So much for the complexities of the question and for the difficulties of answering it, neither of which should be construed as an excuse for fudging the issue. I will attempt to address the question squarely, knowing full well that your interest in the answer is anything but academic. A short version sounds like this. Most fears about Russia are dated or groundless. At the same time, a lot of dangers linked to America’s or Europe’s relations with it are all too happily ignored. In other words: Russia should not be feared but, rather, always be handled with care. If you are interested in an answer which is a bit longer, you are welcome to read further.
Introduction
The Ukraine crisis of 2014 drew a line under the quarter century of virtually unprecedented Russian–Western cooperation, which began with the end of the Cold War and Russia’s shaking off communism. After events in Ukraine, in the view of a number of serious and seasoned observers, the Cold War has staged a comeback. These observers point to the new political front lines being drawn in Europe, this time in its eastern part rather than in the center of the continent. They see this new divide solidifying into a zone of military confrontation. They add that the values gap between the West and Russia is as real as the old ideological confrontation between liberal democracy and communism. Finally, with Russia aligning itself with China and Iran, as well as with authoritarian regimes from Belarus to Syria to Venezuela to Zimbabwe, there is an element of globalism in the new stand-off.
I, on the contrary, do not find the Cold War analogy very useful. Not so much because of the obvious differences between then and now – the absence of an iron curtain; the off-center rather than pivotal global importance of US–Russian relations compared to US–Soviet ones; or the much reduced salience of the ideological factor. As someone who vividly remembers the Cold War, I am concerned that analogies which are too close to that period in history can create patterns of thought that would be misleading and result in preventable mistakes. People would be preparing for things which would not happen, while missing those that would. The situation in Western–Russian relations now may be as bad, and as dangerous, as at any time during the Cold War, but it is bad and dangerous in its own new way.
The absence of an iron curtain makes information space a prime battlefield in the new competition between the Russian state-run propaganda and the Western mainstream media. The still largely open space makes this 24/7 battle extremely dynamic and particularly ruthless, with virtually no holds barred. Information is no longer suppressed, but it is difficult or sometimes impossible to tell truth from falsehood.
Geo-economics, alongside information space, has become a key area of Russian–Western confrontation. Contrary to liberal expectations, interdependence – i.e., between Russia and the EU – has neither prevented nor dampened the conflict over Ukraine. If anything, interdependence made the rupture more painful than during the Cold War. Russia’s integration into the global economy allows for a more effective use of Western economic sanctions in an effort to make the Kremlin change its course.
The obvious asymmetry in power and status between Russia and the United States leads Moscow to elect the field which it finds more comfortable – military action – and to put a premium on the swiftness and boldness of its own steps. The absence of a balance turns the rivalry into a competition of wills, where the Kremlin also capitalizes on the absolute dominance of the Russian president in the national decision-making process. And the values gap, unlike the ideological divide of the past, makes it virtually impossible for the United States, occupying in its own thinking the moral high ground, to reach a compromise with so unworthy an adversary. These are elements which make the current rivalry more fluid and less predictable than the Cold War stand-off.
Whether one prefers to refer to the Cold War or not, one has to admit that mutual adversity between the West and Russia is the new normal, which is likely to last. Trust was not really achieved even in the period of cooperation, but deep distrust comes now with the utter lack of respect, not even of the kind sometimes accorded to an enemy. There is no element of balance either. The Soviet–Western competition is long over, with the West having declared itself the victor. To treat Russia as an equal would not only be wrong as a matter of fact; it would be wrong in moral terms and, whoever might do so, compromises the values of the West. Among the dangers facing the civilized world, US President Barack Obama famously put Russia somewhere between a contagious disease and a terrorist grouping.
This adversity is likely to continue beyond the lifetime of the Obama administration. The forty-fifth US president could actually be tougher on Russia than the forty-fourth one. One hears in Washington that pressure on Moscow will last at least as long as Vladimir Putin’s reign in Russia – which may be a long wait. It is an interesting question what might happen if Russia, as some people hope, cracks under Western pressure and capitulates. If it does not, however, it is hard to imagine that Putin or a successor will roll back the Kremlin’s policies enough to win a “normalization” of relations with the United States. There can be some provisional “fix” in Donbass, but there will be no return to the halcyon days of Russia’s attempted integration into the West in the 1990s, or its equally unfulfilled ambition of forging alliances with the United States and NATO in the 2000s.
The current predicament in Russian–Western relations is anything but fortuitous. European history proves, rather convincingly, that a post-conflict failure to integrate a former enemy, particularly if it is a major power, or at least to make it feel secure and at ease, results in a new conflict roughly a generation away. The way World War I ended made World War II very likely. By contrast, post-World War II integration of West Germany into the US-led system of alliances and the European Common Market essentially resolved the “German Question” that had plagued Europe since the second half of the nineteenth century. With the Cold War being a conflict of a scale, intensity and duration – but not casualties, of course – comparable to a world war, the failure of Russia’s Western integration, which was evident from the mid-2000s, bode ill. People were warned and should have been alarmed.
Things are never so simple, though, and any historical analogies need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. One cardinal difference between post-World War II West Germany and post-Cold War Russia is that the Germans fully accepted US leadership and eagerly fitted into the US-led “free world” as model pupils, as the phrase went then. The Russians, on the contrary, after a very brief period of demonstrating their willingness to embrace US values and interests as their own, began to clamor for a co-equal position in the post-Cold War order, or at minimum for full recognition of their special security interests the way they themselves defined them. In other words, they demanded power-sharing at the top of the system, or at least special privileges within it.
Neither was, or could have been, on offer. Russia of the 1990s, as the prime successor to the Soviet Union, was, in realist terms, a defeated power in all but name; it was also exceedingly weak and seemingly growing weaker; and it was much nearer to the bottom than to the top of the post-communist democracy/market class. The more insightful Americans and Europeans soon concluded that Russia would not make a good – i.e., reliable – ally, in the image of Germany. If allowed into NATO, Russia would probably have undermined the American leadership by its outsize demands and its mischievous propensity to build coalitions against the US – with Germany, France and others. A keen sense of great-power sovereignty was still in the DNA of the Russian political class; the absence of a military defeat at the close of the Cold War – and, instead of post-conflict “re-education,” the liberal talk of a “victory for all” – clouded and confused popular perceptions; and the enormity of the task of Russian modernization made Russia not only a hopeless but also an undesirable ally.