After Germany and Japan, Another Demand for Total Surrender

How Russia Went from Ally to Adversary, Keith Gessen

The dominate-and-surrender paradigm on the global stage

In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush... Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”... Bush did not react... Perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender...

Putin came into the office ready to work with the West... (But he) did not enjoy the Bush Administration’s “Freedom Agenda,” whether it took the form of the full-scale invasion of Iraq or the much milder cheerleading for the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine... Having supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Putin was furious when the U.S. and the U.K. refused to extradite Chechen leaders... there was no room for an equal partner in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s global crusade. By 2004, Putin was darkly accusing the West of collaborating with Chechen terrorists. He started talking more and more about the threat posed by nato expansion. In 2007, during a speech at the Munich Security Conference, he all but declared his secession from the West.

The development of Russia in the post-Cold War period was not the result of a Western plot or Western actions. Russian officials chose, within a narrow range of options, how to behave, and they could have chosen differently....

Everyone in the former Soviet bloc looked to America for guidance and inspiration. Never had the prestige of the United States been higher in that part of the world. We had an astonishing amount of moral capital. What did we do with it?

Ultimately, the West chose the West. We extended our writ where we could, and dug in where we had to. This meant, among other things, keeping the structures we already had in place and expanding them, as opposed to inventing new ones. Back in 1990, three months after the “not one inch” meeting, Gorbachev had waxed lyrical to Baker about a new pan-European security arrangement. The American Secretary of State’s response was polite, but firm: “It is an excellent dream, but only a dream..”