He said, “Think about this.” In that sense, he was throwing out an idea, and wouldn’t it be better to have a united Germany, a member of NATO, than cut loose from NATO? And then he began to imply, he said, “After all, we will need still to make sure that Germany does not go nuclear, that Germany does not pursue the policies they did before. And we need a NATO for that.”
And Gorbachev answered that of course any expansion of NATO would be unacceptable, but he understood the points that Baker was making. And he added that, you know, it has been the policy of the Soviet Union to try to exclude you from Europe militarily, but we now understand that some American presence, military presence could be a stabilizing effect. So we are no longer trying to exclude you from Europe. But then he added, “Of course, you don’t really need 300,000 troops stationed in Europe to perform that.”
Later in other conversations, when the question of expansion of NATO came up, Gorbachev would say, “Well, if you do that, you’re going to have to take us too.”
A Common European Home
I would have to say this was in the background of both sides, in effect, calling for the same end. Gorbachev spoke beginning in a speech in the UN in 1988, saying that we have a common European home, which should be without barriers and so on. And on the other hand, our president and also, I think, Prime Minister Thatcher, who was then the British, spoke of “a Europe whole and free.” And by 1991, the world had a Europe whole and free.
Warning Against NATO Expansion
So later in the ’90s, when a new administration began to consider expanding NATO, I would say not only did I testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that that would be eventually a catastrophe if we started expanding NATO and continued it, but I was joined in a statement by, I think, more than 30 of the senior people who negotiated the end of the Cold War.
Now, the reason we said that was that NATO had been conceived as a defensive alliance in order to make sure that the Soviet Union could not successfully invade Western Europe. There was a great fear that that was their intent. And indeed, if you thought of the Soviet Union and its then East European allies, they had military forces that in quantity were superior to those in the West.
I might say that later, when all the documents have become available, it is clear that the Soviet Union never intended to invade the West. Their policy was that if the West started a war, they would respond and try to push to the English Channel, but that was planned as a response to what they would have considered aggression from the West.
NATO’s Shift from Defensive to Offensive Alliance
But what I’m trying to say now is that the idea of bringing more countries into NATO would turn it from a defensive alliance to an offensive alliance if these forces were used particularly outside Europe. One of the arguments that people for expansion made in the 1990s was “out of area or out of business.” In other words, we had to use the NATO alliance militarily outside Europe, or else there was no point to it.
They also testified, people who were not even involved, that oh, there was never any agreement regarding expansion. Now, what I say now is whether or not there was an agreement, and certainly we were given assurances that we wouldn’t expand NATO, but whether or not that is true, it was a huge mistake to start expanding NATO.
Russian Concerns: Bases, Not Article 5
Another point I would make is that it was not so much the sort of Article 5 of the NATO treaty that worried the Russians. I know the Russian ambassador to Washington, whom I had dealt with many times when he was a deputy foreign minister at the Soviet Union, Yuli Vorontsov, told me sort of in the mid-’90s. He said, “Look, you know, we don’t worry about your Article 5. We’re not going to obviously attack these countries or any others. What we worry about is bases. If you then put your bases in, that is going to be very worrisome to us.”
And in fact, in the 2+4 agreement, though there was no mention of NATO expansion, there was a provision that the territory of the former East Germany would not be used to base any foreign troops or any nuclear weapons. In other words, what was then accepted in the treaty as NATO expansion.
And the fact was that after Baker had returned to Washington, he was told by the lawyers, “Now, if Germany unites, there’s no way you can exclude part of it from the NATO alliance.” So a lot of these issues got mixed up.
NATO’s Offensive Use Against Serbia
But the expansion really, and then next, NATO in the ’90s was used in an offensive way against Serbia. All but a declared war was declared against Serbia, which had not attacked any NATO member. In effect, we were extending NATO protection to others as Yugoslavia began to break up. That was one of the first things that created, I would say, extreme tensions between the United States and then Russia.
Russia’s Role in the Soviet Breakup
Another point I should make is that when people talk about Russia always being aggressive and so on, it was precisely the elected president of the Russian Federation who played the key role in bringing the Soviet Union down. And also, he was a firm supporter of Baltic independence, which was declared legally before the Soviet Union broke up.
So in effect, the breakup of the Soviet Union was not something that the West was pressing for. As a matter of fact, although the first Bush administration was firm in supporting the restoration of independence of the three Baltic countries, we actually, for a number of rational reasons, wanted the rest of the Soviet Union to preserve a voluntary federation, the sort that Gorbachev tended in time to support.
So the idea that we brought the Soviet Union down is absolutely the opposite. We were doing our best to support Gorbachev in negotiating a new union treaty, to the point that when President Bush, after visiting Moscow, visited Kiev, he spoke to the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. He recommended them to enter Gorbachev’s Federation and said that they should avoid suicidal nationalism.
But we said at the time that this was a speech meant for all of the non-Soviet republics, not just Ukraine. And when he spoke of suicidal nationalism, he was thinking of what was going on in Georgia at that time.
The Soviet Breakup and Nuclear Proliferation
But it was clear that we did not want the Soviet Union to break up at that time, that is the United States. But of course, events got ahead of things, and by certainly November, it was clear that it was probably going to break up. And so obviously, after December 25th, when Yeltsin sort of took over in Russia and with the cooperation of others into the Soviet Union, we immediately proposed to recognize the successors.
Because one of the things that worried us throughout was the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So one of the conditions for recognizing the independence of Ukraine and others was that they relinquished their nuclear weapons. I know this has become an issue later. And most of these, by the way, were scheduled to be eliminated under arms control treaties we had with the Soviet Union. And as a condition of recognizing their independence, they had to agree to abide by these agreements.
Ukraine’s Nuclear Weapons
In other words, those weapons that were in Ukraine, first of all, were never under the control of Ukraine politically and practically. The codes and so on were in Moscow, passed on to Gorbachev, to Yeltsin. And second, it is not at all clear that if Ukraine had kept them, that they could have maintained them.
But in any event, the return of those weapons to Russia, which at first was resisted by the Ukrainian parliament, was insisted upon by the United States. And because we feared not that they would be used against us necessarily, but that this technology would seep out into elements that would use it. And I might add, that is still much more a threat in the future than any government actually using them.
And one of the big issues we had in the 1990s was a cooperative effort to make sure that the nuclear materials and nuclear weapons in Russia were, first of all, reduced as we had agreed earlier, and second, that the materials were secured. That’s one of our more successful efforts in the ’90s.
But now, I wanted to explain that background because so many people say now, “Oh, you know, if Ukraine had just kept those weapons, Russia would not have attacked them.” That was never a practical or political possibility.
GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, I hear that argument all the time as well. But I think people often forget that in the 1990s, a lot of great statesmen, George Kennan, yourself, and others, many were warning against essentially going for NATO expansion instead of pursuing this new pan-European security architecture.
So I was wondering, why did we fail to establish then a common European home, as Gorbachev would have said, or at least a common European security architecture? Because we did have some agreements like the Charter of Paris for a New Europe in 1990, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe set up in ’94 based on these principles, all essentially originating from the Helsinki Accords of how to have a common Europe. Why did we fail?
Domestic Politics and the Rise of Neoconservatism
JACK MATLOCK: I think there may have been a variety of reasons, but in fact, I think we, and particularly in the United States, but also in other Western countries, were responding to domestic politics. And in the case of the United States, we have very large numbers of voters in states like Pennsylvania and Illinois from Eastern Europe, and they were determined to get these countries in NATO because they traditionally looked at Russia as a threat.
And that was one thing that sort of politically, I know when I testified against NATO expansion during the intermission, some of the people came up to me and said, look, be practical. The president needs those electoral votes. There are two swing states, Pennsylvania and Illinois, and all those East Europeans are demanding we go into NATO. So I would say in the case of the United States, it was largely, not entirely, a matter of internal politics.
But second, you had the growing influence of what we call the neoconservatives, the neocons, those who actually both Reagan and Bush had sidelined. At that time, most were Republicans, and I would say both Reagan was able to sort of sideline and ignore their advice. They advised against most of our arms control negotiations. They wanted us simply to continue to use force, and to bring down the system. They were thinking of regime change, which by the way was something that neither President Reagan nor the first President Bush thought of.
I mean, they did not think they were trying to bring down the Soviet Union. Reagan’s idea was communism is a crazy idea, but if that’s what the Soviets want, that’s their business. What we object to is they’re forcing it on other people. So there wasn’t an idea that we had a mission to try to change their political system.
The Unipolar Moment and Its Consequences
What I’m trying to say is that suddenly you had a philosophy being expressed that the United States won the Cold War and that now it was the sole superpower, and that therefore it could determine the future of other countries. That there had been two superpowers that ran the world, and now there was only one. And so we were in what they call a unipolar world.
Now, there are several things wrong with that. First of all, yes, the United States had much more power, both militarily and in terms of economics, than any other country. But military power is power to destroy, not power to build. And the economic system is one which could be, I say, responsibly managed to the benefit of everybody, or by the more powerful states turned into a weapon.
Now, to my sorrow, I said, beginning in the ’90s, the United States started to do both. To sanction other countries for things that really had nothing to do with the United States, but what we considered their behavior internally. And second, of course, by expanding NATO and then beginning, and in the 21st century, to put bases there, was basically violating, I would say, the whole spirit of what we should have been building.
A Missed Opportunity for Pan-European Security
But you ask why we didn’t. Obviously, we should have been building a European security structure, in fact, a world security structure that included everybody. And what strikes me is that after the Second World War, we were wise to insist that France and Germany, who had been antagonists for so long, bury the hatchet and start cooperating. We were great inspirers and pushing for what later became the common market.
But after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, instead of bringing Russia and the East European countries into a unified security structure, we began actually to treat Russia as a pariah in many ways. And I think that spirit was expressed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, our first woman Secretary of State. When, in justifying the, in effect, war against Serbia, she said, “America stands tall and can see the future.” This, I think, was absolutely incredible hubris.
And I would note, by the way, for those who say we need more women in high politics, yes, we should have our leaders, whether they are male or female, on the basis of their merits. But all three of our women Secretaries of State have been warmongers. Let’s face it. So one’s sex or gender doesn’t necessarily determine one’s political opinions or abilities in certain respects.
GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, it often cuts a hole in the assumption that women would be more peaceful leaders than men. I think we’re all pretty flawed in this regard. But I also see that the prospect of a hegemonic peace, that is peace through dominance or strength, was very appealing, which contributed to dismantling the work that had been done for pan-European security architecture.
But beyond, I guess, creating a Europe without the Russians, which unavoidably became a bit of a Europe against the Russians, organised around EU and NATO. Do you see any other mistakes being done in terms of how we could have managed this relationship with Russia? Because it is interesting when everyone reads the memoirs of, for example, former CIA Director Robert Gates, or, well, you can mention many, they all recognise that relations were mismanaged and that we are now paying some of the consequences of this mismanagement. But what do you consider to be the main mistakes being made thereafter?
NATO Expansion and Military Encroachment
JACK MATLOCK: Well, as we continue to expand NATO, we not only began to expand NATO, but in the first decade of this century, we began putting military bases there, and the most sensitive of those as far as Russia was concerned was the establishment of anti-ballistic missiles in Romania and Poland. Now, these missiles, it turns out, though most people didn’t understand it at that time, could be used either offensively or defensively depending upon the software.
So there is no, I would say no, it is easy to understand that Putin, the Russian president, would find this threatening. And he made it very clear. He made it very clear in a speech in Munich in 2007, how he considered the expansion of NATO and particularly the plans to place bases there, bases that could practically be used to attack the Soviet Union. And yet we went ahead with this.
Western Interference in Ukraine
And then later, particularly during the Obama administration, we purposely tried to bring about, I would say, a Western-oriented government in Ukraine. This is something that anyone who knows history should have known was totally unacceptable to any government in Moscow, just as any expansion of any outside power into the Western Hemisphere was considered virtually a casus belli by the United States. Yet we continued to do that.
And I think this is one of the big issues that weighed upon Vladimir Putin’s mind. And he warned against it publicly. But later we went ahead and at one point, our representatives were bragging that they spent billions trying to, in effect, determine the government of Ukraine. And so later, when a coup d’état occurred there, I think Russia had every reason, and certainly President Putin, to feel that this had been fueled by the United States and its West European allies, because they had representatives openly trying to promote specific candidates in Ukraine, which in fact became in control of Ukraine in 2014.
And so this is a very complicated situation. Not only did the U.S. and the West European allies try to determine the internal politics of Ukraine so that it would in effect be hostile to Russia, something that certainly the United States would have reacted very forcefully if it had happened to us.
Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis
I can bear witness to that because I was in Moscow in 1961 during what we call the Cuban Missile Crisis. And let’s recall what that was all about. The United States had attempted to invade Cuba unsuccessfully, and Cuba had asked the Soviet Union to supply nuclear weapons. Now, under traditional international law, that was not a violation of international law, particularly since the United States had nuclear weapons poised in Turkey and also Italy that could reach the Soviet Union. This was before either of us had intercontinental missiles. These were very immediate range.
Of course, President Kennedy considered this totally unacceptable and ordered a quarantine, he called it, of Cuba. And we came very close to a nuclear exchange. I was sitting in Moscow then and translating some of Khrushchev’s comments, but finally Khrushchev backed down and agreed to take those weapons out. And in effect, Kennedy declared victory, although he had agreed that we would remove the missiles in Turkey. But that could not be publicized. In other words, he forced Khrushchev to make it look as if he had backed down when in fact there was a deal.
But having seen that, having been through that, it was very clear to me that trying to influence the internal politics of Ukraine against the wishes of Russia was not a good idea, to put it mildly.
Ukraine, NATO, and the Borders Created by Hitler and Stalin
And in fact, when at the United States’ insistence that NATO declare that someday Ukraine and Georgia would be members, this is in 2008, it was clear to me that this was going to create very, very serious difficulties. And so at that time, polls showed that two-thirds of Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO. This country was increasingly divided, and increasingly the politics were pushed by those in Western Ukraine, the areas that traditionally had never been part of Russia, but had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then in Poland.
And I might say that the current borders of Ukraine, which the current government is trying to recover, were borders created by Hitler and Stalin. So in effect, the Ukrainians and the West Europeans who are supporting this are ironically trying to enforce something created by Hitler and Stalin. Think about that and think about how that resonates with Russians.
And so the issues there are very deep and I think increasingly tragic. Both countries, I think, have followed policies which are not in the interest of their people. And it’s difficult to see how this is going to be resolved. But I must say that when we look at the causes, the attempts of the United States and its West European allies to control an area which is absolutely vital to the security of Russia was, I think, an important causative factor. We have reached a point now that it is very difficult to see how that’s going to be resolved so that it doesn’t negatively affect all of us.
GLENN DIESEN: Well, in terms of ending the Cold War, we see that the diplomacy was very important, and we were, I would say, blessed with having some good statesmen at this point in time. But how do you make sense of the current political leadership across the West, both the US and Europe, compared to the diplomacy which helped to bring an end to the Cold War?
Because when I look at people today, be it Merz in Germany, the rhetoric there, or Macron in France, Starmer in the UK, all three of them, by the way, talking now about war with Russia, or Trump in the United States, who is hardly a benign leader himself. How do you make sense of this, that we don’t seem to have diplomacy anymore? I often ask why none of our political leaders or even journalists want to even discuss the security concerns and interests of our opponents, not just the Russians, but all opponents. It’s very confusing. Sorry, that was a very long question, but how do you make sense of the current political leadership?
The Hubris of Western Foreign Policy
JACK MATLOCK: I can’t make sense of it. I can only say that I think that previous norms of diplomacy have simply been abandoned. And we talk about democracy. You know, democracy can mean several things. One thing, it can be a process that the citizens or residents, citizens of a given country should determine its government and so on. That’s a process. Or you can begin to put labels on countries. Oh, some are democratic and some are not. I think the labeling can be quite false.
The United States is not in the final sense a total democracy. We are a republic, and a republic which, by any current analysis, is run by an oligarchy, an oligarchy which is divided, and yet it is one in which the majority of the people do not decide our policies. And I think that has happened also to some degree in other countries. But the idea that somehow there is a division between democracies and non-democracies, and that it was the duty of the United States to, quote, “spread democracy,” even if it means changing governments. I think that was very, very similar to the idea the Soviet Union had until Gorbachev. That it was the vanguard of the proletariat and had to support what they call proletarian revolutions throughout the world because socialism, in their definition, and communism was the future of the world. In effect, we, with just a few changes, tended to try the same thing.
Now, we used very high-flow language. We said that, you know, human rights are very important and we need to enforce them. You know, the problem with that is, first of all, it’s a misnomer. What we really should be talking about is civil rights. I think that human beings do not enter the world with rights. In fact, they’re totally dependent upon other people, and every other mammal is. So the idea that, and I know this has enframed a lot of rhetoric, that should be. The fact is that every great civilization defines their values and their rights, and one needs to understand that. And an attempt, you know, on those grounds to interfere in other countries is going to create great difficulties.
Fukuyama’s “End of History” and Its Consequences
So then I think the idea that, and it was expressed first by one of our scholars, Fukuyama, that in effect, the end of the Cold War meant that what they call the West and democracy was the future of the world, and it was the duty of what they call the democratic countries to spread it to other countries. And that, I think, was a fundamentally mistaken idea. Not that human rights, what we call them, that these rights are not valuable things, but to consider that anybody who doesn’t agree with you on that is somehow at fault gets it all wrong because I think that civilizations have risen and fallen throughout the last few millennia of human history. But to think that there is one formula that fits everybody, I believe, is simply fundamentally incorrect.
And the idea that the fact that the United States and the West survived the Cold War in better economic shape than the others, who were trying, in effect, to adopt our system, as we tried to persuade them. But once they do, we find that the West is actually sanctioning Russia economically, and so on, instead of keeping them in the, I would say, the one world economic system that was created after the end of the Cold War. So that I think that this feeling of righteousness, when we shouldn’t have, has undermined the ability of straight thinking.
Nord Stream, Ukraine, and the Minsk Agreement
Right now, I cannot understand how any German government could tolerate the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. I mean, after all, Germany now is not going to be competitive in many ways because of the high cost of energy. And how you let, I would say, a misapplication of policy toward Ukraine. And the idea of the West Europeans that Ukraine is a democratic society simply struggling. Ukraine is one of the least democratic countries in the world, and it has a government that was achieved by a coup d’état by a minority. And it is one of the most corrupt.
Now, it is not that the Ukrainians are bad. They’re wonderful people. I happen to be one who knows both Russian and Ukrainian. I got my PhD in Slavic languages. And it is tragic the way that I would say West European and the United States have been pushing for something which is not in Ukraine’s interest.
And so without going into all the details of the whole thing, I’ll say one thing, that when the agreement was made in Minsk in 2015, that in effect, Russia at that time, though it had taken Crimea, where the majority of people clearly prefer to be in Russia, that at that time, President Putin agreed, refused any attempt to bring the Donbas into Russia, but said that Ukraine must return to what it had originally had, that is, to recognizing the Russian language of also political validity and to grant amnesty. But France and Germany, which were parties to that, continued to supply, militarily supply the Ukraine with forces that were attacking the eastern part.
So that one can say one of the reasons Russia opposes a ceasefire now is that they had one before. And not only Ukraine, but also Britain and France that were parties violated it because they were supplying military weapons. And later, of course, the former German chancellor said, “Oh well, they signed that just to give Ukraine a chance to build up their military to take it.”
A Pattern of Western Military Interventions
So, you know, I think it is tragic, and I think that President Putin made a horrible mistake when he invaded Ukraine. But, and I’m not, I am not one that justifies that, but I have to recognize that my own country and NATO illegally attacked Serbia, over what was something that Serbia had not attacked any NATO country. And then the United States, with some but not all of the NATO allies, attacked Iraq on fabricated grounds that they had nuclear weapons when they didn’t. We completely occupied the country. Hundreds of thousands of people probably were killed and they stimulated a revival of the Islamic, extreme Islamic groups. So, I mean, don’t we understand that? Actually, the United States and some of its NATO allies.
And then later, we had the case of Libya. And yes, Gaddafi was a tyrant in many respects. No question about that. And there was a UN Security Council determination that, oh, we should protect the opponents of Gaddafi in Benghazi. But that was expanded to a war that ended in the assassination of Gaddafi, just as the war in Ukraine had ended in the assassination of Saddam Hussein. Now, these were certainly bad guys in many ways. But was it the responsibility of outsiders to deal with them, particularly to deal with them the way that brought about internal conditions that were worse for everybody there?
So there was a certain hubris and a feeling that, oh, we can do things that others can’t, and maybe physically. There was also the idea that by use of force, you could topple a government and get something better. It doesn’t happen.
The Danger of Regime Change in Russia
And one of the great dangers now, when people talk about needing regime change in Russia, is that if President Putin is removed by force, you are probably going to get something even worse because there are forces there that are already arguing that Russia has to use its nuclear forces to defend itself. And when the West Europeans start sending weapons to Ukraine that they use to attack Russia, I think already former President Medvedev has said that, you know, “We will consider any of the factors that make these weapons legitimate targets.”
You know, I’m not saying that this is a good policy or not. I’m just saying, I think you have to look at the realities and why Germany would be involved again. And arming rebels in any area that was once part of the Soviet Union, I think is almost inconceivable, and I can’t understand why the current government is doing it.
China’s Rising Influence and Western Decline
But I can see that let’s put on a broader context. Right now, I think both in economic ways and political, China is profiting greatly from all of this because to most of the world, they seem to be the only great power right now that is asking for peace. And tending to support it. And I think it is really a catastrophe that we in the West, through our own hubris and I think misunderstanding of the situation, is in effect conceding leadership in many of these areas to China. Certainly they’re doing a better job of developing alternative energies. And they’re increasingly doing a better job of engineering and producing things like electric cars and so on.
So how we continue to think of wars and use of the military to change things, it seems to me that that is not very rational. In saying so, I’m not endorsing, you know, the Chinese government or the things they do internally. I think that’s something that the Chinese, only the Chinese can change if it needs changing. About the hubris that somehow we in the West possess superiority over the others, which seems to lie behind some of this, I think is deplorable, and I hope it will change.
A Word on the Near East
Let me also say that we haven’t mentioned the Near East, and that of course is, as right now, one that is dominating many things. And all I can say is that I think the recent exchanges between Pope Leo and the President of the United States show that for once we have a Pope that is calling it like it is. There were charges during the Second World War that Pope Pius did not condemn what was going on. I’m not a Catholic, but right now I do think that our American Pope, the first, is telling the world something it needs to hear.
GLENN DIESEN: Very much agree. And that’s one of the, I think, great tragedies as well, that no one is speaking about peace anymore. One is currently engaged in this war with Iran, also war with Russia. People are talking about a possible war with China. At least European leaders have sat by for 4 years while all these hundreds of thousands of people have been dying in Ukraine, and they didn’t even pick up a phone to discuss the security architecture or some way to mitigate the security competition with the Russians. It’s quite appalling, grotesque really. But yeah, hopefully, we’ll be turning a corner. Anyways, Ambassador, thank you so much for taking the time. I think I’ve already taken a bit too much of your time, so I very much appreciate it.
JACK MATLOCK: Thank you for having me on and for listening.
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