“It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake,” so spoke Napoleon’s police chief Joseph Fouche upon learning about the execution of a Bourbon prince on Napoleon’s orders. Napoleon’s swift justice was supposed to deliver a blow to his adversaries — a win — but instead antagonized the rest of Europe.
The Helsinki summit was a win for Putin, as shockwaves from Trump’s kowtowing to the Russian president spread on both sides of the Atlantic. Putin must have left Helsinki thinking that he had just scored another big win against his U.S. counterpart mired in the Kremlin-provoked criminal investigation back home. 'Mission accomplished!' Or is it? Will the decline of the West and the dismantling of the U.S.-led liberal international order so desired by Putin, and so eagerly facilitated by Trump, be good for Russia? Was the post-Cold War period of Western dominance as harmful to Russia as the Kremlin has been telling its citizens and the rest of the world? And what is likely to replace it?
A longstanding staple of the Kremlin’s narrative is that the West exploited Russia’s domestic troubles and retreat from the world stage in the 1990s. According to the Russian version of events, Russia was too weak to resist the West's trampling of its interests and relentless geopolitical expansion at Russia’s expense. As Russian domestic politics stabilized and the economy recovered on Putin’s watch, the Kremlin began to stand up to the West in defense of its interests. In Moscow’s telling, it had no choice but to go to war twice — in Georgia and in Ukraine — to stop the West’s onslaught.
But was the era of U.S.-led Western dominance really so bad for Russia? No denying, the 1990s were a horrible decade for it, but that was hardly the West’s fault. In fact, the West acted as Russia’s principal source of desperately needed aid when its economy collapsed. Marshaling billions of dollars to bail out Russia was one of the key policy priorities for Western governments for more than a decade. Western advisors, much maligned for their supposedly faulty advice to the Russian government, played a crucial role in designing and implementing badly needed economic reforms.
Far from perfect, Western technical assistance paid off for Russia even before oil prices began to climb around the turn of the century and lifted the Russian economy. Putin’s economic miracle would have been impossible without those reforms and the West’s financial and technical help.
And that’s not all. The United States spent many billions of dollars to relocate to Russia and secure the remnants of the Soviet nuclear arsenal scattered across several republics of the former USSR. Would Russia have been more secure if Ukraine on its southwestern border and Kazakhstan on its southeastern border had retained control over nuclear weapons deployed on their territory? The Budapest agreement, which committed Ukraine to give up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and which Russia violated when it annexed Crimea, would not have been possible without active involvement by the United States and its allies.
NATO enlargement is another major Western pursuit that supposedly damaged Russian interests and thus triggered countless Russian objections. Those objections focused on NATO as a military alliance, the threat to Russian security resulting from its growing physical proximity to the Russian heartland and the alleged exclusion of Russia from European security decision-making due to its non-member status.
This too is doubtful. By any measure, NATO enlargement was accompanied by the dismantlement of its capabilities for conventional warfare in the European theater. The United States and its allies, eager to maximize the post-Cold War “peace dividend” and preoccupied with contingencies far beyond Europe, had effectively turned NATO into a demilitarized zone, which posed no threat of invasion to Russia, but provided an unprecedented degree of stability and security for Central Europe. How many tanks did the United States have in Europe in 2014? Zero.
It is hard to find another period in Russian history when its western border was as secure and free of the threat of invasion as between 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. As to the charge of excluding Russia from European security decision-making, it does not really stand up to scrutiny. Given its size, history, and web of relationships with all major European powers, is it really possible to ignore Russia?
Is the current sad state of the Western alliance really a cause for celebration in Moscow? What is likely to come after it? Are Russian interests better served by political paralysis in the United States and Germany, a divided European Union, and Poland and Hungary consumed by xenophobia, and nationalism? Does it make Russia more secure? More prosperous? If not the West, who else would have come to Russia’s rescue at the end of the Cold War with the magnanimity and the generosity displayed by governments striving for a long-term partnership with Russia — China?
These are not questions merely of historical interest. As China emerges as both the alternative to the West and Russia’s preeminent partner, and the West is in disarray, Russian critics of the West should ask themselves what it would have been like had the West not been there in their country’s hour of need, and what it will be like if China supplants the West as the global rule-maker.
Comments(5)
From an economic point of view, the democratic West will reject an international order led by the Chinese Communist Party. Such an illogical proposition is antithetical to the ideals of the US Declaration of independence and all the norms of the European paradigm of human rights. However, the current European security architecture, buttressed against Russia, will remain unstable (and therefor extremely dangerous) until an alternative structure can be agreed upon. NATO must be replaced by a vast zone of demilitarization both within Germany and European Russia. Eventually, all American troops and equipment must leave Europe. After 1945, the German threat to all of Europe was replaced by the creation of a far more balanced dual alliance system called the Cold War. However in our current era, the conventional balance has once again shifted -- this time representing one entire alliance system, with an embedded Germany united and not a two alliance systems with Germany divided. This new structure is poised eastward toward the Russian European heartland. In the future, the neutrality of Russia as a Euro-Asia geopolitical entity will become a significant key to international peace. NATO can neither encompass Russia as a partner, nor continue as a potential aggressor at Russia's border lands without the constant threat of a third world war. China will not tolerate the first scenario, while the Kremlin cannot live under the permanent threat of the second. Somewhere between the expansion of NATO and the void created by its future absence (the potential Russian dominance of Eastern Europe) there lies a more balanced future security architecture. To leave Moscow as a Eurasian power facing east threatens no one. Leaving Europe without a common German-Russian threat means continental peace. The US in such a world becomes the crucial naval balancer, in case of an Asian or European breakdown. Coordination and cooperation between Russia, China and the US are essential for world peace. Finally, I believe that eventual nuclear proliferation is impossible without dramatic concomitant major power nuclear demilitarization. However, dramatic nuclear demilitarization is equally not possible without a strong conventional balance, which must become close to permanent. Given our planet's ecological challenges, and the potential devastation from nuclear war, world peace has now become paramount.
I believe that this issue it's very important in order to maintain the peace every time elsewhere in our controversial world today. The environmental Protection it's crucial for maintain a healthy population in a world with peace and the best internacional cooperation ever. Thanks.
Great article always love carnegie
In reality that President Trump has an erratic conception about President Putin and his negative conduct against the United States of America and their natural allies around the world. Mr. Putin want to be the new Cesar's Russian, and Mr. Trump the new Emperor's f the United States of America, and both close friends forever, but inside the U.S. exist a great civil society and many patriots that believe in the democracy, market economy, transparent election process, free expression, environmental protection, and cooperation international just between all countries of the world. The citizens in the U. S. as U.E. and another democratic countries, have a powerful opportunity to change this situation in the next electoral process. Particularly on November 6, 2018 in U.S. we can revertir the composition in our Congress during the middle term elections, and the action of the President could be limited, and on 2020 the citizens have another opportunity to change the presidency. God bless us.
Good piece. What's sad though is that this alternative narrative, well-based in the actual facts, has had so little traction not just in Russia but in the West. Even many so-called 'hawks' who are thoroughly anti-Putin have to a large degree bought the Kremlin narrative so that we tend to be defensive, allowing ourselves to start on the defensive. In the clash of strategic narratives that is going on then we need to be much more forward-leaning, much less defensive, acknowledging our mistakes but forcefully pointing out the Russian mistakes as well as what we did right. We have allowed Russia to simultaneously portray itself as a victim and sleeping giant awoken by a mighty new Czar.
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