Not One Inch : America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate by Mary Sarotte

A leading expert on foreign policy reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics in a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2021 "Sarotte has the receipts, as it were: her authoritative tale draws on thousands of memos, letters, briefs, and other once secret documents-including many that have never been published before-which both fill in and complicate settled narratives on both sides."-Joshua Yaffa, New Yorker "The most engaging and carefully documented account of this period in East-West diplomacy currently available."-Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs Prize-winning historian, M.E. Sarotte pulls back the curtain on the crucial decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Vladimir Putin, when Americans and Russians-in conflict over NATO expansion and Europe's future-sowed the seeds of the tensions that shape today's world.

FIVE MINUTES WITH Mary Sarotte

INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)

How did you become interested in Russia?

I was an exchange student in West Berlin in 1989, studying Cold War history.  I became interested in the occupying powers of Britain, France, the USA, and the USSR. I wanted to learn more about those countries, and how the course of the Cold War had produced the building of the Berlin Wall. When I first arrived, no one knew, of course, the Wall was going to come down on 9 November 1989, so watching the Cold War order unravel was fascinating. I decided to earn a PhD in History at Yale University and have been working on the Cold War, its ending, and its legacy ever since.

What inspired you to write this book?

It’s the third in a loose trilogy on these topics (and when I started, I didn’t know that I was writing a trilogy). The first book, in order of events, is The Collapse.  It explores the way that a series of unintended events led to the opening of the Wall. The next book is on the diplomacy producing German reunification that took place between the British, French, Americans and the Soviets.  During that research, I discovered that one of the most contentious aspects of German unification was the fight between Moscow and Washington over NATO’s future. I decided it deserved its own book.  It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, since I had to fight to declassify many of my sources before I could even start writing.

Once my research got underway, I realized that Putin likes to mark personally important dates with violence.  I suspected that, on the 30th anniversary of Ukrainian independence and Soviet collapse in December 2021, he would continue this gruesome trend. I decided to publish Not One Inch in late 2021 to draw attention to these issues. At the time, people thought I was alarmist, but then 24 February 2022 happened.

How did you do your research?

Starting already in the 1990s, I carried out a number of interviews.  I like to do what I call “oral history with teeth,” meaning questions backed up by documents. I also did archival work in the US, Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and of course Russia.  And, I filed thousands of declassification requests.  Official documents that are generally closed for 20-30 years.  Using freedom of information requests, which was an exercise in administrative tedium, I was able to get those sources released ahead of time.  My biggest breakthrough came from the William Clinton Presidential Library.  After three years of appeals, the Library released the records of all his eighteen summits with Boris Yeltsin: briefing books, correspondence, and transcripts of the summits.  The Kremlin complained about the release of these papers, saying they should not have been declassified and it had not been consulted.  So I knew that I had gotten good material!

What surprised you?

It wasn’t exactly a surprise, but I was struck by the tragedy of how post-Cold War hope for US-Russian cooperation disappeared.  There was a tragic arc in Washington and in Moscow.  The  high point of US-Russia cooperation was around 1991-92.  In late 1991, the US secretary of state, James Baker, discussed the command and control of former Soviet nuclear weapons with Yeltsin.  Baker wrote down by hand secret information on the mechanics of launch; I found his handwritten notes in Baker’s papers.  Yeltsin was willing to talk about them partly because he wanted to curry favour with Washington in his struggle with Gorbachev, but partly because there was genuine trust at that time.  Later, Yeltsin even sought Clinton’s advice about how to leave office. By 1998, Yeltsin’s health had declined, and his drinking problems had worsened. His family was getting anxious that they might not be able to protect themselves if there wasn’t a suitable successor installed.

Yeltsin discussed with Clinton how he wanted Viktor Chernomyrdin to follow him as president. It would not have been all wine and roses today, but I don’t think we would be where we are now if that had happened. Yeltsin was also working on the assumption that Clinton could make Al Gore his successor.  Given Chernomyrdin and Gore’s successful work together in the past, Yeltsin assumed they would work together well in the future. But Yeltsin was unable to get his wish. 

Eventually he turned to Vladimir Putin, and he advised Clinton of that choice in advance.  Yeltsin urged the American to develop a relationship with Putin. Clinton had a magnetic personality.  He was usually able to establish warm relations with other leaders, but his charms did not work on Putin, who responded coldly.

What explains your book’s title?

There are two meanings. First, James Baker used it with Gorbachev in early 1990, initially proposing that if the USSR allowed German reunification, NATO would not move one inch eastwards. But the White House opted instead, in the words of the then-Deputy National Security Advisor Bob Gates, for “bribing the Soviets out.”  Gorbachev keeps trying to get back to the initial proposal of NATO non-enlargement, but he’s unable to do so after the White House drops the offer.  The final settlement on German unification makes clear the opposite:  that Article 5 of NATO will move eastward beyond the alliance’s Cold War border.  Moscow signs and ratifies this agreement.  That’s the opposite of what Putin says.  He twists and cherry-picks historical documents to make contrary claims, but they are inconsistent with later evidence.   

Second, “not one inch” gradually takes on the exact opposite meaning.  Under Clinton, an approach emerges based on the idea that not one inch of territory should be off limits for NATO.  Strobe Talbott called this policy the “robust open door” for accession.

What are your key conclusions?

Cold wars are not short-lived affairs and neither Moscow nor Washington made best use of the thaw. The full tragedy of that loss is now apparent.  There are no simple answers to the question of what went wrong, but it is possible to highlight key causes.  The disintegration of Russian democracy, combined with the rise of corruption, made relations with Western countries more difficult. Domestic politics in the US played a role as well.  And the friction of NATO enlargement contributed to the decline in bilateral relations at this critical moment when Russia briefly became a democracy, but a fragile one. Bill Perry [US defence secretary] stressed at the time that nothing was more important than working closely with a fragile democratic government Moscow to dismantle the strategic nuclear arsenal.  But Clinton overruled him when Perry sought a delay in NATO expansion.

Put briefly, the debate over NATO expansion has ignored these complexities and been too simplistic.  Enlargement’s supporters say it’s fantastic, its detractors say it’s awful, and there’s no middle ground. My research shows that NATO enlargement was not one thing. There were multiple ways to enlarge—known at the time—which would have caused less friction with Russia. I’m trying to complicate the narrative.

Who is most responsible for what happened?

There’s agency on both sides. For a brief moment, there was a way of enlarging NATO that was sustainable and minimally acceptable to all: the Partnership for Peace, a halfway house without full membership that could gradually deepen for democratising, market economies. That would have provided a berth for the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine.

But then came increasing Russian corruption and de-democratisation. A particularly bad mistake was Yeltsin’s violence against the Russian parliament in 1993 in Moscow and the invasion of Chechnya in 1994.  Yeltsin shed the blood of his opponents instead of sticking to democratic means. Seeing the bloodshed, European countries decided they didn’t want to be in the waiting room of the Partnership. Meanwhile, in the US, after the 1994 mid-term congressional elections, Clinton felt domestic pressure from the Republicans and changed his mind. Washington switched to all-or-nothing expansion.  Clinton had initially resisted this approach, saying it would draw a new line across Europe and leave Ukraine on the wrong side. But he gradually changes his mind.

What is your assessment of the situation today?

The USSR collapsed on paper in a day, but in reality that’s not how empires die. The collapse was not an event, it was a process—and, indeed, one which is still on-going, as Putin uses violence to contest the borders of the shrunken Soviet empire.

The big play in the post-Cold War era was to find a way to give Russia a lasting stake in Europe. Russia is the biggest country by size and military presence in Europe, with a strategic nuclear arsenal. You have to find a way to deal with it. There were ways that would have minimised friction but what’s happening now is extraordinarily dangerous.  The world’s two superpowers are operating in isolation, with consulates closed, diplomats sent home, arms control agreements ripped up. Putin is a grim and murderous leader who is unspeakably brutal and odious. What he’s doing is deeply dangerous for world peace. But, as the saying goes, you don’t make peace with your friends.