How did we come so late to the claim of Putin’s megalomania as the cause of European instability?
THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | NATO leaders meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, have resolved that once the war in Ukraine ends, that country will be admitted into the alliance. Since the war began, the mainstream Western claim has been that the war was an “unprovoked” act of aggression by a “megalomaniacal” Russian president, Vladmir Putin, (some say by Russian imperialism) to recreate the Soviet (or Russian) empire. These views are presented as Biblical truths. Interestingly, since the beginning of debate on NATO expansion in 1997, a large cross section of very senior foreign policy leaders in the U.S. predicted that it will provoke a hostile and aggressive, if not violent, Russian response.
When NATO expansion was first proposed, top U.S. foreign policy journalist, Thomas Friedman, called George Kenan for a comment. Kenan enjoyed iconic status in U.S. foreign policy circles as an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union. His “Moscow Telegram” of 1948 made him the architect of the U.S. policy of containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The interview was published in the New York Times of February 5, 1997.
“(Bluntly) stated…expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era,” Kenan said, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking …I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely to it and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else… It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then (the NATO expanders) will say that ‘we always told you that is how the Russians are’ but this is just wrong.”
In June 1997, 50 U.S. foreign policy experts including former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton. “We, the undersigned, believe that the current US-led effort to expand NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability for the following reasons: In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favour reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanise resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties; In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the “ins” and the “outs,” foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included…”
That same year, the last USA ambassador to Moscow during the Soviet era, Jack Matlock, was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.”
In his memoirs, William Perry, who served as Clinton’s secretary of defense said that “NATO enlargement is the cause of ‘the rupture in relations with Russia’” and that in 1996 he was so opposed to it that “in the strength of my conviction, I considered resigning”.
On June 20, 1997, Senator Joseph Biden, then a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now president of the USA said: “I think the one place where the greatest consternation would be caused in the short term, for admission (into NATO) would be to admit the Baltic states now, in terms of NATO-Russian, US-Russian relations. And if there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance, were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction in Russia, it would be that.”
When NATO integration of Ukraine and Georgia was proposed at the Bucharest summit of 2008, then U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, now director of the CIA, Bill Burns, sent a secret cable to then U.S. secretary of state, Condeliza Rice. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests … Today’s Russia will respond.”
As late as March 5, 2014, former U.S. national security advisor and also former U.S. secretary of state and also a world leading scholar on international relations, Henry Kissinger, wrote an opinion in The Washington Post. “If Ukraine is to survive…it must not be either side’s outpost against the other, it should function as a bridge between them…Ukraine should not join NATO. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers. Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing.”
In 2015, Robert Gates, who has been director of CIA and later served as secretary of defense for both George Bush and Barak Obama, said in his memoirs, Memoirs of a Secretary at War, “Moving so quickly (to expand NATO) was a mistake. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching (and) an especially monumental provocation.”
The reaction by Moscow to NATO expansion was predicted by all these U.S. foreign policy experts/leaders long before Putin became anything in Russia. How then did “Putin’s megalomania” become the explanation for Russia’s response to NATO expansion?
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amwenda@independent.co.ug
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