An opportunity lost
The end of the cold war in 1989 brought a sense of relief and satisfaction to America. As Jack Matlock, America’s ambassador in Moscow, described it in his memoirs, “The way we looked at it at the time, and the way Gorbachev looked at it, was that we all won the cold war. We ended it.” When the Soviet Union crumbled two years later, America was caught unprepared and scrambling for a policy. Its biggest concern was removing nuclear rockets from former Soviet republics. Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s former prime minister in charge of economic reform, says this was one of the most successful operations Russia and America have mounted together.
America’s policy towards Russia was not triumphalist. But nor did the West offer Russia a Marshall Plan to stave off a catastrophic collapse in living standards. As Mr Gaidar says, it was more concerned about recovering the Soviet debts which Russia had inherited than with stabilising its financial system. Poland’s debt was written off, but Russia’s was not. By 1993, when Bill Clinton took office and actively engaged with Boris Yeltsin, the crucial window of opportunity had closed. The funds Mr Clinton managed to accumulate for Russia were too little, too late.
For most of the 1990s, the thrust of Russia’s relationship with the West was about Russia’s transition to a normal, civilised country. But that clashed with NATO enlargement, which presupposed that Russia was a threat. For the West, enlargement was about bolstering security in Europe. In Moscow it was seen as a sign of mistrust and neglect of Russia’s aspirations. A new security structure could have been built to include a democratic Russia, but never was. Instead, NATO enlargement was coated in soothing language about Russia’s co-operation with the alliance inside the Russia-NATO council.
There is nothing legitimate about Russia's objections to NATO expansion and never has been. The "mistrust" that motivated NATO expansion was perfectly understandable in light of 20th-century history and was proven wise by Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008. "Russia's aspirations" which we were "neglecting" were aspirations to dominate its neighbors; if they were anything else, NATO would not have been a threat. The root problem is that Russia has not repudiated and repented of the Soviet episode the way Germany has of the Nazi episode, or the way America has for slavery and segregation. Only when Russians reject the Soviet legacy, and to some extent the tsarist legacy too, will they deserve the world's trust. And they should accept, without resentment, that it may be a decade or two or three before the justified mistrust and contempt of their western neighbors for them fades. By suggesting that "an opportunity" was "lost" through Western mistakes, The Economist is making very unwarranted concessions that can only encourage Russians in their unjustified sense of grievance.
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