David Frost, famous BBC anchor, sought, in the early 2000s, to scrutinize an enigmatic figure, a newcomer to the elite of global politics. He asked the interviewee if Russia could join NATO, a military alliance led by the United States. “Why not? Why not?” replied Vladimir Putin, Boris Yeltsin’s replacement in the Kremlin. “I don’t rule out that possibility… In the event that Russian interests are taken into account, if it is an equal partner.”
The former spy continued: “Russia is part of European culture, and I don’t see my own country isolated from Europe.” His views, at the beginning of his presidential career, were little known, unlike in the past, linked to the dreaded KGB.
Two decades later, growing rifts between the Kremlin and the White House, the leader of the biggest war alliance in history, are fueling a diplomatic crisis that has provoked the smell of war between the holders of the two largest nuclear arsenals. Fears of the late Cold War are rescued.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, expectations of stable ties between Washington and Moscow have been dashed. Imagining bilateral cooperation, possible and necessary in fields such as combating terrorism, climate change, disarmament and nuclear security, has become almost a piece of fiction.
The root of the failure to seek stable links is basically found in different readings, by the Kremlin and the White House, of the meaning of the end of the Cold War. For the US, the early 1990s marked the height of its power and prestige on the international stage. Even a French chancellor referred to the country as the “hyperpower”.
Strategists in the White House, Democrats or Republicans, concluded that this was a historic opportunity to impose the “pax americana”, particularly in Europe, the epicenter of the dispute between Moscow and Washington between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a tool of this strategy, the US used the expansion of the European Union and NATO towards Russia’s borders. Since 1999, 14 countries have joined the military alliance.
For the Kremlin, the dilution of the Cold War and the reduction of military spending corresponded to a necessity, to save the bankrupt superpower. Mikhail Gorbachev, aware of the empire’s weakness, proposed that the US exchange rivalry for cooperation, with an eye on the survival of a faded version of Bolshevism. Yeltsin led the dissolution of the USSR, took Gorbachev’s place and hoped to receive from the Americans the reward, in economic aid, for having led the disintegration of a country previously labeled in Washington as the “evil empire”.
The political elite in Moscow sought to approach Washington for two reasons: economic, in order to contribute to its maintenance in power, and geopolitical vision, prioritizing the insertion of Russia, for historical reasons, in a European and Western context.
The US, however, chose to emphasize the “pax americana” and to maintain distrust of the Kremlin owners, massively linked to the Soviet past. Over the past few decades, the White House has preferred to see Russia more as an adversary and less as a partner.
Result: Moscow bets on rapprochement with Beijing, a geopolitical movement also strengthening, at the domestic level, Russian nationalists and Putin’s authoritarianism. The global scenario would be more stable and Russia, probably more democratic, if the country were less isolated and more integrated into the so-called European and Western structures.
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