The West’s Big Lie to Russia, and Why: The Record, and Jeffrey Sachs’s View
23 November 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
On 10 September 2015, I first called attention to America’s 24 February 1990 double-cross of the Soviet-and-Russian President Gorbachev, that the U.S. President GHW Bush masterminded for deceiving Gorbachev into allowing the Soviet Union to end in the way that Gorbachev did, and I included then the imperialistic U.S. regime’s continuing denial of this history, so that readers could compare those denials versus the proofs that the regime’s propagandists were simply still lying about history. Then, on 19 December 2017, I presented and explained the 10 December 2017 massive new public data-dump by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, about this deceit. And, now, this time around, I am presenting only what I consider (from all of this) to be the key evidences about this proven deceit by the imperialistic U.S. regime (boldfacing highlights):
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https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16116-document-05-memorandum-conversation-between
Document 5
Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.
UNCLASSIFIED
Memcon from 2/9/90 [9 February 1990] meeting w/USSR Prem. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnaze, Moscow, USSR
“Secretary of State James Baker” “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. 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 one inch to the east.”
“MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION” “Date: Friday, February 9, 1990” “Time: 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm” “Place: Kremlin” “PARTICIPANTS: Secretary Baker, President Gorbachev, Eduard Shevardnaze”
Description [of document]: Even with (unjustified) redactions by U.S. classification officers, this American transcript of perhaps the most famous U.S. assurance to the Soviets on NATO expansion, confirms the Soviet transcript of the same conversation. Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: “The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process” of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. 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 one inch to the east.” Later in the conversation, Baker poses the same position as a question, “would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?” The declassifiers of this memcon actually redacted Gorbachev’s response that indeed such an expansion would be “unacceptable” – but Baker’s letter to Kohl the next day, published in 1998 by the Germans, gives the quote.
Source
U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38)
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NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard
Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
Slavic Studies Panel Addresses “Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?”
Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University
The documents show that … discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. …
President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests. …
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” … This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. … Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
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https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16131-document-17-james-baker-iii-memorandum
Document 17
James A. Baker III, Memorandum for the President, “My meeting with Shevardnadze.”
Date:
May 4, 1990
Description:
The secretary of state had just spent nearly four hours meeting with the Soviet foreign minister in Bonn on May 4, 1990, covering a range of issues but centering on the crisis in Lithuania and the negotiations over German unification. As in the February talks and throughout the year, Baker took pains to provide assurances to the Soviets about including them in the future of Europe. Baker reports, “I also used your speech and our recognition of the need to adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to develop CSCE to reassure Shevardnadze that the process would not yield winners and losers. Instead, it would produce a new legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive.” … Baker relates that Shevardnadze “emphasized again the psychological difficulty they have – especially the Soviet public has – of accepting a unified Germany in NATO.” …
Source:
George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Scowcroft Files, Box 91126, Folder “Gorbachev (Dobrynin) Sensitive 1989 – June 1990 [3]”
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https://archive.is/ExKE6#selection-2255.0-2307.1
Document 13
Memorandum of Conversation between Helmut Kohl and George Bush at Camp David.
1990-02-24 [24 February 1990]
Source:George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons
“The Bush administration's main worry about German unification as the process accelerated in February 1990 was that the West Germans might make their own deal bilaterally with the Soviets (see Document 11) and might be willing to bargain away NATO membership. ... The German chancellor arrives at Camp David without [West German Foreign Minister] Genscher because the latter does not entirely share the Bush-Kohl position on full German membership in NATO, and he recently angered both leaders by speaking publicly about the CSCE as the future European security mechanism.[11] ... Bush's priority is to keep the US presence, especially the nuclear umbrella, in Europe [though it’s now an umbrella against a ‘rain’ that was only in the past and that has been ended by Gorbachev; so, this NATO is CLEARLY a military alliance for AGGRESSION, instead of for DEFENSE — as NATO has always claimed to be, and still DOES claim to be]: ‘if US nuclear forces are withdrawn from Germany, I don't see how we can persuade any other ally on the continent to retain these weapons.’ ... [Bush wanted Lockheed and other US weapons-makers to continue booming after the Cold War 'ended' - not for the nuclear-weapons market to end. Bush continued:] ‘We have weird thinking in our Congress today, ideas like this peace dividend. We can't do that in these uncertain times.’ [“Uncertain” ONLY for the former Soviet Union. For the US team, ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’ would be the way forward; a ‘peace dividend’ was the last thing they wanted - ever.] ... At one point in the conversation, Bush seems to view his Soviet counterpart not as a partner but as a defeated enemy. Referring to talk in some Soviet quarters against Germany staying in NATO, he says: ‘To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn't. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.’” [I earlier had placed that crucial secret statement from Bush into historical perspective, under the headline, "How America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed the West".]
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CONCLUSION
Bush’s telling Kohl on 24 February 1990 (and subsequently the heads of state in each of America’s other colonies that collectively constitute America’s NATO military alliance against Russia), “To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn't. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” constitutes proof-positive that America’s claimed ‘anti-communist’ Cold War against the Soviet Union had been merely a cover-story for what was and is (and has been ever since 25 July 1945) instead a mega-imperialistic hyper-aggressive campaign by the U.S. regime to take over the entire world ultimately — NOT actually any war against communism, not basically ideological (capitalist vesus communist), but instead imperialistic. And it continues till this day on America’s side.
For more about this, see Jeffrey Sachs’s video (and transcript of an excerpt) “Jeffrey Sachs Explains the Russia-Ukraine War”, at The Cambridge Union, which was posted on 23 November 2024 (though the event itself occurred on 30 October 2024, before the U.S. elections, and he said in his talk that both Trump and Harris are atrocious and so he’d not be voting on the Presidential line, and he said that today’s America is really no democracy). He speaks there — and you can see and hear it complete in all of its grandeur, in the 16-minute video — spontaneously and fluently delivered by him with no notes and with no factual error — none — because he has a nearly total-recall memory and does not lie) and he documents there the imperialistic evilness (he calls it, at the point where Biden’s agent Boris Johnson tells Zelensky to continue Ukraine’s war instead of accept Russia’s very good terms for ending it, “absolutely ghastly”) of America’s Government, at least ever since 1990. He even documents there the evilness of the U.S. empire’s mainstream ‘news’ media (their owners). And he tells much of this first-person from his own presence, as an advisor, at key events in this history. He even includes mentioning its evilness regarding China and Taiwan. He is describing a Government that might even turn out to be more evil than Hitler’s Government of Germany was. Of course, that elitist, pro-UK-Government, pro-U.S.-Government, and pro-NATO, audience, gave his presentation — which deserved a standing ovation — only a polite applause at the end. Quite an amazing thing to see, hear, and experience. Really awesome, and awful.
If you wish to see even more of his entire 81-minute presentation, I’d start it at 26:37, and then you’ll see him responding to the questioner who praised American “democracy” and who was told by him, and documented by him to be, and to have been, at least since 1990, and maybe even since 1945, an evil dictatorship. If you start it at 26:37, you’ll be seeing a comprehensive 54-minute talk by the person whom I consider to be the most brilliant political scientist yet, especiallly because his understanding of history is vast and perhaps unparalleled — and his theorizing throughout is based 100% on that vast knowledge. What a pity it is, that the students at Cambridge University seem to have had no idea of this — perhaps their prejudices to the contrary of what he was saying, simply overwhelmed it. But his answers were always clear and to the point.
Incidentally, the article that he condemned, by someone he mentions only as “Karlin,” in Foreign Affairs, was “The Return of Total War: Understanding — and Preparing for — a New Era of Comprehensive Conflict”. He referred to it this way:
The people in Washington are stupid, I'm telling you, I know
27:22
them, this is not my surmise, and I just read an unbelievably
27:30
stupid article in an unbelievably awful Journal called Foreign
27:37
Affairs, by what's her name first name [her hame is Mara Karlin] I don't
27:42
remember, Karlin is her second name — oh my God it's about how we have to prepare
27:48
for the next War. … I don't think the word diplomacy is mentioned one time.
(Actually, it and related words are mentioned in it several times, always praising American diplomacy, but that’s a rare error by him. The article is, indeed, stupid, but I think that almost everything in that journal likewise is, and it really is, like Sachs said, “an unbelievably awful journal.”)
He is describing, actually, a U.S. Government that is effectively controlled by the billioanaires who control U.S. firms such as Lockheed Martin.
PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
Whatever US Forces in Germany are for, it is not really to protect Germany. After all, Germany is about the only other country, in all of Europe, that the American people hate as much as they hate Russia. And, I seriously doubt that the US Media ever told the whole truth about either The Cold War or The Second World War. By encroaching on Russia, the US is actually endangering Germany, and, the rest of Western Europe. After all, once Russia is attacked, Putin might be tempted to go West!
Of course, once there is a Nuclear War, Germany and for that matter Japan, will be depopulated. No matter how much one may hate either Germany or Japan, one should not be too quick to gloat. For, there would not be that many Russians or Americans left either.