Dozens Of WikiLeaks Cables Show US Knew NATO Expansion Was Russia’s Bright Red Line

Via American Committee for US-Russia Accord,

Nearly a year in, the war in Ukraine has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and brought the world to the brink of, in President Joe Biden’s own words, “Armageddon.” Alongside the literal battlefield has been a similarly bitter intellectual battle over the war’s causes.

Commentators have rushed to declare the long-criticized policy of NATO expansion as irrelevant to the war’s outbreak, or as a mere fig leaf used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to mask what Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates recently called “his messianic mission” to “reestablish the Russian Empire.” Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor to two Republican administrations, has deemed these views merely the product of a “Russian information war and psychological operation,” resulting in “masses of the US public … blaming NATO, or blaming the US for this outcome.”

Yet a review of the public record and many dozens of diplomatic cables made publicly available via WikiLeaks shows that US officials were aware, or were directly told over the span of years, that expanding NATO was viewed by Russian officials well beyond Putin as a major threat and provocation, that expanding it to Ukraine was a particularly bright red line for Moscow, that it would inflame and empower hawkish, nationalist parts of the Russian political spectrum, and that it could ultimately lead to war.

In a particularly prophetic set of warnings, US officials were told that pushing for Ukrainian membership in NATO would not only increase the chance of Russian meddling in the country, but risked destabilizing the divided nation — and that US and other NATO officials pressured Ukrainian leaders to reshape this unfriendly public opinion in response. All of this was told to US officials in both public and private by not just senior Russian officials going all the way up to the presidency, but by NATO allies, various analysts and experts, liberal Russian voices critical of Putin, even, sometimes, US diplomats themselves.

This history is particularly relevant as US officials now test the red line China has drawn around Taiwan’s independence, risking military escalation that will first and foremost be aimed at the island state. The US diplomatic record regarding NATO expansion suggests the perils of ignoring or outright crossing another military power’s red lines, and the wisdom of a more restrained foreign policy that treats other powers’ spheres of influence with the care they treat the United States’ own.

An Early Exception

NATO expansion had been fraught from the start. The pro-Western Boris Yeltsin had told Bill Clinton he “saw nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed” with plans to renege on the verbal promises made years earlier not to enlarge NATO eastward, and warned it would be “sowing the seeds of mistrust” and would “be interpreted, and not only in Russia, as the beginning of a new split in Europe.” Just as containment architect George Kennan had predicted, the decision to go ahead helped inflame Russian hostility and nationalism: The Duma (the Russian parliament) declared it “the largest military threat to our country over the last fifty years,” while the leader of the opposition Communist Party called it “a Treaty of Versailles for Russia.”

By the time Putin became president the day before the new Millennium, “the initial hopes and plans of the early ‘90s [were] dead,” a leading liberal Russian politician declared. The first round of NATO enlargement had been followed by NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, done without UN security council authorization, triggering a Russian cut-off of contact with the alliance. By 2000, the revised Russian national security strategy warned that NATO using force beyond its borders “’is a threat of destabilization of the whole strategic situation,” while military officers and politicians started claiming “that if NATO expands further, it would ‘create a base to intervene in Russia itself,’” the Washington Post reported.

Ironically, there would be one exception to the next two decades’ worth of rising tensions over NATO’s eastward creep that followed: the early years of Putin’s presidency, when the new Russian president defied the Russian establishment to try and make outreach to the United States. Under Putin, Moscow re-established relations with NATO, finally ratified the START II arms control treaty, even publicly floated the idea of Russia eventually joining the alliance, inviting attacks from his political rivals for doing so. Even so, he continued to raise Moscow’s traditional concerns about the alliance’s expansion, telling NATO’s secretary-general it was “a threat to Russia.”

“If a country like Russia feels threatened, this would destabilize the situation in Europe and the entire world,” he’d said in a speech in Berlin in 2000.

Putin softened his opposition as he sought to make common cause with the George W. Bush administration. “If NATO takes on a different shape and is becoming a political organization, of course, we would reconsider our position with regard to such expansion, if we are to feel involved in the processes,” he said in October 2001, drawing attacks from political rivals and other Russian elites.

As NATO for the first time granted Russia a consultive role in its decision-making, Putin sought to assist its expansion. Italian president Silvio Berlusconi made a “personal request” to Bush, according to an April 2002 cable, to “understand Putin’s domestic requirements,” that he “needs to be seen as part of the NATO family,” and to give him “help in building Russian public opinion to support NATO enlargement.” In another cable a top-ranking state department official urges holding a NATO-Russia summit to “help President Putin neutralize opposition to enlargement,” after the Russian leader said allowing NATO expansion without an agreement on a new NATO-Russia partnership would be politically impossible for him.

This would be the last time any Russian openness toward NATO expansion is recorded in the diplomatic record held by WikiLeaks.

Allies Weigh In

By the middle of the 2000s, US-Russian relations had deteriorated, partly owing to Putin’s bristling at US criticism of his growing authoritarianism at home, and to US opposition to his meddling in the 2004 Ukrainian election. But as explained in a September 2007 cable by New Eurasia Foundation president Andrey Kortunov, now a Russian foreign policy advisor who has publicly criticized both Kremlin policy and the current war, US mistakes were also to blame, including Bush’s invasion of Iraq and a general sense that he’d given little in return for Putin’s concessions.

“Putin had clearly embarked on an ‘integrationist’ foreign policy at the beginning of his second presidential term, which was fueled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and good relations with key leaders like President Bush” and other leading NATO allies, Kortunov said according to the cable. “However,” he said, “a string of perceived anti-Russian initiatives,” which included Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and “further expansion of NATO,” ultimately “dashed Putin’s hopes.”

What followed was a steady drumbeat of warnings about NATO’s expansion, particularly regarding neighboring Ukraine and Georgia, much of it from Washington’s NATO allies.

“[French presidential diplomatic advisor Maurice] Gourdault-Montagne warned that the question of Ukrainian accession to NATO remained extremely sensitive for Moscow, and concluded that if there remained one potential cause for war in Europe, it was Ukraine,” reads a September 2005 cable. “He added that some in the Russian administration felt we were doing too much in their core zone of interest, and one could wonder whether the Russians might launch a move similar to Prague in 1968, to see what the West would do.”

This was just one of many similar warnings from French officials, that admitting the two states “would cross Russian ‘tripwires’,” for instance. A February 2007 cable records then-director general for political affairs Gérard Araud’s recounting of “a half-hour anti-US harangue” from Putin in a meeting one day earlier, in which he “linked all the dots” of Russian unhappiness with US behavior, including “US unilateralism, its denial of the reality of multipolarity, [and] the anti-Russian nature of NATO enlargement.”

Germany likewise raised repeated concerns about a potentially bad Russian reaction to a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) for the two states, with deputy national security advisor Rolf Nikel stressing that Ukraine’s entry was particularly sensitive. “While Georgia was ‘just a bug on the skin of the bear,’ Ukraine was inseparably identified with Russia, going back to Vladimir of Kiev in 988,” Nikel recounted, according to the cable.

Other NATO allies repeated similar concerns. In a January 2008 cable, Italy affirmed it was a “strong advocate” for other states’ entry into the alliance, “but is concerned about provoking Russia through hurried Georgian integration.” Norway’s foreign minister (and today, prime minister) Jonas Gahr Stoere made a similar point in an April 2008 cable, even as he insisted Russia mustn’t be able to veto NATO’s decisions. “At the same time he says that he understands Russia’s objections to NATO enlargement and that the alliance needs to work to normalize the relationship with Russia,” reads the cable.

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