The crisis has been long in coming. When Russia was weakest, in the mid-1990s, NATO chose to announce plans for eastward expansion, in violation of a gentleman’s agreement that Mikhail Gorbachev had struck with the first Bush administration. Boris Yeltsin objected angrily to NATO’s reneging, but to no avail. The first round of enlargement came in 1997 and included the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary. Three subsequent rounds inducted other Eastern European countries, including the Baltics in 2004. Ukraine and Georgia, though denied invitations to initiate membership proceedings in 2008, were assured that they would eventually be allowed to join. No matter how often Western leaders and NATO voiced benign intentions toward Russia, they persuaded no one here. The four-letter acronym standing for the world’s mightiest military alliance sounds to Russian ears about as harmless as “Warsaw Pact” once did to Americans. The Bush administration’s 2002 abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—the 1972 agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union severely limiting the deployment of missile-defense systems in both countries—combined with its plans to build such installations in Eastern Europe, stoked the fire. The East-West “armed bloc” mentality that had supposedly died with the Cold War, in favor of a “Europe Whole and Free,” was alive and well. Thus, the Russia-U.S. partnership destined to last, said Yeltsin in 1995, not “for one year ... [but] for a millennium,” began breaking down just a few years after its inception. This was predictable, and predicted. In 1998, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spoke to George Kennan, who authored the containment policy that guided U.S. relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and got his take on NATO’s enlargement. It deserves to be quoted at length: I think [NATO’s expansion] is the beginning of a new cold war, said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. ... I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.” NATO’s expansion, Kennan said, “shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.” Kennan also predicted that the alliance’s enlargement would result in a “new cold war, probably ending in a hot one” and the death of democracy in Russia. There is no more succinct a diagnosis of what happened than his. Putin’s icy demeanor, agate-blue eyes, and judo-trained physique all befit the current mood in Russia: seething anger. But there is something to add. While Western leaders have long held that great-power politics belongs to the past, Russians have seen proof of the opposite—and of the West’s hypocrisy. During the Yeltsin years, they watched Western disdain for their country’s interests increase. The popular perception was, “The West, and especially America, is taking advantage of our weakness and advancing on us with NATO.” The 1999 NATO intervention over Kosovo in Yugoslavia, with which Russia shares a religion and Slavic ancestry, provoked long-lasting anger. During the Soviet decades, NATO would not have launched an unprovoked 78-day bombing campaign on the border of Warsaw Pact countries. In more recent years, Russians watched the United States invade Afghanistan and Iraq, torture detainees, drone suspected terrorists, spy on its population and allies (as revealed by Edward Snowden), favor the super-wealthy in Supreme Court rulings, and suffer a seemingly endless series of mass shootings that would be unimaginable in Russia or almost anywhere else. Who are the Americans to lecture us? they asked. The West’s moral authority, always shaky here, disappeared. For many Russians, the conflict over Ukraine has been nothing more than a base, old-fashioned power struggle between two morally equivalent, equally self-interested blocs.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 09:35:54 +0000
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