Abstract
One comes away from this book wishing that more dreams came true. Mikhail Gorbachev's most certainly did not. As the Soviet leader hammered the last nails into the Cold War's coffin during the spring of 1990, he dared to dream of a future in which peaceful superpower cooperation might replace the militarized antagonism of Europe's previous 40 years. NATO and the Warsaw Pact would dissolve, he hoped, and a new pan-European security organization would allow all Europeans, Americans and Soviets to live in a ‘common European house’. US Secretary of State James Baker had many strengths, but dreaming was not one of them. He told the Soviet leader that his vision was ‘an excellent dream, but only a dream’ (p. 88). The reality, as Baker understood it, was that the United States had won the Cold War, NATO had kept the peace on the European continent, and all of Gorbachev's former allies in Central and Eastern Europe now wanted to join the western alliance. There was no need to dream up a new European security architecture because, with the Warsaw Pact now melting away, there was nothing to fix about the old one.
Not One Inch is the best history to date of how American and Russian leaders went from the early post-Cold War world where dreams seemed unnecessary to our current one, in which dreams seem out of reach. The book offers a briskly-told, deeply-researched and analytically-balanced international history of NATO expansion in the 1990s. Its central drama concerns why NATO leaders (above all, those in Washington) chose to rapidly expand the alliance by extending full Article 5 membership to a select number of states in Central and Eastern Europe rather than by offering incremental accession to a large number of states, including Russia, through a new NATO initiative called the Partnership for Peace (PfP). Leaders in the Kremlin stridently criticized this choice for reestablishing the Cold War division of the continent further to the east and warned Western leaders that it would only serve to strengthen anti-Western and anti-liberal forces within Russia. But the expansionists proceeded undeterred. The accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as full members in 1999 set the scene not only for future rounds of full Article 5 expansion, but also for the rise and resistance of Vladimir Putin to the West's encroachment under the umbrella of NATO.
Sarotte's arguments for why the advocates of full Article 5 expansion prevailed over those advocating for the Partnership for Peace are admirably wide ranging. Fierce bureaucratic battles within the Clinton administration, the Republicans’ stunning victory in the 1994 midterm elections, effective advocacy for expansion from Central and Eastern European leaders, the denuclearization of Ukraine, and Boris Yeltsin's violent turn to domestic repression all coalesced to give advocates of Article 5 expansion the upper hand by late 1994. The broad outlines of this confluence of events will be well-known to specialists, but Sarotte's archival research has yielded numerous new discoveries for even the most seasoned NATO watcher.
The weight of this new evidence makes clear that the forces pulling US policymakers in the direction of NATO expansion in general – and Article 5 expansion in particular – were prodigious. In some of the most revealing sections of the book, Sarotte makes abundantly clear that leaders in the crumbling Warsaw Pact were inquiring about joining NATO before the Cold War had even ended. As early as February 1990, Hungarian leaders were promoting expansion of the alliance to US officials as a means of providing a ‘political umbrella’ for the region's post-communist development (p. 68). Such advocacy continued throughout the 1990s and strengthened the bureaucratic leverage of the numerous American officials who shared this understanding of the transformative power of their alliance. Particularly after the Republican triumph in the 1994 midterm elections, Article 5 expansion became the path of least resistance for US President Bill Clinton.
Despite this constellation of foreign and domestic pressures favouring Article 5 expansion, Sarotte contends that Clinton need not have embraced it. ‘What happened did not have to happen’, she concludes (p. 345). In her view, Clinton administration officials foolishly frittered away their chance to make the Partnership for Peace the bedrock of NATO's forays into the former Eastern Bloc. If they had chosen this path, they would have not only preserved US-Russian cooperation for longer and supported pro-Western reform within Russia, but also perhaps have averted the long descent into hostility that now defines Russia's relations with the West. That US officials should have done this is, in retrospect, relatively clear to see. Whether they plausibly could have done so is another matter. Maintaining the PfP as the long-term basis of NATO expansion would have required that most leading members of the Clinton administration – including Clinton himself – actually believed in such a vision. But there is little evidence that they did. Faced with unrelenting criticism over PfP from opportunistic Republicans at home and moral titans like Lech Walesa abroad, Clinton quickly dropped all conviction that the PfP was anything more than a makeshift step on the way to NATO's ultimate destination, Article 5 expansion. PfP was not ‘a permanent holding room’, he told the world in early 1994. ‘The question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members…but when and how’ (187).
Resisting Article 5 expansion – not just in 1993 and 1994, but indefinitely – would have required something more than the bureaucratic band-aid that the PfP provided. It would have required a radically different vision of international order worth fighting for. But after the collapse of communism appeared to confirm that the West's ways had won, dreams of different futures were in short supply, at least within the halls of power. As Not One Inch makes all too clear, after the Cold War the dreamers had no power, and the powerful had no dreams.