With tension in the East, the West isn’t blameless

In the era of Russian weakness, the West have tried to bring the border of NATO to the Russian frontier.

Putin is a rational actor and directs Russian policy based on what he believes is the national interest of his country and he is a menace, chiefly to blame for the geopolitical failure to assimilate Russia into the international world order. Yet these balanced concessions are not enough for the endless flocks of commentators who see Russia as Nazi Germany and Putin as the Fuhrer. Speaking exclusively in a pseudo-Churchillian tone of voice, imagining that they are a majestic hawk, and any dissenters are cowardly doves appeasing the predatory Russian bear, they enthuse for a casus belli so they can exorcise the ghost of Neville Chamberlin, haunting Whitehall as he does.

The official Western history of the ‘long twilight struggle’, as President Kennedy put it, is confused about Christmas 1991. Three separate events- the breakup of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism- have been viewed by the West as one: that it was victorious over its foe, Russia (as the Soviet successor state). The mainstream Russian interpretation is that they underwent an internal counter-revolution which over threw the Bolshevik regime and they had not been defeated by anyone.

In the era of Russian weakness (recovery of strength coinciding with Putin’s ascendency; hard evidence that he acts rationally in the national interest of Russia), the West have tried to bring the border of NATO to the Russian frontier- the chief of the disagreements between the West and Russia in the post Cold War years. Putin argues that the Warsaw Pact was disbanded, so why is NATO so insistent on becoming their next-door neighbour. NATO has grown dramatically onto the Baltic territory of the former USSR and now includes many ex-Soviet satellite states, something which directly contradicts diplomatic promises the West gave Russian leaders in the early nineties.

The annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 was a calculated move, pre-empting a long-term expectation that the West would draw Ukraine into NATO and turn the Sevastopol base located in Crimea into an essentially American one; an eventuality that was about as likely as Lithuanian or Latvian membership of NATO and the EU would have seemed thirty years ago.

It was an enormous mistake of the Clinton-Yeltsin era to immediately impose upon post-Soviet Russia an extreme version of neo-liberal capitalist economics, convinced as the West was by Francis Fukuyama’s End of History. Capitalism and democracy were considered the priority, rather than the far more valuable commodities of the rule of law and liberty.

It was an enormous mistake of the administration of George W. Bush to begin to extend the embrace of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, perceived as highly threatening by Russia.

It was an even graver mistake of the European Commission to force Ukraine’s President to choose between Europe and Russia in 2014, rather than allow for the option of it being a neutral buffer zone. This was a contributory factor in provoking the terrible civil war which ravaged that country (and the event which explodes forever the conventional wisdom that the institutions of the European Union are somehow inevitably peace producing).

Donald Trump campaigned with a more conciliatory tone towards Russia in 2016, which could have ended up being a mistake, but could also have led towards greater cooperation and a legitimate strategic partnership. Alas it was not put to the test, as once he took office, he behaved within the permitted confines of US foreign policy by supporting NATO and bombing Syria. This is because the, for lack of a superior term, military-industrial complex in America insists on complete US hegemony and aims for Russia to be a subordinate power, which it stubbornly and frustratingly resists. Treating Russia as a subordinate power has become increasingly difficult- gone are the days of Yugoslavia and Iraq- here are the days of Ukraine and Syria.