How America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed West
The conditionality of the Soviet Union’s agreement to allow East Germany to be taken by West Germany and for the Cold War to end, was that NATO would not expand «one inch to the east». This was the agreement that was approved by the Russian President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, a great man and a subsequent hero to democrats around the world.
He agreed then to end the Soviet Union and abandon communism and thus to end the entire Cold War; he agreed to this because he had been promised that NATO would expand not «one inch to the east,» or «one inch eastward,» depending upon how the promise was translated and understood — but it has the same meaning, no matter how it was translated. He trusted American President George Herbert Walker Bush, whose friend and Secretary of State James Baker made this promise to Gorbachev. With this promise, Gorbachev agreed to end the Soviet Union; end the communist mutual-defense pact which was their own equivalent of NATO, the Warsaw Pact; and he believed that the remaining nation that he would then be leading, which was Russia, would be accepted as a Western democracy.
He was even promised by the United States that «we were going to make them a member [of NATO], we were –observer first and then a member». In other words: the U.S. promised that NATO would not extend up to the borders of Russia and so become a mortal threat to the national security of the Russian people – now isolated and separated from its former military allies. Instead, Gorbachev was told, Russia would itself become welcomed into the Western Alliance, and ultimately become a NATO member. That was the deal, ending the 46-year Cold War.
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