While Russia was turning out to be “beyond the pale,” the West proceeded to build a “Europe whole and free” without Russia by expanding its principal institutions in the area, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. To the Clinton administration and liberal internationalists across the West, extending NATO and the EU east of the Cold War divide made a lot of sense, as the countries in the region were eager to accede to the West and, while in the process of accession, to adopt Western ways of doing things. Such integration was also the best way of preventing conflicts among the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
As a result, by the late 2000s, virtually all of Europe outside the former Soviet Union had evolved into a single economic, political, security and humanitarian space. The oft-asked but never clearly answered question about the borders of Europe was being solved on the ground, not in the discussion fora. Russia’s designated role was that of a partner of, not a party to, the expanded West.
To the Russian foreign and security policy community, such treatment was nothing less than insult added to injury. Some bemoaned the “Versailles-like” conditions allegedly imposed on Russia. Nearly all fulminated at the “perfidious” Western scheme of bringing NATO all the way to Russia’s doorstep, supposedly in contravention of promises made by US and Western European leaders to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev at the time of Germany’s reunification in 1990.
These Russian claims, however, rested on shaky foundations. Rather than being castigated and turned into a pariah à la post-Versailles Germany, Russia inherited the Soviet seat at the UN Security Council and all of the USSR’s nuclear arsenal, joined the G7 (which thus became G8), the Council of Europe, and the World Trade Organization, and acquired privileged status as a partner of both NATO and the EU – all with the West’s assistance. True, the Soviet Union’s $100 billion debt to the West was not forgiven, unlike Poland’s, but Russia was not saddled with reparations and retributions. Moreover, having had – and been able – to pay its debt eventually saved Russia’s pride.
Essentially, Russian grievances against its Western partners fall into two categories. The first one is mostly to do with the West’s refusal to appreciate what Russia did to end the Cold War – from allowing Eastern Europe to “go its own way” to shaking off communism and dismantling the Soviet Union at home – together with its failure to integrate Russia into its midst and to give it an elevated status there. The other one reproaches the West for its refusal to treat Russia as a great power in its own right, complete with a sphere of interests around its borders, and immune from Western interference in its own affairs. Both sets of grievances misread the nature of international relations.
The Russian complainers ignore the hard fact that the Soviet Union utterly lost the economic, ideological and political competition with the West and that, instead of the “convergence” of the two systems, as Andrei Sakharov and many other intellectuals had hoped, and a sort of “bi-hegemony” of Moscow and Washington, as Gorbachev’s advisers anticipated, the West celebrated a complete and total victory and the United States entered a period of global dominance unprecedented in history. In the final stages of the Cold War, Moscow gave in to Washington’s demands not only in the issues of arms control and geopolitics but also in human rights, economic freedoms and the treatment of the Baltic republics. Russians demanded recognition for their seemingly graceful but actually painful exit from communism and the empire and claimed a status no longer supported by the realities at hand, but these things could not have been had for the asking.
The United States and its allies were fully triumphant. Robert Gates, then CIA director, called his drive into the Kremlin in 1992 for talks a “victory lap.” He later reflected that
[F]rom 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, [had] badly underestimated the magnitude of Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War and then in dissolution of the Soviet Union, which amounted to the end of the centuries-old Russian Empire. The arrogance, after the collapse, of American government officials, academicians, businessmen, and politicians in telling the Russians how to conduct their domestic and international affairs (not to mention the internal psychological impact of their precipitous fall from superpower status) had led to deep and long-term resentment and bitterness.[1]
The end of the Cold War, however, signaled more the defeat of the Soviet system, which had become unsustainable in a number of key areas, starting from economics, than a victory for the West. The defeat of the system was mainly the work of the Russian elites and people, who, alongside others – Armenians, Balts, Georgians, Ukrainians – opened a new beginning for themselves, although at a high price. The fact that the metropolitan territory of an empire led the way out of it is a rare occurrence in world history.
To blame the West for the downfall of the USSR is factually wrong. US President George H. W. Bush’s July 1991 speech in Kiev, in which he urged the Ukrainians to remain in the Soviet Union, revealed the keen understanding in Washington of the dangers inherent in a collapse of a nuclear superpower. The utterly false claims of US responsibility for the disintegration of the USSR put Russians into the position of fake victims, while diminishing their twin historical accomplishments – or responsibility, depending on where one stands on these issues – for a peaceful end to the seven decades of communist dictatorship and a voluntary dissolution of the 300-year-old empire.
As for the NATO argument, the West’s mistake was not that its leaders had broken any formal commitments – which were non-existent – or informal promises – which were exceedingly vague and widely open to interpretation – to their Soviet counterpart, but that it lacked a credible strategy toward a major power left outside of its expanding alliances and feeling the discomfort of it, to say the least. This discomfort could be papered over, managed and minimized, but eventually it led to a sudden pushback.
With hindsight, some senior Western statesmen concede that, in the words of Robert Gates, “moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake.” To Gates, “NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russian considered their own vital national interests.”[2] However, this realist assessment was a minority view at the time of making decisions about NATO’s enlargement.
Essentially, the failure to understand the consequences of expanding the NATO security area while leaving Russia outside it was rooted in the widely held belief that the “end of history” had arrived: that classical geopolitics no longer applied in the globalized world, that, in the post-Cold War environment, compromising with authoritarian regimes, especially about third parties, meant compromising one’s own core principles, and that anyway Russia was on a declining path. Conventional wisdom suggested that Russia had no option but to take the world as it is, and adjust to it, by bandwagoning on the West.
1
Robert Gates,