George Vowed Never to Be So Irresponsible Again True False

Two days before Russia invaded Ukraine with an attack that intelligence officials had warned was coming, conservative commentator Candace Owens insisted that the U.S. was "at mistake."

"NATO (under direction from the U.s.) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward," Owens said in the Feb. 22 tweet, which directed her more than three one thousand thousand followers to remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin that she said showed "what's really going on."

Owens' comment echoed a grievance claimed by Putin and other Russian leaders regarding the West'due south negotiations with the Soviet Union later the Cold War.

The subject of the grievance is whether the U.Due south. and its Western allies promised the Soviet Union during negotiations over the reunification of Germany that they would not allow NATO to expand its membership due east of the Cold War border.

The question has fueled decades of debate and disagreement over what was said around those negotiations, what was meant by information technology all, and whether Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and other leaders received sure assurances regarding NATO'due south expansion beyond East Frg.

But fifty-fifty historians who argue that the Soviets were led to believe that NATO would not expand farther to the east told PolitiFact Owens' statement is more wrong than right. No binding, legal agreement ever codified the terms that Putin's camp — and Owens — at present say were violated.

"Such an agreement was never made," NATO says in a fact page on its website, one of multiple pages that addresses the Russian allegations. "NATO's door has been open to new members since it was founded in 1949 — and that has never changed."

Negotiating German reunification

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a divided Federal republic of germany and the four powers that had occupied information technology since World State of war 2 were discussing whether the state should exist reunified.

The treaty they signed in 1990 extended NATO into East Germany, which had been zoned to the Soviet Union. To appease the Soviets, it as well granted the territory a "special military status" that ruled out the stationing of foreign NATO forces there.

The agreement said cypher nigh NATO's power to aggrandize further eastward, a process that began with the access of Poland, the Czechia and Hungary as members in 1999. Subsequent agreements, like the NATO-Russian federation Founding Act in 1997, also made no mention of a prohibition on eastward expansion.

"I know of no agreement signed by the U.s., Germany, Britain, French republic or any NATO member that foreswore NATO enlargement," said the Brookings Institution's Steven Pifer, who was the deputy director of the State Department'southward Soviet desk at the time the 1990 deal was struck.

"This claim (from Owens) is factually incorrect," added John Lough, an acquaintance fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, who served from 1995 to 1998 as NATO's commencement representative based in Moscow. "NATO never made a commitment to Russia not to enlarge."

The source of controversy, however, is centered around statements made during the negotiations by Western leaders — especially James Baker, the U.S. secretary of state, and German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher.

U.S. President George H. Bush signs an arms-reduction treaty as Secretary of Land James Bakery, left, talks with Germany's Hans Dietrich Genscher in Paris on Nov. xix, 1990. (AP)

"Not shift 1 inch eastward"

One primal statement came during a February. 9, 1990, coming together between Baker and Gorbachev.

Afterward explaining why the U.S. wanted the reunited Frg to stay within the framework of NATO, Baker told Gorbachev that "if we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO 1 inch to the east."

"I put the post-obit question to (Gorbachev)," Baker recounted in a letter of the alphabet to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "'Would you prefer to see a united Frg outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO'due south jurisdiction would non shift 1 inch eastward from its present position?'"

U.Southward. Secretary of State James Baker, left, looks on while Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev gestures during their meeting at the Kremlin, on Dec. 16, 1991 in Moscow. (AP)

Those comments, along with similar remarks from Baker's European allies, similar Genscher and Kohl, were part of what researchers at George Washington University'southward National Security Archive called a "cascade of assurances" offered to the Soviets.

But Baker and other officials involved in the events have denied that the conversation ever turned on expanding NATO to other countries.

The comments, they say, were made in the context of the High german reunification argue. Talk of NATO's expansion to the residuum of Europe never came up, in role considering the Soviet Marriage and its associated Warsaw Pact were even so intact. And in whatsoever issue, those assurances were non baked into the final U.Due south. position and agreement around "special armed forces status," they say.

"There was a discussion almost whether the unified Federal republic of germany would be a member of NATO, and that was the only give-and-take we ever had," Baker told CNN during a 2009 interview. "There was never any discussion of anything but (East Germany)."

Other figures have said that assurances were fabricated, including Jack Matlock, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Spousal relationship, and Robert Gates, the deputy national security adviser at the fourth dimension. Gates said the Soviets "were led to believe" NATO would not expand east.

Gorbachev has sent mixed letters. On 1 occasion, he insisted that he was promised NATO would not "move 1 centimeter further east." In another interview in 2014, he said the question never came up, though he added that NATO's eventual expansion was "a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to united states in 1990." He said:

"The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Non a single Eastern European country raised the effect, not even afterward the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring information technology upwardly, either."

Scholars have landed on both sides of the debate. Some, like Lough and Harvard University's Mark Kramer, who wrote well-nigh it in 2009, have argued that the idea of a no-NATO-enlargement promise is a "myth." Other interpretations say the question is more complicated.

"At ane extreme, there's a position you sometimes hear from the American side, that none of this always came upward, it's a total myth, the Russians are psychotic," Johns Hopkins University'southward Mary Sarotte, the author of a book examining the issue, told the New Yorker. "On the other cease, you accept the very adamant Russian position: 'We were totally betrayed, there's no doubtfulness about information technology.' Unsurprisingly, when you get into the evidence, the truth looks to be somewhere in between."

When Russian President Boris Yeltsin protested NATO'southward expansion, President Bill Clinton'south assistants asked the German foreign ministry to await into the matter. The ministry reported that Yeltsin's complaint was formally incorrect, simply it said it could understand "why Yeltsin thought that NATO had committed itself non to extend beyond its 1990 limits," according to the Guardian.

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on December. 20, 1990 in Moscow. (AP)

Why Owens' claim is misleading, regardless

To support her statement, Owens shared via Twitter an 2016 op-ed that Joshua Shifrinson wrote for the Los Angeles Times.

Shifrinson, an associate professor of international relations at Boston University, wrote that while no formal agreement restricted NATO's expansion, Baker and other diplomats had offered the Soviets exact assurances that NATO would non enlarge to the east.

In an interview with PolitiFact, Shifrinson said that he still holds the same view, and that a new document he recently discovered in the British National Athenaeum supports that example.

The record, from 1991, quotes a German official as telling British and American policymakers, "We had fabricated it articulate during the ii+4 negotiations that we would non extend NATO beyond the Elbe (a river in Federal republic of germany). Nosotros could not therefore offering membership of NATO to Poland and the others."

But Poland joined NATO in 1999. The reason that was allowed is the same reason why Owens' statement near NATO "violating previous agreements" is misleading: whether or not assurances were made, the West did not tie NATO'due south hands with any formal agreement.

"Candace Owens' argument is more fiction than not," Shifrinson told PolitiFact. "No. 1, NATO as an organization did not make this delivery. No. 2, it wasn't an understanding."

"There is a legitimate point to say that the U.S. offered assurances to the Soviets that NATO would do something, merely that is not the same thing as proverb NATO offered an understanding," Shifrinson continued. "NATO is not violating, and it never offered an agreement."

None of that justifies Russian federation's invasion of Ukraine, he added.

Marc Trachtenberg, a professor emeritus from the University of California, Los Angeles, has summarized the enquiry on the NATO-enlargement-promise debate. His writing as well argued that U.S. officials made assurances to the Soviets that they ultimately reneged on.

But in an email to PolitiFact, he also took effect with Owens' apply of the word "agreement."

"What we had hither were purely unilateral statements made by high U.Due south. and German officials," Trachtenberg said. "Strictly speaking, this does not show there was an 'agreement' … I think the term 'tacit understanding' is a better mode to put it."

Our ruling

Owens said, "NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward."

At that place is an ongoing historical debate over comments that Western leaders, including Bakery, made during post-Cold War negotiations, and whether what they said amounted to assurances that NATO would refrain from welcoming in countries closer to modern-solar day Russia.

Just NATO as an organization made no such pledge, and the formal agreement signed at the cease of those negotiations said nothing most the alliance non expanding eastward.

We rate this merits Mostly False.

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Source: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/28/candace-owens/fact-checking-claims-nato-us-broke-agreement-again/

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