Donald Blinken (Ambassador to Hungary, 1994-1998)
Cross-posted from Ambassador Blinken’s January 13, 2015 special to to The Huffington Post.
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Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, Russia’s is using complaints of humiliation by the West to support its seizure of the Crimea, its military presence in Eastern Ukraine, and its provocations in the Baltics.
One of the chief abuses Moscow cites it is the eastward expansion of NATO. In fact, however, expanding NATO has enhanced Russia’s security by extending the frontiers of stability. Since the 1990s, peace and quiet have prevailed along the NATO-Russian border. Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland – much less any of the Baltic states – were not, and are not, about to invade Russia. Meanwhile, the terrorist attacks suffered by Russia over the past two decades have all come from places to the east, like Chechnya and other former Islamic states of the USSR.
Nevertheless, Russia’s complaint about its humiliation at Western hands is being taken seriously in many circles, particularly this version of history: Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the U.S. and its allies deceived then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev by promising him that a reunited Germany would not join NATO, nor would Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) be offered NATO membership.
It is a cleverly concocted story, but the facts say otherwise.
Ambassadors Perspectives 