I encourage you to read this piece at Atlantic from retired U. S. diplomat William Burns on where we went wrong in managing our relationship with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here’s a telling snippet:
In December 1994, on the eve of a visit by Vice President Al Gore to Moscow, I had tried to capture Russia’s domestic predicament in a cable to Washington. “Winter in Russia is not a time for optimists, and in some respects the popular mood here mirrors the descending gloom. Born of a mood of national regret over the loss of superpower status and an equally acute sense that the West is taking advantage of Russia’s weakness,†I wrote, assertive policies abroad had become one of the few themes that united Russians. Yeltsin wished to reaffirm Russia’s great-power status, and its interests in the neighboring post-Soviet republics.
President Bill Clinton tried hard to manage Russia’s post-traumatic stress disorder, but his push for the eastward expansion of NATO reinforced Russian resentments. When I left Moscow after my first tour, in early 1996, I worried about the eventual resurgence of a Russia stewing in its own grievances and insecurities. I just had no idea that this would happen so quickly, or that Vladimir Putin—then an obscure bureaucrat—would emerge as the embodiment of that peculiarly Russian combination of qualities.
That was precisely why I was so outraged that Russia was not invited to participate in the 50th anniversary celebration of D-Day. It would have cost us nothing and not inviting them demeaned the Russians and their contributions to the “Great Patriotic War” (which they believe they won). Over the course of decades we have routinely ignored, diminished, or opposed Russian interests. How in the world would we expect them to react?
Shorter: Don’t spike the ball and do a chicken dance in the end zone. We are left to only speculate how GHWB might have handled it.
Bush I might have been better on this than Clinton, but the problem either POTUS would have faced was that the foreign policy establishment in both parties was then (still is though maybe less) so heavily dominated by neocon thought as was Congress.
I think they should have been invited to D Day, but not particularly outraged. D Day wasn’t an operation they were heavily involved with, to the best of my knowledge.
Steve
Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev all called for a united Europe from “Lisbon to Vladivostok†(Putin’s words). Putin wanted Russia in the EU and NATO. The neoconservatives who control out foreign policy rejected this. And so here we are. Russia is forced into an unwanted alliance with China foe mere survival. And now the neocons are forcing Turkey of NATO into an alliance with Russia and China. Just who are the neocons loyal to?