Historian Stephen F. Cohen asserted in 2005 that a commitment was given that NATO would never expand further east,[10] but according to Robert Zoellick, then a US State Department official involved in the Two Plus Four negotiating process, this appears to be a misperception; no formal commitment of the sort was made.[11] On 7 May 2008 the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in an interview with the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, stated his view that such a commitment had been made: