By David K. Shipler
The new
Cold War, which now grips Europe and the United States, is not all Russia’s
fault. A seed was sown in the American assurances broken by Presidents Bill
Clinton and George W. Bush, who reversed verbal pledges to refrain from
expanding the Atlantic military alliance toward Russia. The Russians didn’t get
it in writing, and some analysts doubt that commitments were made, but official
records of conversations suggest American bad faith.
That past doesn’t excuse Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive effort to reconstruct Russia’s sphere of
influence. He has ignored one commitment that actually was put in writing, the
1994 Budapest
Memorandum, which obligated Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. “to
refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independence of Ukraine.” Negotiated in exchange for Ukraine’s
relinquishing Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, it was brushed
aside by Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea from Ukraine and began an ongoing
proxy war against Ukrainian forces in the country’s east.
There are myriad reasons for
Putin’s own expansionism, including Russia’s historic anxieties about the
West’s political and military encroachment. Nevertheless, the past American
behavior helps explain his distrust of the U.S., his sense of victimization,
and his worries about national security. As exaggerated as those concerns might
appear to the West, whose alliance has not threatened to attack Russia, they are
amplified by Moscow’s experience with Washington after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said that he was “swindled.”
Declassified documents tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s.
