Room 1,120 at the Presidente Hotel in Moscow was buzzing. Some were talking on the phone, others were looking at a bluish computer screen. George Gorton, Joe Shumate and Richard Dresner, Americans, had landed in Russia in 1996 with one objective: to help the presidential campaign for the reelection of Boris Yeltsin and prevent the victory of communist Guennadi Ziuganov.
The cooperation was agreed between Yeltsin and Bill Clinton and resulted in an electoral victory. However, articulations between the White House and the Kremlin appear today as unthinkable, in the scenario marked by the tragic invasion of Ukraine.
When the Cold War and the USSR crumbled, the possibility arose for the countries with the two largest nuclear arsenals on the planet to build a minimally stable and predictable relationship. Thirty years later, failure remains in the bilateral scenario.
In 1962, in one of the most tense moments of the Cold War, John Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev removed the specter of atomic war, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, by agreeing to mutual setbacks. Under American pressure, the Kremlin removed weapons stationed on the Caribbean island, and the White House later ordered the dismantling of similar material in Turkey, a country allied with Washington and bordering the USSR.
A dramatic chapter of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis also left as a legacy the establishment of the famous “red telephone”, a direct line of communication between the superpowers, in order to make fluid contacts and avoid disasters of planetary proportions.
The fierce dispute over zones of influence, a basic pillar of the Cold War, coexisted with efforts to prevent the deterioration of the dialogue between the protagonists of that historic moment. In 1967, for example, President Lyndon Johnson received Soviet premier Alexei Kosiguin, precisely to allay fears of an atomic collision.
A few weeks earlier, the Six-Day War had taken place between Israel and its Arab neighbors, with the US and USSR supporting opposing sides in the conflict. However, the superpowers were clearly committed to not being dragged into a direct confrontation. And the agenda was not limited to the Middle East, as one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s was unfolding on Vietnamese soil.
The Johnson-Kosiguin diplomatic party did not produce “concrete results”, but it did send out the message of superpower efforts to maintain global stability. Thus was born the expression “spirit of Glassboro”, in reference to the American location where the meeting took place.
Other moments of tension permeated bilateral relations. In 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, increasing the list of Soviet military interventions, such as those that took place, for example, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The US reacted to the invasion of Afghan territory with economic sanctions and with the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Negotiations on nuclear disarmament went into crisis, were suspended and resumed only in 1982.
In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev, aware of the failure of the Soviet system, injected new vigor into bilateral relations and proposed the exchange of rivalry for cooperation. His interlocutors, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, watered down the anti-communist orthodoxy and positively signaled the changes coming from the Kremlin.
History, therefore, offers several moments of ties between Moscow and Washington shaped by the search for global stability, and not defined only by national agendas. Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden could learn from such episodes.
