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As for "Star Wars," Jack Matlock, whom Ermarth replaced at the White House and NSC, attributed the President's refusal to compromise on anti-ballistic missile work beyond the laboratory to a mistaken belief that the proposed restrictions would be detrimental to the program. Matlock argued that the restrictions would have had little effect on research that was still in its very early stages. Matlock, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, remains among the most widely respected specialists on Russia since George Kennan.
A career Foreign Service officer, Matlock missed the opportunity that Ermarth had to be initiated into the ethos of defense contractors like Northrop. According to its website: "From detection to tracking to engagement, Northrop Grumman is bringing its entire suite of expertise in systems integration, high-tech weaponry, and domain knowledge to bear on the challenge of a layered missile defense capability."
Also, in contrast to Matlock, Robert Gates was elected a director of Northrop Grumman on April 24, 2002, during one of his private-sector breaks between top jobs in the national security apparatus.
So, the Reykjavik summit was another blown chance for real peace that would have been beneficial for the world -- but for Northrop Grumman, not so much.
Chance #3 -- The Soviet Union Falls Apart
By the late 1980s and early 1990s with the crumbling of the Soviet bloc and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, another opportunity for genuine peace and nuclear disarmament presented itself, but blowing such chances had become predictable.
The failure of the Communist regimes in the U.S.S.R. and in Eastern Europe brought with it a unique opportunity to create the kind of peace that Europe had not seen in modern times. It was an historic moment. President George H. W. Bush sensed this, even before the Berlin Wall fell, when he told a German audience in Mainz on May 31, 1989, "the time is ripe for Europe to be whole and free."
To his credit, President Bush, the elder, refused to gloat over the historic concessions being made by Soviet President Gorbachev. Bush said he would not dance in celebration of the Berlin Wall coming down and assured Gorbachev that he had "no intention of seeking unilateral advantage from the current process of change in East Germany and in other Warsaw Pact countries."
In early February 1990, Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev there would be "no extension of NATO's forces one inch to the East," provided that the Russians agreed that a united Germany could become a member of NATO.
As historian Mary Elise Sarotte has pointed out, "Such statements helped to inspire Gorbachev to agree, on Feb. 10, 1990, to internal German unification" -- a bitter pill to swallow when earlier 20th Century history is taken into account. The undertaking not to push NATO east was in the nature of a gentlemen's agreement; nothing was committed to paper, and as the years went by, so did the gentlemen.
While U.S. media have generally ignored this sordid history, one can find chapter and verse in Steve Weissman's recent article, "Exposing the Cold War Roots of America's Coup in Kiev." And Der Spiegel published an even more detailed account in November 2009 in "Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?"
Double-Cross?
It didn't take long, however, for Official Washington's "triumphalism" to take over. "Free-market" experts were dispatched to Moscow to apply "shock therapy" to the Russian economy, a process that gave rise to a handful of well-connected "oligarchs" plundering the nation's wealth while poverty spread among the masses of the Russian people.
With similar arrogance, the U.S. government cast aside Russian objections to NATO expansion. On March 12, 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO. On March 29, 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia also became NATO members. (Albania and Croatia joined on April 1, 2009.)
In a major speech in Munich on security policy on Feb. 2, 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was reasserting Russian self-respect, was blunt:
"I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation to the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them."
In no way impressed by Putin's protestations, and having already added 12 countries on or near Russia's borders, NATO leaders kept on looking east. On April 3, 2008, at a summit in Bucharest, the heads of state of the alliance issued a declaration that included this relating to NATO plans for Ukraine:
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