The following is a transcript of former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley’s remarks during a Carnegie Council talk on Jan. 23, 2008. Bradley served as U.S. Senator from New Jersey in 1979-1997. Bradley comments here on the original promise made, in 1990, by the then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand “one inch Eastward,” if the Soviet Union would allow the reunification of Germany, which would remain in NATO. This promise, as many readers will know, was broken many times over, starting in 1999 during the Clinton Administration, and multiple times since.
BILL BRADLEY: On Russia, this is a terribly sad thing for me, because I spent a lot of time in the ’80s and early ’90s on Russia. I’d go there every year, I’d spend weeks there. I traveled all over, and I got to know most of the people who ran the government, and who are now there. And I think that right now we’re confronted with something that potentially could have been avoided. And the fundamental blunder that the United States made in the mid-’80s, late ’80s to early ’90s was the expansion of NATO. I mean, here we had won the Cold War! And you then had people saying, “Well. now what are we going to do with NATO?” “Oh, well, I don’t know. It’s a bureaucracy. It works. What are we going to do with it?” And so then [came] the idea of expanding NATO.
The problem with it is this. During the negotiation for the reunification of Germany [between] Gorbachev and Jim Baker, Jim Baker says to Gorbachev, “In the treaty it says no NATO troops in what was then East Germany.” In the discussions—and I had this discussion with Gorbachev last summer—he told me, very directly, in the conversation with Jim Baker, the question was, Baker saying, “If you agree to reunification of Germany, in NATO, NATO will not expand one inch further East,” which is what I went to see Gorbachev to confirm, because I care so much about this—“Is this true?”
