WASHINGTON—U.S. President Bill Clinton forced a resisting Russian President Boris Yeltsin into signing a NATO-Russia pact in 1997 totally on U.S. terms, newly disclosed U.S. documents show.
Further, the trove of U.S. documents adds, when Yeltsin demanded in return that NATO not expand eastwards towards Russia, thus incorporating the formerly socialist nations of Eastern Europe, Clinton turned him aside.
Even after signing the pact, Yeltsin was angry. He told Clinton when they met at Helsinki, Finland, in March 1997: “Our position has not changed. It remains a mistake for NATO to move eastward. But I need to take steps to alleviate the negative consequences of this for Russia.
“I am prepared to enter into an agreement with NATO, not because I want to but because it is a forced step. There is no other solution for today.”
The documents, made public after a freedom of information demand from the private non-profit National Security Archive, confirm Russia’s subsequent contention that the NATO expansion, which has since occurred, violates the pact. It posted them online.
Current Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s successor, cited that violation to justify his military’s invasion of Ukraine.
The archive released the trove of documents to coincide with NATO’s recent 75th anniversary summit/ celebration in Washington, just blocks away from the archive’s offices in D.C.
At that gala, current President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders reaffirmed the alliance’s commitment and goals—which are very different from the aims the documents reveal.
The pact was originally envisioned as a “Partnership for Peace” by Clinton, including both Russia and Ukraine. By 1994, U.S. policymakers had dropped that goal in favor of NATO expansion. They also believed Russia then would not resist.
In 2000, near the end of Clinton’s term, Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Eastern European specialist, also predicted NATO expansion eastwards would be easier under Putin, by then the increasingly-ill Yeltsin’s obvious successor.
The key document, which Yeltsin unwillingly signed, is the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997. It was anything but a real partnership, the documents show. Clinton forced it on Yeltsin only after both were re-elected in 1996. Though the National Security Archive did not say so, Yeltsin won a runoff against Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov only after U.S. interference in the election.
Despite being on the hook to Washington after the U.S. helped him stay in power, Yeltsin still refused to provide the “grudging endorsement” of NATO’s expansion which Clinton demanded. The U.S. went ahead with its plans anyway.
Manfred Woerner, NATO Secretary-General in 1993, actually got the expansion ball rolling that year by raising the idea with Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, a cable from Christopher’s office to the U.S. Mission to NATO says.
“Woerner urged the Secretary to start considering possible timeframes, candidates, and criteria for membership expansion,” the cable says. It reports Eastern Europe’s new anti-Communist leaders were less concerned about Russian military threats and more focused on whether “NATO membership can help” keep them in power at home. They believed “NATO is an organization” to accomplish that goal.
Woerner, it turns out, was playing a double game, according to a July 7, 1991, memo to Yeltsin, then still president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union.
“NATO should make a clearer, more detailed, and definitive statement about the need for a gradual decrease in the military efforts of that organization,” the memo from the Russian delegation to NATO tells Yeltsin.
“This could have great significance for [our] forces in Russia and generally in the [Soviet] Union who are fighting for large cuts in the defense budget in order to allocate major resources for the implementation of economic reforms,” including privatization and marketization, it says in part.
“Woerner stressed the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO. Thirteen out of 16 NATO members support this point of view. In the near future, at his meeting with L. (Lech) Walesa and the Romanian leader A. (Anton) Iliescu, he will oppose Poland and Romania joining NATO, and earlier this was stated to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. We should not allow, stated M. Woerner, the isolation of the USSR from the European community.”
Christopher, Clinton’s Secretary of State, played a double game, too. He told Yeltsin at a later meeting about the so-called Partnership for Peace and left the impression that it would govern Russia-NATO relations, without NATO expansion.
What Christopher said within the administration, according to a later memo from Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, was that NATO expansion “would be a long-term eventuality” with no timeline given.
“All your advisers agree that doing anything at this stage to indicate that NATO’s border will move closer to Russia and Ukraine without at the same time including those two states would have major negative consequences within both. That could make the Central Europeans less secure,” Lake’s memo says. “President Clinton approved this memo with a handwritten ‘OK,’” the National Security Archive adds.
Then Yeltsin and Russia’s new capitalist elite all start to get suspicious about what an expanding NATO would mean for their authority, a mid-1997 “progress report on the expansion project” memo from Lake to Clinton says.
“Featuring a thick black checkmark and scrawled notes from Clinton, this memo from the national security adviser gives the president some bad news,” the Archive’s analysis says.
“Hardening Russian opposition to NATO enlargement, unease among some West Europeans, and still-uncertain congressional support pose a challenge to our policy,” Lake wrote. Clinton replied: “I think we need to discuss how the Europeans feel [underlined] about this and what they are likely to do.”
“The timing here is important,” the archives analysts say. When Clinton attended an earlier Victory Day in Moscow, commemorating the Soviet victory over Hitler, Yeltsin yelled at him that NATO expansion represents “nothing but humiliation for Russia.” Clinton promised Yeltsin again that no action on NATO expansion would happen in 1995 or 1996, not before the Russian and U.S. presidential elections.
“Russian opposition to NATO enlargement is unlikely to yield in the near or medium term to some kind of grudging endorsement,” Lake wrote after that confrontation. “Russia’s opposition is deep and profound. For the period ahead, the Russian leadership will do its level best to derail our policy, given its conviction that any eastward expansion of NATO is at root antithetical to Russia’s long-term interests.”
The best the U.S. can do, Lake concludes, is just to achieve a “muted reaction in a context of broader cooperation.” But the U.S. went far beyond that, as a memo from U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross during the Republican George H.W. Bush administration shows.
“Viewed through Russian eyes, Ross tells Strobe Talbott, NATO expansion ‘tends to confirm the imagery that they lost the Cold War, their status as a great power is collapsing, they continue to be humiliated, and worse, they will face potential threats closer to their borders.’
“The Russians feel they were snookered at the time of German unification. As you noted with me,” Bush official James “Baker’s promises on not extending NATO military presence into what was East Germany were part of a perceived commitment not to expand the Alliance eastward.”
“The 1991 promise to transform NATO from a military alliance into a political alliance was part of a Soviet explanation for accepting unified Germany in NATO” Ross said to Talbott, who put a question mark next to that sentence. As a result, Ross wrote Russia “wants more formal and more well-defined promises of a binding and precise character.”
While outlining the Russian position on NATO expansion, Ross concludes that the “worst outcome for Yeltsin is NATO enlargement and no Russian-NATO deal. Nothing could further demonstrate Russian weakness and irrelevance.”
“This reality gives the United States certain leverage in negotiations, which Ross advises Talbott to put to use,” the archivists note.
In the years ahead, that leverage was exercised repeatedly by the U.S.
Former Warsaw Pact nations or Soviet republics that have become NATO members since then include: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia. Other countries that have been part of the alliance’s eastward expansion are Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland, and Sweden.
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