“Hostile Russian response if NATO expands to the Baltic states”. Word of Biden (in 1997)
What Biden thought in 1997 about the enlargement of NATO in the ex-Soviet space. The article by Andrea Mainardi
Twenty five years ago. Joe Biden is an influential Democratic Senator from Delaware. Vladimir Putin is a "provincial" public official and politician. It rotates on St. Petersburg but is already attracted to Moscow. Reciprocated. It is 1997.
On June 18, Biden speaks to the US Atlantic Council and offers his support for NATO enlargement. At the heart of the political discussion is whether to admit the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Which in fact entered the Atlantic alliance in 1999.
However, he warns: the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded to the Baltic states. So yes. However, he excludes the possibility of a military response and declares himself optimistic about the solution. He also said that Russia would eventually see NATO expansion in its own interest, as a matter of security and stability. “I believe that with time, in the next few years, we will resolve. It is my hope that in the short term, ie by the end of this century or shortly thereafter, the Baltic states will be admitted ”.
Biden 's prediction came true when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO in 2004.
Meanwhile, Putin has made a career. He became president. NATO complained a little about those enlargements, but without exaggerating.
A video clip of Senator Biden 's '97 speech surfaced via Twitter earlier this week, then relaunched by Newsweek and went viral within hours. To date it has been viewed about two and a half million times, commented in various ways on social media and in newspapers.
That speech of 25 years ago is, moreover, highly topical. That the opening to the Baltic states – as predicted by Biden – would provoke a strong protest from Moscow, even if not military, has happened. And with Putin already in the Kremlin. But the assessment of a Russia persuaded that NATO enlargement would even reassure the Kremlin was wrong.
In Biden 's twenty-five-year-old speech, there is another current passage. The senator reported that the Russians had told him they may have to look to China as an alternative if NATO continues to expand. In the mood for jokes Biden said he wished him "good luck" . Laughter of his listeners follows.
How things have changed. Biden was joking, but the Kremlin with Putin was lucky with the Chinese . And despite some commercial embarrassments, Xi Jinping confirms his faithful partner these days. Of course the world has changed in 25 years. China has changed. But not the Beijing mentality. Russia has changed, but not the ideology of mystical nationalism , of the deep soul of the country on which Putin stands . That the continuation of NATO expansionism towards the East was a mistake, however, is a widespread judgment. In Italy, General Leonardo Tricarico explained it: NATO was wrong to encourage Ukraine to join the alliance by causing Putin's Russia "reaction foul". For Ted Galen Carpenter , senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, " the United States and NATO have contributed to triggering the war in Ukraine ". And admitting it "is not siding with Putin". Der Spiegel has published documents that even demonstrate the NATO promise not to expand eastward as early as '90 -'91.
This was not the case. From Poland onwards. Fourteen Eastern European nations have moved under the Atlantic umbrella also – if not primarily – to be part of an alliance that obliged the United States to come to their defense in the event of an attack by Russia.
William J. Burns , Biden 's CIA director, had warned of the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995. Two years earlier, then Senator Biden 's lukewarm reaction and his call to stall on the states Baltics. Burns , then a political officer of the US embassy in Moscow, immediately reported to Washington that " hostility to the first NATO expansion is almost universal across the internal political spectrum ."
When President Bill Clinton 's administration moved to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO – the occasion of Biden 's 1997 speech – Burns wrote that the decision was "premature at best, and unnecessarily provocative in the worse". He explained in a memoir, The Back Channel . "As the Russians simmered in their resentment and disadvantage, a growing storm of 'stab in the back' theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia's relations with the West that would last for decades."
In June 1997 – the year of Biden 's speech – fifty foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton , stating: “We believe that the current US-led effort to expand NATO is a political error of historical proportions. it would disturb European stability ”.
On May 2, 1998, immediately after the Senate ratified the NATO expansion, George Kennan , the architect of America's Cold War containment of the Soviet Union, expressed a very strong judgment : beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react rather negatively and that will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for that. Nobody was threatening anyone else. This expansion would turn the founding fathers of this country upside down in their graves. We are in NATO to protect a whole series of countries, even if we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in a serious way ".
The diplomat who joined the State Department in 1926, former ambassador to Moscow, considered the greatest American expert on Russia, now 94 years old, insisted: “Don't people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the same people who organized the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime ”. He warned: "Obviously there will be a bad reaction from Russia."
It happened.
Mystery remains the reasons for the strategic error of the US on the NATO enlargement to the East highlighted by authoritative analysts. In 2016, Clinton's former defense secretary Bill Perry told The Guardian: “In recent years, most of the blame can be attributed to the actions taken by Putin. But in the early years I have to say that the United States deserves much of the blame. Our first action that really put us in a bad direction was when NATO started expanding to Eastern European nations. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and were starting to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy… but they were very uncomfortable having NATO right on the border. "
In 2008, also Burns , who became American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice : “Ukraine's entry into NATO is the most obvious of all limits for the Russian elite. Not just Putin. In more than two and a half years of conversations with leading Russian players, from brass knuckles in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to the harshest liberal critics of Putin, I have yet to find someone who sees Ukraine in NATO as something other than a direct challenge to interests. Russians ".
According to a survey conducted in Ukraine in early December, the majority of Ukrainians want to join the EU (58%) and NATO (54%).
Thomas L. Friedman observes in the New York Times that Putin views Ukraine's ambition to leave its sphere of influence as both a strategic loss and a personal and national humiliation. Ukraine cannot aspire to anything else because for the Kremlin it is an integral part of Russia, its people are tied to it by blood and family ties. Leaving Russia is like a betrayal, punishable by an old-fashioned honor killing. Putin – writes Friedman – is basically saying to the Ukrainians: you fell in love with the wrong person. You will not run away with either NATO or the EU. And if I have to beat your government to death and drag you home, I will.
However, fueling the fire is also the decision of the United States in the 1990s to expand NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in Friedman 's opinion, above all "the way in which Putin has cynically exploited the expansion of Born closer to Russia's borders to rally the Russians on his side to cover up his huge leadership failure. It has completely failed to turn Russia into an economic model that actually attracts its neighbors and inspires its most talented people to stay, not line up for visas to the West. "
As the New York Times writes , in the days of past NATO enlargements, Putin was presiding over the dizzying growth of Russian personal incomes. After painful restructuring and impoverishment following the collapse of communism, an elite clientelist kleptocracy was born. He chose to accompany her, explained Leon Aron. And to cover up and distract from that choice, Putin shifted the basis of his popularity from being "the distributor of Russia's newfound wealth and an economic reformer, to the defender of the motherland." He thus offered himself in the image of the nationalist mystic blessed by the Moscow patriarchate to rally the Russian people behind him. Taking advantage of the NATO expansion was a great opportunity.
The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. "It was a real mistake," Steven told Vox in January. Pife r, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Clinton: “He drove the Russians crazy. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which were never met ”.
Ukraine is the fourth largest recipient of US military funding, and intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened recently. But Ukraine will not join NATO in the near future. Biden also made it clear.
Obviously, nothing justifies Putin 's dismemberment of Ukraine. Neither did his made-up stories about the war in Ukraine. Faced with the state of affairs of an attacked and invaded state and an aggressor and intrusive state, there is no argument for the neutral narrative. If anything, the diplomatic moves of the US and its latest choices in the game photograph its limits in the region. The main ones lined up on Newsweek Ted Galen Carpenter , of the Cato Institute.
In his 2014 memoir Duty , Robert M. Gates , who served as defense secretaries in both the Bush and Obama administrations , admitted that "trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO has been really over the top." . Moscow began to reject. Putin used a provocation by the pro-Western government of Georgia to launch a military offensive that has penetrated deeply into the country. After its victory, Russia broke two secessionist-minded Georgian regions and put them under Russian control.
Carpenter muses: "The Kremlin's decisive action should also have alerted US leaders that the days when Russian officials merely launched verbal protests about the West's constant invasion of Russian security were over." The Obama administration then sought to turn Ukraine into a NATO political and military asset between late 2013 and early 2014, when the United States and several European governments pledged to support protesters' efforts to oust the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Victor Yanukovych , about two years before his term expires.
Carpenter writes: “That campaign has been particularly inappropriate since Yanukovych became president in 2010 following an election that even the European Union and other international observers have recognized as being reasonably free and fair. In a democratic system, the legal way to remove a president from office is, depending on the constitutional rules of a specific country, through a parliamentary vote of no confidence, impeachment or defeat in the next election. Angry street demonstrations do not fit into any of these categories, yet the United States and its allies have supported that illegal trial. A recording of the phone call leaked between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt confirmed the extent of Washington's interference in the affairs of a sovereign country ”.
Putin responded by annexing the Crimean peninsula. From there on even more, until the total invasion. NATO's enlargement policy to include Eastern Europe does not seem to have guaranteed the promised security.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/biden-nato-ucraina-russia/ on Fri, 11 Mar 2022 06:54:41 +0000.