Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance in 1977. As Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski orchestrated a covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Photo: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Top level globalist and Rockefeller confidant Zbigniew Brzezinski has mounted the pages of Politico to call for more pointed U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
“It is more than a month since the Russians annexed Crimea, and recent events have only exacerbated the crisis, with pro-Russian rebels reportedly shooting down two Ukrainian helicopters in separatist-held Slaviansk on Friday. Yet the president still hasn’t laid out a comprehensive statement of what is really at stake,” writes the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission.
Indirectly calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “thug,” Brzezinski says “we have an obligation to help Ukraine.” He characterizes the crisis as “the most important challenge to the international system since the end of the Cold War” and tells Obama he desperately needs to issue “a comprehensive statement of what is really at stake” and address “the American people on this issue… He needs the support of the American people. Thus he has to convince them that this is important and that his stand deserves both national understanding and support.”
In late April, a Rasmussen Reports poll indicated nearly 60 percent of Americans believe the situation in Ukraine does not concern the United States. On April 28, a USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll found Americans overwhelmingly oppose the idea of sending arms or military supplies to Ukraine.
Despite this disapproval by the American people, Brzezinski writes “we should be more open to helping the Ukrainians defend themselves if they’re attacked. The Ukrainians will fight only if they think they will eventually get some help from the West, particularly in supplies of the kind of weaponry that will be necessary to wage a successful urban defense. They’re not going to beat the Russians out in the open field, where thousands of tanks move in. They can only beat them through prolonged urban resistance. Then the war’s economic costs would escalate dramatically for the Russians, and it would become futile politically. But to be able to defend a city, you have to have handheld anti-tank weaponry, handheld rockets and some organization.”
Arizona Senator John McCain has led the call in Congress to arm the junta in Ukraine.
Brzezinski, a notorious Russophobe, employed a similar tactic when he was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. He was instrumental using U.S. taxpayer money to covertly arm the Afghan Mujahideen to fight against the Soviet Union. Factions within the Mujahideen would eventually become the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
In 1998, he told Le Nouvel Observateur the CIA’s “secret operation was an excellent idea” and “had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap” and “giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”
Asked if he regretted lending a hand in the creation of radical and terrorist Islamic groups, the ever testy Brzezinski replied: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
The State Department’s less than covert installation of a gang of ultra-nationalists and fascists in Kyiv is evidence enough the “liberation of Central Europe” – apparently, for Brzezinski, Russia is Eastern Europe – is an ongoing project.
Now that Brzezinski has issued a public statement on Ukraine and called for arming Russophobes in that country — many who have long expressed their desire to ethnically cleanse and kill not only Russians, but Jews and Poles (Brzezinski is Polish) — we can conclude the global elite have decided to foster a civil war along Russia’s western border.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/brzezinski-...ne/5380304
NATO officials escalated their military build-up against Russia yesterday, as the pro-Western puppet regime in Kiev reinstated conscription in order to boost its crackdown on spreading pro-Russian protests in eastern Ukraine.
The news came as the position of the far-right regime in Kiev weakened, with more cities and government buildings in east Ukraine held by protesters and militias opposed to it. Protesters stormed the prosecutor’s office, disarming police, in the city of Donetsk, one of many cities in the region, including Luhansk, Slavyansk, and Kramatorsk, now outside of Kiev’s control.
A statement issued by the Kiev regime’s acting president Oleksandr Turchynov confirmed that the aim of the conscription order, for all able-bodied males between 18 and 25, was to boost the crackdown in predominately Russian-speaking areas. The order was issued “given the deteriorating situation in the east and the south [and] the rising force of armed pro-Russian units and the taking of public administration buildings,” the statement declared. It added that the protests “threaten the territorial integrity” of Ukraine.
Turchynov’s justification for the conscription order is a political fraud. His regime, the product of a Western-backed putsch, does not stand for Ukraine’s independence or its territorial integrity. The regime has launched crackdowns planned in discussions with top US officials such as CIA Director John Brennan and Vice President Joe Biden, who visited Kiev as successive waves of repression began.
The contempt of the Kiev regime and its imperialist backers for the Ukrainian population was further underscored by their agreement to a $17 billion bailout package dictated by the International Monetary Fund. It is conditioned on unpopular fuel price increases and mass layoffs in the public sector that have already provoked protests in several cities.
Turchynov has admitted that his regime’s security forces are “helpless” to stop the spread of pro-Russian seizures of cities and government buildings across east Ukraine. Some army and police units have refused orders to shoot protesters. The Kiev regime has turned to setting up private militias led by business oligarchs or fascist paramilitaries from the Right Sector to attack the protesters.
This crackdown has placed the world on the verge of war. Moscow has stated that it will use “all means” to protect ethnic Russians from Ukrainian forces, should the Kiev regime’s crackdown escalate into a large-scale massacre of the population of east Ukraine. In a phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that all Ukrainian troops be withdrawn from eastern Ukraine.
The conscription order is a desperate attempt to bolster the tottering Kiev regime amid deepening political crisis and rising popular opposition. If obeyed in parts of the country still under Kiev’s control, it would provide back-up to the fascist forces spearheading the repression of the protests.
It would also place an army of over a million men, supported and equipped by NATO, directly on Russia’s southwestern border. In this, the Kiev regime is doing the bidding of its Western imperialist masters, who are recklessly denouncing Russia and mounting a military build-up across Eastern Europe laying the basis for a major war with Russia.
Yesterday, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow branded Russia an enemy. “Clearly the Russians have declared NATO as an adversary, so we have to begin to view Russia no longer as a partner, but as more of an adversary than a partner,” he said.
Vershbow said NATO could repudiate its 1997 pledge not to station nuclear weapons or large numbers of troops in Eastern Europe. Given Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and the east Ukraine protests, he said, “we would be within our rights” to scrap the deal and permanently station “significant” numbers of troops in Eastern Europe.
The Western powers are seizing upon the Ukraine crisis to try to carry out a major restructuring of European and world politics. Like the September 11, 2001 attacks, which US imperialism exploited to launch a series of unpopular Middle East wars, the Ukraine crisis is to provide the Western imperialist powers with a justification for a massive military escalation and the preparation of large-scale wars.
Such topics will doubtless be at the heart of discussions today between US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is visiting Washington, DC.
Claims that NATO’s reckless escalation is simply a response to Russian military aggression are lies. Protests in eastern Ukraine—previously the power base of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed by the February putsch—are not the product of Russian aggression, but of broad opposition to the oligarchs and fascists who lead the Kiev regime. They are a consequence of the reckless decision of the NATO powers, led by Washington and Berlin, to back the putsch and then stoke tensions with Moscow.
Since the Kiev putsch, Washington and its NATO allies have stationed fighter jets and ground forces in Poland, the Baltic States, and Romania. They have also stepped up naval deployments to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, while hypocritically denouncing Russia for stationing troops along its western border with Ukraine.
Vershbow said that NATO will deploy more forces, to be able to intervene rapidly in the Baltic states. “We want to be sure that we can come to the aid of these countries if there were any, even indirect, threat very quickly before any facts on the ground can be established,” he said.
Such a deployment would be wildly provocative. Were NATO forces to be stationed in the northernmost Baltic country, Estonia, they would be less than 100 miles from Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg.
NATO officials also announced yesterday that they were examining ways to grant NATO membership status to the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus.
Such a move also directly raises the risk of war between Russia and NATO. Russia and Georgia fought a brief war in 2008, after Georgia attacked Russian peacekeepers stationed in ethnic minority regions of Georgia along its border with Russia. Had Georgia been a NATO member state at the time, the other NATO powers could have invoked the Clause 5 mutual self-defense guarantee between NATO member states to justify intervening in the war on Georgia’s side.
NATO Special Representative for the Caucasus James Appathurai pledged that the organization would ignore Russian objections to Georgian membership in NATO.
“What Russia says or does will not influence our decision,” he said. “We will judge Georgia on Georgia’s merits and regardless of what’s happening elsewhere and regardless of comments from the Kremlin or elsewhere … We are now looking, of course, at next steps, at bringing Georgia even closer to NATO and to meeting its goals.”
Notre site en Français : mondialisation.ca
EspañolItalianoDeutschPortuguêssrpskiالعربية
Global Research
HomeAboutContactMembershipOnline StoreDonate
Sophisticated US Weapons for Al Qaeda Mercenaries in SyriaOdessa Massacre Pushes Ukraine to the Edge. Towards a Larger Destructive Conflict?Ukraine: Odessa on the edge of all-out street warGeopolitical Interplay: The Ukraine Debacle Could Have Been Avoided?The IMF’s “Rescue Package”. Coercing Ukraine into a Civil WarSecretive Airborne Police Surveillance in California
Twisting Putin’s Words on Ukraine
By Robert Parry
Global Research, May 03, 2014
Consortiumnews 2 May 2014
Region: Russia and FSU
Theme: Media Disinformation
In-depth Report: UKRAINE REPORT
3 3 1 38
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivering a speech on the Ukraine crisis in Moscow on March 18, 2014. (Russian government photo)
Anti-Russian bias pervades the mainstream U.S. media in the Ukraine crisis, reflected in word choices – “pro-democracy” for U.S.-favored protesters in Kiev, “terrorists” for disfavored eastern Ukrainians – but also in how the narrative is shaped by false summaries.
Sometimes dealing with the waves of U.S. media propaganda on the Ukraine crisis feels like the proverbial Dutch boy putting his fingers in the dike. The flood of deeply prejudiced anti-Russian “group think” extends across the entire media waterfront – from left to right – and it often seems hopeless correcting each individual falsehood.
The problem is made worse by the fact that the New York Times, the traditional newspaper of record, has stood out as one of the most egregious offenders of the principles of journalism. Repeatedly, the Times has run anti-Russian stories that lack evidence or are just flat wrong.
Among the flat-wrong stories was the Times’ big front-page scoop on photos that purportedly showed Russian troops inside eastern Ukraine, but the story had to beretracted two days later when it turned out that a key photo – allegedly of several men “clearly” in Russia before they later turned up in Ukraine – was actually taken in Ukraine, destroying the story’s premise.
The other type of Times’ propaganda – making assertions without evidence – appeared in another front-page story about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s phantom wealth ($40 billion to $70 billion, the Times speculated) without presenting a shred of hard evidence beyond what looked like a pricy watch on his wrist.
However, in some ways, the worst of the New York Times reporting has been its slanted and erroneous summations of the Ukraine narrative. For instance, immediately after the violent coup overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych (from Feb. 20-22), it was reported that among the 80 people killed were more than a dozen police officers.
But, as the pro-coup sympathies hardened inside the Times, the storyline changed to: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.” [NYT, March 5]
Both the dead police and the murky circumstances surrounding the sniper fire that inflicted many of the casualties simply disappeared from the Times’ narrative. It became flat fact: evil “pro-Yanukovych” police gunned down innocent “pro-democracy” demonstrators. Also consigned to the memory hole was the key role played by well-organized neo-Nazi militias that led the final assaults on the police.
More recently, the Times’ Ukraine summary has challenged Putin’s denials that Russian special forces are operating in eastern Ukraine (the point that the bogus photo scoop was supposed to prove). So, now whenever Putin’s denial is noted, the Times contradicts him by claiming that he made the same denial about Crimea, that Russian troops weren’t involved, and then reversed himself later.
For instance, in Friday’s editions, the Times wrote: “Mr. Putin has said there are no Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. He made similar claims during the annexation of Crimea, however, and then later acknowledged the existence of a Russian operation.”
But that simply isn’t true. The Russians never denied having troops in Crimea, since that’s where they maintain a major Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol and had a contractual agreement with Ukraine allowing the presence of up to 25,000 troops. At the time of the Feb. 22 coup, Russia had about 16,000 troops in Crimea and that was well known as Crimea began to break away from the post-coup regime in Kiev.
On March 4, the Associated Press reported that “the new Ukrainian leadership that deposed the pro-Russian Yanukovych … has accused Moscow of a military invasion in Crimea. The Kremlin, which does not recognize the new Ukrainian leadership, insists it made the move in order to protect Russian installations in Ukraine and its citizens living there.
“On Tuesday, Russian troops who had taken control of the Belbek air base in the hotly contest[ed] Crimea region fired warning shots into the air as around 300 Ukrainian soldiers, who previously manned the airfield, demanded their jobs back. …
“The shots reflected tensions running high in the Black Sea peninsula since Russian troops – estimated by Ukrainian authorities to be 16,000 strong -tightened their grip over the weekend on the Crimean peninsula, where Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet is based.
“Ukraine has accused Russia of violating a bilateral agreement on conditions of a Russian lease of a naval base in Crimea that restricts troop movements, but Russia has argued that it was acting within the limits set by the deal.
“Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, said Monday [March 3] at the U.N. Security Council that Russia was entitled to deploy up to 25,000 troops in Crimea under the agreement. Churkin didn’t specify how many Russian troops are now stationed in Crimea, but said that ‘they are acting in a way they consider necessary to protect their facilities and prevent extremist actions.’”
Putin’s Comments
Also on March 4, Putin discussed another public confrontation in Crimea at a Moscow press conference. He said: “You should note that, thank God, not a single gunshot has been fired there; there are no casualties, except for that crush on the square about a week ago. What was going on there? People came, surrounded units of the [Ukrainian] armed forces and talked to them, convincing them to follow the demands and the will of the people living in that area. There was not a single armed conflict, not a single gunshot.
“Thus the tension in Crimea that was linked to the possibility of using our Armed Forces simply died down and there was no need to use them. The only thing we had to do, and we did it, was to enhance the defense of our military facilities because they were constantly receiving threats and we were aware of the armed nationalists moving in. We did this, it was the right thing to do and very timely.”
So, Putin did not deny that Russian troops were present in Crimea. He even acknowledged that they were operational and were prepared to take action in defense of Crimean citizens if necessary.
Arguably, Putin did dissemble on one point, though the precise circumstances were unclear. When a reporter asked him about a specific case of some people “wearing uniforms that strongly resembled the Russian Army uniform,” he demurred, claiming “those were local self-defense units.”
A Formal Speech
Two days after a hastily called referendum, which recorded a 96 percent vote in favor of seceding from Ukraine and rejoining Russia, Putin returned to the issue of Russian involvement in Crimea, a territory that first became part of Russia in the 1700s.
On March 18 in a formal speech to the Russian Federation, Putin justified Crimea’s desire to escape the control of the coup regime in Kiev, saying: “Those who opposed the [Feb. 22] coup were immediately threatened with repression. Naturally, the first in line here was Crimea, the Russian-speaking Crimea. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities.
“Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part.”
Again, Putin was not claiming that the Russian government had no involvement in Crimea. He was, in contrast, confirming that it was involved. He continued:
“First, we had to help create conditions so that the residents of Crimea for the first time in history were able to peacefully express their free will regarding their own future. However, what do we hear from our colleagues in Western Europe and North America? They say we are violating norms of international law. Firstly, it’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law – better late than never.
“Secondly, and most importantly – what exactly are we violating? True, the President of the Russian Federation [Putin] received permission from the Upper House of Parliament to use the Armed Forces in Ukraine. However, strictly speaking, nobody has acted on this permission yet. Russia’s Armed Forces never entered Crimea; they were there already in line with an international agreement.
“True, we did enhance our forces there; however – this is something I would like everyone to hear and know – we did not exceed the personnel limit of our Armed Forces in Crimea, which is set at 25,000, because there was no need to do so.”
However, several weeks later, when Putin reiterated these same points, saying that Russian troops were in Crimea in support of the Crimean people’s right to have a referendum on secession from Ukraine, the New York Times and other U.S. publications began claiming that he had reversed himself and had previously hidden the Russian troop involvement in Crimea.
That was simply bad reporting, which now gets repeated whenever the Times mentions Putin’s denial of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Clearly, there is nothing “similar” between Putin’s previous statements about Crimea and his current ones about eastern Ukraine.
Beyond sloppy reporting, however, something arguably worse is playing out here, since this distortion fits with the pattern of anti-Russian bias and anti-Putin prejudice that has pervaded the “news” coverage at the Times and other major U.S. media outlets.
Rather than show some independence and professionalism, the Times and the rest of the MSM have marched in lock-step with the propaganda pronouncements emanating from the U.S. State Department.
The following text was published by Spiegel in November 2009.
It sheds light on the current crisis in Ukraine and on the history of Russia-Western relations in the immediate post-Cold era.
What it overlooks is that Gorbachev and Shevardnaze were tacitly serving Western interests. (Gr Editor, M. Ch.).
(Copyright Spiegel Online 2009)
By Uwe Klussmann, Matthias Schepp and Klaus Wiegrefe
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has accused the West of breaking promises made after the fall of the Iron Curtain, saying that NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe violated commitments made during the negotiations over German reunification. Newly discovered documents from Western archives support the Russian position.
Part I
No one in Russia can vent his anger over NATO’s eastward expansion quite as vehemently as Viktor Baranez. The popular columnist with the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda (“Komsomol Truth”), which has a readership of millions, is fond of railing against the “insidious and reckless” Western military alliance. Russia, Baranez writes, must finally stop treating NATO as a partner.
Baranez, a retired colonel who was the Defense Ministry’s spokesman under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, asks why Russia should even consider joint maneuvers after being deceived by the West. NATO, he writes, “has pushed its way right up to our national borders with its guns.” He also argues that, in doing so, NATO has broken all the promises it made during the process of German reunification.
There is widespread agreement among all political parties in Moscow, from the Patriots of Russia to the Communists to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, that the West broke its word and short-changed Russia when it was weak.
In an interview with SPIEGEL at his residence outside Moscow in early November, President Dmitry Medvedev complained that when the Berlin Wall came down, it had “not been possible to redefine Russia’s place in Europe.” What did Russia get? “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,” Medvedev said.
Different Versions
The question of what Moscow was in fact promised in 1990 has sparked a historical dispute with far-reaching consequences for Russia’s future relationship with the West. But what exactly is the truth?
The various players involved have different versions of events. Of course there was a promise not to expand NATO “as much as a thumb’s width further to the East,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president at the time, says in Moscow today. However, Gorbachev’s former foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, speaking in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, says that there were no such assurances from the West. Even the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the Eastern military alliance, “was beyond our imagination,” he says.
For years former US Secretary of State James Baker, Shevardnadze’s American counterpart in 1990, has denied that there was any agreement between the two sides. But Jack Matlock, the US ambassador in Moscow at the time, has said in the past that Moscow was given a “clear commitment.” Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister in 1990, says this was precisely not the case.
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.
On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m., Genscher spoke with Shevardnadze. According to the German record of the conversation, which was only recently declassified, Genscher said: “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.” And because the conversion revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: “As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.”
Shevardnadze replied that he believed “everything the minister (Genscher) said.”
Not a Word
The year 1990 was one of major negotiations. Washington, Moscow, London, Bonn, Paris, Warsaw, East Berlin and many others were at odds over German unity, comprehensive European disarmament and a new charter of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Soviets insisted that everything be documented in writing, even when all that was at issue was the fate of Soviet military cemeteries in East Germany. However, the numerous agreements and treaties of the day contained not a single word about NATO expansion in Eastern Europe.
For this reason, the West argues, Moscow has no cause for complaint today. After all, the West did not sign anything regarding NATO expansion to the east. But is that tough stance fair?
At the beginning of 1990, the Soviet Union was still a world power with troops stationed at the Elbe River, and Hans Modrow, the former Dresden district chairman of the East German Communist Party, the SED, was in charge in East Berlin. But the collapse of the East German state was foreseeable.
Bonn’s allies in Paris, London and Washington were concerned about the question of whether a unified Germany could be a member of NATO or, as had already happened in the past, would pursue a seesaw policy between east and west.
Genscher wanted to put an end to this uncertainty, and he said as much in a major speech to the West on Jan. 31, 1990 in Tutzing, a town in Bavaria. This was the reason, he said, why a unified Germany should be a member of NATO.
Moving with Caution
But how could the Soviet leadership be persuaded to support this solution? “I wanted to help them over the hurdle,” Genscher told SPIEGEL. To that end, the German foreign minister promised, in his speech in Tutzing, that there would not be “an expansion of NATO territory to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union.” East Germany was not to be brought into the military structures of NATO, and the door into the alliance was to remain closed to the countries of Eastern Europe.
Genscher remembered what had happened during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Some of the insurgents had announced their intention to join the Western alliance, giving Moscow the excuse to intervene militarily. In 1990, Genscher was trying to send a signal to Gorbachev that he need not fear such a development in the Soviet bloc. The West, Genscher indicated, intended to cooperate with the Soviet Union in bringing about change, not act as its adversary.
The plan that was proclaimed in Tutzing had not been coordinated with the chancellor or West German allies, and Genscher spent the next few days vying for their support.
As Genscher’s chief of staff Frank Elbe later wrote, the German foreign minister had “moved with the caution of a giant insect that uses its many feelers to investigate its surroundings, prepared to recoil when it encounters resistance.”
US Secretary of State James Baker, a pragmatic Texan, apparently “warmed to the proposal immediately,” says Elbe today. On Feb. 2, the two diplomats sat down in front of the fireplace in Baker’s study in Washington, took off their jackets, put their feet up and discussed world events. They quickly agreed that there was to be no NATO expansion to the East. “It was completely clear,” Elbe comments.
Part 2: Calming Russian Fears
A short time later, then-British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd joined the German-American consensus. As a previously unknown document from the German Foreign Ministry shows, Genscher was uncharacteristically open with his relatively pro-German British counterpart when they met in Bonn on Feb. 6, 1990. Hungary was about to hold its first free elections, and Genscher declared that the Soviet Union needed “the certainty that Hungary will not become part of the Western alliance if there is a change of government.” The Kremlin, Genscher said, would have to be given assurances to that effect. Hurd agreed.
But were such assurances intended to be valid indefinitely? Apparently not. When the two colleagues discussed Poland, Genscher said, according to the British records, that if Poland ever left the Warsaw Pact, Moscow would need the certainty that Warsaw would “not join NATO the next day.” However, Genscher did not seem to rule out accession at a later date.
It stood to reason that Genscher would present his ideas in Moscow next. He was the longest-serving Western foreign minister, his relationship with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze was unusually strong, and it was his initiative. But Baker wanted to address the issue himself during his next trip to Moscow.
‘One Cannot Depend on American Politicians’
What the US secretary of state said on Feb. 9, 1990 in the magnificent St. Catherine’s Hall at the Kremlin is beyond dispute. There would be, in Baker’s words, “no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” provided the Soviets agreed to the NATO membership of a unified Germany. Moscow would think about it, Gorbachev said, but added: “any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.”
Now, 20 years later, Gorbachev is still outraged when he is asked about this episode. “One cannot depend on American politicians,” he told SPIEGEL. Baker, for his part, now offers a different interpretation of what he said in 1990, arguing that he was merely referring to East Germany, which was to be given a special status in the alliance — nothing more.
But Genscher, in a conversation with Shevardnadze just one day later, had expressly referred to Eastern Europe. In fact, talking about Eastern Europe, and not just East Germany, was consistent with the logic of the West’s position.
If East Germany was to be granted a special status within NATO, so as not to provoke the Soviet leadership, the promise not to expand the alliance to the east certainly had to include countries like Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, which directly bordered the Soviet Union.
When the Western politicians met once again a few weeks later, their conversation was more to the point, as a German Foreign Ministry document that has now been released indicates. According to the document, Baker said that it appeared “as if Central European countries wanted to join NATO.” That, Genscher replied, was an issue “we shouldn’t touch at this point.” Baker agreed.
Positive Light
The political leaders of the day are now elderly gentlemen who don’t necessarily always find it easy to remember exactly what happened back then. Besides, they are all eager to be portrayed in a positive light in the history books. Gorbachev doesn’t want to be the one who failed to tightly close the door to the eastward expansion of NATO. Genscher and Baker don’t want to be accused of having made deals with Moscow over the heads of the Poles, the Hungarians or the Czechs. And Shevardnadze came to the conclusion long ago that there is “nothing horrible” about NATO expansion — not surprisingly, given that his native Georgia now wants to join NATO.
Their interests were different back in 1990. Bonn and Washington wanted to expedite German reunification. A few days after the talks at the Kremlin, Genscher, Baker and Shevardnadze met again, this time all together and with all of the foreign ministers of the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries present, at a disarmament conference in a converted former train station in the Canadian capital Ottawa.
At the conference, the two German foreign ministers (the East German foreign minister at the time was Oskar Fischer, who had been close to the former East German leader Erich Honecker) came together in the corridors and conference rooms, met with the foreign ministers of the four victorious powers in World War II and, in various configurations, discussed the future course of Germany. By the end of the conference, it had been decided that the external aspects of German unity, such as the alliance issue and the size of the German military, were to be resolved in the so-called “two-plus-four” talks.
Sounding Out the Soviets
Genscher says today that all the key issues should have been addressed in this forum, and that during the talks there was never any mention of excluding the Eastern Europeans from NATO membership, which the participants all confirm.
But what about Genscher’s comments to Shevardnadze on Feb. 10, 1990?
Genscher says today that he was merely “sounding out” Shevardnadze prior to the actual negotiations to determine Moscow’s position on the alliance issue and to see whether there was any leeway.
This is the official position. But there are also other versions of the events.
A diplomat with the German Foreign Ministry says that there was, of course, a consensus between the two sides. Indeed, the Soviets would hardly have agreed to take part in the two-plus-four talks if they had known that NATO would later accept Poland, Hungary and other Eastern European countries as members.
The negotiations with Gorbachev were already difficult enough, with Western politicians repeatedly insisting that they were not going to derive — in the words of then-US President George H. W. Bush — any “unilateral advantage” from the situation, and that there would be “no shift in the balance of power” between the East and the West, as Genscher put it. Russia today is certainly somewhat justified in citing, at the very least, the spirit of the 1990 agreements.
Absurd Notion
In late May 1990, Gorbachev finally agreed to a unified Germany joining NATO. But why didn’t Gorbachev and Shevardnadze get the West’s commitments in writing at a time when they still held all the cards? “The Warsaw Pact still existed at the beginning of 1990,” Gorbachev says today. “Merely the notion that NATO might expand to include the countries in this alliance sounded completely absurd at the time.”
Some leading Western politicians were under the impression that the Kremlin leader and his foreign minister were ignoring reality and, as Baker said, were “in denial” about the demise of the Soviet Union as a major power.
On the other hand, the Baltic countries were still part of the Soviet Union, and NATO membership seemed light years away. And in some parts of Eastern Europe, peace-oriented dissidents were now in power, men like then-Czech President Vaclav Havel who, if he had had his way, would not only have dissolved the Warsaw Pact, but NATO along with it.
No Eastern European government was striving to join NATO in that early phase, and the Western alliance had absolutely no interest in taking on new members. It was too expensive, an unnecessary provocation of Moscow and, if worse came to worst, did the Western governments truly expect French, Italian or German soldiers to risk their lives for Poland and Hungary?
Then, in 1991, came the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the war in Bosnia, with its hundred thousand dead, raised fears of a Balkanization of Eastern Europe. And in the United States President Bill Clinton, following his inauguration in 1993, was searching for a new mission for the Western alliance.
Suddenly everyone wanted to join NATO, and soon NATO wanted to accept everyone.
The dispute over history was about to begin.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
