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The End Of Civilization As We Knew it, Part Thirty Two
In the fall of 1994, weeks after the American-Russian summit at the White House, and just before the off year election that changed the trajectory of the presidency of Bill Clinton, the nation and the world, Keith Blume, founder and president of Planet Earth Foundation and World Campaign, met with President Clinton and a handful of others in a Seattle hotel room.
Keith asked Clinton a number of things–such as would the U.S. commitment on ending world hunger that began under Jimmy Carter after seeing his film on hunger continue and expand, both for humantiarian reasons and as a necessity for global stability and avoiding conflict and war, with the majority of people in the world still living in poverty or with lower income incapacity to meet basic needs?
The answer was a resounding yes.
As importantly, perhaps more importantly at the moment in history this occured in a nuclear world capable of destroying all life on earth: what was Clinton’s disposition toward including Russia in NATO, just as things had settled somewhat after the end of the Cold War, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of democracies in previous Soviet states and Eastern Europe?
Would this not finally take the furthest step yet by far that had initially been envisioned at the end of World War Two (which began in Europe 86 years ago today and ended 80 years ago tomorrow worldwide), of a world without war and of equality and security for all?
Yes, said Clinton. And his disposition was positive.
When Keith and Foundation project director Clara Lippert were in Berlin at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, meeting with, interviewing and filming numerous Ukrainian groups, refugees and activists, with thousands pouring off the the trains from Ukraine daily, they took a walk along the Berlin Wall.
It had never seen so full of hopefull meaning and tragic irony.
What could have happened in a world filled with every possibility starting with the fall of the wall in 1989?
And what would happen now?
Keith’s question about the possibility of Russia joining NATO in meeting with Bill Clinton in the fall of 1994–the question many had–particularly Clinton who had the foresight to propose the idea and more power than anyone to potentially see it through the stormy waters in would take to navigate it, never seemed so weighty.
Had Russia joined NATO, the world would be an entirely different place and history changed with an enormity impossible to overstate.
A new article in Der Speigel in Berlin examines, with new information, what ocurred in this regard. Here it is:
How Close Was Russia to NATO Membership?
U.S. President Bill Clinton sincerely wanted to bring Russia into the NATO fold. European countries, though, were strictly opposed, particularly Germany. Previously classified documents from the 1990s reveal German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s two-pronged strategy.
27.08.2025
Lunch was finished and coffee had been brought out in the East Wing of the White House, yet U.S. President Bill Clinton, 48, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, 63, still hadn’t exchanged a single word about NATO’s eastern expansion. Finally, Clinton laid his hand on his guest’s arm and said: “Boris, one last thing: on NATO: Please note, I have never said we shouldn’t consider Russia for membership … with NATO. So when we talk about NATO expanding, we’re emphasizing inclusion, not exclusion.” Then, he added: “My objective is to work with you and others to maximize the chances of a truly united, undivided, integrated Europe.”
“I understand,” Yeltsin responded. “And I thank you for what you’ve said.”
The American-Russian summit in question took place in September 1994. Five years later, Poland, Czechia and Hungary joined the alliance, followed by 11 additional European countries as part of NATO’s eastern expansion. But Russia, the largest country on earth, wasn’t one of them.
U.S. President Bill Clinton with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the NATO summit in Brussels in 1994. Foto: picture alliance
Including Russia would have made NATO the most powerful military alliance in human history, stretching from San Francisco to Vladivostok, with control over almost all of the nuclear weapons in the world at that point. Of the official nuclear powers, only China wouldn’t have been a member. But that vision never became reality. On the contrary, the relationship between Russia and the West has markedly deteriorated since then. Under Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin, Moscow is now likely as far away from NATO membership as it was under the Kremlin dictator Josef Stalin. And it was Stalin’s aggressive foreign policy that led to the 1949 founding of NATO in the first place. Some Western politicians are even concerned that Putin might launch an attack against NATO following a potential victory in Ukraine.
What, then, was the intention when the U.S. president discussed possible Russian accession to NATO with his visitor? Was the idea meant seriously, as Clinton insisted following the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when he said that throughout his presidency, “we left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO.”
Or is it Putin who should believed, who contradicted Clinton and created the impression that there never really had been a path for Russia to become a member of the alliance? Did the West waste an opportunity to persuade Moscow to abandon the path that ultimately led to the attack on Ukraine?
DER SPIEGEL has examined previously classified German documents from 1994. That was the year NATO member states made the fundamental decision to accept countries that had formerly belonged to the Warsaw Pact. The documents come from the private archive of one of the individuals involved in that decision and from the file collection that the Institute of Contemporary History regularly publishes on behalf of the German Foreign Ministry. The documents include letters written to Clinton by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, reports from German diplomats in Moscow and Washington, and internal analyses compiled for German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin with U.S President Bill Clinton in New York in 1995. Foto: GRANGER / IMAGO
According to the papers, Clinton really was considering including Russia in NATO. That was the “official U.S. position,” reported German Ambassador Thomas Matussek from Washington in 1994.
Clinton, a cheerful southerner with an optimistic nature, believed that his generation – the new generation – had a special responsibility for shaping the future. And he believed the Cold War had demonstrated that almost anything is possible.
The U.S. government at the time spoke regularly with its allies about the possibility of Russian accession, such as on January 15 at NATO headquarters in Brussels. U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Strobe Talbott had flown in, a university friend of Clinton’s who was also an expert on Russia and the president’s most important advisor when it came to NATO’s eastern expansion. Talbott informed the gathered NATO ambassadors of Clinton’s position. Afterwards, the German representative wrote to Bonn that if the alliance were to follow the U.S. approach, the question of Russian membership would have to be addressed “within just a few years.” A couple of weeks later, a German diplomat reported from Washington that Talbott had even identified a timeline, saying that the process could start around 2004.
German Concerns
The documents now made available also show, however, that Clinton and Talbott encountered significant resistance. Clinton had just been voted into the White House the previous year, and Talbott was a newcomer to the State Department, having previously worked as a journalist for Time magazine. The two of them had even been unable to convince experienced staffers inside their own government of their plan, as a surprised German Foreign Ministry delegation registered in 1994. The Germans met high-ranking officials from the U.S. State Department, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA. They all said they couldn’t figure out why Clinton hadn’t “long-since changed” his approach to Russia’s possible NATO accession. One German Embassy staff member called the encounter “remarkable.”
The U.S. president also experienced significant headwinds from allies in Europe, particularly from the Kohl government. When it came to the possible inclusion of Russia in NATO, the German government was as flexible as concrete. Russia’s accession would be the alliance’s “death certificate,” complained Defense Minister Volker Rühe, a senior member of Kohl’s Christian Democrats (CDU) – though Rühe would later change his stance.
The withdrawal of Russian troops from Magdeburg in 1994. Foto: Vision Photos / ullstein bild
Bonn diplomats produced long lists of concerns: internal differences would grow too extreme, NATO wouldn’t be able to make decisions. Plus, the alliance was an “insurance policy against Russian instability” – a policy that wouldn’t pay off if Moscow became a member. Most importantly, however, if Moscow became part of the alliance, Western soldiers might have to “defend Russia on the border to China (nuclear power) and to Mongolia.” Such a thing was unimaginable, which would then weaken the credibility of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which holds that an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all alliance members. In conclusion: “A Russian accession would mean the end of the alliance as we know it.”
It was a fundamental concern that couldn’t just be waved away. Bonn didn’t believe that even a reliably democratic Russia could ever be part of the alliance.
Because other European NATO members shared this view, it is difficult to imagine how Russia could ever have become a member, particularly because accession decisions in the alliance must be made unanimously. Years later, Clinton’s successor George W. Bush failed to secure Ukrainian membership to the alliance due to opposition from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders.
Kinkel’s Excuse
Still, Kohl and Kinkel didn’t want to alienate the Kremlin. A working group made up of staff members from the Chancellery, the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry formulated a position paper that was distributed in November 1994 to all German representations abroad. It read: “Russia – just like Ukraine and Belarus – can obtain membership neither to the WEU nor NATO. However, public statements to this effect should be avoided in consideration of desired agreements with the Moscow leadership.” The Western European Union (WEU) was a European defensive alliance that was later dissolved.
When Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev at one point asked his German counterpart what Germany had against his country’s accession to NATO, Kinkel quickly came up with an excuse. NATO, he said according to the new documents, wasn’t “currently” prepared for Russia’s accession.
German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev following a tennis match in Bonn in 1994. Foto: Sepp Spiegl / IMAGO
Kohl, by contrast, was spared the uncomfortable NATO issue in telephone calls and meetings with Yeltsin, according to Joachim Bitterlich, who was the chancellor’s most important foreign policy adviser at the time. Yeltsin likely didn’t bring it up because he felt it was largely up to the Americans. And Kohl simply avoided saying anything. “DER SPIEGEL once described me as the last dinosaur,” Kohl told Clinton during this period. “And if that’s true, I should move carefully.” Dinosaurs, he said, need not always be at the front.
The three politicians Kohl, Clinton and Yeltsin liked each other and spoke informally. The son of a farmer from the Ural Mountains, Yeltsin had grown up in poverty before later becoming an engineer. Kohl, who was roughly the same age, respected the courage and willingness to reform displayed by Yeltsin, who put down an attempted communist putsch in 1994. Kohl felt that Western support for Yeltsin was vital but didn’t believe that support should come in the form of membership in NATO.
Yeltsin’s Test
The rather spectacular idea initially came from the Kremlin, with Yeltsin first expressing his interest in NATO membership on December 20, 1991. It was the final days of the Soviet Union, which was set to dissolve at the end of the year, and as president of the new Russia, he wrote to Brussels that he was prepared to view membership “as a long-term political aim.”
It was a proposal that matched the optimistic mood of the time: Russia had “sniffed the air of democracy, felt freedom,” Yeltsin promised, adding that it would become a “different country.”
Boris Yeltsin and Helmut Kohl at the ceremony for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Berlin in 1994. Foto: Wolfgang Kumm / picture alliance
When Poland, Czechia and Hungary entered the alliance one-and-a-half years later, Kozyrev, Yeltsin’s foreign minister, asked the Americans to please treat the Russians just as it did the other, new democracies.
Kozyrev now lives in the U.S. and is a critic of Vladimir Putin. Even at the time, Russia experts at the German Foreign Ministry believed he was oriented toward “Western ideals (democracy, human rights, the establishment of new security structures).” He was “promoting Russia’s integration into European and trans-Atlantic institutions.” In his 2019 memoirs, Kozyrev wrote that the question of NATO was, for his government, “the litmus test of whether the alliance was fundamentally against Russia´s interests.”
From Russia’s perspective, there was a “fundamental understanding” stemming from the negotiations that led to Germany’s 1990 reunification, as the German Foreign Ministry wrote in 1994: “SU/RUS relinquishes its control of territory up to the Elbe and withdraws its military presence from the entire region. In return, the West refrains from exploiting this politically or militarily, and European security architecture is jointly established in an equal partnership.”
It remains unclear, however, whether Russia really was prepared to join the alliance as just one of many members – or whether it was hoping for a special, hegemonic status.
The Kremlin, in any case, is of the opinion that it fulfilled its part of the “fundamental understanding.” In 1994, Russian troops permanently withdrew from Germany, Estonia and Latvia. German diplomats in Bonn also believed the Russian military to be in “desolate condition.” An expansion of NATO to the east was not consistent with the security situation – a view shared even by pro-Western reformers in Moscow. Unless, that is, Russia was also part of that expansion.
During a trip to Europe in January 1994, Clinton said that NATO expansion was no longer a question of if, but when and how. When the U.S. president then flew onward to Moscow, Yeltsin proposed that NATO should bring Russia onboard as the first new member. Clinton disagreed on the order of accession, but he did signal his fundamental support for the possibility of Russian accession, as Talbott would soon relay to America’s NATO allies. Bonn’s diplomats immediately voiced their objections: “We advised the Americans not to encourage Russian considerations in this regard.”
Kohl’s Hesitation
From Helmut Kohl’s perspective, the entire expansion debate came at the wrong time. “We must tell these Eastern European countries that they can count on our support, but not membership,” he said. Four years after German reunification, the chancellor’s international reputation was at an all-time high. He thought Clinton’s expansion plans to be premature, and he wanted to avoid anything that might weaken Yeltsin, who was up for re-election in 1996 and was facing immense pressure from ultra-nationalist hardliners.
Kohl felt that the warning delivered by Polish President Lech Walesa against the Russian bear, namely that it must be locked in a cage and not be allowed to roam freely, was exaggerated. The Poles, he complained, were adamant about wanting to join NATO and “do not care at all what price we may have to pay to Moscow as a result.” Kinkel also asked the Americans to calm down the Poles: It’s “not likely that RUS will attack them tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, the chancellor and his foreign minister were pursuing their own plan. They wanted to see Poland, Hungary, Czechia and perhaps other countries join the European Union, which first had to be reformed. Given that priority, it wasn’t likely that the trans-Atlantic alliance could be expanded before 2000, if at all.
Clinton’s Decision
But Clinton didn’t want to wait that long. He had studied in Oxford, and he apparently really did harbor a dream of a Europe united in peace, including Russia. But he, too, was facing increased pressure. The Republicans had discovered eastern expansion as a potent political lever and they had consulted with the Polish government. They blasted Clinton for being too lenient with Moscow. It was one of the issues that led to the Republicans’ dramatic gains in the 1994 mid-term elections.
With no small degree of malice, Alexander Vershbow, the White House senior director for European affairs, who was an ardent supporter of NATO expansion, told a top German official that Kohl himself had unwittingly contributed to Clinton significantly increasing the pace. Kohl had shared the Bonn timeline for EU reform with the U.S. president, who had apparently known nothing about it to that point. The U.S. was hoping that NATO expansion would start in 1996 or 1997, with Poland as the first candidate. The German ambassador to NATO, Hermann von Richthofen, reported on November 22, 1994, that the Americans were now operating according to the motto which he quoted in English as: “My way or no way.”
Advisor Yuri Ushakov (4th from right) with Putin (5th from right) on August 16, 2025, in Alaska for negotiations over Ukraine. Foto: Gavriil Grigorov / ZUMA Press / IMAGO
With that, a Russian NATO membership receded permanently into the distance. From then on, it seemed like a transparent attempt to reconcile the Russians with the impending accession of Poland and other countries to the alliance – an attempt that ultimately failed. As early as November 1994, Russian diplomat Yuri Ushakov fulminated that NATO’s eastward expansion was “a kind of betrayal.”
It is the same Yuri Ushakov who currently represents Vladimir Putin in negotiations pertaining to the war in Ukraine.