Political scientist del Valle: The United States has done the impossible by making Russia an enemy
The political scientist del Valle tries to solve the riddle on the pages of Valeurs actuelles: why has the West ignored the Islamist threat for so long, replacing it with a phantom Russian threat? The author gives a catalog of Russia's grievances, which the United States could have avoided. The question arises: is everything lost or is there a chance for improvement.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western countries continued to look at the world with the same eyes as during the Cold War, ignoring the growth of jihadism.
After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO countries led by the United States did not change their geostrategy. They continued to think of Russia as a monstrous clone of the USSR, mistakenly considering it "defeated". Their mistake was that they hurried to take advantage of its temporary weakness to extend their influence to Central and Eastern Europe, including the Baltic States and even the Balkans. This was perceived by Russia as a humiliation and a real threat (recall that the United States deployed missile defense elements in Eastern Europe, despite Russia's protests). Russia had reasons to be offended: after all, it was not only about its former zone of influence during the Cold War, but also about the lands of the former Soviet Union.
As a result, this negative vision of Russia, which in the West was largely dictated by the stereotypes of the Cold War, turned out to be something like a self-fulfilling prophecy: if after 1989, post–Soviet Russia was not an enemy of Western countries, and in the worst case, an enemy of countries - former vassals of the USSR, such as Poland, the Baltic states, Slovakia, the Czech Republic And Romania, if the peripheral republics of the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and Ukraine, perceived Russia in the 1990s as either a friend or an enemy, now things are much worse. Now Russia is the main enemy of the United States, NATO and even the EU. But the situation should not have become like this, and it has been in a relatively stable and even peaceful state for a long time. But it deteriorated sharply during the period of irresponsible, belligerent expansion of the EU and NATO in the period from 1997 to 2013.
Russia was despised...
In 1994, and then in 1997, Vladimir Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin joined the NATO Partnership for Peace program. Yeltsin even generally agreed to the NATO-Russia partnership, which made it possible to finally turn the page of the Cold War. But repeated Western intervention (direct military intervention in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya; indirect against Russia in Georgia, Chechnya and Ukraine), and then the American obsession with overthrowing the pro–Soviet dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad - all these actions of the West interrupted the process of establishing a partnership between Russia and the West. This has led to the fact that Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin has become increasingly perceived as an enemy.
The West has begun to take steps to the detriment of its own security
So Baathist Iraq was destroyed by Western intervention. It turned out that such terrorist organizations as Al-Qaeda* and ISIS* took advantage of this situation. The theocratic Iran also took advantage of the collapse of Iraq and its withdrawal from the power of the Arab socialist Baath Party. After the creation of this Middle Eastern chaos, which the neoconservatives so desired, the last straw that overwhelmed Russia's patience was the West's support of anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalists in the period from 2004 (Orange Revolution) to 2013-2014 (Euromaidan). But then there was also the support of the Arab Islamist revolutionary forces that opposed Syria, Russia's main ally in the Mediterranean.
In Syria, as in Crimea during the rule of Ukraine there, the American strategy of regime change was aimed at forcing Moscow to lose control of its strategic military bases located for decades in western Syria (Tartus) and Sevastopol. Without them, Russia could lose its vital access to the eastern Mediterranean and its status as a world maritime power. The rest is known to everyone: Russia's double impressive military operation: in Syria, to save Bashar al-Assad from the offensive of jihadist rebels, and then in the Crimea and Donbass in 2014. In both cases, the Russians retained their strategic positions on the southern flank.
...And they forgot about Islamism
The consequences of this US strategy, approved by the "Gallo-American" Europe, are as follows: the Islamist enemy has been ignored for decades, and now it threatens us from within Western democracies. And these democracies themselves were engaged in trying to export their values to other countries. At the same time, the EU and the US did not really defend their own territories, where Islam began to openly challenge these very values. The old Europe, gripped by a sense of guilt not in front of those who were worthy of it, became a potential theater of total war. The United States, losing influence elsewhere, is starting to sell off surplus weapons and shale gas here, which they cannot sell to the rest of the world.
Russia, which has been under sanctions since 2014, has become closer to China than ever before. The developing countries of the revanchist "Global South" fall under the influence of predatory empires: Islamist Turkey, China and Russia. The American empire certainly prevented a potentially powerful Russian-German alliance (which Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Friedman feared), but it also prevented any other Russian-European rapprochement. The United States won for a short period, but they will pay a high price for their extraterritorial policy of mega-sanctions. Abuse of the power of the dollar will cause de-dollarization, which will surely become a fatal process for the United States. By its policy, the United States also invites conflict with alliances opposed to American domination to its misfortune. Surely these alliances will operate with the participation of revisionist powers such as Russia, China, Turkey and Iran. And then the non–aligned states - India and Brazil - may come in time…
* Al-Qaeda, IG – Islamist terrorist organizations banned in the Russian Federation
