Was Nato expansion worth the risk?

This is an important and topical book. Mary Sarotte traces the difficult course of Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States during the decade which followed the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, a period which saw Russia’s brief dalliance with democracy and Nato’s advance to the frontiers of the old Soviet Union.

The story has been told before, but never so fully or so well. In a remarkable historical coup, Sarotte has persuaded the German foreign ministry to open its archives to her, and the Americans to declassify thousands of documents previously closed to researchers. When Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was moved to denounce so much disclosure of confidential diplomatic material, it became obvious that Sarotte was on to something. For this is the story of how successive Russian leaders were out-manoeuvred by more skilful politicians, notably the wily German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the American secretary of state James Baker.

The expansion of Nato has always been controversial. Russia resisted it with impotent ferocity from the start. A powerful strand of opinion in the US State Department has always believed that their sensitivities should have been accommodated. Russia is a big country with nuclear weapons. It has sat at Europe’s top table since the 18th century. Those elder statesmen of American diplomacy Henry Kissinger and George Kennan thought it the height of folly to humiliate her in her moment of weakness. They were also worried about the risks of extending the American nuclear guarantee to unstable countries on Russia’s borders with ancient issues with their larger neighbour. In 1997, Kennan took to the pages of the New York Times to denounce ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. Sarotte’s judgment is more cautious, but her instinct is much the same.