With more than 100,000 Russian troops circling the Ukrainian border, prompting formal diplomatic engagement from the United States and NATO, a 30-year-old foreign policy debate has made a return to center stage.
The question: Should NATO, the mutual defense pact formed in the wake of World War II that has long served to represent Western interests and counter Russia's influence in Europe, expand eastward?
NATO's founding articles declare that any European country that is able to meet the alliance's criteria for membership can join. This includes Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies in Europe have repeatedly said they are committed to that "open-door" policy.
But in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO's eastward march represents decades of broken promises from the West to Moscow.
"You promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly," Putin said at a news conference in December.
The U.S. says a ban on expansion was never on the table. But Russia insists it was — and now, Putin is demanding a permanent ban on Ukraine from joining the pact.
"Unsurprisingly, when you look at the evidence, what happened is somewhere in between," said Mary Sarotte, a post-Cold War historian whose book about those negotiations, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, was published last fall.
What is the origin of Putin's "not move an inch" claim?
For the first four decades of NATO's existence, the treaty represented the U.S., Canada and America's closest allies in Western and southern Europe. On the other side of the Iron Curtain were the Soviet Union and its allies in Central and Eastern Europe, including the former East Germany.
But that long-standing divide was challenged in 1989 when anti-communist protests spread across East Germany and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Early in the effort to reunify Germany, U.S. officials wrestled with the question of Soviet control of the east: What could entice Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to withdraw?
"The Americans guess that maybe what Gorbachev wants in exchange for letting Germany unify is a promise that NATO will not expand eastward," Sarotte said. "And so Secretary of State [James] Baker, in a speculative way in an early stage of negotiations, says to Gorbachev, 'How about this idea: How about you let your half of Germany go, and we agree to move that one piece forward?' "
But President George H.W. Bush rejected the idea, and when more formal negotiations began later in 1990, a ban on NATO expansion was never actually offered, Sarotte said.
There is some disagreement about what took place during the Baker-Gorbachev talks in February 1990. Some say that when Baker suggested that NATO shift not "one inch" to the east, he intended to refer only to East Germany, because neither side had begun to think about NATO expansion beyond that.
Seemingly conflicting comments from U.S. officials and Gorbachev made years later do not help clear this up. (Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said as recently as Friday that "nobody was even imagining Czechoslovakia or Poland or Hungary at that time.")
The historical record shows otherwise, according to Sarotte. Contemporaneous notes, letters, speeches and interviews show that Western leaders were, in fact, already contemplating NATO enlargement by the time the February 1990 talks took place, she says.
What is not in dispute: Gorbachev later agreed to withdraw from East Germany in exchange for financial concessions, in a treaty that did not place limits on the future expansion of NATO.
"But there's this residual bitterness afterwards. Still, to this day, Putin is saying, 'Look, there was this other offer on the table, right?' " Sarotte said. "And that's sort of factually accurate in a narrow sense, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the treaty."
