JEFFREY SACHS:
"In 2007, President Putin gave a very clear speech at the Munich Security Conference—very powerful, very correct, very frustrated—where he said:
'Gentlemen, you told us in 1990 that NATO would never enlarge. That was the promise made to President Gorbachev and it was the promise made to President Yeltsin. You cheated, and you repeatedly cheated, and you don't even admit that you said this. But it's all plainly documented, by the way, in a thousand archival sites, so it's easy to verify all of this.'
James Baker III, our Secretary of State, said that NATO would not move one inch eastward. It wasn't a flippant statement; it was a statement repeated and repeated and repeated.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the Foreign Minister of Germany, said the same story. The Germans wanted reunification, and Gorbachev said, 'We'll support that, but we don't want that to come at our expense.'
'No, no, it won't come at your expense. NATO won't move one inch eastward, Mr. President,' was repeated so many times in many documents, many statements by the NATO Secretary General, by the US Secretary of State, by the German Chancellor.
Now, of course, all denied by our foreign policy establishment because we're not supposed to remember anything.
Remember, this was all 'unprovoked'.
So, back to 2007—Putin gives this speech and says:
'Stop. Don't even think about Ukraine. This is our 2,100-kilometer border. This is absolutely part of the integrated economy of this region. Don't even think about it.'
Now, I know from insiders, from all the diplomatic work that I do, that European leaders were saying to the US, 'Don't think about Ukraine. Please, you know this is not a good idea. Just stop.'
We know from our current CIA Director, Bill Burns, that he wrote a very eloquent, impassioned, articulate, clear, secret (as usual) memo, which we only got to see because Wikileaks showed the American people what maybe we would like to know once in a while but are never told—what our government's doing, how they're putting us at nuclear risk, and other things.
This one did get out, and it's called 'Nyet Means Nyet' ('No Means No').
What Bill Burns very perceptively, articulately conveys to Condoleezza Rice and back to the White House in 2008 is: 'Ukraine is really a red line. Don't do it. It's not just Putin; it's not just Putin's government. It's the entire political class of Russia.'
And just to help all of us as we think about it, it is exactly as if Mexico said, 'We think it would be great to have a Chinese military base on the Rio Grande. We can't see why the US would have any problem with that.'
Of course, we would go completely insane (and we should, of course).
The whole idea is so absurdly dangerous and reckless that you can't even imagine grown-ups doing this.
What happens is, from what I'm told by European leaders and through long, detailed discussions, Bush Jr. says to them, 'No, no, no, no, it's okay. Don't worry. I hear you about Ukraine.'
Then he goes off for the Christmas holidays and comes back—whether it's Cheney, whether it's Bush, whatever it is—and says, 'Yeah, NATO's going to enlarge to Ukraine.'
The Europeans are shocked, pissed—'What are you doing?'"
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