Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 1, February–March 2010, pp. 236–244
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Since 1999 relations between Russia and the West have gone from bad to worse. The West watched Russia move away from liberal democratic standards as Vladimir Putin reasserted the power of the centre, to popular Russian approbation. Geopolitics threw up a series of contentious issues. In 1999 the first wave of NATO expansion and the air campaign against Serbia provided evidence of Russia’s diminished influence in European security. The second enlargement of the Alliance in 2004, the prospect of future expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, the support given by the West to the latter’s ‘Orange Revolution’ and the geopolitics of Caspian oil routes further fuelled Russian apprehension that America was challenging its interests in its immediate neighbourhood. Moscow’s direct involvement in the 2004 election in Ukraine, the interruption of gas flows to Ukraine in 2006, and the increasingly abrasive style of Russian diplomacy fuelled symmetric fears in the West of a return of Russian imperialist practices.
Two events have interrupted this downward spiral. The August 2008 Georgia crisis signalled that there were limits to the level of confrontation the West could afford in support of ‘pro-Western’ governments in Russia’s neighbourhood, and the Obama administration’s ‘reset’ of relations with Moscow was a recognition that things had gone fundamentally astray. The Georgia War was an opportunity for Moscow to humble a reckless and hostile Georgian government. Its wider consequence was to take further enlargement of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia off the agenda for some time, but at a price for Russia, which appeared overbearing and dangerously exhilarated by its success. The reset policy remains vulnerable in the United States, where it will be judged on its ability to conclude a meaningful strategic arms treaty, and on the solidarity of Russia in face of the growing Iranian nuclear challenge, both problematic outcomes. Moreover, these results will be scrutinised in Washington and in the rest of the world against a background of growing doubts as to the firmness of Obama’s international leadership.
Still, the current situation presents a welcome if fragile opportunity to redress the current state of Moscow’s relations with the West. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has never quite found its proper place in European security structures. Russian President Dimitry Medvedev’s proposals for a new security pact, detailed in November 2009, go a long way towards clarifying Russia’s grievances vis-à-vis the current European order, some of which are indeed well founded. For all of its obvious flaws, it would be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand, as some Western leaders have already done.
In a 5 June 2008 speech in Berlin, where he first outlined his proposal, Medvedev argued that there is a European civilisation, of which Russia is a part. As three branches of that civilisation, Russia, the European Union and the United States should be able to develop a genuinely equal partnership. That was made possible by the end of the Cold War, but Europe and North America developed their relationship (which he…
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Gilles Andréani is a Contributing Editor to Survival. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Paris II University and a Transatlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund.
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