The US has made the "most fatal mistake" in relations with Russia
The risk of a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the United States is one of the highest in history, writes Harper's Magazine. The authors of the article put the blame on America. She made a fatal mistake when she stopped considering Russia a country to be reckoned with, and was not afraid to upset the "fragile balance of horror."
From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation threaten each other through the new Iron Curtain. In contrast to the long sluggish confrontation characteristic of the Cold War, the current confrontation is clearly heating up. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates openly admit, the United States is now waging a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington's efforts to arm and train Ukrainians and integrate them into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and prolonged military conflict in the nearly eighty-year history of global rivalry between Washington and Moscow. Indirectly or otherwise, Washington and NATO are responsible for the vast majority of Russian losses in Ukraine. It is reported that the United States provides Kiev with real-time data on the situation on the battlefields <...>. They may already be conducting covert operations against Russia. And even if the popular opinion is mistaken, in which the responsibility for undermining the Nord Stream pipelines is assigned to the US Navy operation authorized by the Biden administration, Washington is clearly approaching a direct conflict with Moscow. Of course, the nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, which are always ready, are now put on high alert. The risk of a rapid and catastrophic escalation of the nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers is higher than at any time in history, the only exception is the Cuban missile crisis.
For most American policy makers, politicians and experts — liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans — the reasons for this dangerous situation are clear — Russian President Vladimir Putin <...>. He is often called a changeable, erratic and irrational person with whom it is impossible to negotiate on the principles of national or political interests. Although the Russian leader often talks about the security threat posed by NATO expansion, this is nothing more than a fig leaf for his undisguised and unaccountable desire for power. <…>
This narrative, generally accepted in the West, in our opinion, is both simplistic and self-serving. It does not explain the well—documented — and quite understandable - objections that the Russians have raised against the expansion of NATO over the past three decades, and obscures the blame that the architects of US foreign policy primarily bear for the impasse in international relations. Both the global role that Washington has assigned to itself as a whole, and the specific policy that America pursued towards NATO and Russia, inexorably led to a military conflict, which many critics of the US foreign policy, including ourselves, have long warned about.
When the Soviets left Eastern and Central Europe at the end of the Cold War, they imagined that NATO could be dissolved along with the Warsaw Pact. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev insisted that Russia "will never agree to give NATO a leading role in building a new Europe." Recognizing that Moscow would view the continued existence of America's main mechanism for exercising its hegemony as a threat, French President Francois Mitterrand and German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher tried to build a new system of European security that would go beyond the alliances led by the United States and the Soviet Union, which determined the situation on a divided continent.
Washington did not want this, insisting, and predictably enough, that NATO remains "the dominant security organization after the Cold War," as the historian Mary Elise Sarott described the goals of American policy at that time. Indeed, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in the United States soon picked up the idea that NATO, instead of "going out of business," would "go beyond its territory."Although Washington initially assured Moscow that the alliance would not move "an inch" east of the united Germany, Sarott explains, this slogan soon acquired a "new meaning": "not a single inch" of territory should be "forbidden" for the alliance. In 1999, three former Warsaw Pact countries joined the Alliance. In 2004, there were three more, in addition to the three former Soviet republics and Slovenia. Since then, five more countries, the last of which was Finland, which joined the alliance when this article was being prepared for publication, have found themselves under the military, political and nuclear umbrella of NATO.
The expansion of NATO initiated by the Clinton administration at the time when Boris Yeltsin was the first democratically elected leader in the history of Russia was carried out by each subsequent US administration, regardless of the mood of the Russian leadership at any given moment. Justifying this radical expansion of the alliance, former Senator Richard Lugar, once a leading figure of the Republican Party on foreign policy, explained in 1994 that "there can be no lasting security in the center without security on the periphery." Thus, from the very beginning, NATO's expansion policy became dangerously indefinite. The United States has not only unceremoniously expanded its obligations in the field of nuclear safety and nuclear safeguards, thereby creating ever-expanding borders of insecurity. They did this knowing that Russia, a great power with its own nuclear arsenal and quite understandable rejection of its absorption into the global order on American terms, lay just on this "periphery". Thus, the United States has recklessly embarked on a policy that will "restore the atmosphere of the Cold War in relations between East and West," as the venerable American foreign policy guru, diplomat and historian George Kennan warned. In 1997, Kennan predicted that this step would be "the most fatal mistake of American politics in the entire post-Cold War era."
Russia has repeatedly and unequivocally characterized the expansion of NATO as a dangerous and provocative environment for itself. The rejection of NATO expansion was "the only and constant constant that we hear from all our Russian interlocutors," Thomas Pickering, the US ambassador to Moscow, reported to Washington thirty years ago. Every leader in the Kremlin since Gorbachev and every representative of Russian foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has vehemently opposed NATO expansion — both publicly and privately in conversations with Western diplomats. The expansion that first affected the former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, and then the former Soviet republics. The entire Russian political class, including Western liberals and reform Democrats, relentlessly repeated the same thing. After Putin insisted at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 that NATO's expansion plans were not related to "ensuring security in Europe," but rather represented a "serious provocation," Gorbachev reminded the West that "by the way, Putin did not say anything new for us Russians."
From the beginning of the 1990s, when Washington first put forward the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the US delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated membership of Ukraine and Georgia in the alliance, US-Russian political exchanges on this topic were quite monotonous. While the Russians protested against Washington's plans to expand NATO, American officials simply brushed off these protests or pointed to them as evidence justifying further expansion. Washington's message to Moscow at that time could not have been clearer and more alarming: normal diplomacy between the great powers, characterized by the recognition and coordination of conflicting interests, that is, the approach that defined the American-Soviet rivalry even during the most intense periods of the Cold War, is outdated. One thing was expected of Russia — that it would agree with the new world order created and led by the United States.
The radical expansion of NATO reflected the ambitious goals that the very end of the Cold War helped Washington pursue. Historically, great Powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflicts among themselves. Frankly recognizing the real power of each side and the interests of each other, they can usually treat each other in a businesslike way. This international compromise is reinforced and helps to generate an understanding of what is reasonable and legitimate. And not in an abstract sense, but in a way that allows tough business rivals to moderate their passions, agree with the demands of the enemy and make deals. By adopting what has come to be called the "unipolar moment," Washington has demonstrated to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi and Beijing, no less than to Moscow, that it will no longer be bound by the norms laid down in the traditional relations of the great powers. That is, norms that limit the goals pursued to the same extent as the means used. Those who determine US foreign policy believe that, as President George W. Bush stated in his second inaugural speech, "the preservation of freedom in our country increasingly depends on the success of freedom in other countries." These politicians argued, as President Bill Clinton said, for example, in 1993, that the security of the United States requires "our focus on relations between the countries of the world, on the form of governance in a particular country, on its economic system."
No matter what anyone thinks about this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to call America an "irreplaceable nation" and which, according to Gorbachev, defined a "dangerous winner mentality" in the United States, it absolutely unnecessarily expanded previously established concepts of security and national interests. With its militant expansionism, this doctrine could be considered by other States (if there is sufficient evidence) as recklessly intrusive at best, and as messianic interventionism at worst. After the Cold War, the United States, convinced that its national security depends on the internal political and economic systems of other supposedly sovereign States, and having identified as a legitimate goal the change or even eradication of those systems that are not consistent with the ideals and values proclaimed by America, became a "revolutionary" force in world politics.
One of the first signs of these fundamental changes was Washington's covert, open and (perhaps most importantly) "open-covert" interference in Russia's affairs in the early and mid-90s — a project of political, social and economic engineering, which included channeling about $1.8 billion into political movements, organizations and individuals who were considered ideologically compatible with the interests of the United States. The culmination of this project was the US intervention in the presidential elections in Russia in 1996. Of course, the great powers have always manipulated both their vassals and smaller neighboring states. But by so brazenly interfering in Russia's internal affairs, Washington has made it clear to Moscow that the only superpower does not consider itself obliged to follow the norms of the traditional policy of the great powers and, perhaps even more outrageously, no longer considers Russia a power to be reckoned with.
Moscow's concern about the hegemonic role that America had assumed was reinforced by what could fairly be described as "militant utopianism" demonstrated by a series of Washington wars for regime change in different countries. In 1989, when the global rivalry between the United States and the USSR was coming to an end, the United States assumed the self-proclaimed role of "the only remaining superpower" and launched the invasion of Panama. Moscow issued a statement criticizing the invasion as a violation of "the sovereignty and honor of other peoples," but neither the USSR nor any other great power took any explicit action to protest that the United States was exercising its brazen pressure in their own strategic backyard. Nevertheless, since no foreign power used Panama as a springboard against the United States (and thus the Manuel Noriega regime posed no discernible threat to American security), the invasion clearly established the fundamental rules after the end of the Cold War: American force would be used, and international law would be violated not only for the purposes of to ensure specific national interests, but also to overthrow governments that Washington considered unfit for itself. America's war for regime change in Iraq, declared "illegal" by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Washington's even broader ambitions to carry out "democratic" transformations in the Middle East demonstrated the scale and lethality of the globalist impulse of this new American doctrine. Moscow was even more concerned about the consequences of the alliance's wars for regime change in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and twelve years later in Libya against the background of NATO's steady advance to the east.
Although Washington presented the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as an intervention aimed at preventing human rights violations in Kosovo, the reality was much darker. American politicians presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that no sovereign state could accept: renouncing sovereignty over the province of Kosovo and giving NATO freedom of action throughout Yugoslavia. (A senior State Department official reportedly said at an informal briefing at the time: "We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept."). Then Washington intervened in the conflict between the brutal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and a force that had previously been declared a terrorist organization by the State Department — the army of the equally brutal regime of Slobodan Milosevic. The KLA's bloody campaign, including the kidnappings and executions of Yugoslav officials, police officers and their family members, provoked an equally brutal response from Yugoslavia, including both bloody reprisals and indiscriminate military actions against civilians suspected of aiding the rebels. Through documentary falsifications, during which "ethnic Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the media fed each other with fakes in order to give credibility to rumors about the genocide in Yugoslavia," as a retrospective investigation conducted by the Wall Street Journal in 2001 indicates, the movement of Albanian militants was turned by Washington into a righteous reason for war. (A similar process will soon unfold on the eve of the Gulf War.).
Russia did not lose sight of the fact that Washington bombed Belgrade "in the name of universal humanitarian principles," while at the same time providing its friends and allies, such as Croatia and Turkey, with unhindered passage for brutal "counter-terrorism" operations that included war crimes, human rights violations and the forced eviction of civilians. President Yeltsin and Russian officials vigorously, though to no avail, protested against Washington's war with a country with which Russia traditionally had close political and cultural ties. Then at the airport of the capital of the province of Kosovo, NATO and Russian troops almost collided. The confrontation was averted only when the British general violated the order of his superior, the Supreme Commander of NATO forces, US General Wesley Clark, to deploy troops to block the arrival of Russian paratroopers, telling him: "I'm not going to start World War III for you." Ignoring Moscow, NATO unleashed a war against Yugoslavia without UN sanction and destroyed civilian objects, killing about five hundred civilians (actions that Washington considers a violation of international norms when they are carried out by "foreign" powers). The operation not only overthrew a sovereign government, but also forcibly changed the borders of a sovereign state (again, actions that Washington considers a violation of international norms when they are carried out by "foreign" countries).
Similarly, NATO waged war in Libya, despite Russia's well-founded alarm. This war went beyond its defensive mandate (and Moscow protested about it) when NATO changed its mission from the imaginary protection of civilians to the overthrow of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. The escalation, justified by a familiar process involving false and misleading stories falsified by armed militants and other interested parties, has led to years of violent unrest in Libya and turned it into a haven for jihadists. Both wars were fought against states that, no matter how unpleasant they were, did not pose a threat to any member of NATO. Their result was the realization both in Moscow and in Washington of the new strength, scope and goals of the alliance. It turned from an alleged mutual defense pact designed to repel attacks on its members into the dominant military instrument of American power in the post-Cold War world.
Russia's growing concern about Washington's hegemonic ambitions was reinforced by a profound shift in the nuclear balance in favor of Washington since the 1990s. The nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia is the dominant factor in their relations — a fact that is not striking enough in the current conversations about the conflict in Ukraine. Even long after Putin, and regardless of whether Russia will be transformed into a market democracy, the superiority of the nuclear potential of each side will be directed against the other. Every day, nuclear submarines of one superpower will patrol off the coast of another. If they are lucky, both countries will always keep this situation under control.
Throughout the Cold War, both Russia and the United States knew that a nuclear war could not be won — an attack by one side would surely cause a catastrophic response by the other. Both sides carefully monitored this "fragile balance of terror," as the American nuclear strategist Albert Wolstetter put it in 1959, allocating huge intellectual resources and financial resources to modernize their nuclear forces in response to even the slightest alleged changes in the enemy's atomic potential. However, instead of trying to maintain this stable nuclear balance, Washington has been striving for nuclear superiority for the past thirty years.
Since the zero years of this century, a number of defense analysts, primarily Keir Lieber, a professor at Georgetown University, and Daryl Press, a professor at Dartmouth University and a former consultant to the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation, began to express concern about the processes in strategic nuclear developments that have occurred since the onset of the "unipolar moment" of America. First, it is the rapid quantitative erosion of the Russian nuclear potential. Throughout the nineties and noughties, this decline primarily affected Russia's ability to monitor American installations of intercontinental ballistic missiles, its missile warning networks and its nuclear submarine forces — all essential elements to maintain a viable deterrent. Meanwhile, as Russia's nuclear capability declined, America's nuclear capability became increasingly lethal. Reflecting the exponential progress of the so-called military-technological revolution, America's nuclear arsenal has become much more precise and powerful, even though it has shrunk in size.
These improvements did not correspond to the goal of deterring an enemy nuclear attack, which requires only a nuclear capability for a "disarming" strike on enemy cities. However, they were necessary for a "counter-force" strike that could preempt a retaliatory nuclear strike by Russia. A 2003 RAND report on the U.S. nuclear arsenal states, "What the planned forces seem best suited for is a preventive capability to counter Russia and China."
This new nuclear stance has obviously worried military strategists in Moscow, who have taken similar actions. They undoubtedly perceived Washington's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, about which Moscow has repeatedly expressed its objections, in the light of these changes in the nuclear balance, realizing that Washington's withdrawal and its concomitant introduction of various missile defense schemes will strengthen America's offensive nuclear capabilities. Although no missile defense system could protect the United States from a full-scale nuclear strike, it could well protect them from the very few missiles left in the enemy's possession after an effective counter-force American strike.
For Russian strategists, Washington's pursuit of nuclear supremacy seemed to be another indication of America's efforts to force Russia to accept the US-led global order. Moreover, the means used by Washington to realize these ambitions should rightly have seemed extremely dangerous to Moscow. The initiatives of the United States — advances in anti—submarine and anti-satellite warfare, in improving the accuracy and effectiveness of missiles, as well as in remote sensing of large areas - have made Russian nuclear forces even more vulnerable. In such circumstances, Moscow should have been strongly tempted to strengthen its deterrence potential at the cost of dispersing its nuclear forces, decentralizing its control systems and pursuing a policy of "launching on the first sign of an attack." All such countermeasures can lead to an uncontrolled escalation of crises and provoke the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, the existence of the danger of guaranteed mutual destruction has ensured decades of peace and stability. The elimination of such reciprocity by cultivating the possibilities of overwhelming counteraction (i.e., the first strike) is another paradox – increased instability and increased likelihood of an extremely destructive exchange of nuclear strikes.
Since the beginning of the decline of its power for a decade and a half after the collapse of the USSR, Russia has nevertheless strengthened both its nuclear deterrent and, to some extent, its counter-force strike capabilities. Despite this, America's advantage in the "counter-force" has actually grown. Yet U.S. leaders often take offense when Russia takes steps to upgrade its own nuclear capabilities. "From Moscow's point of view... the US nuclear forces look really intimidating, and so it is," Lieber and Press note. The United States, they continue, "first plays strategically tough in the nuclear sphere, and then presents the Russians as paranoid, fearing US actions."
The same solipsism (A philosophical doctrine and position characterized by the recognition of one's own individual consciousness as the only and undoubted reality and the denial of the objective reality of the surrounding world. – Approx. InoSMI.) also determined America's assessment of what, as it claimed, posed a Russian threat to NATO. Despite Moscow's insistent warnings that it views NATO expansion as a threat, the swelling alliance has been intensifying its provocations. Starting from the zero years of the XXI century, NATO began to conduct large-scale military exercises in Lithuania and Poland, where permanent army headquarters were established, as well as on the border with Russia in Latvia and Estonia. In 2015, it was reported that the Pentagon was "reviewing and updating its plans in the event of an armed conflict with Russia" and, in violation of the 1997 agreement between NATO and Moscow, the United States offered to deploy military equipment on the territories of its Eastern European allies. One Russian general called the move "the most aggressive move by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War." The Permanent Representative of the United States to NATO directly pointed to "Russia and its malicious activities" as the "main" goal of NATO. The United States justifies these steps as a necessary response to Russia's military actions in Ukraine and the need, as the editorial board of The New York Times stated in 2018 in the spirit of Cold War rhetoric, to "contain" the "Russian threat." And what did the Russians pose a threat to NATO? According to a 2018 Pentagon report, they intended to "destroy" the alliance, a military pact directed against them.
