ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

PERINA: Well my sense was always that the motivation was political. NATO
membership was obviously favored by the ethnic groups in the United States: the Czechs,
the Poles, all of the Central and East Europeans. The votes add up. I can understand that
Poles, for example, wanted to be in NATO as an insurance policy against Russia. But it
would have been much wiser to take a longer-term view and try to really transform
Russia. This was a time for really creative thinking about European security
architecture—for trying to devise an arrangement that would give Russia the sense of
being included rather than excluded and integrated rather than isolated. This would have
had to involve both NATO and the European Union. But once we started down the
expansion road with the first tranche of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, it was
obvious that it would be very difficult to draw the line and stop. You cannot say these
countries get into NATO but the rest of you don’t. So the expansion continued to the
Baltic states, and now there is even talk of Ukraine, Georgia and so on. It was obvious
that Russians—and I mean average Russians, not just the government—would begin to
see this as threatening. I just did not see NATO expansion as worth the cost of alienating
Russia and losing a really historic opportunity to change its direction.
Q: How were the decisions made on who would be in the first group to join NATO?
Weren’t there so-called standards that were set up?
PERINA: Yes, there were numerous criteria devised but in the end it was just a political
judgment call. I was very much involved in this because I had a good relationship with
the Romanian Ambassador, Mircea Geoana. The Romanians really wanted to be in that
first tranche of new members and lobbied extremely hard for it. It was Geoana’s major
objective in Washington. To me it was pretty clear that Romania was not politically ready
to be a NATO member. Democratic reforms were shaky, and the country had problems
with neighbors like Moldova. But people were leading the Romanians on in order to
motivate them to undertake reforms, and the Romanians started believing that they had
cleared the hurdle. The Europeans were just telling Bucharest what it wanted to hear
because they assumed the U.S. would block the membership. Well, in the end that is
exactly what happened. It came down to the U.S. and we predictably decided it was too
early for Romania’s membership. I was tasked with breaking the news to Geoana
informally the day before Strobe Talbott did it formally. It was a real shock to him. He
was devastated and thought his diplomatic career was over. In fact it wasn’t, and he later
became Foreign Minister of Romania.
Q: And Romania got into NATO.
PERINA: And Romania got into NATO in the second tranche. By then it was less of an
issue. The real irony was that once most of these countries got into NATO, it was no big
deal because their real objective was to get into the European Union.
Q: It really had no particular importance anymore.
PERINA: It had a certain symbolic significance but that was it. And the symbolism was
exactly the wrong kind to the Russians and damaged our relationship with them. That is
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