April 7, 2022 27Not One Inch:
America, Russia, and the Making
of Post–Cold War Stalemate
by M. E. Sarotte.
Yale University Press, 550 pp., $35.00The last thing Joe Biden must have ex-
pected upon fulfilling his dream of be-
coming president in January 2021 was
that a year later he would face a Rus-
sian invasion of Ukraine and the largest
armed conflict in Europe since World
War II. This wasn’t supposed to hap-
pen. China was seen as the new threat.
The Quad—the alliance of the US,
Japan, India, and Australia, designed
to contain Beijing’s geopolitical am-
bitions—was the main focus of Wash-
ington’s foreign policy. Now suddenly
Vladimir Putin, keen to prove Russia’s
status as a great power, was hell- bent
on reconquering the second- largest re-
public of the former Soviet Union. The
scope and brutality of his invasion has
been shocking; yet to many of those
old enough to remember the end of the
cold war—when the USSR lay supine
and a series of American presidents set
out to expand (or as their aides put it, in
an attempt to avoid accusations of neo-
imperialism, “enlarge”) the NATO mil-
itary alliance to include nearly every
nation in Central and Eastern Europe
that had been a vassal of the Krem-
lin for the previous half- century—the
attack, at least initially, came as little
surprise. In a sense, it was a backlash
waiting to happen.
Not One Inch, M. E. Sarotte’s highly
detailed, thoroughly researched, and
briskly written chronicle of NATO’s
expansion in the first decade after the
end of the cold war, leaves the impres-
sion that Putin has a case for resenting
how the United States and its allies took
in the western parts of his country’s
erstwhile empire—though not as good
a case as he seems to believe. Sarotte, a
professor of history at Johns Hopkins,
takes her title from Putin’s frequent ref-
erences to a “promise,” allegedly made
by American leaders at the end of the
cold war, not to expand NATO into the
power vacuums of Central and Eastern
Europe. “‘Not an inch to the east,’ we
were told in the 1990s,” Putin said in a
December 2021 speech. “They cheated
us—vehemently, blatantly.”
But as Sarotte documents, the US
made no such promise. On February
9, 1990, shortly after the Berlin Wall
fell but before the Soviet Union im-
ploded, James Baker, President George
H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, met with
Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet leader
had no illusions that he could prevent
the unification of East and West Ger-
many, but he wanted assurances that the
new German state would not be part of
NATO, the US- led military alliance that
was created in 1949 to contain the Soviet
Union. West Germany had been a mem-
ber of NATO since 1955; East Germany
was a member of the Soviet- controlled
Warsaw Pact. For the reunified German
state to be a part of NATO would rub
defeat a bit too harshly in the Russians’
faces. It might be better, Gorbachev
said, to keep the new Germany neu-
tral. Baker replied that a unified neutral
Germany might not be in anyone’s in-
terest, that it might even build its ownnuclear arsenal. He asked, according to
a transcript of the meeting:Would you prefer to see a united
Germany outside of NATO, inde-
pendent and with no US forces, or
would you prefer a unified Ger-
many be tied to NATO, with as-
surances that NATO’s jurisdiction
would not shift one inch eastward
from its present position?It was a question, not a pledge. Gor-
bachev said that, put that way, he pre-
ferred the latter; Baker said he did too.
But upon returning to Washington,
Baker was upbraided. “To hell with
that!” President Bush exclaimed, dis-
missing the notion of letting the Sovi-
ets have a say on the fate of the new
German state. “We prevailed and they
didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch
victory from the jaws of defeat.” Baker
never mentioned “not one inch” again.
But the dilemma couldn’t be
sidestepped so easily. The Soviet
Union—which at this point hadn’t yet
dissolved—had thousands of troops
and hundreds of tactical nuclear weap-
ons in the eastern part of Germany,
which gave Gorbachev leverage to un-
dermine any effort to establish a new
order in the heart of Europe. Bush,
German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and
other Western leaders worried about
what they might have to concede in
order to win his consent to keep a uni-
fied Germany in NATO and to get the
Soviet troops and weapons out. Re-
markably, though, Gorbachev gave up
the one strong card in his otherwise
meager hand. In a meeting the day
after Baker’s, Kohl asked Gorbachev
if he agreed “that the Germans them-
selves must now decide” all questions
about unification. Gorbachev allowed
that this was “very close” to his view.
Kohl was stunned. He proceeded
to boast publicly that Gorbachev had
agreed to German unification without
conditions—and Gorbachev did notpush back. The Soviet foreign minister,
Eduard Shevardnadze, later wrote in
his memoir that the concession left him
in “a melancholy and fatalistic mood.”
Bush announced that the unified Ger-
many would hold full membership in
NATO. Kohl’s task was now to mol-
lify Gorbachev—whose economy was
tanking—with vast financial assistance.And so the pattern was set for the
next decade: NATO expanded, first into
the former East Germany, then beyond;
Gorbachev—and later Boris Yeltsin,
the president of the Russian Federation
after the USSR’s implosion in 1991—
put up a fuss; the US, Germany, and the
IMF sent Moscow billions of dollars to
quell his protests (though much of the
money disappeared, as the elites con-
trolling Russia’s government shifted it
to foreign bank accounts). When Pres-
ident Clinton told Yeltsin that Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania—the three Baltic
states that had once been Soviet repub-
lics—would join NATO at some point,
Yeltsin begged him not to pile on such
deep humiliation. Clinton held out the
bribe of Russian membership in sev-
eral Western institutions, including the
prestigious Group of Seven, consisting
of the most powerful industrial democ-
racies. Yeltsin caved; he had no alterna-
tive. (Russia was expelled from the G- 8,
turning it back into the G- 7, in 2014, as
punishment for annexing Crimea.)
All this said, it is crucial to note that
the campaign to expand NATO was not
simply a power play by the West’s cold
war victors. The most excited advo-
cates of enlargement were the leaders
(and to a great degree the populations)
of the Central and Eastern European
states, who were eager to throw off the
Kremlin’s yoke and join the West. To
some, this was a matter of principle; to
others, it posed an irresistible opportu-
nity to get on the winning side. Either
way, neutrality was not an attractive
option. The Czech novelist Milan Kun-dera once defined a small country as
“one which knew it could disappear
at any moment,” and if the leaders of
these newly independent states hadn’t
read Kundera, they’d witnessed enough
modern history firsthand to draw the
same lesson.
Václav Havel knew Kundera very
well. When the dissident playwright im-
probably became president of Czecho-
slovakia in 1989, he touted a grand
vision of a “Europe free and whole”
and pressed for US and Soviet troops
to leave Central and Eastern Europe.
However, by the summer of 1990, he
saw the appeal of NATO’s Article 5,
which pledges that an attack on one
member will be treated as an attack on
all members. As he later put it to Pres-
ident Clinton, in a one- on- one meeting
during a trip to Washington, “We are
living in a vacuum.... That is why we
want to join NATO.” Lech WałĊsa, the
hero of Poland’s Solidarity movement
who emerged as his country’s presi-
dent, expressed the same sentiment,
compounded by a deep fear of a Rus-
sian resurgence. Sarotte writes (based
on declassified memos of conversa-
tions) that these pleas affected Clinton
deeply and convinced him that NATO
was “key” not just to Europe’s security
but also to its stability.
Many were skeptical about the no-
tion of enlargement. General Colin
Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said he “was not sure what NATO
would mean” with the influx of so many
nations that didn’t share the democratic
traditions of its original twelve members
(Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France,
Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Neth-
erlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and
the US) and the four that were added
between 1952 and 1982 (Greece, Tur-
key, West Germany, and post- Franco
Spain).^1 Clinton’s first two secretaries
of defense, Les Aspin and William
Perry, feared that pushing NATO closer
to Russia’s border might agitate the
Kremlin into pulling out of nuclear
arms–reduction talks. Many in the
State Department worried that NATO’s
eastward expansion might endanger
Yeltsin’s fragile democratic experiment
and usher ultranationalists into power.
I n May 1995 eighteen for mer US of fi-
cials, mainly retired Foreign Service of-
ficers, signed an open letter expressing
concern that NATO enlargement risked
“exacerbating the instability that now
exists in the zone that lies between Ger-
many and Russia” and might convince
“most Russians that the United States
and the West are attempting to isolate,
encircle, and subordinate them, rather
than integrating them into a new Eu-
ropean system of collective security.”
In a New York Times op- ed, George
Kennan, the dean of Russia hands and
the architect of America’s cold war
containment policy, agreed, castigating
NATO enlargement as “the most fate-
ful error of American policy in the en-
tire post- cold- war era.”^2 Senator Sam‘A Bridge Too Far’
Fred Kaplan
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US secretary of state James Baker
in the Kremlin, Moscow, February 9, 1990Boris Yurchenko /APImages(^1) NATO eventually grew to thirty mem-
bers, most recently with Montenegro in
2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.
(^2) George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,”
The New York Times, February 5, 1997.
Kaplan 27 28 .indd 27 3 / 9 / 22 5 : 06 PM