Enlarging NATO, Expanding Confusion

Twenty years ago, dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe toppled. During this season of remembering, the focus has rightly been on celebration of the new freedoms gained by the inhabitants of those countries: to speak freely, to travel, to vote and to choose their own national futures and alliances. Yet the legacy of 1989 has difficult aspects as well, mostly centering on the origins and legitimacy of later NATO expansion to former East German and Warsaw Pact territory; acknowledgment of them by the United States could greatly improve American and Russian relations.

Moscow has long asserted that the Soviet Union allowed Germany to unify only in return for a pledge from Washington never to expand the Atlantic alliance. Former advisers to Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have transcended partisan differences in dismissing the Russian claim. An internal State Department review during the Clinton era concluded that no legally binding prohibition on NATO enlargement emerged from the era of German unification.

Since then, however, it has become possible to reconstruct what happened from first-hand evidence. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany released the papers of his office, which inspired the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to publish many of his own. A number of other leaders and institutions also opened files in advance of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall: the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, Secretary of State James Baker, the German Foreign Ministry and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office among them.

There are many twists and turns, but the story as we now understand it is as follows: The crucial month was February 1990. It had become apparent that the cold war order in Europe had collapsed. Some kind of new order needed to be established quickly. Bonn and Washington had agreed that it should center on the rapid unification of Germany.

Both countries also wanted to head off alternative visions to NATO’s continued primacy that were proposed by Mr. Gorbachev, who sought new European institutions from the Atlantic to the Urals, and by former Warsaw Pact dissidents-turned-rulers, who wanted a demilitarized Central and Eastern Europe to serve as a neutral bridge between East and West. Those plans would have diminished the leading role of the United States in Europe, whereas perpetuating the Atlantic alliance would maintain it.

The biggest obstacle was, of course, the Soviet Union. Despite economic hardship at home, the Soviets maintained 380,000 troops in East Germany and still held legal rights of occupation emanating from the unconditional German surrender in 1945. Bonn and Washington thus wanted Moscow to remove its troops and to renounce its claims, without forcing NATO troops out as part of the bargain.

What would Mr. Gorbachev demand in return? To learn the answer, Mr. Baker and Mr. Kohl journeyed to Moscow within a day of each other. On Feb. 9, 1990, Mr. Baker asked Mr. Gorbachev, “Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?” Mr. Gorbachev, according to Mr. Baker, answered that “any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.” Their meeting ended without any final deals made. Mr. Baker left behind a secret letter, detailing what he had said, for Mr. Kohl in Moscow.

While Mr. Baker was in Moscow, though, members of the National Security Council back in Washington were worrying about his comment that NATO would not move eastward. To undo the damage they felt Mr. Baker had caused, they drafted a letter that President Bush sent to Mr. Kohl later that day.

The presidential letter included language that differed in a subtle but significant way from the language offered by the secretary of state. Instead of a pledge about NATO’s borders, Mr. Bush suggested that East German territory be given a “special military status” within NATO. What that status would consist of was to be negotiated later, but the core assumption was clear. NATO would grow and former East German areas would have a special status within the alliance as it did so.

A foreign leader can see daylight between a president and his secretary of state from the other side of the world, and Mr. Kohl did not have to look that far. He just had to read the differing phrasings used by Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker to notice it. So whose language did Mr. Kohl echo in his own talks with Mr. Gorbachev the next day, Feb. 10 — the president’s or the secretary’s?

Mr. Kohl chose to echo Mr. Baker, not Mr. Bush. The chancellor assured Mr. Gorbachev, as Mr. Baker had done, that “naturally NATO could not expand its territory” into East Germany. The documents available do not record Mr. Kohl using the presidential phrase — “special military status” — that the National Security Council had rushed over to him. Mr. Kohl’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, visiting the Kremlin as well, assured his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, that “for us, it stands firm: NATO will not expand itself to the East.”

Crucially, the Gorbachev-Kohl meeting ended with a deal, as opposed to the Gorbachev-Baker session the previous day. After listening to Mr. Kohl, Mr. Gorbachev agreed that Germany could unify internally. Mr. Kohl and his aides publicized this major concession immediately at a press conference. Then they returned home to begin merging the two Germanys under one currency and economic system.

In essentially settling for a gentleman’s agreement, Mr. Gorbachev missed some important pitfalls and then failed to do anything about them. First, Mr. Kohl spoke for West Germany, not for the United States or for NATO as a whole. Second, the Soviet leader got nothing about the trans-Atlantic alliance in writing. Third, Mr. Gorbachev did not criticize Mr. Kohl publicly when he and Mr. Bush later agreed to offer only a special military status to the former East Germany instead of a pledge that NATO wouldn’t expand. Finally, he did not catch subtle signals that, by early 1990, speculative discussion in the West about NATO’s future involved the inclusion of Eastern Europe as well. Mr. Gorbachev later complained to Mr. Kohl that he felt he had fallen into a trap.

Did the United States betray Russia at the dawn of the post-cold war era? The short answer is no. Nothing legally binding emerged from the negotiations over German unification. In fact, in September 1990, an embattled Mr. Gorbachev signed the accords that allowed NATO to extend itself over the former East Germany in exchange for financial assistance from Bonn to Moscow. A longer answer, however, shows that there were mixed messages and diplomatic ambiguities.

By acknowledging that there might be some substance to Russian grievances, the Obama administration would strengthen our relations with Moscow. Given that NATO enlargement has already taken place (and efforts for further expansion are stalled), little would be lost with such an acknowledgment but much could be gained. Certainly, Western attempts to manage everything from Iran’s nuclear program to European energy supplies during the coming winter would be a great deal easier with Russia’s cooperation. A commemoration of the events of 20 years ago that included both celebration and candor would increase the likelihood of such cooperation.

Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the author of 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.