How the US pushed Russia into a corner

Relations between Russia and NATO in the past 30 years have experienced a downward spiral from honeymoon to spat, from detente to bickering, and from new cold war to quasi-hot war, an expert says.

The dramatic change in their relations is not just the epitome of the drastic shifts in Russia's identity orientation and foreign policy, but of expanding US clout over former Warsaw Pact countries since the end of the Cold War, said Kang Jie, an associate research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing.

Thirty years ago a newly independent Russia sought to join NATO but was met by the George H.W. Bush administration's promise of not one inch eastward of NATO expansion.

Despite no direct engagement, Russia is now in an all but hot "war" with NATO amid its military conflict with Ukraine, Kang said.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, its leader Boris Yeltsin told the US and NATO that cooperation with the only Western military alliance was an integral part of Russian security, and called NATO membership a "long-term political aim" of Russia.

Russia followed liberal internationalism after its independence. Then Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev wrote in NATO Review, the alliance's official magazine, that "we see NATO nations as our natural friends and in future as allies".

Then US president George H.W.Bush repeatedly said Russia would be granted entry into NATO as long as it undertook political reforms.

That NATO started eastward enlargement dented Russia's fantasies about the West, Kang said. From late 1993 the administration of president Bill Clinton began to push NATO eastward in order to compete with Republican voters, curry favor with the domestic military-industrial complex and win over Polish American and Czech American voters.

The NATO foreign ministers' meeting announced an expansion road map without prior consultations with Russia, a move that infuriated Yeltsin.

In 1995, an expert panel appointed by Yeltsin proposed two options for NATO expansion: either NATO should give Russia membership, or NATO should be placed under the authority of an expanded United Nations-led Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, in which Russia would have the right of veto.

Eastward expansion

In recent years Russia has repeatedly said NATO reneged on its "no eastward expansion commitment".In February 1990, when then US secretary of state James Baker visited the Soviet Union to negotiate the reunification of Germany, he proposed to the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the US and NATO would guarantee that NATO jurisdiction and military presence would not move an inch to the east once Germany was reunified.

In Russia's view, "no eastward expansion" included the Eastern European countries east of then East Germany, so it was equivalent to the US commitment of NATO not expanding eastward. But in the US view this commitment was only aimed at the reunification of Germany, and the issue of eastward enlargement was not on the agenda of all parties at that time, so the commitment did not apply to Eastern Europe.

The Balkans was the first wrestling arena between Russia and NATO, Kang said. In March 1999, despite repeated warnings from Russia, NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia. In April that year, despite Russia's opposition, NATO adopted a new strategic concept with emphasis on "out-of-area operations", marking the expansion of NATO's military operations from collective defense to external power projection, Kang said.

In response, Russia immediately froze all relations with NATO and launched the biggest military exercise, Zapad-99, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In October 1999 Russia published a new version of its military doctrine, stressing for the first time that external military invasion was the main threat.

In fact, the Kosovo crisis did not change Russia's pragmatic attitude in working with NATO. In August 1999 the then Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin said Russia should and would integrate itself into the civilized world, and that his country would work with NATO.

The Sept 11 attacks in the US in 2001 became an opportunity to warm up relations between the two sides, Kang said, noting that Putin was the first among major power leaders to call in support of then US president George W. Bush, and after that, the US and Russia set up a joint working group on counterterrorism.

Action plan

In December 2004 a NATO-Russia action plan on terrorism was approved by the two sides, and Russia took part in NATO's counterterrorism Operation Active Endeavour in the Mediterranean.

At the same time the then secretary-general of NATO George Robertson and leaders of some NATO member states supported Russia's accession to NATO.

This period is seen as a short honeymoon between Russia and NATO, Kang said.

Also during this period, he said, three cracks in Russia's relations with the US and NATO began to emerge.

One was the antimissile system and strategic stability. In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that the US and the Soviet Union had signed.

The second remains the eastward expansion of NATO. After admitting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, NATO started its second round of eastward expansion. In 2004 the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO.

The third crack between Russia and NATO was the so-called color revolutions in countries that had been part of the Soviet Union. These revolutions took place in countries such as Ukraine and Georgia from 2003 to 2005.

In 2006 the US formally proposed to deploy antimissile bases in Eastern Europe, and in January 2007 the US started negotiations on antimissile deployment with Poland and the Czech Republic.

One month later, in an address to the Munich Security Conference, Putin fiercely criticized the actions of NATO's eastward expansion and the US deployment of antimissile systems in Eastern Europe. The speech was seen as a watershed in Russia's relations with the US and NATO.

Though Russia and NATO resumed military cooperation in 2010, the negotiations on the new security architecture between Russia, the US and the European Union failed to make progress.

The Ukrainian crisis that broke out in 2014 became the biggest turning point in relations between Russia and NATO, Kang said, noting that the two sides broke off security cooperation and turned to substantive military confrontation.

Driven by ideology and pushed by the military-industrial complex, Washington has pushed NATO eastward again and again, repeatedly, forcing Russia into a corner, Kang said.

Xinhua