Power's world: The long insult to Russia

If Richard Nixon, the erstwhile red baiter, wasn't safely in his grave, most probably he would be writing op-eds in the New York Times saying that, “we are in danger of losing Russia.” For all the bodies of the liberal left in America dispatched by him on the way to the pinnacle of power, as president he became the originator of détente with the Soviet Union and at the same a respecter of its history and Russia's massive contribution to arts, culture and religion. In his own words, Nixon was a Russophile. Once communism was defeated, he used to argue, Russia could assume its rightful place as a powerful European nation.

Today it seems that no one, either in the US or Europe, has the courage to stand up and say that we are in danger of falling back on our well-honed, oversimplistic cold war reflexes. The invasion of Georgia didn't just happen because of some Kremlin malevolence. It happened because of the west's ill thought-out position on the independence on Kosovo, the self-defeating military support President Bush provided for an unstable Georgian leader and, not least, because the west failed to bring Russia into the fold after the death of the Soviet Leninist system.

This is not to exonerate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for his macho posturing and his disregard of the importance of building a nation not of men but of laws. Neither is it to exonerate Boris Yeltsin for his erratic presidency, which allowed the deterioration of much of his country, not least the economy, and the rise of the robber barons.

But the west was the victorious party in the cold war. It was economically healthy and politically robust. It had nothing to lose and everything to contribute to the new Russia. But it dragged its feet in the most appalling way. If it had been sensible it would have started to move off its haunches when Mikhail Gorbachev came to the London G8 and asked for financial aid for a careful but steady transition to a more open economy and more open and pro-western society. Despite all the warm words spoken about welcoming perestroika, the west demurred from getting too involved. Nixon's plea for a much more positive response fell on deaf ears.

As Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, “Washington's crucial error lay in its propensity to treat post-Soviet Russia as a defeated enemy.” Washington's attitude was totally at variance with that of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who expected to see a common strategic partnership develop. At the same time, Washington missed the great opportunity offered for large-scale nuclear disarmament and took the fatal step, mainly for domestic electoral reasons, of expanding Nato up to Russia's doorstep, ignoring the pledge made to Gorbachev by the administration of George Bush Snr.

The Clinton administration couldn't resist taking advantage of Russia's weakness, hoping to win a geopolitical advantage that Russia could never unwind, even if one day it recovered its strength. It was even low down enough as to exploit Yeltsin's heavy drinking, extracting concessions when he was over the limit. Washington wanted Russia to have no independent foreign policy and to swallow economic reforms at such a speed they would have been instantly spat out in any self-respecting western democracy. It failed to understand Moscow's reservations about going to war against Serbia without the necessary legal approval from the UN.

Later, when Putin was in power, Washington blatantly ignored his offer to co-operate against al Qaeda and the Taliban, believing the US could do the job unaided and preferred to annoy Moscow by concentrating on bringing ex-Soviet Muslim states under Washington's wing.

Even after September 11th 2001, when Putin went out of his way to aid Washington, allowing the US overflying rights, endorsing the establishment of American bases in central Asia and facilitating access to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, a Russian-trained military force, the US continued to treat Russia as a country it could walk over.

The Kremlin is by no means faultless, but Washington badly needs to look at the beam in its own eye.