Poor Silly Russia! She Doesn’t Realize the West is Surrounding Her for Her Own Good Will Hollande’s outreach to Moscow break the vicious circle of Atlantic geopolitical nihilism?
Source: Poor Silly Russia! She Doesn’t Realize the West is Surrounding Her for Her Own Good
Symbolized by French President François Hollande’s visit the other day to the Kremlin, one of the most stunning results of IS’s attacks in Paris was the immediate push it gave some members of the Western alliance to reach out to Russia. IS’s blood lust may have created the circumstances for the beginning of a potentially significant rapprochement between leery geopolitical areas.
How far this rapprochement will go, remains to be seen.
Though it wasn’t his intention, former NATO General-Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen earlier this month reminded us that, hidden in a squabble over Europe’s post-Cold War history, the obstacles in the way of wide-scale cooperation between Russia and the West—including not just IS and Syria but also Ukraine—are structural and ideological, rather than merely political.
Decrying ‘The Kremlin’s Tragic miscalculation’, Rasmussen lodges the blame for the present impasse with Moscow: Russia ‘fundamentally misjudged the West’s intentions and created an entirely unnecessary confrontation that undermines both sides’ interests.’
By vacuuming up the former Warsaw Pact states of Central and Eastern Europe (and three former Soviet Socialist Republics) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rasmussen argues, NATO and the EU meant Russia no harm. On the contrary, they were doing Moscow a favour, creating an arc of peace and prosperity on Russia’s Western borders from which Russia has profited immensely.
Blinded by zero-sum thinking, the Kremlin couldn’t see this. Rather, just as the capstone of the West’s win-win geopolitics was being set in place in the form of the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine, the Kremlin inexplicably restarted the Cold War.
The liberal Rasmussen is flabbergasted. How could the Kremlin fail to see that Russia’s future lay in ‘working with Western powers to enhance shared prosperity’ rather than geopolitical confrontation?
The former NATO general-secretary repeats the usual pieties about strengthening democracy and human rights being the only goal of the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood Policy, with its alleged ‘open door’ towards Russia. But his account never ventures an answer to the question: Why did Moscow fail to see the West’s intentions for what they—factually, objectively, empirically—were? Why did it see NATO and, later, EU expansion as a threat?
Lacking an answer, all Rasmussen can do is assure us that. ‘Russia’s interpretation was patently wrong—and I can say so with full authority’, apparently unaware of the solipsism in reference to his role as Danish prime minister and chair of the 2002 EU summit.
‘The truth is that the young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe sought to join the EU and NATO […] because they longed for peace, progress and prosperity. It was those countries’ ambitions, not some vendetta against Russia, that drove EU and NATO expansion.’
But are we really to believe that NATO and EU expansion was an act of charity rather than politics? That decisions about the alliance’s future lay not with leaders in existing NATO capitals but in the hands of supplicants for membership? That Prague, Warsaw and Tallinn were in the driver’s seat rather than Washington and Brussels?
The answer, of course, is no. In fact, Rasmussen perfectly expresses what Chatham House expert Richard Sakwa calls the ‘geopolitical nihilism’ of the West’s “New Atlanticism, the ideological manifestation of a Western alliance both more militant in advancing its interests and more culturally aggressive’ than the old NATO.”
Of course, Rasmussen gets some things right. One of them is that NATO expansion had nothing to do with threatening or encircling Russia. It didn’t. It had everything to do with justifying that organization’s existence after the purpose behind its 1949 creation—deterring a Soviet invasion of Western Europe—had been fulfilled. For NATO to survive, it had to expand—not for the sake of deterring a Russian threat to Europe, since there was none, but in order to preserve the ‘Atlantic Community’, that consensus of interests between the elites (and sometimes the societies) of Western Europe and North America that the Cold War had midwifed, but which myriad forces now threatened to dissolve. (The high-flown rhetoric that surrounded the launch of the Euro about the EU becoming an independent pole in a multipolar world seems quaint today.)
Faced with the prospect of extinction, NATO reneged on the commitments made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 and set about its expansion plans—not to ‘threaten’ Russia but to save itself and a united North Atlantic community, from extinction. That Moscow (along with many distinguished Western analysts who warned publicly against it, including George Kennan, author of the original 1940s ‘containment theory’) objected, was of no consequence: what mattered was the preservation of the alliance as an end in itself.
Western leaders were telling the truth when they said this had nothing to do with Russia, but the result was no less tragic. By failing to order their priorities, by trying to pursue two incompatible ends (to preserve the North Atlantic security system while proclaiming NATO’s desire to work with Russia as a partner rather than an adversary), US and EU leaders sowed the seeds of the present confrontation.
NATO expanded until expansion itself summoned into existence the threat it originally lacked; the EU shelved its plans for an independent European defence capability and folded its defense and security policy into NATO in the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. This effectively militarized the EU and transformed what were once two discrete and separate organizations—NATO and the EU—into different faces of a single Euro-Atlantic community. European statesmen learned to cultivate that doublespeak we’re so familiar with today, whereby Europe would become ‘stable, peaceful, whole and free’—by excluding Europe’s greatest power.
Rasmussen complains that despite two decades of Western ‘goodwill’ Russia is ‘far from our strategic partner; it is our strategic problem’. Little wonder.
It’s not just that no great power in history has allowed other powers to dictate the scope and nature of its interests. In the Western Hemisphere the United States never has and today, China shows that things will be no different in East Asia.
Rather, the heart of the new Atlanticism is about a certain closing of the North Atlantic (and especially European) mind which, in Sakwa’s words, makes the new Atlantic system ‘increasingly unable to reflect critically on the geopolitical and power implications of its own actions’. Its founding liberal assumptions become an ‘“ideological project’ of universalizing dimensions that effectively denies those excluded from its ranks the capacity to define—and ultimately to possess—their own interests.”
In the end, it was this that provoked the Ukraine crisis. Russia’s longstanding historical, cultural, political, economic and strategic interests were simply not considered worthy of consideration.
Today, the deeply intertwined structures of NATO and the EU have coalesced into an ‘empire by invitation’, where no invitation ever can or will be addressed to the Kremlin, and according to whose norms Russia in its present form not only will always fall short but in fact cut the figure of a scarcely legitimate mendicant at Europe’s door.
The tragedy here, as Rasmussen’s muscular rhetoric makes clear, is that the liberal-universalist logic of the new Atlanticism not only generates conflict with those who don’t share it, but also renders the pursuit of compromise—the basic task of classical diplomacy—conceptually and practically impossible. Diplomacy becomes appeasement and ‘appeasement will not lead to peace; a conciliatory approach will only prolong the conflict’, Rasmussen writes.
‘The sooner the West convinces Russia that it will not back down, the sooner the conflict will be over. Only then will Russia return to the path of constructive cooperation with NATO, the EU and US—and a more prosperous future’.
Thus, the West’s expectations of conformity acquire undertones of threatened force. Relations with countries outside this neo-Atlantic empire of the mind become a trial not only of strength but of armed ideologies—and when the other side’s ideology cannot be discerned, it is invented, as many Western commentators have sought to do by invoking ‘Russian imperialism’ or an exaggerated ‘Eurasianism’ to explain Russian foreign policy. Indeed, when Sakwa writes that ‘sanctions, media campaigns, and covert operations are all part of the comprehensive attack on outsiders and antagonists’, he means those going on in the West—not Russia.
Hollande’s visit to Moscow opens up the possibility of reviving a pragmatic coordination of interests between Russia and France with a long history behind it, and which, depending on French boldness and Russian flexibility, has the real potential to alter the balance of power and influence in Europe. By acting independently of Washington, Brussels and Berlin, Paris’s outreach to the Kremlin has momentarily transcended the logic of the ‘New Atlanticism’.
Yet whatever momentum Hollande’s visit may have created, hopes (or fears) of a ‘grand bargain’ between Russia and the West on Ukraine and Syria would appear premature. For the foreseeable future, real geopolitical cooperation between the two may in fact have become impossible.
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