In
1991, the USSR dissolved into a collection of independent states
leaving the Russian Federation as its internationally recognized
successor. (As the legal successor state, Russia inherited the
Soviet Union's seat on the UN Security Council.) The states of the
former Eastern Bloc had already broken free of Soviet control.
German unification was a fact. It might have seemed that the Cold
War was over with NATO's mission of protecting the West from Soviet
aggression no longer needed. But NATO did not disappear. Instead it
began moving east into the former Warsaw Pact countries. In
Washington, the judgement was that the US had “won” the Cold War,
the USSR had “lost” and Russia was now just a second class power
of little consequence. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined
in 1999. By 2004, NATO took in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania thereby moving well beyond the former
boundaries of the USSR. Albania and Croatia were admitted in 2009.
Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia are on on the doorstep. Reaching
deeper into the former USSR, NATO unilaterally decided to eventually
bring in the Ukraine and Georgia.
It
demands great credulity to believe that Russia would not have seen
this expansion east as a form of aggression. Russia has a long
history and a deep culture. It also possess a formidable military,
nuclear weapons, and that seat on the Security Council. Moscow
essentially swallowed the first waves of NATO expansion but balked at
Georgia (where Stalin was born) and in 2014 drew the line in Ukraine.
None of this should have been surprising. That President Putin, for
partly political reasons, played to Russian nationalism in his
reaction to NATO's pretensions should not hide the fact that Russia
and the Russian people had good reason to feel brazenly provoked.
During
the Yeltsin years, the US made efforts to support Russian “reform.”
But we Americans have little appreciation of the particularities of
other countries – historical, social, cultural, political – and
expected too much and gave too little. With Putin the trajectory has
been mostly down. But the events in Ukraine, Russian resilience to
sanctions, and Moscow's reclaimed role in the Mideast suggest that it
was always foolish to see Russia as simply a second class power of no
consequence. The US and Europe – as at least the Germans
understand – need Russia.
Russia
and the US have a deep shared interest in their own and global
security. They form, in effect, the Western and Eastern flanks of
the Atlantic community. Conflict between the two helps neither. We
face a common threat from Islamic fundamentalism and the regional
chaos in Syria and Iraq. We both must contend with the “rise” of
China. That the two countries have different political systems is
not unusual and reflects our very different histories. It should not
take Donald Trump to note that the Russian people have chosen their
president and still support him. Sanctions have not weakened Putin
because the Russian people need little help in seeing in them another
example of US aggression.
What
should be done? Washington's political class should make up its
collective mind to deal with the Russia that is rather then the one
it might wish. NATO expansion into Ukraine is not required by US
national interests and should be dropped. EU membership for Ukraine
should be left to the EU to process (or not). Sanctions should be
rolled back. The US played a large part in Syria and Iraq's descent
into chaos. There, Washington should accept that Russia has
interests and that Assad's fate needs to be negotiated. More
generally, the US should commit itself to working multilaterally and
with it's partners on the UN Security Council, especially Russia.
Achieving compromise approaches may not be easy. Trust has frayed.
But as our work together on Iran nuclear shows, things can get done.
And the US needs partners that don't always simply say “yes.”
Those “coalitions of the willing” are not adequate protection
from making mistakes.
Note: An earlier version of this appeared in TransConflict.
