old salt wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 12:28 pm
a fan wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 12:57 am
old salt wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 12:09 am
In 1990 & 1993, in official meetings, between US, EU, Russian leaders & officials, assurances were given that NATO would not expand eastward if Germany was reunited. There are official records of those assurances, though no signed documents of agreement were executed. Just official records of the meetings, which afan dismisses as "made up nonsense".
Yep. Were all members of NATO there? Did they vote? Was all this in full view of the public, so that the people that are represented could see these assurances for themselves? Did the press report on these assurances? Were they put in writing and signed by NATO and Russia, as Rasheed claimed? No, no, no, no, and no.
old salt wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 12:09 am
afan calls those assurances "a lie"
This is why you write sh(t down, and sign it. You know, what ordinary folk would call "a contract".
Hmmm. Let me see if I can find one for you. Ah, I got one! Here ya go:
https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/fil ... 1645824948
But sure, tell me again how you're so off your rocker that you can't tell the difference between what someone "thinks" that George Bush said in a closed, smoke filled room, and "therefore this is a binding agreement with NATO".......and a freaking written document in the full light of day, signed by everyone involved....followed by international press conferences.
So we're back to my
Step two: it's 1000% immaterial of this information is true or not. Doesn't matter. It just has to further the narrative.
When govt officials & diplomats meet, official records are kept "for the record". Apparently you don't read links.
*
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book ... ders-early
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 (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, 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.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
The Budapest Memo is no more binding than the JCPOA with Iran. Without Senate ratification as a treaty, it is dependent on the willingness of the President in office to follow through on his predecessors agreements. Diplomats understand that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
In the US, neither the George H. W. Bush administration nor the Clinton administration was prepared to give a military commitment to Ukraine, and they did not believe the US Senate would ratify an international treaty and so the memorandum was adopted in more limited terms. The memorandum has a requirement of consultation among the parties "in the event a situation arises that raises a question concerning the ... commitments" set out in the memorandum. Whether or not the memorandum sets out legal obligations, the difficulties that Ukraine has encountered since early 2014 may cast doubt on the credibility of future security assurances that are offered in exchange for nonproliferation commitments. Regardless, the United States publicly maintains that "the Memorandum is not legally binding", calling it a "political commitment".
Apparently, at least according to this source's summary, the "memoranda" are of discussion negotiations, not agreements.
"Assurances" in private negotiations are not legal commitments, they are persuasions to get to an agreement. To provide the space to achieve an agreement. The agreement, if reached,
can be binding. But if not actually reached, the "assurances" in that context mean nothing more than effort to reach an agreement not reached. And they were in advance of the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union, the party with which these negotiations were happening.
And NATO never reached an agreement with the Soviet Union, nor did the US for that matter.
By contrast, the Budapest Memo, while not a treaty and ultimately not legally binding in its explicit commitments, was indeed a set of clear diplomatic promises between the signatory nations, including the Russian Federation. Note, not Soviet Union. It was a public promise, though, clearly we now understand that such promises cannot be relied upon as binding the way a treaty should be. Of course, treaties get breached as well.