In the book, the US historian Sarotte using new evidence has shown what went wrong in the US-Russia relationship. “Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you let your part of Germany go, we will move NATO not one inch eastward. Controversy erupted almost immediately over this 1990 exchange—but more important was the decade to come, when the words took on new meaning. Gorbachev let his Germany go, but Washington rethought the bargain, not least after the Soviet Union’s own collapse in December 1991. Washington realized it could not just win big but win bigger. Not one inch of territory needed to be off limits to NATO,” Sarotte stated.
In today’s context, some experts view the current Russia-Ukraine war crisis as the result of tensions reaching its peak between Russia and NATO. Wondering as to what is the source of Russia’s dispute with NATO, these experts point out “Russian leaders have long been wary of the eastward expansion of NATO, particularly as the alliance opened its doors to former Warsaw Pact states and ex-Soviet republics in the late 1990s. But how did NATO become a sensitive issue between Moscow and Washington? For the limitation of time and space, let it suffice to go back to a couple of years after the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991. Jonathan Masters, in a long essay in the Council on Foreign Relations – cfr – reveals how the then US President Bill Clinton, against the advice of his officials that such a move “would rankle Russian leaders,” anyway wanted to move quickly and start expanding NATO’s membership eastward. “Clinton chose to develop a new NATO initiative called Partnership for Peace (PfP), which would be nonexclusive and open to both Warsaw Pact members and to non-European countries,” Jonathan wrote.
To conclude, as early as in December 2020, days after president-elect Joe Biden looked certain to enter the White House, experts had started pointing out the primary agenda of the Biden Administration foreign policy would be “to reassert U.S. global leadership by reconsolidating a common U.S.-European capitalist program of domination that was disrupted with the ‘America first’ positions of the Trump Administration.” A similar concern is now increasingly being reflected in media commentaries in China. Ding Gang, a senior editor with the official People’s Daily, was quite blunt recently in accusing NATO and US-European “hegemonic” agenda for the current crisis in Ukraine: “The Russia-Ukraine war is both a natural consequence of the dramatic geopolitical changes in Europe in the wake of the Cold War and the nature of NATO - the world's single most powerful military bloc.”