(PART
1)
by Gary
Leupp
In 1990,
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. president George H. W. Bush
through his secretary of state James Baker promised Soviet premier
Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for Soviet cooperation on German
reunification, the Cold War era NATO alliance would not expand “one
inch” eastwards towards Russia. Baker told Gorbachev: “Look,
if you remove your [300,000] troops [from east Germany] and allow
unification of Germany in NATO, NATO will not expand one inch to the
east.”
In the
following year, the USSR officially dissolved itself. Its own
defensive military alliance (commonly known as the Warsaw Pact) had
already shut down. The Cold War was over.
So why
hasn’t NATO also dissolved, but instead expanded relentlessly,
surrounding European Russia? Why isn’t this a central question for
discussion and debate in this country?
NATO: A
Cold War Anti-Russian Alliance
Some
challenge the claim that Bush’s pledge was ever given, although
Baker repeated it publicly in Russia. Or they argue that it was never
put in writing, hence legally inconsequential. Or they argue that any
promise made to the leadership of the Soviet Union, which went out of
existence in 1991, is inapplicable to subsequent U.S.-Russian
relations. But it’s clear that the U.S. has, to the consternation
of the Russian leadership, sustained a posture of confrontation with
its Cold War foe principally taking the form of NATO expansion. This
expansion hardly receives comment in the U.S. mass media, which
treats the entry of a new nation into NATO much as it does the
admission of a new state into the UN—as though this was altogether
natural and unproblematic.
But recall
the basic history. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed
in April 4, 1949, initially consisting of the U.S., Canada, U.K.,
France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark,
Iceland, Norway and Portugal, as a military alliance against the
Soviet Union, and principally the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic.
It was
formed just four years after the Soviets stormed Berlin, defeating
the Nazis. (As you know, Germany invaded Russia six months before
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; the U.S. and USSR were World War II
allies versus the fascists; the key victories in the European
war—Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk—were Soviet victories over the
Nazis; that U.S. soldiers only crossed the Rhine on March 22 as the
Red Army was closing in on Berlin, taking the city between April 16
and May 2 at a cost of some 80,000 Soviet dead. If you don’t know
these things, you’ve been denied a proper education.)
In the
four-year interim between Hitler’s suicide and the formation of
NATO, the two great victors of the war had divided Europe into
spheres of influence. The neighboring Soviet Union had contributed
disproportionately to the fascist defeat: over eight million military
and over 12 million civilians dead, as compared to the far-off U.S.,
with losses of around 186,000 dead in the European theater and
106,000 in the Pacific.
It might
seem strange that the lesser hero in this instance (in this epochal
conflict against fascism) gets all the goodies in the battle’s
aftermath: the U.S. created a bloc including Britain, France, Italy,
most of Germany, the Low Countries, Portugal, and most of
Scandinavia, while the Soviets asserted hegemony—or tried to—over
their generally less affluent client states. But the Soviets were not
in any case interested primarily in drawing the richest nations into
their fold; were that the case, they would not have withdrawn their
troops from Austria in 1955.
Rather
Russia, which had historically been invaded many times from the
west—from Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, France, and Germany multiple
times—wanted preeminently to secure its western border. To insure
the establishment of friendly regimes, it organized elections in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and elsewhere. (These had
approximately as much legitimacy as elections held under U.S.
occupation in Iraq or Afghanistan in later years, or at any point in
Latin America). They brought the Eastern European “people’s
republics” into existence.
The U.S. and
British grumbled about the geopolitical advances of their wartime
ally. In March 1946 former British Prime Minister Churchill while
visiting the U.S. alluded to an “iron curtain” falling across
Europe. (Perhaps he was unwittingly using the expression that Josef
Goebbels had used just thirteen months earlier. The German propaganda
minister had told a newspaper that “if the German people lay
down their weapons, the Soviets…would occupy all of Europe…An
iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory…”) Very
scary.
But the U.S.
was working hard at the time to consolidate its own bloc in Europe.
In May 1947 the U.S. CIA forced the Italian and French governments to
purge Communist members of cabinets formed after electoral successes
the previous year. (The U.S. had enormous clout, bought through the $
13 billion Marshall Plan begun in April 1947, designed to revive
European capitalism and diminish the Marxist appeal.)
The CIA
station chief in Rome later boasted that “without the CIA,” which
funded a Red Scare campaign and fomented violent, even fatal clashes
at events, “the Communist Party would surely have won the
[Italian] elections in 1948.” (Anyone who thinks Soviets rigged
elections while the U.S. facilitated fair ones as a matter of
principle is hopelessly naïve.)
Meanwhile—before
the establishment of NATO in April 1949—the U.S. and Britain had
been fighting a war in Greece since 1946 on behalf of the monarchists
against the communist-led forces that had been the backbone of the
anti-fascist movement during the World War II. The Communists had
widespread support and may well have won the civil war if the Soviets
had only supported them. But observing the understanding about
spheres of influence agreed to at Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin refused
appeals for Soviet aid from the Greek (and Yugoslav) Communists. The
Greek partisans surrendered in Oct. 1949, six months after the
formation of NATO. (But NATO was in fact not deployed in this
military intervention in Greece, seen as the first Cold War U.S.
military operation under the broadly anticommunist “Truman
Doctrine.”)
Just a month
after NATO was formed, the pro-U.S. leaders in west Germany
unilaterally announced the establishment of the Federal Republic of
Germany. (The pro-Soviet German Democratic Republic was declared only
six months later. As in Korea, the Soviets promoted reunification of
occupied sectors. But the U.S. was intent on establishing client
states, and dividing nations if necessary to stem Soviet inroads.
This was also the case with Vietnam.)
Four months
after the creation of NATO the Soviets conducted their first
successful nuclear test. The Cold War was underway in earnest.
NATO was
thus formed to aggressively confront the USSR and exploit fears of a
supposed threat of a westward Soviet strike (to impose the Soviet
social system on unwilling peoples). That threat never materialized,
of course. The Soviets cordoned off East Berlin from the west by the
Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent embarrassing mass flight. But they
never invaded West Germany, or provoked any clash with a NATO nation
throughout the Cold War. (Indeed, in light of the carnage visited on
Europe since 1989, from civil wars in the Balkans and Caucasus to
terrorist bombings in London, Madrid and Paris to the neo-fascist-led
putsch in Ukraine last year, the Cold War appears in retrospect as a
long period of relative peace and prosperity on the continent.)
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