“These are new times”, declared Bill Clinton, then President of the United States, on the day of the signing of the first agreement on economic and military cooperation after the Cold War between Russia and NATO, now on opposite sides of the Ukrainian War.
The pact, then unexpected, was called the NATO-Russia Founding Act and signed on May 27, 1997, 25 years ago, formally eliminating the last vestiges of the Cold War eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Boris Yeltsin, in the Russian Presidency, celebrated the rapprochement with the West by declaring that his country’s nuclear missiles – today brought to the fore by figures in the Vladimir Putin regime – would no longer be aimed at NATO members. The US-led military alliance, on the other hand, pledged to consult Moscow in decision-making and not to deploy a large military contingent and nuclear weapons to Russian borders.
“NATO will work together with Russia, not against it,” Clinton said of the deal, in terms that today, in light of Putin’s statements, sound out of place. Years earlier, the military alliance would also have pledged not to interfere with Russian nuclear power or expand into Eastern Europe, where former Soviet republics are located.
More than promises of non-aggression, the pact opened space for some level of dialogue and exchange of information on sensitive security issues – among the main ones at the time, in another irony with current times, were the political destabilization of Afghanistan and the strengthening of the Taliban after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country. Joint military maneuvers were also planned, although there are no records of them taking place.
“The text generated a series of advances, but even so, there was always great resistance against a reasoned military approach”, says Leonardo Trevisan, professor of international relations at PUC-SP.
He says that although the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, the Russian invasion of Chechnya with the aim of defeating an independence movement three years later left the distrust of NATO countries to remain. “It was concluded that the Kremlin was interested in an economic negotiation, but militarily, the Russians remained the same. [da Guerra Fria].”
Although cautious, Russia and NATO approached in the late 1990s in a context in which a new world order was emerging. According to Trevisan, by formalizing the pact with the Kremlin, the White House and NATO were trying to build in Moscow a kind of third way between capitalism and communism.
“The idea was that to solve the problem of animosity with Russia it was necessary to integrate it. Moscow, on the other hand, wanted to recompose its economic structures within the logic of globalization.”
As a background, Trevisan says that Western European countries were interested in bargaining for Russian oil in order to spend less. The founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995 was another factor that influenced the signing of the agreement.
Gunther Rudzit, an expert on international security and professor of international relations at ESPM, recalls that the collapse of the Soviet Union left Russia politically, economically and militarily weakened. In this context, the signing of the Founding Act was a way found by Yeltsin to give the population something like a kind of consolation prize, which would show that the country was integrated and looking for ways to overcome the crisis.
In the 1990s, Russia faced high debt, inflation and unemployment rates, as well as low rates of economic growth, as a result of an accelerated transition to a market economy. In 1998, the so-called ruble crisis caused the currency’s value to collapse and caused the country to declare a moratorium.
The economic crisis also opened space for the advance of Russian ultranationalism, a feeling that marks, in 2000, the arrival of Vladimir Putin to power. Since then, diplomatic relations between Russia and the West have cooled again.
“Yeltsin, when he was in office, had a different worldview, which did not include the mentality of re-establishing Russia as a great power. Putin, for his part, was always suspicious of the West,” says Rudzit.
The Russian offensive against Georgia in 2008 provoked reactions from the West and caused the agreement to be frozen. Years later, the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, considered a rehearsal of the current conflict in Ukraine, was the decisive factor in, according to the expert, “burying the coffin” of the NATO-Russia Founding Act.
