what the Alliance could do in the territory of the GDR, but that had they known at the time that it would eventually happen, they would have been fine with NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe over their objections and without any similarly binding restrictions on what it could do over there.140 So the fact that NATO scrupulously respected the letter of the treaty that settled Germany’s status, which nobody denies, is of no relevance to the Russian argument that it violated its spirit. This argument is not only correct but obviously so and it certainly isn’t, as some have claimed, a “rewriting of history”.141 As we shall see, US officials responded to the Russian protest against NATO expansion a few years later by arguing that the GDR was a special case due to the legal rights that the Soviet Union still held over Germany as a result of World War II, but that Moscow had no such rights over Central and Eastern Europe and that unlike in the case of the GDR the US and its allies were therefore under no obligation to obtain Russia’s assent to expand in that area. However, while it’s true that the need for the Soviet Union’s assent in the case of Germany’s continued membership to NATO after reunification stemmed in part — though not only — from those legal rights, Russian officials were not for the most part making a legal argument and the negotiations record for the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany shows very clearly that Western officials not only understood that the Soviets saw NATO moving to the east as a security threat but also regarded this concern as legitimate and said as much to their Soviet counterparts on multiple occasions.142 Thus, it’s simply not true that, during the negotiations on the treaty, Western officials tied the legitimacy of the Soviet concerns that led to the special military status of the GDR exclusively to the legal rights Moscow held over Germany as a result of World War II.

1.4.2 The fact that Soviet officials didn’t raise the issue of NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe doesn’t mean the West didn’t have some obligation not to do it

Another common argument, which is related to the point that the treaty did not contain any prohibition against NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe, is that Soviet officials never raised the issue during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, which critics of the Russian position seem to think implies that nothing Western officials said during those negotiations could have created any obligation not to expand NATO. This argument implicitly rests on the assumption not only that Soviet officials never raised the issue of NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe and demanded explicit guarantees against it during the negotiations, but also that unless Soviet officials did so the West can’t possibly have said anything that created some obligation not to expand NATO. Now, while the first assumption is mostly (though not entirely) true, the second is clearly false. Let’s start with the first point. It’s true that Soviet officials did not insist on specific guarantees against NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe during the Two Plus Four process and that discussions focused on whether Germany could stay in NATO after reunification, then on what restrictions the Alliance would face in the territory of the GDR after Gorbachev accepted the principle of Germany’s continued membership to NATO, but it’s not entirely true that they never brought up the issue and expressed their concerns about it. Indeed, during his conversation with Baker in Moscow on May 18, Gorbachev complained to him that he “had information that the goal of your policies [was] to separate Eastern European countries from the Soviet Union”.143 He mentioned this part of his conversation with Baker during his meeting with Mitterrand a few days later, when he said to the French president that he’d told Baker that he was aware of Washington’s “favorable attitude towards the intention expressed by a number of representatives of Eastern European countries to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact in order to subsequently join NATO”.144 However, those were pretty isolated comments, so the claim made by critics of the Russian position is mostly correct. Of course, even if they were concerned about the possibility that NATO might expand to Central and Eastern Europe (which they were), Soviet officials had good reasons not to explicitly raise the issue at the time.145 Indeed, one has to keep in mind that although Soviet officials realized that the Warsaw Pact would not survive in its current form, they were still hoping to save part of it. By insisting on guarantees against NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe, they would have effectively admitted that it was condemned, which would have made it harder to do that.

Now, if the Soviets had just avoided raising the issue of NATO expansion because it would have made their goal of saving what they could of the Warsaw Pact harder, it would have no bearing on the argument made by critics of the Russian position, because at the end of the day it’s still true that, except for a few isolated comments, they did not mention that issue and didn’t ask for guarantees against that possibility. However, if Soviet officials didn’t feel the need to raise the issue explicitly and demand specific guarantees against NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe, it’s also in part because as I have argued the assurances made by Western officials indirectly precluded that possibility. Indeed, despite what critics of the Russian position implicitly assume, the fact that Soviet officials almost never raised the issue during the negotiations and in any case didn’t insist on explicit guarantees against it doesn’t imply that Western officials can’t have said anything that created some obligation not to expand NATO against Moscow’s wishes and in fact they did. The fact that Soviet officials didn’t make such a demand doesn’t mean that, to the extent that assurances made by Western officials created some obligation not to expand NATO, the Russians wouldn’t remember them when NATO expanded anyway a few years later and wouldn’t be justified in retrospect to deem that Western countries had misled them during the negotiations on German reunification. In fact, as long as I’m right that assurances made by Western officials in 1990 created some obligation not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe, it doesn’t even matter whether the Soviets were even thinking about that possibility in the moment. They would have been just as justified in deeming that Western countries had violated the assurances they made at the end of the Cold War even if that possibility had not even occurred to them at the time. Indeed, because people can’t think about every implication of the promises they make or receive, they often make promises that create obligations the recipients don’t think about at the time they are made, but it doesn’t release them from the obligations in question for all that. This is particularly true with vague assurances such as those made by Western officials during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, which precisely because they’re vague have many implications people typically don’t think about, although their vagueness also makes them less binding. Finally, it’s worth pointing out again here that although Soviet officials didn’t insist on explicit guarantees against NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification and only raised the issue on a few occasions, several Western officials did explicitly tell them it would not happen in 1991. Again, this wasn’t a pledge in the context of a quid pro quo, but it happened because Soviet officials expressed their concern that the West was going to expand NATO and made it clear that they thought it was incompatible with the assurances they had received a few months earlier, which Western officials did not dispute.

1.4.3 Moscow’s acceptance of the Helsinki principle didn’t void the obligation created by those assurances

Critics of the Russian position also argue that, even if the assurances made by Western officials created some obligation not to expand NATO, this obligation was superseded by the recognition by Gorbachev of the principle, enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act of the CSCE (which the Soviet Union signed in 1975), that sovereign countries are free to enter into alliances as they see fit.146 In May 1990, during the Washington Summit, Bush told Gorbachev that since he accepted that principle he also had to accept that if Germany wanted to stay in NATO after reunification he couldn’t object to it.147 At this point, to the surprise of US officials and the consternation of Gorbachev’s advisors, he reluctantly conceded the point.148 The Soviets immediately tried to walk it back, but soon after that Gorbachev stopped opposing Germany’s membership of NATO and started to focus on obtaining restrictions on the Alliance’s freedom of action on the territory of the GDR after reunification. This principle was once again endorsed implicitly by the Soviet Union in November 1990, when it signed the Charter of Paris just one month after the signature of the Two Plus Four Agreement. The Charter of Paris, which reaffirmed and expanded the principles stated in the Helsinki Final Act, would become a foundational document for the Organization Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which replaced the CSCE in 1995.149 So critics of the Russian position argue that Russia, which as the Soviet Union’s continuation state took on all its commitments, also has no grounds to object to the accession to NATO by Central and Eastern European countries a few years later. This argument, that Russia can’t object to NATO expansion because Central and Eastern European states are sovereign countries and therefore free to choose their own alliances, has become ubiquitous but it’s obviously fallacious. Indeed, while it’s true that Central and Eastern European states have a right to ask to join NATO, they don’t have a right to join NATO simply because they want to, for the simple and obvious reason that current members also have the right to refuse. Thus, if the Russians are right that Western countries were under some obligation not to expand NATO because of the assurances they had made during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification and the implicit recognition of the security concerns that NATO expansion posed to Russia contained in the Two Plus Four Agreement (which I have argued they are), it’s impossible to claim that Russia has no grounds to protest against NATO expansion simply because sovereign countries have a right to seek out alliances as they see fit, which is neither here nor there.

The key issue is therefore whether the Two Plus Four Agreement together with the assurances made during the negotiations that led to it created some obligation not to expand NATO against Russia’s opposition. If as I have argued, you think that is the case, then you cannot argue that Western countries get off the hook because of the Helsinki principle that sovereign states are free to seek whatever alliances they want. Not only does this not follow from that principle, as I have just explained, but even if that were not the case it would still not absolve them since they already adhered to that principle when they made those assurances and signed this treaty. Indeed, one can’t make assurances that will predictably and reasonably be interpreted by another party as creating some obligation toward them, only to argue later that no such obligation was created because it would be inconsistent with another commitment you had previously made. One can’t undertake commitments, even vague ones, but then ignore them on the ground that one wasn’t in a position to make them in the first place. If that is really the case, then one shouldn’t have undertaken that commitment to begin with. But again this doesn’t even matter ultimately, because as I have explained above, the Helsinki principle prevented neither Western countries from committing not to expand NATO nor Russia from opposing it. Voluntarily refraining from doing something that you might otherwise have done to ensure better relations with another state is a perfectly legitimate diplomatic practice in which statesmen engage all the time and that is just what I have argued that Western countries did by making the assurances they did and signing the treaty they did at the end of the Cold War. As we shall see, over the years, the idea that it would be illegitimate not to expand NATO because Russia was opposed to it on the ground that it would amount to giving Russia a “veto” on NATO’s policy became a common talking point. This confused argument therefore became the basis for NATO’s “open door policy”, which has since been elevated to the rank of dogma and, as I will argue later, had very unfortunate consequences. However, this is more a rhetorical device aiming at making something that, regardless of whether you think it’s a good idea, is within the normal confines of diplomacy look nefarious than a real argument.

I think part of the issue here is that many people have or pretend to have an overly irenic view of international relations. In particular, since NATO is a defensive alliance, they don’t think that its expansion to Central and Eastern Europe constitutes a security threat for Russia and they think that Moscow therefore has no business trying to prevent its neighbors from joining NATO if they want to. They may concede if pressed that, as I have just argued, the so-called Helsinki principle is not inconsistent with the idea that states can provide assurances to others they won’t seek to form alliances with third parties. But they clearly assume that there can’t be any legitimate reason for a country to be concerned about the fact that its neighbors want to form or join a defensive alliance with others and that any attempt to prevent it can only be explained by imperialism. However, as I will argue later in more detail, this is simply not true. Due to the anarchical nature of international relations, i.e. the fact that the international system lacks a superior authority that can resolve disputes (unlike in the domestic sphere where the state normally has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force), there is a sense in which states can only count on themselves to ensure their security and this makes them paranoid. In particular, they often care more about capabilities than intentions, because if at the moment they are confident that other states don’t mean them harm they can never be sure that this will always be the case. Furthermore, even if a state’s neighbors have no intention of attacking it, their membership even in a defensive alliance can weaken its position in international negotiations and make accidental conflicts more likely. Thus, while it’s true that Russia’s foreign policy elites are paranoid about NATO and that Russian fears about NATO expansion are exaggerated, those fears are not entirely irrational.

Moreover, when the shoe is on the other foot, nobody considers that states can’t have a legitimate interest in what alliances other sovereign countries enter into. As we shall see, the US in particular isn’t just concerned about what alliances its neighbors want to join, but it regularly applies various kinds of pressure on countries that are thousands of kilometers from its borders to ensure they will not enter security arrangements Washington deems harmful to its interests. The real difference between the US and Russia in that respect isn’t so much that the US respects the sovereignty of other countries whereas Russia doesn't, but that the US is strong enough to usually get its way without having to start a war or engage in histrionic behavior and Russia isn't. The fact that many people don’t recognize this reality leads them to adopt a very strong interpretation of the Helsinki principle, which as formulated in the Final Act of the CSCE and the Charter of Paris is very vague. Indeed, the former just says that states have “the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance”, while the latter just says that the signatories “fully recognize the freedom of States to choose their own security arrangements”.150 On the strong interpretation many critics of the Russian position implicitly adopt, states are not allowed to do anything to prevent the constitution of alliances they deem harmful to their interests, but as we have seen while people may sometimes talk as if they believed that in practice no state behaves in a way that is consistent with that interpretation. The truth about the Helsinki principle is that on such a strong interpretation it can’t be a realistic basis for international relations, while on a weaker interpretation, it’s not clear exactly what constraints it places on states.

1.4.4 Western officials were not trying to mislead their Soviet counterparts when they made broad assurances at the end of the Cold War

Another common argument made by critics of the Russian position is that, regardless of what assurances Western officials made to their Soviet counterparts at the end of the Cold War exactly, they were not trying to mislead them. In other words, even if you agree with the argument I have made that Western countries had some obligation not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe against Russia’s wishes because of those assurances, critics of the Russian position insist that Western officials made them in good faith and in particular were not planning to expand NATO at the time. However, not only is the claim that Western officials were not being disingenuous when they made broad assurances to their Soviet counterparts at the end of the Cold War not entirely true, but it has no bearing on whether those assurances created some obligation not to expand NATO which the West subsequently violated and whether the Russians are justified in blaming them for doing so. Indeed, even if Western officials had every intention to uphold the assurances they made at the end of the Cold War at the time they made it, the Russians would still have a legitimate grievance against the West if they or their successors later violated them. Now, the evidence is clear that Western officials had no definite plans to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe at the time, but that is not to say that all of them were fully honest with the Soviets. First, beyond the specific issue of NATO expansion, Western and in particular US officials were privately saying things at odds with the assurances they were making to Soviet officials about the future of the European security architecture. Moreover, while nobody had made the decision to expand NATO, some US officials were already thinking about it. Finally, not only were they already thinking about it, but as we shall see there is evidence that it affected their stance during the negotiations on German reunification. However, they were careful not to mention it to Soviet officials in the conversations they had with them during that period, because they knew that it would be anathema to them. This would have prevented the US from achieving several goals it cared deeply about, such as ensuring that Germany would stay in NATO after reunification and bringing to a successful conclusion the arms control negotiations that were taking place in parallel to the Two Plus Four process, because Moscow’s cooperation was indispensable for that.

The decision to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe was not made until 1994, during the Clinton administration, but as we shall see many officials in the Bush administration had already reached the conclusion that it would have to happen eventually by 1992 and several US officials were already thinking about it during the negotiations on German reunification.151 For instance, in his book on NATO expansion, US diplomat Ronald Asmus wrote:

Such nuanced diplomatic points aside [he is referring to the arguments exchanged by US and Russian officials in the mid-1990s about whether NATO expansion was consistent with the assurances made in 1990 and the Two Plus Four agreement], the reality was that no one in either Washington or Moscow was thinking about further NATO expansion in the spring and fall of 1990. Indeed, the issue had not yet been raised by the Central and East Europeans. These countries would not embrace that goal for another two years.152

However, although critics of the Russian position often make a similar claim, every single part of that claim is demonstrably false. First, as we have seen, there is conclusive evidence that Soviet officials were in fact thinking about that possibility in the spring of 1990. It’s also not true that Central and Eastern Europeans hadn’t raised the issue yet at the time, even if Asmus is right that no Warsaw Pact state had formally adopted that goal yet.153 In fact, Asmus himself wrote that, during a conference organized by RAND in June 1990 and attended by both US and Polish officials, the Poles asked whether they could join NATO and a Polish general even asked during a panel discussion co-chaired by Asmus if US forces could be stationed in Poland.154 Over the summer, after NATO announced that it would open “liaison offices” in Warsaw Pact states, one of Havel’s aides also quietly asked the Americans “how NATO would respond if Czechoslovakia applied for membership”.155 Thus, it is unsurprising that, contrary to what Asmus claims, US officials also were thinking about NATO expansion and not ruling it out, even if again they hadn’t decided to do it yet and wouldn’t for a while.

For instance, in July 1990, Baker argued during a meeting of Bush’s foreign policy team that Washington needed to craft “a ‘half-way house’ for governments who want out of the Warsaw Pact and CEMA but can’t join NATO and EC (yet)”.156 Yet just one month and a half earlier, during his meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow, the same Baker was assuring the Soviet leader that although the US thought that NATO was important in the short and medium term, in the long run they would create a pan-European security architecture. Indeed, while it’s true that he had called the idea of immediately replacing the Cold War alliances by such a system “a wonderful dream, but just a dream”, he quickly realized that it was a blunder and clarified later in the conversation that he didn’t mean that a pan-European security architecture of the sort advocated by Gorbachev shouldn’t be created later and reiterated the argument that allowing Germany to stay in NATO was not a way for the US to upset the balance of power in Europe but to preserve the status quo:

And one more thing. I said that pan-European security is a dream. What I meant is that it is a dream today. We made concrete proposals on how to build its structures in order for it to become a reality. In the meantime, we consider it important for Germany to be firmly anchored in security institutions, so it is not tempted to create some kind of security structure of its own.157

It’s hard to argue that Baker’s statement was not somewhat disingenuous when, around the same time, he was considering expanding NATO to Warsaw Pact states. This is especially true given that, as we shall see, in the same conversation he also ignored Gorbachev’s repeated suggestion that the Soviet Union might ask to join NATO. For US officials, who assured their Soviet interlocutors that Washington had no intention of excluding Moscow from the post-Cold War European security architecture, creating a “half-way house” for Central and Eastern European countries pending NATO membership was a serious option but there was no question of doing that for the Soviet Union.

Not only were some US officials already thinking about expanding NATO to Central and Eastern Europe during the Two Plus Four process, but there is evidence that it had a significant impact on the negotiations toward the end, which almost derailed the deal at the last minute. Indeed, during the last meeting on the eve of the scheduled signing ceremony in Moscow, a difficulty arose in connection to NATO’s freedom of movement in the territory of the GDR.158 Genscher and Shevardnadze reached a deal according to which the treaty would prohibit both the stationing and deployment of foreign troops in that territory after the departure of the Soviet troops from Germany, but the German government would have the option, at its discretion, to authorize foreign troops to cross the line temporarily as long as it was not a large number, in order to make it possible for NATO to hold exercises in that part of Germany. This deal would not be part of the treaty, but it would just be stated orally to the other foreign ministers and confirmed orally during the press conference for the signing. However, the US and even more so the UK insisted that oral assurances would not do and demanded that it be written down in the treaty (the French delegation seems to have been closer to the German position and played a role of mediator), which led the Soviets to threaten to call off the signature at the last minute. As no agreement could be found, Baker went to bed, but discussions continued between the Western delegations. Genscher was absolutely beside himself at the British for putting reunification at risk just when a deal had appeared imminent and insisted that US diplomat Robert Zoellick wake up Baker in the middle of the night so he could talk to him. They eventually came up with a solution with the help of Roland Dumas, the French Foreign Minister, in the morning. The Western allies proposed that a so-called “agreed minute” be added to the treaty stipulating that, although the deployment of foreign troops in the territory of the GDR was prohibited under the terms of the treaty, the German government would be able to determine what counted as “deployment” as long as it did so “in a reasonable and responsible way taking into account the security interests of each contracting party”. As Sarotte notes, the Western allies insisted that all parties sign under this “agreed minute” as well as under the treaty, which showed how important it was to them.

Why did the US and the UK jeopardize the deal for something that, in comparison to Germany’s reunification, seemed rather unimportant? Part of the explanation is probably that they wanted to avoid any permanent constraint that, in case of war, could have made the defense of Germany more difficult for NATO.159 But it’s unlikely to have been the only explanation, since even US officials acknowledged at the time that a prohibition on the deployment of foreign troops in the territory of the GDR, even if absolute, would not prevent the US from fulfilling its obligation to defend Germany.160 Similarly, the Western allies were very concerned about not agreeing to anything that would suggest Germany’s sovereignty was less than total and may have opposed the Soviet position for that reason, but since the Germans themselves were okay with it that is also not a very plausible explanation.161 According to Zoellick, another reason was that he was already thinking about the possibility that NATO might expand and wanted to make sure that NATO troops would be able to cross into Poland from Germany, though he also said that few US officials were thinking about that. Moreover, while for a long time German officials blamed the British (who they suspected of having tried to prevent reunification at the last minute because Thatcher had never been able to reconcile herself with it), Zoellick also claimed recently that, although the British had taken the lead, it was the US who had really been responsible for that position:

The night before the signing of the treaty, a difficult question appeared. It was about the possibility of stationing non-German NATO forces on the territory of East Germany, theoretically made impossible by the Treaty. Still, we needed to secure that possibility because, if Poland were eventually to join NATO in a second step, we wanted American forces to be able to cross East Germany on their way to be stationed in Poland. The Germans blamed the Brits for holding up the signature with that late-night request, whereas we were in essence responsible for that position. We finally agreed that NATO troops would not be present in East Germany until the Soviets left. And that we could cross East Germany if Poland joined. Remember that today we have battalions in the Baltics! Germans were upset because they felt the British wanted to undermine the signature. It is true that the British had the same idea as us. But as usual, they were aggressive and rash, contrary to us, whom Germans considered as more trustworthy. It was basically considered as a mere provocation. We all agreed to drop a note stating that “this question will be for the Germans to decide.” Meanwhile, an infuriated Genscher had called Dumas and Baker. … Coming back to the further enlargement of NATO, Scowcroft would later say that he did not even think of it. I can say that I certainly did. It was necessary and inevitable. But it is true that in Ukraine and Georgia, in 2007, we went too far. This is another story.162

While to my knowledge Zoellick’s claim is not supported by any contemporary document, and even he doesn’t claim that the possibility of NATO expansion was not the only reason for the American position, it’s nevertheless very plausible for several reasons.163 First, although no contemporary document supports Zoellick’s claim, he has been making it consistently for more than 20 years. Moreover, as we have seen above, Central and Eastern Europeans had already been probing Washington about the possibility of joining NATO and internally US officials had not ruled it out. Finally, according to the British account of the end of the Two Plus Four process, during the last minute dispute that led to the addition of the “agreed minute” to the treaty Baker in particular insisted that “something in writing would be necessary about the provisions on military activity in the former GDR after Soviet troop departure” and that “oral assurances would not do”.164 He didn’t mention the possibility of NATO expansion and instead claimed that it was because otherwise the Senate would not ratify the treaty, but this is not very plausible and, in any case, it at least supports Zoellick’s claim that despite the German impression that London was behind the roadblock the US was actually instrumental to it.165

It was not just on the possibility that NATO might be expanded to Central and Eastern Europe that US officials were, to put things mildly, less than fully transparent with the Soviets, but more generally on their thinking about the future of the European security order. While they were showering Soviet officials in assurances that, despite their insistence on the importance of not dissolving NATO, they agreed with the long-term goal of building a pan-European security architecture and only wanted Germany to stay in NATO to preserve the status quo, privately they were voicing skepticism about pan-European security and were already planning to expand the US footprint in Europe to fill the vacuum left by the Soviet Union’s retreat from Central and Eastern Europe.166 Their motivations were complex and will be discussed in more detail later, but they are not relevant to the question of whether US officials tried to mislead the Soviets during the negotiations on German reunification, so for now I just want to highlight the gap between what they were telling Soviet officials about the future of the European security architecture and what they were saying in private. In that respect, what Scowcroft reportedly told Jacques Attali, one of Mitterrand’s closest advisors, in March 1990 is particularly revealing:

We want to find a forum where we can talk with Europeans, to contribute to the political stability of the continent. The CSCE can be used in technical areas (such as the environment), but the USSR is a member, so it's difficult to talk about the security of democracies in it. [emphasis is mine] The best solution would be NATO, but the danger would be to make it an exclusively political body, which would remove any justification for the presence of our troops in Germany. Another option would be to extend NATO to the countries of Eastern Europe, but the danger would be to isolate the USSR. We could also use the OECD to involve Japan (a potentially very dangerous country in that it has never been and still isn't a democracy), but there are too many people. We could also think of the G7. The best thing would be to set up the "Directoire à Quatre" proposed by de Gaulle in his day.167

This statement by Scowcroft is yet another piece of evidence that US officials were thinking about NATO expansion from very early on, even if at this point they still opposed it, but it also makes it clear that, despite their assurances to the Soviets that eventually the CSCE would become the main institution in a pan-European security system, they were not actually prepared to deal with important security issues in a forum where Moscow would have an equal voice. As we shall see, this attitude would persist in subsequent years as Western states increasingly made their most important security decisions within NATO and the CSCE/OSCE was gradually relegated to less important issues, which explains a lot about the degradation of Russian-Western relations since the end of the Cold War.

To be fair, though as we have seen US officials led their Soviet counterparts to believe that eventually a pan-European security architecture would be created, they occasionally let their skepticism about pan-European security come out in conversations with them. For instance, when he met Shevardnadze in April 1990, here is what Bush told him:

We are working with you and the other European countries to strengthen the CSCE. CSCE will be an important pillar in the new Europe but we should not try to make it do more than it can. Those of us who remember when Europe was not at peace do not want to return to notions of collective security that almost inevitably fail.168

Nevertheless, immediately after he said that, he added that the US willingness to stay in Europe was “in the interest of a Europe whole and free and the common European home as you call it”. In doing so, he was equating his concept of a “Europe whole and free” with Gorbachev’s concept of a “common European home”, but they were very different and US officials were perfectly aware of it. For instance, in a recent testimony about the Two Plus Four process, here is how Zelikow explained why US officials opposed Gorbachev’s “common European home”:

Gorbachev thought that his vision, known as “the common European House,” would be welcomed because it was close to Mitterrand’s vision of a confederation, with the background melody of De Gaulle’s Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Of course, we did not favor these views. Not only because obviously there was no place for the US in this “house,” but also because the common house concept avoided expressing and voicing the final win of a system against the other one. It only alleviated the military tensions.169

As this passage shows, not only did US officials oppose Gorbachev’s “common European home” concept because it would have reduced the US influence in Europe, but also because they wanted the outcome of the Cold War to make clear who had won. As we shall see, this way of thinking goes a long way to explain how the Bush administration dealt with the end of the Cold War, which may have prevented a different settlement that would have made the subsequent deterioration of the relations between Russia and the West less likely.

So did Western officials try to mislead their Soviet counterparts during the negotiations on German reunification by making broad assurances they intended to violate? Not if by that you mean that, when they assured Soviet officials that eventually a pan-European security architecture would be created even if for the moment it was impossible and NATO was still necessary to ensure stability on the continent, they were already planning to expand NATO to Warsaw Pact states. This is not the case, but at the same time, some US officials were already thinking about NATO expansion and not ruling it out in the future, even though such a policy was hard to reconcile with the assurances they were making to Soviet officials about the future of the European security order. Beyond the specific issue of NATO expansion, for a number of reasons I will discuss in more detail later, US officials never truly believed in pan-European security and always intended NATO to remain the main security institution in Europe. Yet they still led the Soviets to believe that in time a transformed CSCE would play this role, as Gorbachev was proposing. It would be unfair to the Americans to say that they openly lied to the Soviets, but it’s hard to deny that their behavior involved a measure of deception. To be sure, it’s a form of deception that is common in diplomacy, but that doesn’t make it any less deceptive and knowing that is unlikely to make the Russians feel better about it. Finally, it’s worth reiterating that even if Western officials had been completely forthcoming about their intentions and had not been trying to mislead their Soviet counterparts in any way, the Russians would still have a legitimate grievance against the West insofar as, regardless of whether it was premeditated or not, Western countries ended up violating the assurances they made at the end of the Cold War.

1.4.5 Gorbachev never denied that the West had violated its obligations

It is sometimes claimed that even Gorbachev, who obviously would know how Soviet officials interpreted the statements made by Western officials in February 1990, denied that a pledge not to expand NATO had been made at the time. Indeed, back in 2014, Gorbachev told a journalist interviewing him for Russia Beyond the Headlines, a state-owned Russian media outlet that the issue of NATO expansion to Central and Eastern European countries wasn’t even discussed in February 1990 and basically endorsed Kramer’s position:

RBTH: One of the key issues that has arisen in connection with the events in Ukraine is NATO expansion into the East. Do you get the feeling that your Western partners lied to you when they were developing their future plans in Eastern Europe? Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to you – particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East – be legally encoded? I will quote Baker: “NATO will not move one inch further east.”

M.G.: The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.170

If even Gorbachev says there was no promise, so the argument goes, then surely the Russians are dissembling when they claim to have interpreted Baker’s statements as a pledge that NATO would not be expanded.

The problem is that Gorbachev said that in 2014 and, as what he says immediately after this passage makes clear, he was trying to defend himself against the accusation, which has become very common in Russia and isn’t without justification, that he had been played by the West in 1990:

Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years. So don’t portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West’s finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object.171

As you can see, he is talking about himself in the third person and is trying to deflect the accusation that he failed to safeguard Russia’s interests because he was naïve, in a context where this accusation had become widespread in Russia. Indeed, the interview took place immediately after the US and Europe had taken harsh sanctions in response to the annexation of Crimea and the shooting of MH17 over Ukraine, so his statements have to be interpreted in light of that context.

In particular, one can’t infer from this interview that Gorbachev didn’t believe that, as I have argued above, statements made by Western officials before and during the negotiations on German reunification created some obligation not to expand NATO over Russia’s objections. In fact, not only did he not say anything in this interview that implies that he did not believe that it was the case, but he explicitly said that he did:

The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. [emphasis is mine] With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.172

In this passage, Gorbachev clearly distinguishes between the assurances that were made by Western officials about Germany, which were put in writing in the treaty and were subsequently observed, from the assurances that were made about other topics, which were implicit and subsequently violated. Since he also claimed that NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe was never discussed during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, his argument must be that it didn’t have to be discussed explicitly for the assurances made at the time to create some obligation not to do it, which is precisely the argument I have made above.

1.5 Many Western officials also interpreted, both at the time and later, the assurances made at the end of the Cold War as ruling out NATO expansion

I have argued that, in light of the assurances made by Western leaders during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, Russian officials were justified in having the expectation that NATO would not expand to the east against their wishes, but there is also evidence that some Western officials at the time similarly interpreted those assurances as ruling out that possibility. Indeed, Shifrinson recently discovered in the British archives notes from a meeting that took place on 7 March 1991 between high-level officials of the US, France, the UK and Germany about security in Central and Eastern Europe showing that even some Western officials thought the Soviet Union had been promised that NATO would not expand in the area.173 The document starts by noting that there is "general agreement that membership of NATO" would be unacceptable. Of course, this could have been unrelated to any promise Western officials felt they had made to the Soviet Union, but Jürgen Chrobog, Political Director of the German Foreign Office, is noted to have said that "we had made it clear during the 2+4 negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe" and that "we could not therefore offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others".174 Another document recently discovered in the German archives by Klaus Wiegrefe, which summarizes the same meeting, talks about "the understanding already expressed in the 2 + 4 process that the withdrawal of Soviet troops must not be used by the West for its own advantage".175 This is somewhat less specific, but on the other hand this remark is attributed to both Chrobog and Raymond Seitz, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada. Thus, according to German diplomatic archives, at least one top-level US official also felt at the time that during the negotiations on Germany's reunification a commitment had been made not to take advantage of the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Central and Eastern Europe and that this precluded the expansion of NATO in that area.176 Yet today Western officials insist that claims to that effect by Russian officials are nothing but a figment of their imagination.

Nor is the March 7 meeting the only evidence that some Western officials continued to regard themselves bound by assurances they'd given to the Soviets in 1990 even after the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Germany was signed. Wiegrefe also found in German diplomatic archives that Genscher, Chrobog's boss at the German Foreign Office, had also told other Western officials they couldn't expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe because of the commitments they'd made during the negotiations about Germany's reunification on three other occasions in 1991. He made that point to US officials on March 1, to his Greek counterpart on April 18 and finally to his French and Spanish counterparts on October 11. Thus, Genscher explicitly ruled out NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe before, during and after the negotiations on Germany's reunification. This is inconsistent with the view defended by critics of the Russian position, who not only argue that no Western official ever mentioned NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe before the negotiations on Germany's reunification started and that any assurances given during those negotiations concerned only the territory of the GDR, but that in any case even those more limited — according to them — assurances were later superseded by the final settlement eventually reached. Indeed, if this were true, then how could Western officials have still felt bound by assurances given in 1990 not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe several months after the signature of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Germany? One could argue that, since many Western officials still opposed NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe in 1991 (in part because they feared it might cause a backlash in the Soviet Union), some of them fabricated a promise not to expand it that was allegedly made during the negotiations on Germany's reunification, but this seems far-fetched, especially since everyone they talked to apparently agreed that NATO shouldn't be expanded. It would mean that some Western officials just happened to come up with the same lie — according to critics of the Russian position — back then as Russian officials today in order to convince people who in most cases also didn't want to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe anyway. It's much more likely that, even after the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Germany had been signed, they really felt that expanding NATO would violate assurances that had been made during the negotiations of that agreement.177

This interpretation is also supported by statements that Western officials involved in the negotiations about Germany’s reunification made later. William Burns, who in 1990 was deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department and therefore well positioned to know what had transpired during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, wrote in his recently published memoirs:

With President Bush’s support, Baker sold the [Two Plus Four negotiations format that associated the FRG and the GDR to the US, France, the Soviet Union and the UK] to German chancellor Helmut Kohl and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in early February, agreeing to use Two Plus Four negotiations to press for rapid German unification and full NATO membership, while reassuring the Soviets that NATO would not be extended any farther to the east, and would be transformed to reflect the end of the Cold War and potential partnership with the Soviet Union.

In meetings a few days later with Shevardnadze and Gorbachev in Moscow, Baker won their initial support, and began the effort to ease their resistance to membership of a unified Germany in NATO. Baker maintained that Soviet interests would be more secure with a united Germany wrapped up in NATO, rather than a Germany untied to NATO and perhaps eventually with its own nuclear weapons. He also said that there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction or forces “one inch to the east” of the borders of a reunified Germany. The Russians took him at his word and would feel betrayed by NATO enlargement in the years that followed, even though the pledge was never formalized and was made before the breakup of the Soviet Union. It was an episode that would be relitigated for many years to come.178

In this passage, Burns talks about “the borders of reunified Germany” when he mentions the pledge not to expand NATO eastward, which is inconsistent with the view that it only applied to the territory of the GDR. In case that was not clear enough, later in his memoirs, he also writes that “Yeltsin and the Russian elite assumed, with considerable justification [emphasis is mine], that Jim Baker’s assurances during the negotiation of German reunification in 1990—that NATO would not extend its reach ‘one inch’ farther east—would continue to apply after the breakup of the Soviet Union”.179

Of course, Burns’s understanding may not reflect the thinking of the rest of the Bush administration and indeed we have seen that other Western officials who played a role at the time disagree, but he is hardly alone among the participants in the diplomatic activity that took place at the end of the Cold War in thinking that Western officials had, if not outright pledged that NATO would not be expanded, at least led the Soviets to believe that it would not happen. For instance, here is what Robert Gates said when, after the first round of NATO expansion was carried out, he was asked what he thought Bush would have done if he had been reelected in 1992:

That would have been a tough fight within the administration. I’m not sure where people would have come down, but I think that the Bush administration would have, at the end of the day, kept our focus on our priorities, which in my view are, if you don’t get it right with Russia and China, none of the rest matters. And at a time of a special humiliation and difficulty for Russia, pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward, when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen [emphasis is mine], at least in no time soon, I think probably has not only aggravated the relationship between the United States and Russia but made it much more difficult to do constructive business with them. I think between that and the bombing of Belgrade we have really antagonized the Russians in a major way and I think those are two things that the Bush administration would not have done, when all is said and done.180

He makes a weaker claim than Burns, one that is more in line with the view I defended above, but they both think that the Russians have good reasons to be upset by the decision to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe given what they were told at the end of the Cold War.

Seitz is another high-ranking member of the Bush administration who is on the record saying that, although US officials never gave the Soviets any explicit guarantee that NATO would not expand to Central and Eastern Europe, Russia’s feeling of betrayal is justified:

At the time, there was never an explicit guarantee that NATO would not expand eastward. But the Russians felt later that there was an implicit commitment by the West, even if it was never part of any written agreement. The decision to expand NATO was taken later, by the Clinton administration. The idea was to stabilize eastern Europe. That was a very good argument in terms of expanding the EU. But I thought that it was not a good argument for expanding NATO. All the liberated Eastern countries definitely wanted NATO membership, but the Soviets did not believe we would agree. They had the impression that we would not take advantage of their weakened position. But at the end, we did, and it's understandable that they feel double-crossed.181

Dobbins, who in 1990 was Seitz’s deputy, also testified recently that he thought the Russian complaint was justified:

The 2+4 was signed, and with it started the ambiguity on Eastern Europe in NATO, in a context of the USSR falling apart. … It would be untrue to say that at that time there was a written doctrine on the enlargement of NATO. I personally opposed it in 1990. Again, at that moment, there was no intention of moving on very quickly. It became an issue only with the Clinton administration. I think that the “you betrayed us” of the Russians is a valid objection. There is no doubt that Genscher and Baker said that the West had no intention to enlarge. But Gorbachev did not ask for it in writing. The Warsaw Pact was operating, troops were in the barracks. The Soviets never imagined that things would change so fast. It was just unimaginable! It was their fault for not taking the assurances and formalizing the deal.182

Seitz’s view is very similar to mine, whereas Dobbins makes a stronger claim, but again they both validate the Russian position in some way.183

Nor are former Bush administration officials the only Western officials who think the Russian position has merit. Elbe, who in 1990 was the head of the West German delegation during the Two Plus Four process, passed away in 2022, but a few years before that, he had endorsed the Russian position in the strongest possible terms:

Under Clinton, the enlargement of NATO started. Having been a negotiator in the 2+4 process in 1990, I can say that there was no mis-understanding that the USA had given a stringent verbal commitment to the Soviet Union on February 8, 1990 that, “NATO should never expand by one inch to the East.” Secretary of State Jim Baker had discussed the issue with Gorbachev. In a letter that Baker wrote on the day he left Moscow, he informed Chancellor Kohl of his discussions, in particular on the deal of integrating united Germany into NATO. The clarity of the American position was instrumental in triggering the decision by Gorbachev a day later that the Soviet Union would not oppose reunification of Germany.184

Mallaby, who at the time was the British Ambassador to Moscow (like Elbe he died in 2022), also said in 2020 that several Western officials pledged not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe:

I think there was a mistake by three Western countries. Baker, for the United States, and Kohl, for the Federal Republic, as well as John Major, for the UK, told the Soviet Union informally that NATO would not be extended further east than the eastern frontier of the united Germany. Later NATO was extended further east and the Soviets were understandably furious. I confess that I am glad about this extension of NATO because it gave those new members of NATO security in the face of Putin's subsequent policies.185

Here it seems that Mallaby is not just referring to the February 1990 talks in Moscow, but also to Major’s visit in March 1991, when he did assure the Soviet Minister of Defense who complained that NATO was thinking about inviting Warsaw Pact states to join that “nothing of the sort will happen”.

I don’t quote those Western officials because I necessarily think what they say is true. In fact, many of them argue that Baker explicitly promised Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t be expanded to Central and Eastern Europe, but as we have seen, critics of the Russian position are right that he was only talking about the territory of the GDR. However, the fact that many Western officials who were directly involved in the negotiations on German reunification at the highest level, both immediately after the end of the Cold War and more recently, interpreted the assurances made at the time as ruling out NATO expansion to Warsaw Pact states is still relevant to the controversy about whether the Russian complaint has merit. First, although many incorrectly claim that Baker’s infamous February assurance was about Central and Eastern Europe in general (as opposed to the territory of the GDR), some make a weaker claim that is very similar to the view I have defended above. In other words, they don’t claim that Western officials explicitly promised not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe, but that they nevertheless made broad assurances that implicitly were hard to reconcile with such a policy, so it wasn’t unreasonable for the Russians to feel they had been misled when it happened. Moreover, if even some Western officials who played a role in the negotiations with the Soviet Union at the time feel that NATO expansion violated the assurances made at the end of the Cold War, it seems hard to argue that it’s unreasonable for the Russians to feel the same thing.186 Indeed, the argument I have made is that Western officials mollified the Soviets by showering them in assurances that, although individually vague enough for Western officials to be able to claim — probably in good faith — that NATO expansion did not violate them, collectively were such as to create expectations that were clearly incompatible with it. Again, this doesn’t mean that Western officials deliberately tried to mislead the Soviets in that way (although we have seen that US officials were less than entirely forthcoming about their intentions), but it doesn’t make it any less true that it was justified for the Russians to deem those assurances misleading in retrospect.

1.6 Hell hath no fury like a Russian scorned

So what should we make of this controversy that has been plaguing the relations between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War? As usual, the answer is complicated, but some things are pretty clear. First, despite what is often claimed or suggested (including sometimes by Russian officials), Baker was almost certainly talking only about the territory of the GDR when he infamously told Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union consented to let Germany stay in NATO after reunification, the Alliance’s “jurisdiction” would not move “one inch to the east”, whatever this could have meant exactly. It’s understandable that people think he was talking about Central and Eastern Europe, because this interpretation of the words he used is very natural, but a close reading of the conversation as a whole makes it very unlikely that he actually was.187 Genscher on the other hand, who repeatedly made a similar assurance at the beginning of 1990, was clearly talking about Central and Eastern Europe in general and not just the territory of the GDR, contrary to what critics of the Russian position allege. As we have seen, at some point even Baker was ambiguous on this point, though his ambiguity may have been calculated. In any case, Genscher’s early statements on the issue were informed by his views on what a post-Cold War European security architecture should look like, which though close to Gorbachev’s “common European home” concept were not shared by the FRG’s allies and in particular the US or even by the more Atlantist Kohl. As a result, his position was quickly marginalized among Western officials and he eventually had to fall behind the Bush-Kohl position, a fact that as we have seen the Soviets did not fail to notice. Thus, critics of the Russian position are still correct that no obligation to not expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe arose from the statements made by Western officials in February, but as they like to point out the negotiations on Germany’s reunification didn’t stop in February.

During the Two Plus Four process, Western officials hardened their position on the GDR by abandoning Baker’s “jurisdiction” talk (whose precise meaning had never been clear anyway) in favor of Bush’s “special military status” formula, but they also made a number of broader assurances on what the post-Cold War European security order would eventually look like. As I have argued, the assurance that NATO would not expand to the east had never been meant as compensation for allowing Germany to stay in the Alliance, but as a way to make this outcome even more appealing than the alternative of a Germany unconstrained by membership to the West’s security structures by promising that NATO would not take advantage of Germany’s reunification to expand its footprint. The broader assurances made after February were similarly meant to make the prospect of a reunified Germany in NATO more appealing by promising that although it couldn’t happen overnight eventually a pan-European security system would be created. Those broad assurances, I have argued, were clearly in tension with NATO expansion and created some obligation that it would not happen against Russia’s wishes. Indeed, as we have seen, this was explicitly confirmed by Major to Soviet officials in 1991 during a visit in Moscow and contemporary documentary evidence shows that at least some Western officials agreed this was implied by the assurances made in 1990. Western and in particular US officials were not actively planning to violate any of the assurances they made during this process, but they kept them deliberately vague and papered over their disagreements with Moscow about the future of the European security order, so the Soviets would hear what they wanted to hear. Their main concern was the immediate goal of securing Germany’s continued membership of NATO, with as few restrictions as possible, after the reunification and in the pursuit of that goal they made broad assurances to mollify the Soviets without giving much thought about what problems could arise in the future as a result of how they interpreted those assurances. It worked and, when later the Russians complained because they had interpreted them more expansively than what US officials intended, but still very reasonably given what they had actually been told, they accused them of making things up. It’s not hard, provided that one is capable of a modicum of empathy, to understand why the Russians are upset.

There are in principle three different things people could mean when they say that Western officials pledged to the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand at the end of the Cold War:

A.    they signed a legally binding treaty that ruled out NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe;

B.     they made a verbal pledge not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe in exchange for allowing Germany to stay in NATO after reunification;

C.     they gave other, more vague verbal assurances that it would nevertheless have been natural for the Russians to interpret as ruling out NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe.

Everybody in that debate agrees that A is false, even if critics of the Russian position sometimes make it sound as if Moscow were making that claim, but the debate has been focusing on B, while C has mostly been ignored even though unlike B it’s very well supported and still vindicates the Russian position to a large extent. Indeed, in light of the assurances Soviet officials received at the end of the Cold War, the Russians have very good reasons to regard NATO expansion and more generally their exclusion from the post-Cold War European security architecture as a betrayal, even if they sometimes overstate their case by suggesting that something like B is true.

One could acknowledge that, as I have argued, the assurances made by Western officials at the end of the Cold War created some obligation for the West not to expand NATO against Russia’s wishes, but insist that it’s Russia’s fault if NATO was expanded anyway and more generally if the sort of pan-European security architecture that Soviet officials were assured would eventually be created never materialized. On this view, to the extent that assurances made at the end of the Cold War create some obligation not to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe against Russia’s wishes, this obligation was defeasible and depended on Russia’s behavior, but after 1991 Moscow acted in a way that made it impossible to create the kind of pan-European security system that Western officials promised would emerge in due time during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification. I don’t think anyone has actually proposed this line of thinking, which is not surprising since critics of the Russian position deny that any obligation not to expand NATO resulted from the assurances made at the end of the Cold War, but it’s a logically possible position and as we shall see many people in the 1990s did argue that Russia’s actions made NATO expansion necessary. It’s certainly true that, if only because it wasn’t part of a legally binding treaty, the obligation not to expand NATO and to include Moscow in the post-Cold War European security order could not have been unconditional and that creating the kind of pan-European security architecture promised at the end of the Cold War required Moscow’s cooperation. Thus, in principle it could be that although NATO was expanded to Central and Eastern Europe and Moscow was de facto excluded from the post-Cold War European security architecture, it was Russia’s fault and the West can’t be blamed for not fulfilling the assurances made at the end of the Cold War. However, while it’s true that Russia has a share of the responsibility for the degradation of the relations with the West in subsequent years, I will argue that the bulk of it falls on the US and its allies. The truth is that US officials in particular were never able to shake the deep suspicion of Russia inherited from the Cold War, which effectively made it impossible to find a place for Russia in the post-Cold War European security order.

People generally assume, more or less implicitly, that whether the West violated some kind of obligation it had contracted at the end of the Cold War by expanding NATO to Central and Eastern Europe is independent from the question of whether NATO expansion was a good policy, but I don’t think that is quite true.188 Indeed, since that obligation was not codified by a treaty or even in a non-legally binding written document but resulted from broad verbal assurances, there is no objective fact of the matter about how strong it was exactly and therefore I don’t think those issues can be so neatly distinguished. I think that everyone should agree that some obligation not to expand NATO was created by those assurances, and that wasn’t as strong as it would have been if Baker had made a clear and explicit quid pro quo with Gorbachev (in the way Khrushchev agreed with Kennedy to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey), but that beyond that there is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree about how strong it was. Since there is no objective fact of the matter about how binding that obligation was, it’s natural and legitimate that how bad one thinks the fact that NATO was expanded to Central and Eastern Europe in spite of those assurances was depends in part on one’s view about whether it was a good idea to expand NATO. One can argue that although the assurances in question created some obligation not to expand NATO, this obligation was outweighed by other considerations, but that is not the same thing as denying that some obligation not to do it existed. Unfortunately, because participants in the debate have focused on B while mostly ignoring C, this is what critics of the Russian position have done. Meanwhile, people sympathetic to that position have implausibly tried to argue that B was true instead of focusing their efforts on defending C, which is on much firmer grounds.189 To be fair, Russian officials are partly to blame for this situation, because as we have seen in their desire to cast NATO expansion as illegitimate they have encouraged the confusion between B and C by throwing the kitchen sink at their opponents. However, this is not a reason to ignore C and deny that, after what they were told at the end of the Cold War, Russian officials had legitimate reasons to feel they had been misled when the process to expand NATO to Central and Eastern Europe was launched and a NATO-centric European security order started to take shape.

Indeed, what most people miss in this debate is that it’s not so much NATO expansion per se that Russia resents as much as its exclusion from the post-Cold War European security order. NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe was merely the main concrete manifestation of this exclusion. Western officials could have acknowledged that, in light of the assurances they had made at the end of the Cold War, they understood that Russia felt betrayed, but argued that circumstances had changed in ways that were impossible to foresee at the time and could only be dealt by expanding NATO. As I will argue when I discuss how the decision to expand NATO was made, I don’t think there is a good case to be made for this view, but at least by presenting that argument Western officials would have acknowledged that NATO expansion was in tension with the assurances made at the end of the Cold War, even if ultimately they thought that other considerations trumped the obligation that resulted from those assurances. Instead, they just denied that any such tension existed and replied to Russia’s complaints by making irrelevant points such as the observation that the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany did not contain any provision that precluded NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe (which the Russians never claimed) or the claim that Central and Eastern European states have a right to seek admission into NATO (which is beside the point), thereby adding insult to injury. The truth is that when those assurances were made the Soviet Union was still perceived as a force to be reckoned with and the West needed Moscow’s cooperation to solve a number of issues it cared a great deal about. This was no longer true a few years later as people came to realize how weak Russia was, so Western officials ignored the assurances they had previously made or at least interpreted them in the way that suited them best, which is often how things go in international relations. As unfair as it was, the Russians would have been better served to accept all of this and focus on building a stronger economy, but they didn’t and more recently the West has, or rather should have, learned that ignoring Russia’s wounded pride was not as costless as it once seemed, because even in this weakened state it can still make a mess.

2 The road not taken at the end of the Cold War

I have spent a lot of time on the controversy about the assurances that were made during the negotiations on Germany’s reunification, not only because it has become a focal point in the dispute between Russia and the West in subsequent years (especially since the invasion of Ukraine), but also because a deep-dive into that controversy was the occasion to identify some important facts about the end of the Cold War that are crucial to understand what happened later. In particular, this discussion showed that if US officials were so insistent that Germany had to stay in NATO after reunification, it’s because they knew that if Germany left NATO the US would no longer be able to keep a significant military presence in Europe, which in turn is directly related to what I call the “original sin” of the West’s post-Cold War policy toward Russia. Indeed, this “original sin” is not the fact that the US and its allies made broad assurances at the end of the Cold War that, as I have argued, it later violated by expanding NATO to Central and Eastern Europe a few years later. The “original sin” is the decision to solidify NATO at the end of the Cold War, rather than create a new European security architecture that would have included Russia. This decision put the world on the path that led to the events of 2014 and eventually the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While it did not make this trajectory inevitable, as we shall see there were numerous occasions after that when it could have been avoided if Russia, Ukraine and the West had made other decisions, it made the degradation of relations between the West and Russia, as well as a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, much more likely. In this section, I will explain why that is the case, but also why the US and its allies nevertheless made the fateful decision to enshrine NATO’s primacy instead of trying to create a truly inclusive European security order to replace the Cold War alliances as the conflict that structured international relations for 40 years came to an end.

2.1 NATO’s primacy and the logic of exclusion

NATO was created in 1949, at the beginning of the Cold War, to protect Western Europe against a possible attack by the Soviet Union. By committing the US to defend Western European countries if they were attacked, it represented a major break in US foreign policy, which so far had avoided this kind of commitment in Europe and had been strongly influenced by isolationism. The logic behind the decision to create NATO, from the US point of view, was to avoid another costly intervention in Europe by deterring the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe, which US officials thought would inevitably force Washington to enter the war.190 However, this commitment did not initially translate into a large build-up of US troops on the continent, which didn’t happen until North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, prompting fear that the Soviet Union might attempt a takeover of Western Europe.191 The Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 as a counterweight to NATO and in order to ensure the “stability” of the Eastern bloc. Since NATO had been created to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War, it would prima facie have been logical to dissolve it at the end of the Cold War and create a new European security architecture that would have included the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern European countries, but this did not happen. For reasons I will discuss shortly, although some Western officials briefly explored the possibility of creating a pan-European security system along the lines proposed by Gorbachev, Western countries in general and the US in particular refused to countenance the dissolution of NATO and were determined to ensure that it would continue to be the main forum where they would discuss hard security issues. Before I explain what led them to make this choice, I want to explain why it made the exclusion of Russia from the European security architecture, the subsequent deterioration of relations between Russia and the West and a conflict between Russia and Ukraine more likely.

The logic that made this kind of outcome more likely is pretty straightforward. As long as NATO continued to exist but no pan-European security organization was created, Central and Eastern European countries would find themselves in a security vacuum and, having recently shaken off the Soviet yoke, would inevitably be pulled toward NATO and try to join the Alliance to obtain security guarantees against the possibility that Russia might recover and try to subjugate them again. As Sarotte noted, declassified materials show that US officials understood that point and privately made it as early as the summer of 1990, when Central and Eastern Europeans started to probe Washington more forcefully about the possibility of joining NATO:

Havel’s security advisor asked (as the NSC expert on Eastern Europe, Robert Hutchings, reported to Scowcroft on August 16, 1990), “how NATO would respond if Czechoslovakia applied for membership.” Hutchings understood why they were asking. If the “East Europeans want out of the Warsaw Pact but cannot join NATO,” he asked, “where do they find their security in the Europe of the future?” Genscher and Mitterrand had previously tried to answer that question by proposing that some kind of pan-European entity replace both military pacts, but the American preference for NATO had prevailed.192

Unless Russia also joined NATO, it would find itself completely excluded from the European security architecture, as important security issues would be discussed and decisions made in NATO, where it doesn’t have a vote. In turn, this would cause a bad reaction in Russia as NATO moved closer to its borders and it found itself increasingly isolated, until finally a point was reached where the US and its allies would no longer be willing to risk a conflict with Russia by expanding NATO further, leaving some countries in the former Eastern bloc facing an aggravated Russia on their own.

The only way to prevent that would have been for Russia to join NATO, but for both objective and subjective reasons, it was unlikely to ever happen. First, although it was not as large as the Soviet Union, Russia was still a gigantic country that spanned the whole Eurasian landmass with very large armed forces. So in the event that it joined NATO, not only would the Alliance suddenly find itself committed to a vast geographic area going far beyond the Euro-Atlantic zone, but it would also have to make a very difficult and costly effort to modernize the Russian armed forces and make them interoperable with NATO forces. Russia would also have had to carry out enough democratic reforms to qualify for membership, though how much was enough would ultimately have been a political decision, so this criterion was only partly objective. In addition to such objective factors, there were also subjective factors that made Russia’s membership in NATO unlikely. Indeed, despite the end of the Cold War, people in the West remained suspicious of Russia and feared that if Moscow joined the Alliance it would turn into an ineffective collective security system because Russia’s interests were insufficiently aligned with the West’s.193 This suspicion would only increase as Central and Eastern European countries, with their deep-seated fear of Russia, started to join the Alliance. Baker himself emphasized the importance of that factor a decade later when he argued that NATO should invite Russia to join the Alliance:

If Russia wishes to join NATO and at some point in the future satisfies all of the criteria for membership, what is the problem? The problem is, of course, that many participants in this process impose one more condition for membership that Russia can never satisfy—namely, that the candidate not be Russia. To some extent, this sentiment reflects historical bias. NATO was formed to resist the threat of Soviet aggression against the West. Russia essentially controlled the Soviet Union. QED. Why admit to the alliance the very adversary against whom the alliance was formed?194

Subjective factors were equally present on the Russian side, where the legacy of the Cold War also loomed large and NATO was still perceived as an anti-Russia organization, making it politically difficult for any Russian government to apply for membership. That is not to say that it was impossible for Russia to join NATO, as we shall see it was seriously considered both in Russia and in the West for a while, but it would have required to overcome those obstacles and that was unlikely to happen.

As long as it did not happen and NATO moved toward Russia’s borders while Moscow was left on the outside, it was bound to perceive this process with increased suspicion, until eventually things came to a head and caused a clash. On the other hand, once NATO expansion had started, it was always going to be difficult to stop the process because this would have amounted to redrawing a line in Europe and implicitly admitting that Russia had a veto over NATO expansion. No Western leader was likely to explicitly close the door to further expansion because, only a few years after the end of the Cold War, the idea that Russia should have a say on Western policy was clearly going to be a political nonstarter, especially in the US. Clinton explained this logic very clearly to Yeltsin in 1997, when the Russian President tried to convince him that, if NATO expansion was to continue, they should at least make a “gentlemen’s agreement” that former Soviet republics would not be invited to join:

"Good," said Clinton. "But I want you to imagine something else. If we were to agree that no members of the former Soviet Union could enter NATO, that would be a bad thing for our attempt to build a new NATO. It would also be a bad thing for your attempt to build a new Russia. I am not naïve. I understand you have an interest in who gets into NATO and when. We need to make sure that all these are subjects that we can consult about as we move forward. 'Consult' means making sure that we're aware of your concerns, and that you understand our decisions and our positions and our thinking. But consider what a terrible message it would send if we were to make the kind of supposedly secret deal you're suggesting. First, there are no secrets in this world. Second, the message would be, 'We're still organized against Russia-but there's a line across which we won't go.' In other words, instead of creating a new NATO that helps move toward an integrated, undivided Europe, we'd have a larger NATO that's just sitting there waiting for Russia to do something bad.

"Here's why what you are proposing is bad for Russia. Russia would be saying, 'We've still got an empire, but it just can't reach as far west as it used to when we had the Warsaw Pact.' Second, it would create exactly the fear among the Baltics and others that you're trying to allay and that you're denying is justified.

…

"I've been repeating that I'd leave open the possibility of Russia in NATO and in any event of having a steadily improving partnership between NATO and Russia. I think we'll have to continue to work this issue, but we should concentrate on practical matters. However, under no circumstances should we send a signal out of this meeting that it's the same old European politics of the cold war and we're just moving the lines around a bit."195

Thus, while initially there was little appetite for NATO expansion in the West, once it started the idea that it should continue indefinitely became a dogma, which predictably further aroused Russian suspicions. Indeed, no matter how often US officials insisted that NATO expansion wasn’t directed against Russia, that NATO had rejected the logic of blocs and that even Moscow could join eventually, the Russians were not buying it and as we shall see they had excellent reasons not to. While Clinton himself was mostly sincere, for most people in the West and Central and Eastern Europe, creating a “a larger NATO that's just sitting there waiting for Russia to do something bad” was precisely the point.

Therefore, from the moment the West decided to keep NATO in place instead of creating a pan-European security architecture to replace the Cold War alliances, the expansion of NATO, the exclusion of Russia and the deterioration of relations with the West had already become likely. It was clear that, with the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact (which had been imposed by force in the first place and could not survive once Gorbachev had made the decision not to use force to keep the Soviet Union’s satellites in line), Central and Eastern European countries would find themselves in a security vacuum and NATO would become a magnet for them. This would eventually result in the exclusion of Russia from the European security architecture unless it could also join NATO, which though not impossible was unlikely for both objective and subjective reasons. Again, that is not to say that this outcome was inevitable, but the tracks that led to it had been laid and it would have taken unusually competent statesmanship to avoid it. This was entirely predictable and, indeed, it was predicted by several people at the time. In particular, it’s in part because he foresaw that development that Mitterrand proposed his project of a European confederation at the end of 1989, which by including the Soviet Union could have prevented Moscow’s exclusion from the post-Cold War European political order.196 This project initially attracted support in both the West and the East, but it eventually failed and never came to anything, in part because it was shot down by the US for reasons to be discussed shortly.

Another person who foresaw this outcome, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, was Gorbachev himself. In May 1990, after trying and failing to convince Baker that Germany should be neutral after reunification, he told him this:

Let us continue this conversation in Washington. And if none of my arguments convince you, then I’ll suggest to the President and announce publicly that we want to join NATO too. After all, you say that NATO is not directed against us, that it is just a security structure that is adapting to the new reality. So we will propose to join NATO.197

He added immediately after that it was not “a purely hypothetical question” or “some absurdity” and came back to the issue later in the conversation by saying that “our potential membership in NATO is not such a wild fantasy”, but Baker ignored him and changed the subject in both cases. While at the beginning of the year, Gorbachev still harbored some hope that part of the Warsaw Pact could be preserved, by then he knew that it was condemned and understood that if NATO was not dissolved, it would result in Moscow’s isolation unless it could also join. As Baker later acknowledged, in a paper where he argued that Russia should be invited to join NATO (precisely to avoid the kind of process I’m arguing was made likely by the decision not to create a pan-European security architecture at the end of the Cold War), Gorbachev “was more serious than we gave him credit for at the time” and was “looking several moves ahead”.198 A very similar scene happened in March 1991 during Major’s visit to Moscow. As we have seen, during that visit, Gorbachev complained that, despite the assurances the Soviet Union had received during the negotiations on German reunification, NATO was taking steps to expand to Central and Eastern Europe. Major assured him that nothing of the sort would happen, but Gorbachev was not convinced, and he said that in that case the Soviet Union would apply for membership in NATO, to which Major just replied that he should apply to the EEC instead and then changed the subject. Gorbachev understood that, despite the West’s protests to the contrary, the Soviet Union was still perceived as a threat. He also understood that, in time, this would result in Moscow’s isolation and threaten Europe’s stability.

2.2 Anatomy of a decision

I have argued that keeping NATO in place as the main European security institution, instead of creating a pan-European security architecture, was a mistake, but it’s important to understand why that decision was made. While the US did not make that decision alone, as the leader of NATO, it was by far the main player. As we have seen, in February 1990, Bush essentially made a deal with Kohl. The US would support German reunification and, in exchange, Bonn would resist the temptation to secure Moscow’s assent to it by giving up NATO membership. Thatcher did not like German reunification, but she understood that she could not prevent it and wanted to preserve NATO, while France was interested in pan-European security but knew that it couldn’t impose such a solution once the US, the UK and Germany had agreed to maintain NATO’s primacy and therefore had no choice but to join the bandwagon. The motivations of US officials in adopting this position were complex and should not be caricatured or judged without taking into account what people knew at the time. Although I’m critical of the Bush administration’s decision to maintain NATO’s supremacy after the end of the Cold War instead of supporting the creation of a pan-European security architecture that would have included Moscow as well the Central and Eastern European countries, I think it had by far the best foreign policy team of any US administration since then and that it made that decision in large part based on solid reasoning that deserves to be fairly characterized. In short, US officials in Bush’s foreign policy team were no fools, so it’s important to understand why they adopted that position despite the drawbacks I have identified. Of course, that is not to say their policy cannot be criticized and again I think ultimately it was a bad policy, but to criticize it one has to understand not just the outcome but also the decision-making process in context.

First, Bush was a very cautious man and so were his main foreign policy advisers, which played a major role in how the US managed the end of the Cold War. In general, this caution was perhaps his greatest virtue, but unfortunately in this case it proved to be a liability and led to a suboptimal outcome. However, once you take into account the context in which the decision to maintain NATO’s supremacy was made, it becomes harder to blame Bush for making not only that decision but other controversial choices he made at the time. By 1988, Reagan was fully convinced that Gorbachev was serious about reform and was actively collaborating with him to bring about the end of the Cold War and assist in the transformation of the Soviet Union, but his Vice-President was not. When Bush became President in 1989, he immediately ordered a pause in US-Soviet relations, because he and Scowcroft did not believe that Gorbachev was sincerely interested in reforms. They suspected that he was just a smarter kind of Soviet leader who was just pretending to be a democrat to further traditional Soviet aims and were afraid that Reagan had been too hasty in beginning a rapprochement with the Soviet Union.199 They did not become convinced that Gorbachev was the real deal until several months later, when as promised a year earlier, he did not use force to stop the revolutions that were overthrowing communist regimes everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Some people argue that, had Bush trusted Gorbachev and collaborated with him from the outset instead of ordering the pause, perestroika might have succeeded, but I find that rather dubious.200 However, that is not to say that the pause ordered by Bush at the beginning of his administration did not have serious consequences, if only because as a result the US and the Soviet Union lost precious time to move forward on arms-control agreements. By the time Bush was ready to resume the negotiations, Gorbachev was less capable of delivering, so it’s plausible that had Bush never ordered the pause more ambitious arms-control agreements would have been signed. But more importantly, Bush did not abandon his cautious approach toward the processes then underway in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, it simply took a different form and had far-reaching consequences on subsequent relations between Russia and the West.

Indeed, even after he became convinced that Gorbachev was a genuine reformer and that he really wanted to end the Cold War, Bush still kept him at arm’s length compared to Reagan and was much less willing than his predecessor to entertain a complete transformation of the nature of the relationship with the Soviet Union. That’s because he and his foreign policy team made a distinction between Gorbachev and the Soviet Union and they continued to regard the latter as a geopolitical adversary of the US. In their view, the Soviet Union had been weakened and for the moment was cooperating with the US, but it could nevertheless be counted on to eventually revert to a more hostile position. In particular, Bush and his advisers thought it was likely that, sooner or later, Gorbachev would be overthrown and that hardliners would take his place. Their strategy was therefore to lock in as many advantages as they could until the window of opportunity opened by Gorbachev closed and the Soviet Union reverted to a more adversarial position.201 The decision not to undermine NATO’s effectiveness by embarking on a very uncertain process to create a pan-European security architecture that would include Moscow was in part a hedge against that scenario. While it can and, in my opinion, should be criticized as lacking vision at a critical moment history, this is easier to say now with the benefit of hindsight and one must acknowledge that it was not crazy at the time. In any case, since Gorbachev was delivering on several key US goals, such as the reunification of Germany, the CFE Treaty and the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe, the Bush administration endeavored to prop up Gorbachev as much as possible to reduce the probability that he would be overthrown or at least get more time to extract more irreversible advantages from him before he was replaced. In particular, this meant supporting the center against the republics (with the exception of the Baltics whose annexation by the Soviet Union had never recognized), many of which had already started to agitate for their independence by the end of 1989.202 Thus, despite a widespread belief to the contrary, the US policy at the time was not to encourage the dissolution of the Soviet Union but on the contrary to support the center against the republics.

The most famous illustration of that policy is the speech Bush made in Kiev on his way back from Moscow on August 1, 1991, in which he clearly took side for Gorbachev and the center against Ukrainian nationalism:

Freedom cannot survive if we let despots flourish or permit seemingly minor restrictions to multiply until they form chains, until they form shackles. … Yet freedom is not the same as independence. America will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred. We will support those who want to build democracy.203

Three weeks later, there was a coup attempt in Moscow against Gorbachev, which quickly failed but undermined his authority and made the disintegration of the Soviet Union inevitable. This was precisely the kind of thing that US officials feared would happen, and what had motivated the policy of supporting the center against the republics to avoid undermining Gorbachev in the first place, but since the coup failed that policy has been described as inept and short-sighted by most commentators ever since. In particular, after the coup had failed The New York Times columnist William Safire sarcastically dubbed Bush’s speech the “Chicken Kiev speech” for his failure to espouse the cause of Ukrainian nationalism against the center, a moniker that has stuck to this day.204 But this was easy to say after the coup had failed and it had become clear that Gorbachev and the Union would not survive for long. Bush on the other hand did not have the benefit of hindsight and, while one could perhaps criticize his exact choice of words, I think his policy was the prudent thing to do under the circumstances. It’s not just that Gorbachev was delivering on US long-standing objectives, it’s also that US officials were rightly afraid that the disintegration of the Soviet Union could lead to widespread violence. This had already begun to happen in Yugoslavia, but the prospect of a civil war in the Soviet Union was far scarier, if only because a huge number of nuclear weapons were disseminated across the country. The fear of such a scenario, which Baker famously described as “Yugoslavia with nukes”, was another important factor in Washington’s policy toward the Soviet Union during that period.205

Nevertheless, the Bush administration support for the center against the republics remained purely tactical and the US continued to regard the Soviet Union as a geopolitical adversary, which had been weakened and was temporarily collaborating with the US because of Gorbachev, but would eventually reverse to a more hostile stance. Bush and other US officials made that view of the Soviet Union very clear in discussions with allies at the time:

At a meeting with the German delegation in London [during the Summit of the G7 in 1991], Bush disliked French agnosticism about NATO’s future mission. “Let’s be sure we don’t reopen things,” he said. “As long as Soviet missiles are aimed at the United States, I know who the enemy is.”206

This attitude was recently summarized by Jacques Blot, then a high-level French official directly involved in the negotiations on German reunification in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in connection with the failure of Mitterrand’s European confederation project:

On December 12 in Berlin, James Baker had sketched out another vision, that of an Atlanticist Europe, with a reformed and perhaps more political NATO as its linchpin. A reunified Germany would naturally find its place in it. This conception was an extension of the logic of the blocs. Negotiations with the USSR led to appeasement and a reduction in forces and arsenals, but the aim was to organize a balance that would maintain the counterweight of the American superpower against what remained the imposing and indisputable Soviet military power. Of course, during this period, President Bush, like the French President, was concerned not to do anything that might destabilize Gorbachev, but American diplomacy never ceased to push its advantage against a country that was always seen as an adversary to be weakened and its influence reduced, and not, as had been the case with Germany after the war, treated as a partner to be helped to recover.207

As Sarotte argued, despite what is often claimed (especially by former US officials), the evidence doesn’t support the view that “integration of the Soviets into new or existing institutions was dominant” in US policy at the end of the Cold War but rather that “the goal was to get the Soviets out”.208

As Vladislav Zubok put it, despite being urged by some people to base US policy on a more ambitious vision, Bush “continued to pursue the short-term vision of locking in the Cold War gains”.209 This attitude sometimes bewildered US allies, who found it short-sighted and tone-deaf, but the US was the undisputed leader of the Alliance and, as this example from July 1991 illustrates, they had no choice but to follow:

At the opening session of the G-7, which took place in Gorbachev’s absence, Bush shared the advice he had received from the scholars gathered at Kennebunkport. He also raised other points against the “Grand Bargain”: the Soviet state continued to spend a lot of money on its military needs, including modernization of strategic missiles, and Gorbachev was still unwilling to set the Baltic republics free. The US President also pitched the priority of helping the Eastern European states, rather than the Soviet Union. Some Western leaders in London felt embarrassed. The American team was finding every possible reason not to help Gorbachev. The Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, made a moving speech. In 1985, he said, then Vice-President Bush had attended Chernenko’s funeral in Moscow. What would Bush have done then if, meeting him after the funeral, Gorbachev had said: I will free Eastern Europe, I will dismantle the Warsaw Pact, a united Germany will join NATO, a UN force will start a war against Iraq, the USSR will sign the CFE and START agreements, there will be elections and democracy, I will develop personal ties with America, and economic ties with the West will grow. “If Gorbachev had said these things in 1985,” Mulroney concluded, “I would have hurried in with a check.” Andreotti reminded the group of what Reagan had said in 1985: “I don’t know if Gorbachev will succeed, but none of us should have on our conscience the responsibility of not helping.” Yet nobody at the G-7 wanted to question American leadership. And nobody wanted to hold out the money bag.210

But adopting the kind of ambitious vision that many people urged him to embrace simply wasn’t consistent with Bush’s character. While Reagan was a visionary, his successor was first and foremost a pragmatist, who was risk averse and preferred certain but limited advantages to uncertain but more desirable outcomes. Again, this was generally a virtue, but in this case it proved to be a major flaw and we are still paying the price today.

However, Bush’s risk aversion was not the only reason why he did not support the creation of a pan-European security architecture that would have included Moscow and instead did everything he could to ensure NATO’s continued primacy in the post-Cold War era, he also had ulterior geopolitical motives. Indeed, thanks to the efforts of historians and the declassification of many documents from the US archives, we now have a very good idea of how US officials were thinking at the time and what sort of considerations guided their decision-making about strategy. Analysis of these documents shows that, in addition to the fear that Gorbachev would be overthrown by hardliners and that Moscow would revert to a more adversarial position vis-à-vis the US, officials in the Bush administration were also guided by the goal of sustaining and even reinforcing US supremacy in Europe in the post-Cold War era.211 In order to understand why that goal was the highest priority for the US in 1989-1991, and why this led Washington to do everything it could to ensure that nothing would threaten NATO’s primacy on European security, it’s crucial to understand the relationship between US power and its role as a European power. The European alliance is a major power multiplier for the US because, while individually the economic, political and military power of each European states is negligible relative to that of the US, collectively it’s formidable and the ability of the US to harness it greatly enhances its ability to further its goals. For instance, Washington’s ability to impose a cost to adversaries like China by denying them access to certain technologies through export controls — regardless of whether such a policy is a good idea — relies on cooperation with economically advanced allies in Europe, because in the long-run unilateral export controls will only harm US companies by reducing their market shares while US adversaries will be able to source the products and services they need from European companies. Similarly, while the US has by far the most powerful military in the world, the support of European countries still enhances the ability of the US to conduct military interventions abroad — again regardless of whether such interventions are a good idea — not only because they can provide troops but also and perhaps mainly because conducting these kinds of operations at the head of a large coalition rather than unilaterally is perceived as more legitimate both domestically and internationally.

But NATO is a major channel through which the US is able to exert political influence in Europe, because as long as European states depend on the US for their defense, they can’t easily ignore requests to cooperate with US policy. Of course, it’s not the only reason why they often agree to cooperate with the US (the community of values between the US and Europe, for instance, also plays a role), but it’s a major and arguably the main factor. As recently declassified materials show, this is partly why during that period US officials in the Bush administration were determined to ensure that new security arrangements emerging from the settlement of the Cold War would not threaten NATO’s primacy on security in Europe, because they otherwise would have undermined one of Washington’s main levers of influence on the continent and thereby also its ability to, as one US official put it, “harness European power” to further its interests or at least what it perceived as such.212 Just as Gorbachev foresaw that NATO’s continued primacy would eventually result in Moscow’s exclusion from the European security architecture, US officials predicted that unless it could be preserved in the post-Cold War era, the US would, if not be excluded from Europe altogether, at least lose some of the influence it had on the continent and with it the ability to use the European alliance as a power multiplier. Moreover, influence over Europe was not just a way for the US to channel European power to further its foreign policy goals, but also important to ensure that European states would not endanger US-led economic globalization. Indeed, as they felt more secure and less reliant on the US security umbrella with the end of the Cold War and became more able to coordinate with the progress of European integration, there was a risk that Europeans would become more reluctant to collaborate with the US to build such a globalized economic order and might even be tempted to endanger it by turning toward protectionism, which US officials believed would harm not only the US but also Europe and the rest of the world.213

As this last point makes clear, US officials did not see their desire to cement US dominance over Europe in the post-Cold War era as a kind of end in itself, but saw the US as a benevolent hegemon and thought that Washington’s continued influence over Europe would be good for everyone, including for Europeans. In their view, it wasn’t just that by preserving the US ability to influence decision-making in Europe they would be protecting US economic interests, but also that Europeans had to be protected from themselves, lest without the benevolent guiding hand of the US they should drift left and reject the neoliberal economic order Washington promoted at the time. Similarly, in the domain of security, US officials saw the preservation of NATO’s primacy not just as a way for the US to continue to be able to harness European power to further its foreign policy goals, but also to preserve stability in Europe and preempt the need for another costly military US intervention in Europe because in the absence of a US military presence the continent slid back into old habits:

Against this background, the White House also understood that U.S. policy towards Western, Central, and Eastern Europe was tightly linked together. “Our future as a European power will depend in large measure on how well we grasp these new opportunities,” the NSC wrote to the President at the beginning of 1990. Germany was quickly filling the European power vacuum in Central Europe. Soon, the only powers with “real influence” in the region were going to be Germany and the Soviet Union, the NSC argued. On the one hand, this was “not the architecture of a stable European security order,” American officials believed, as such a framework invited a return to the “cyclical pattern of Russo-German conflict and condominium that bedeviled Europe from 1870 to 1945.” On the other hand, U.S. engagement would help shape German reunification, manage “an eastward drift” in Germany’s policy, and strengthen the “future position” of the United States within European security and economic affairs. Thus, the NSC resolved that the United States had to remain engaged in Central Europe “between Germany and Russia.”214

While I have no doubt that US officials sincerely viewed things in that way, I don’t think this should completely absolve them of the charge of imperialism, because throughout history imperialists have always come up with good reasons and self-serving beliefs to justify their domination but it doesn’t mean that the will to power was not part of what motivated them. What this shows is rather that the motivations of US officials were complex and combined altruistic motives with more imperialist inclinations.

Indeed, the desire to preserve NATO’s primacy in Europe didn’t just lead the Bush administration to shoot down pan-European alternatives such as Mitterrand’s European confederation project or Gorbachev’s “common European home” concept, but also to start thinking about NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe as a way to prevent the emergence of a common European defense policy within the EU that would make it strategically independent from the US, which is harder to explain in non-imperialist terms. Up until recently, the consensus was that NATO expansion had never even been seriously considered by the Bush administration, which had been content to establish loose partnerships between NATO and Central and Eastern European countries. It was thought that the US only started to think seriously about NATO expansion under the Clinton administration and that the decision to expand it wasn’t made until 1994.215 However, as I have already noted above, US officials in the Bush administration had already started to consider NATO expansion to Central and Eastern Europe as early as 1990, during the negotiations on German reunification. In fact, recent work has shown that, by the end of Bush’s presidency, a consensus had emerged in the administration that NATO would have to be expanded, although the decision to do so had not formally been made yet and the timeline remained unclear.216 It’s very clear, based on declassified materials, that the desire to keep Europe dependent on the US and preserve Washington’s ability to influence decision-making in Europe played a key role in the thinking of US officials at the time:

Over the subsequent months, Washington planners assessed that Central Europe’s yearning for American involvement offered both challenges to and unique opportunities for cementing U.S. influence in Europe—influence that was deemed necessary for achieving broader U.S. political and economic goals. In terms of challenges, the Central Europeans’ fears—rekindled by recent instability and American hesitancy—ranked high. U.S. analysts concluded if the U.S. government blocked NATO expansion, the “new democracies” would lose interest in a transatlantic bond and seek entrance into Western European security structures. Nobody in the region believed seeking such shelter was “ideal.” In America’s absence, there was “little military teeth” in European frameworks. And yet, within a decade, the Europeans, led by Paris, would merge security and economic institutions, with the Community thus becoming the “de facto keeper of European peace.” As a consequence, NATO would be marginalized. Washington would retain “indirect and implied” security responsibilities due to the linkage between the Alliance and Western European security structures. Equally, the U.S. government would have “little to say” about European decision-making.217

With the end of the Cold War and the dislocation of the Soviet empire, the US was now the only superpower and intended to keep things that way, which required keeping allies dependent on the US and preventing the emergence of alternative power centers. It also had no intention of undertaking security responsibilities in Europe without any way to influence European decision-making. As we shall see, by the mid-2000s this goal had been reached in the case of the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), whose potential for disrupting American leadership over Europe was effectively neutralized by ensuring that it would be tightly linked to NATO and would not compete with it.218

Another factor that cannot be neglected in the decision to preserve NATO’s primacy and reject pan-European security, though it would be wrong to say it was the only one, is the triumphalism that prevailed in the West in general and in the US in particular at the end of the Cold War. In the eyes of Bush and his foreign policy team, the US had won the Cold War and the Soviet Union had lost it, so the post-Cold War settlement had to reflect this fact. This was already clear when he met Kohl at Camp David in February 1990:

Having said that, the Soviets are not in a position to dictate Germany's relationship with NATO. What worries me is talk that Germany must not stay in NATO. To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn't. We can't let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.219

To be fair, because he wanted to protect Gorbachev against domestic attacks, Bush was careful not to put this triumphalism on display in public. But after Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, he let his true feelings be known publicly in his 1992 State of the Union address:

Even as President, with the most fascinating possible vantage point, there were times when I was so busy managing progress and helping to lead change that I didn't always show the joy that was in my heart. But the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War. [emphasis is mine]

I mean to speak this evening of the changes that can take place in our country, now that we can stop making the sacrifices we had to make when we had an avowed enemy that was a superpower. Now we can look homeward even more and move to set right what needs to be set right.

I will speak of those things. But let me tell you something I've been thinking these past few months. It's a kind of rollcall of honor. For the Cold War didn't end; it was won. [emphasis is mine] And I think of those who won it, in places like Korea and Vietnam. And some of them didn't come back. Back then they were heroes, but this year they were victors.220

Such feelings were understandable under the circumstances, especially for someone of Bush’s generation, but it would be naïve to imagine that they didn’t have some impact on the decisions that were made at the time about the post-Cold War settlement and in particular about how Moscow would be treated. As we have seen, Zelikow recently admitted as much, saying that in addition to the fact that pan-European security arrangements such as Gorbachev’s “common European home” and Mitterrand’s European confederation had no place for the US, the Bush administration rejected them because they “avoided expressing and voicing the final win of a system against the other one”.221

The problem is that the Russians had, and still do, a very different interpretation of how the Cold War ended. In their view, they didn’t lose the Cold War, but just stopped fighting it because they came to reject what Vladislav Zubok has called the “imperial-revolutionary” ideological foundation of Soviet foreign policy.222 There is a sense in which both the American and the Russian interpretations are correct. On the one hand, it’s true that the communist ideology championed by Moscow during the Cold War was defeated because a centrally planned economy just isn’t efficient, so the Soviet Union could only sustain the competition with the US by allocating a huge share of its GDP to the military, thereby keeping consumption low and being forced to resort to coercion to quell discontent. On the other hand, as Zubok showed in more recent work, the Soviet Union was not forced to stop fighting the Cold War.223 This couldn’t have lasted forever, because any political-economic system so at odds with human nature would eventually have collapsed, but it probably could have sustained the competition with the US for a while by continuing to allocate a large share of its GDP to the military at the expense of the well-being of its citizens while resorting to violence to keep them in check. This didn’t happen because Gorbachev wanted to improve living standards in the Soviet Union, which required that military expenditure be diminished radically, and in turn this was impossible without reducing tensions with the West, but in the process he came to reject the whole ideological edifice on which the Soviet Union was built and in particular to regard Soviet foreign policy as immoral. While his reforms ended up destroying the Soviet Union, which he had not intended, the fact that the Cold War ended when and how it did was very much the result of a choice on his part. Again, both interpretations are correct, but they focus on different aspects of the end of the Cold War.

This difference of interpretation regarding how the Cold War ended goes some way toward explaining the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West in subsequent years. Indeed, from the Russian point of view, not only did they freely choose to stop fighting the Cold War after rejecting the communist ideology and not because they were literally forced to so (in the way Germany or Japan were by total military defeat in WWII), but they collaborated with the US and its allies in settling that conflict in a way that was favorable to Western interests in part because they were promised that Moscow would have a place in the post-Cold War European security architecture. As we have seen, this view is the main reason why they felt they had been misled by the West, with more than a little justification, after NATO started to expand to Central and Eastern Europe and Russia was gradually excluded from the European security order. For the West in general and the US in particular, on the other hand, Russia was seen first and foremost as the loser of the Cold War and anything done by the West to accommodate it was essentially supererogatory. That is not to say that one should caricature the way in which the West treated Russia after the end of the Cold War and the dislocation of the Soviet Union, it’s not as if the US and its allies didn’t try to accommodate Moscow’s sensitivities to some extent, but as we shall see they did so mostly with trinkets that could not make up for the fact that, despite what they had been led to believe at the end of the Cold War, it was still treated as a potential adversary and increasingly excluded from the European security architecture. This point was made very clearly by none other than Baker a decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union:

One sad lesson of the twentieth century is that refusing to form alliances with defeated adversaries is more dangerous than forming such alliances. The Treaty of Versailles solved the "German problem" in exactly the wrong way— by sealing the defeat with territorial and economic retribution. This resolution certainly demoralized Germany in the immediate aftermath of war, but the resulting grievances fueled something unimaginably worse and more dangerous. One hesitates to stretch historical analogies too far, but little imagination is required to see something similar happening in Russia. The end of the Cold War was certainly not settled by anything like Versailles, but from Russia's perspective, the results have been much the same—a humiliating loss of territory, prestige, and power. Russia's economic and political problems have stemmed largely from Russia's own failure to implement the necessary reforms to encourage the creation of a market economy, but it would not be difficult—indeed, it has not been difficult—for Russian demagogues to blame the West for the troubles ordinary Russian men and women have experienced during the past decade. Couple all these developments with the expansion of NATO up to Russia's doorstep and the use of NATO as an offensive (as opposed to defensive) alliance to bomb Russian allies, and you have a recipe for disaster. By continuing to treat Russia like a potential adversary, we may encourage it to become our enemy, the very thing we fear. The best way to find an enemy is to look for one, and I worry that that is what we are doing when we try to isolate Russia. The same principle would apply, of course, if we were to embark on a policy to try to isolate China.224

Sadly, his warning was not heeded, and today anyone who says the same thing would immediately be accused of being a Putin apologist or some such nonsense. But as I have argued in this section, this was to some extent predictable at the end of the Cold War, when Baker and the rest of the Bush administration’s foreign policy team made the decision to ensure NATO’s continued primacy in the post-Cold War era and shot down pan-European security alternatives. This made the subsequent trajectory of the relations between Russia, the West and Ukraine, which ultimately led to the Russo-Ukrainian war, much more likely.225 However, it wasn’t inevitable, and for the worst to happen, many other mistakes had to be made on both sides. In the rest of this work, I will explain what they are and why I think they could have been avoided, even if the choices made at the end of the Cold War made that more difficult.