Shut Up About NATO Expansion

Part 3 pf 4
In which I talk about NATO Expansion, partly to debunk the idea that it caused the war but mostly as a springboard for explaining the evolution of the Russian-American relationship

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Music Credits:
Disasterpeace - Pressure
Scattle - Generator
Danger Mouse - Strangers
Scott Joplin - Maple Leaf Rag
Modest Mussorgsky - Night on Bald Mountain
Pyotr Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake Suite
Wrecks-N-Effect - Rump Shaker
Cypis - Gdzie Jes Biały Węgorz (Polish Cow)
Quelle Chris and Jean Grae - Gold Purple Orange
The Clash - White Riot
John Adams - Doctor Atomic Symphony, Mvmt. III
The Reduta Club Jazz Band feat. Bill Clinton - Summertime

0. It is worth noting that the natural gas theory is entirely implausible. By annexing Crimea, Russia only stole about 60-70 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Which could only be tapped (expensively) at a rate of about 1 trillion cf a year, max. This is enough to damage Ukraine's economy but not enough to change the picture as far as energy strategy in Europe. Norway alone exports 4 trillion cf of natural gas a year.

1. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president...

2. Iraq, of course, is the canonical example of America being unable to get the rest of NATO to join in on a military adventure. People with a more conspiratorial view of NATO sometimes point to the use of NATO infrastructure for the interventions in Kosovo and Libya, but in both these cases this was the result of a compromise in a situation in which Europe wanted the war more than the US, but didn't have the means to fight it on it's own. (The Libyan war was an initiative of Nicholas Sarkozy, and Clinton had promised not to send ground troops to Yugoslavia due to the wars unpopularity, and so making it a "NATO" mission allowed

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4. The evidence that America pressured Russia into doing Shock Therapy is surprisingly thin, given it's a common assumption. I read the 4 most popular English language accounts of Russia in the 90s that make this claim and all of them basically either rely on fraudulent sources or none at all.
The 1998 Nation magazine article "The Harvard Boys Do Russia" by Janine Wedel which is often presented as evidence, is mostly based on a fictional book called "How America Created the New Oligarchy" by a woman named Anne Williamson, who seems to have tried to make a career of shopping around a manuscript to different writers telling them that it was for a book that was just about to be published, but never was.

"The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein alleges that Bush pressured Gorbachev to do shock therapy by threatening to withhold aid unless Gorbachev gave up on gradual reform at the 1991 G7 meeting, however this contradicts both the declassified transcript of the conversation, and the description of the event in Gorbachev's memoirs.

"Globalization and It's Discontents" by Joseph Stiglitz mostly covers Stiglitz tenure at the World Bank and the CEA, which mostly took place after Yeltsin had given up on Shock Therapy in 1994, but he blames Larry Summers for not making more aid dependent on legal reform rather than making it dependent on more privatization. As I'll describe later, the decision to give Russia lots of aid in 1996 was a political decision and didn't hinge on either privatization or rule of law.

5. In the English transcript, it's explicitly stated that this was a hypothetical deal that could be made at the coming German reunification negotiations. When those negotiations actually came and the white house had revoked the offer, Gorbachev didn't have the leverage to prevent German reunification, and so had to settle for an agreement that no NATO infrastructure would be deployed on East German soil (and aid money).

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16...
Sarotte, M. E. "Not One Inch: America, Russia, and The Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate" Ch. 3

6. To make a long story short, James Baker's offer was a hypothetical of what could be agreed to at a six party negotiation on the terms by which East and West Germany would be reunified. During that conference, America was able to negotiate the Soviets down to a ban on deployments of non-German NATO troops to East Germany. But, the Germans, desperate to get the deal done, decided to grease the skids by telling the Russians there would be no expansion, behind the American delegation's back.
Sarotte, M. E. "Not One Inch: America, Russia, and The Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate" Ch. 3

7. Gorbachev M. S. "Memoirs" 1996 Ch. 27-29

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