Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock demonstrates in a Feb. 17 radio interview with Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now” that the Ukraine crisis is the direct result of the post-Cold War push for expansion of NATO. He headlined his latest article. “I was There: NATO and the Origins of the Ukraine Crisis.” (https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/02/15/the-origins-of-the-ukraine-crisis-and-how-conflict-can-be-avoided/)
Ambassador Matlock writes about his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 25 years ago, having been stationed in Moscow in the early 1960s, and there during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He writes that, 25 years ago, he told the Senate, “I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.”
Matlock explained about that article to Democracy Now: “The reason I testified against expanding NATO expansion … in the late ’90s, was because we had — at the end of the Cold War, we had removed the Iron Curtain. We had created what we had aimed for: a Europe whole and free. And it was obvious, if you start piecemeal expanding NATO, you are going to — without including Russia — you are going to once again precipitate a buildup of arms and a competition, an armed competition, then. But there was no reason to do it at that time. Russia was not threatening any East European country. Actually, the Soviet Union in its last years was not, because Gorbachev had accepted the democratization of the East European countries.The Soviet Union in its last years was not threatening any East European country.”
Matlock thought then that there should be a European security organization that included Russia. “So, I certainly approved at the time the continuation of the NATO that existed at the end of the Cold War; however, I thought it should be integrated into an overall European security organization that included Russia, the East Europeans and the other states that had been in the Soviet Union. And we actually had plans for that at the time through a proposal called the Partnership for Peace, which could include them all.”
But problems included not only NATO expansion, but that the second Bush Administration withdrew from almost all of the arms control agreements, and directly intruded into the politics of newly independent, formerly Soviet countries. Matlock states that after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. “reversed the diplomacy that we had used to end the Cold War, and started sort of doing anything, everything the opposite way. We started, in effect, trying to control other countries, to bring them into what we called the ‘new world order,’ but it was not very orderly. And we also sort of asserted the right to use military whenever we wished. We bombed Serbia in the ’90s without the approval of the UN Later, we invaded Iraq, citing false evidence and without any UN approval and against the advice not only of Russia but of Germany and France, our allies. So, the United States — I could name a number of others — itself was not careful in abiding by the international laws that we had supported.”
Matlock concludes that perceptions count, especially “if President Putin feels he is being pressed and his security threatened — rightly or wrongly, because it’s perceptions that count — then what’s to keep him, since we have walked out of most of the other agreements, from putting, say, intermediate-range missiles in Kaliningrad or bringing them close to the border? Then what are we going to do? So, to get into another insane arms race, when we have so many other common problems we need to deal with, I think, is extraordinarily unwise.” [agg]
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/17/jack_matlock_ukraine_russia_nato_us
