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Declassified documents released by the National Security Archive, at George Washington University, reveal that former US President Bill Clinton made a surprising proposal to Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000: Russia's membership in NATO.
According to the transcript of the conversation between the two leaders, held on June 4, 2000 in the Kremlin, Clinton assured Putin that NATO expansion did not pose a threat to Russia, and stressed that he was open to discussing Russia's participation in the Western military alliance.
"I have known from the beginning that NATO expansion could be seen as a problem by Russia. But I want to be clear: NATO is not a threat to you. I am serious when I say that I am ready to discuss Russia's membership in the alliance," Clinton's statement said, according to a document prepared by the White House.
The former US president praised the restoration of relations between Russia and NATO as "fully normalized" and suggested that if the two sides continued to see each other as a threat, they would miss the opportunity to solve other global challenges together.
The Clinton-Putin meeting came just over a year after NATO's 1999 air campaign against Serbia, an intervention aimed at stopping ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo. NATO's action had significantly soured relations between the United States and Russia, which strongly opposed the intervention.
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