NATO Expansion - The Budapest Blow Up 1994

Washington, D.C., November 24, 2021 - The biggest train wreck on the track to NATO expansion in the 1990s - Boris Yeltsin's "cold peace" blow up at Bill Clinton in Budapest in December 1994 - was the result of "combustible" domestic politics in both the U.S. and Russia, and contradictions in the Clinton attempt to have his cake both ways, expanding NATO and partnering with Russia at the same time, according to newly declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive.

The Yeltsin eruption on December 5, 1994, made the top of the front page of The New York Times the next day, with the Russian president's accusation (in front of Clinton and other heads of state gathered for a summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, CSCE) that the "domineering" U.S. was "trying to split [the] continent again" through NATO expansion.

The angry tone of Yeltsin's speech echoed years later in his successor Vladimir Putin's famous 2007 speech at the Munich security conference, though by then the list of Russian grievances went well beyond NATO expansion to such unilateral U.S. actions as withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the invasion of Iraq.

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