Natylie’s Place: Understanding Russia
November 18, 2021
By Natylie Baldwin
On October 18th, Russia announced it would formally suspend its mission with the NATO alliance, including ending official communication. This is a significant event but not totally shocking to anyone who has been paying attention to post-Soviet Russian relations with NATO. It’s important to look at what led up to Russia deciding it had enough and that it was no longer worth having an official relationship with the western military alliance as there is a lengthy historical context to the breakdown.
NATO had just expelled eight Russian diplomats for espionage activities but provided no public evidence or details on these serious allegations. But this was just the immediate event that provided the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
Post-Cold War Triumphalism
The problem started with the triumphalist attitude that eventually prevailed in Washington after the end of the Cold War. President Ronald Reagan intentionally took the approach during negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that ended the Cold War that doing so would be in the interests of both countries. It was characterized at the time as a negotiated settlement that benefited all parties involved and not a defeat. Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush adopted the same attitude until it was time to campaign for his reelection, during which he bragged that the U.S. had won the Cold War.
In the 1990’s, the Clinton administration, encouraged by foreign policy hawks, greedy defense contractors and domestic reelection politics, expanded NATO to former Warsaw Pact countries Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. This was a violation of verbal assurances given by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, along with other western government officials, during 1991 negotiations with Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” This assurance was made in order to get Gorbachev to accept a unified Germany in NATO given the deep historical memory of the Germans having invaded Russia twice in the 20th century, the second time resulting in 27 million deaths and destruction of a third of the Soviet Union. But NATO didn’t stop there and expanded by seven more countries, right up to Russia’s border, by 2004.