Gibbs:
One of the surprises of the post-Cold War
era is the persistence of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization and other US-led
alliances. These alliances were created
during the Cold War mainly or exclusively
for containing the claimed Soviet threat. In
1991, the USSR disappeared from the map,
but the anti-Soviet alliance
systems persisted and in fact expanded. How
do we account for the persistence
and expansion of NATO? What in your view is
the purpose of NATO after the Cold War?
Chomsky:
We have official answers to that. It’s a
very interesting question, which I was
planning to talk about but didn’t have time.
So thanks. It’s a very interesting question.
For fifty years, we heard NATO is necessary
to save Western Europe from the Russian
hordes, you know the slave state, stuff I
was taking about. In 1990-91, no Russian
hordes. Okay, what happens? Well there are
actually visions of the future system that
were presented. One was Gorbachev. He called
for a Eurasian security system, with no
military blocs. He called it a Common
European Home. No military blocs, no Warsaw
Pact, no NATO, with centers of power in
Brussels, Moscow, Ankara, maybe Vladivostok,
other places. Just an integrated security
system with no conflicts.
That was one. Now the other vision was
presented by George Bush, this is the
“statesman,” Bush I and James Baker his
secretary of state. There’s very good
scholarship on this incidentally. We really
know a lot about what happened, now that all
the documents are out. Gorbachev said that
he would agree to the unification of
Germany, and even adherence of Germany to
NATO, which was quite a concession, if NATO
didn’t move to East Germany. And Bush and
Baker promised verbally, that’s critical,
verbally that NATO would not expand “one
inch to the east,” which meant East Germany.
Nobody was talking about anything farther at
the time. They would not expand one inch to
the east. Now that was a verbal promise. It
was never written. NATO immediately expanded
to East Germany. Gorbachev complained. He
was told look, there’s nothing on paper.
People didn’t actually say it but the
implication was look, if you are dumb enough
to take faith in a gentleman’s agreement
with us, that’s your problem. NATO expanded
to East Germany.
There’s very interesting work, if you want
to look into it by a young scholar in Texas
named Joshua Shifrinson, it appeared in
International Security, which is one of the
prestige journals, published by MIT.4 He
goes through the documentary record very
carefully and he makes a pretty convincing
case that Bush and Baker were purposely
deceiving Gorbachev. The scholarship has
been divided on that, maybe they just
weren’t clear or something. But if you read
it, I think it’s quite a convincing case,
that they were purposely setting it up to
deceive Gorbachev.
