The Rise and Fall of the Partnership for Peace, pt. 1

First part of a series on post-Cold War US-EU-Russia diplomacy

“We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction… one inch to the east.” Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbechav

When the Soviet Union came apart in 1991, there were serious concerns on both sides of the rusted iron curtain that violence might break out along any number of vectors. The fuse was already burning in the Balkans, but that was hardly the only region that kept Western and Russian leaders up at night. Countless ethnic and religious grievances had been suppressed under the weight of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and threatened to reignite as nationalist sentiment surged in the former Soviet Bloc. The Soviet armory hit the open market in the 1990s, and there was real worry over whether the nuclear arsenal could be accounted for and brought under control. No one was asking what might, at first glance, seem an obvious question in the wake of the Soviet collapse, namely, why not wind down NATO as well? It was considered very possible that Balkans-style warfare could break out among newly independent states, many of whom had had their borders moved and populations transferred under Stalin. The last thing anyone wanted was a war between, say, Ukraine and Poland, over their long-disputed Galician borderlands, especially since a good number of the USSR’s nukes remained in newly-independent Ukraine. Kazakhstan and other countries also had Soviet nukes on the day the empire collapsed. There was great concern that the world was about to have several new nuclear powers, and it is a signal achievement of the post-Cold War period that we came out of the crisis with the same number of nuclear states that we had going into it. But at the time, no one knew how that was going to turn out. In the case of war or nuclear danger, there would have been a need for a military power on the ground that could quickly act to stabilize the situation, and the only organization that could hope to meet that mission was NATO.