How close was Russia to NATO membership?

Lunch was over and coffee was served in the East Wing of the White House, but US President Bill Clinton, 48, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, 63, had not yet exchanged a word about NATO’s eastern expansion. Finally, Clinton took his guest by the hand and said: “Boris, one more thing: about NATO. Please remember, I never said that we should not consider Russia for membership… in NATO. So when we talk about NATO enlargement, we emphasize inclusion, not exclusion.” He then added: “My goal is to work with you and others to maximize the chances of a truly united, unified, and integrated Europe.”

“I understand,” Yeltsin replied. “And I am grateful to you for what you said.”

That US-Russian summit was held in September 1994. Five years later, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary joined the Alliance, followed by 11 other European countries as part of NATO's eastern expansion. But Russia, the world's largest country, was not among them.

If Russia had joined, NATO would have become the most powerful military alliance in human history, stretching from San Francisco to Vladivostok, with control over almost all the nuclear weapons in the world at that point. Of the official nuclear powers, only China would not be a member. But that vision never became a reality. On the contrary, relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated significantly since then. Under Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, Moscow is now probably as far from NATO membership as it was under the Kremlin dictator Joseph Stalin. And it was Stalin’s aggressive foreign policy that led to NATO’s founding in 1949. Some Western politicians even fear that Putin might launch an attack on NATO after a possible victory in Ukraine.

So what was the intention when the American president discussed with his guest the possible accession of Russia to NATO? Was the idea serious, as Clinton claimed, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when he said that during his presidency they “left the door open for possible Russian membership in NATO”?

Or should we believe Putin, who contradicted Clinton and created the impression that there was never really a path for Russia to become a member of the Alliance? Did the West squander an opportunity to persuade Moscow to abandon the path that ultimately led to the attack on Ukraine?

SPIEGEL: Der Spiegel has examined previously classified German documents from 1994. That was the year when NATO member states made the crucial decision to admit former Warsaw Pact countries. The documents come from the private archive of one of the participants and from a collection of documents that the Institute for Contemporary History regularly publishes on behalf of the German Foreign Ministry. They include letters sent by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Clinton, reports by German diplomats in Moscow and Washington, and internal analyses compiled for Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel.

According to the documents, Clinton did indeed consider including Russia in NATO. That was the “official US position,” German Ambassador Thomas Matusek reported in Washington in 1994.

Clinton, a bright Southerner with an optimistic nature, believed that his generation - the new generation - had a special responsibility to shape the future. He also believed that the Cold War had shown that almost anything was possible.

The US government at the time was regularly discussing the possibility of Russian accession with its allies, such as the January 15 meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Strobe Talbot, Clinton’s friend from college, Russia expert, and the president’s top adviser on NATO’s eastern expansion, also arrived. Talbot briefed the NATO ambassadors present on Clinton’s position. Afterwards, the German representative informed Bonn that if the Alliance followed the American approach, the question of Russian membership would have to be considered “within a few years.” A few weeks later, a German diplomat in Washington reported that Talbot had even given a timeframe, saying that the process could begin around 2004.

Germany's concerns

The documents, now available, also show that Clinton and Talbot encountered significant resistance. Clinton had only been elected president the previous year, and Talbot was a newcomer to the State Department, having previously worked as a journalist at Time magazine. The pair failed to convince even experienced officials within their own government of their plan, as a surprised delegation from the German Foreign Ministry noted in 1994.

The Germans then held meetings with senior officials from the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA. All said they could not understand why Clinton had not long ago “changed” his approach to Russia’s possible NATO membership. A German embassy official called the meeting “significant.”

The American president also faced strong opposition from allies in Europe, especially Chancellor Kohl’s government. When it came to the possible inclusion of Russia in NATO, the German government was “flexible as concrete.” Russian membership would be “the death knell of the Alliance,” complained Defense Minister Volker Rieh, a senior member of Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), although Rieh would later change his position.

Diplomats in Bonn drew up a long list of reasons for concern: internal differences would become too great, NATO would be unable to make decisions. In addition, the Alliance was an “insurance policy against Russian instability” – a policy that would be invalidated if Moscow became a member. Most importantly, if Moscow became part of the Alliance, Western soldiers might be forced to “defend Russia on the border with China (a nuclear power) and Mongolia”. Such a thing was unthinkable, and it would also undermine the credibility of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which stipulates that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Conclusion: “Russia’s accession would mean the end of the Alliance as we know it.”

This was a fundamental concern that could not be dismissed lightly. Bonn did not believe that even a reliably democratic Russia could ever be part of the Alliance.

Since other European NATO members shared this view, it is difficult to imagine how Russia could ever become a member, especially since decisions on joining the Alliance are made unanimously. Years later, Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, failed to secure Ukraine's membership in the Alliance due to opposition from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders.

Kinkel's pronunciation

However, Kohl and Kinkel did not want to alienate the Kremlin. A working group consisting of officials from the German chancellor's office, the Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry of Defense formulated a position paper, which was distributed to all German missions abroad in November 1994. It stated: "Russia, just like Ukraine and Belarus, cannot become a member of either the WEU or NATO. However, public statements to this effect should be avoided, given the desired agreements with the Moscow leadership." The Western European Union (WEU) was a European defense alliance that was later dissolved.

When Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev at one point asked his German counterpart what Germany had against his country joining NATO, Kinkel quickly came up with an excuse. NATO, he said, was “currently” not ready for Russia to join, according to the new documents.

Kohl, by contrast, was spared the awkward question in phone calls and meetings with Yeltsin, according to Joachim Bitterlich, then the chancellor’s most important foreign policy adviser. Yeltsin probably didn’t mention it because he thought it depended largely on the Americans. Kohl simply avoided saying anything. “Der Spiegel once described me as the last dinosaur,” Kohl told Clinton at the time. “And if that’s true, I should tread carefully.” Dinosaurs, he added, don’t always have to be in the front lines.

The three politicians, Kohl, Clinton, and Yeltsin, were close and spoke informally. The son of a farmer from the Urals, Yeltsin had grown up in poverty before becoming an engineer. Kohl, who was about the same age, admired the courage and willingness to reform shown by Yeltsin, who had crushed a communist coup attempt in 1994. Kohl believed that Western support for Yeltsin was vital, but he did not believe that this support should take the form of NATO membership.

Yeltsin's test

The rather spectacular idea initially came from the Kremlin, when Yeltsin first expressed interest in NATO membership on December 20, 1991. These were the final days of the Soviet Union, which had collapsed at the end of that year, and as president of the new Russia, Yeltsin wrote in a letter to Brussels that he was prepared to view membership “as a long-term political goal.”

It was a proposal that fit the optimistic mood of the time: Russia, Yeltsin promised, had “breathed the air of democracy, felt freedom,” adding that it would become “a different country.”

When Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary joined the Alliance a year and a half later, Kozyrev, Yeltsin's foreign minister, asked the Americans to treat the Russians the same as other new democracies.

Kozyrev now lives in the United States and is a critic of Vladimir Putin. Even then, Russia experts at the German Foreign Ministry considered him to be oriented towards “Western ideals (democracy, human rights, the establishment of new security structures)”. He “advocated Russia’s integration into European and transatlantic institutions”. In his 2019 memoirs, Kozyrev wrote that the NATO issue was for his government “a litmus test of whether the Alliance is fundamentally against Russia’s interests”.

From the Russian perspective, there was a “fundamental understanding” that emerged from the negotiations that led to German unification in 1990, as the German Foreign Ministry stated in 1994: “The USSR/Russia relinquishes control over the territory up to the Elbe and withdraws its military presence from the entire region. In return, the West refrains from political or military exploitation of this, and a European security architecture is jointly established in an equal partnership.”

It still remains unclear, however, whether Russia was truly prepared to join the Alliance as just one of many members - or whether it desired a special, hegemonic status.

The Kremlin, in any case, believed it had fulfilled its part of the “fundamental understanding.” In 1994, Russian troops permanently withdrew from Germany, Estonia, and Latvia. German diplomats in Bonn also believed that the Russian military was in a “desperate state.” NATO’s eastward expansion was incompatible with the security situation—a view shared even by pro-Western reformers in Moscow. Unless, of course, Russia were part of that expansion.

During a trip to Europe in January 1994, Clinton said that NATO enlargement was no longer a question of “if” but “when and how.” When the US president then flew to Moscow, Yeltsin proposed that NATO include Russia as the first new member. Clinton did not agree with this order of accession, but he did signal his substantive support for the possibility of Russian membership, which Talbot quickly conveyed to America’s NATO allies. Diplomats in Bonn immediately expressed their opposition: “We advised the Americans not to encourage Russian considerations in this regard.”

Cole's hesitation

From Helmut Kohl’s perspective, the whole debate about enlargement came at the wrong time. “We have to tell these Eastern European countries that they can count on our support, but not on membership,” he said. Four years after German reunification, the chancellor’s international reputation was at its peak. He considered Clinton’s enlargement plans premature and wanted to avoid anything that might weaken Yeltsin, who was up for re-election in 1996 and was under enormous pressure from ultranationalist hardliners.

Kohl thought that Polish President Lech Walesa’s warning about the “Russian bear,” that is, that it should be caged and not allowed to roam freely, was exaggerated. The Poles, he complained, were determined to join NATO and “didn’t care at all what price we might have to pay Moscow as a result.” Kinkel also asked the Americans to reassure the Poles: “It’s not likely that the Russians will attack them tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, the Chancellor and his Foreign Minister were pursuing their own agenda. They wanted to see Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and perhaps other countries in the European Union, which needed to be reformed first. Given this priority, it seemed unlikely that the transatlantic alliance could be expanded before the year 2000 - if at all.

Clinton's decision

But Clinton didn’t want to wait that long. He had studied at Oxford and clearly had a genuine dream of a Europe united in peace, including Russia. But he too was facing increasing pressure. Republicans had discovered eastern enlargement as a powerful political weapon and were consulting with the Polish government. They accused Clinton of being too soft on Moscow. It was one of the issues that led to the Republicans’ dramatic gains in the 1994 midterm elections.

With a touch of glee, Alexander Vershbow, the White House’s senior director for European affairs and a passionate advocate of NATO enlargement, told a senior German official that Kohl himself had unwittingly helped Clinton accelerate the pace significantly. Kohl told the American president, who had apparently been completely unaware of it until then, about Bonn’s timetable for EU reform. The US had hoped that NATO enlargement would begin in 1996 or 1997, with Poland as the first candidate. The German ambassador to NATO, Hermann von Richthofen, reported on 22 November 1994 that the Americans were now acting on a motto he quoted in English: “My way or no way.”

This permanently pushed Russian membership in NATO into the background. From then on, it seemed like a transparent attempt to reconcile the Russians with the impending accession of Poland and other countries to the Alliance - an attempt that ultimately failed. As early as November 1994, Russian diplomat Yuri Ushakov angrily declared that NATO's eastern expansion was "a kind of betrayal."

This is the same Yuri Ushakov who today represents Vladimir Putin in negotiations regarding the war in Ukraine.

Prepared by: NB