In September, Vice President Kamala Harris stated several points at the White House as to how she would handle the Ukraine-Russia war: “I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war. … Putin started this war, and … Putin could set his sights on Poland, the Baltic states, and other NATO Allies. … [S]ome in my country … demand that Ukraine accept neutrality, and would require Ukraine to forego security relationships with other nations. These proposals are the same of those of Putin.”
But these are the same Biden-Harris tactics and policies that provoked war.
Harris blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war. But the proximate source of the Russia-Ukraine conflict goes back beyond Putin to the breakup of the Soviet Empire and even earlier.
End of the Cold War
In late October 1989, the famed Berlin Wall as a dividing line between Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and West Germany, called a “wall of mistrust” by then former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was crumbling.
Obviously, Gorbachev, with almost 400,000 troops in East Germany could have stopped the reunification. But Western officials gave Russian leaders assurances there was nothing to worry about. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that NATO expansion would proceed, “not one inch eastward.” The next day, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl assured Gorbachev, “… NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity.”
The Los Angeles Times noted, “Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion. … NATO’S widening umbrella doesn’t justify Putin’s … incursions in Ukraine or Georgia. Still, the evidence suggests that Russia’s protests have merit and that U.S. policy has contributed to current tensions in Europe.”
Documents at George Washington University testify to agreements made between Western leaders and Russian officials at this time — that western nations would not expand NATO to the East.
Boris Yeltsin was the first president of the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999, coming to office immediately after Premier Gorbachev’s resignation with the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. In 1995, President Yeltsin met with President Clinton in St. Catherine’s Hall at the Kremlin.
Yeltsin said to Clinton, “I want to get a clear understanding of your idea of NATO expansion, because now I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed. How do you think it looks to us if one bloc continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia. Many Russians have a sense of fear. What do you want to achieve with this if Russia is your partner, they ask. I ask it too. Why do you want to do this?”
When Clinton spoke to Yeltsin in 1995, there were 15 NATO member countries. When Clinton left office, there were 18.
Russia’s Opposition to NATO Expansion
In 2016, President Clinton’s former Defense Secretary Bill Perry said, “In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years … the United States deserves much of the blame. … Our first action … in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia.”
Former CIA Director Robert Gates, who also served as Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, opposed the policy of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”
In June 1997, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats, and foreign policy academics wrote to President Clinton about the problems and ill consequences of NATO expansion:
“[T]he current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions. … NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability …”
“In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition … [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement …”
In 1998, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asked George Kennan, who devised the successful “containment” policy to prevent the Soviet Union from achieving its goal of world domination through open warfare, what he thought of the U.S. Senate ratifying NATO expansion even up to Russia’s border. Kennan replied:
“[I]t is the beginning of a new Cold War. … There was no reason for this. … No one was threatening anybody else. … We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so.
“I was … bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. … Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.”
In 2007, Putin noted, “NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders … and what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact … NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on May 17, 1990 … said … ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”
Fiona Hill points to 2007 when Putin “put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. … In 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. … Four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the [Russian] invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership.”
William Burns, now President Biden’s Central Intelligence Director and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players … I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Putin told Burns in 2008: “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia. We would do all in our power to prevent it.”
In 2015, the German Der Speigel magazine interviewed Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, regarding the status of Ukraine in response to the abrupt change in the presidential leadership and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Brzezinski suggested that, “Ukraine should be free to choose its political identity. … But … Russia should be assured credibly that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.”
More recently in 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported, “Pope Francis said that the ‘barking of NATO at the door of Russia’ might have led to the invasion of Ukraine. … The pope … deplored the brutality of the war. … Pope Francis … described Russia’s attitude to Ukraine as ‘an anger that I don’t know whether it was provoked but was perhaps facilitated’ by the presence in nearby countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. … ‘In Ukraine, it was other states that created the conflict.’”
The caution of these experienced statesmen and world leaders is lost on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
