[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Russia largely defines itself by it’s struggle with America, the same cannot be said in the reverse. For the US the Cold War happened and now it’s over, for Russia it will never be over…very much like The Civil War and the Deep South. I agree about the global hegemony, but disagree that America places Russia high on the threat list.
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First of all, Russia is very high on the threat list of the United States whether politicians care to admit it or not. Our avowed policy is that we aren’t pointing nuclear armed ballistic missiles at targets inside or around Russia (and they’re silent on the complementary issue) but even if true that is just semantics; it is the matter of a couple of minutes to retask an ICBM or SLBM to a known target site. At this point, Russia has the largest active stockpile of nuclear weapons and arguably the largest number of ICBMs on active status, plus they are currently jointly developing new class of solid motor ICBMs and SLBMs that are approximately equal in throw weight, range, and estimated accuracy to the American Trident D5. Russia is by no means the only threat, and economically it is no longer a dominating superpower (and arguably never was) but militarily Russia is still a potential strategic threat.
Although the U.S. has been the most recent major opponent to Russian interests, it is unfair to say that Russia defines itself exclusively in terms of the Cold War competition. As others have established, the nation of Russia, as a cultural nexus, has been around far longer than the United States, extending back to the Grand Principality of Moscow (also known as the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality) in the 12th Century CE. The U.S. is only the latest in a long line of regional and global powers (Germany, Britain, France, Poland, Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, China, the Mongol Empire, et cetera) to challenge the power and even existence of an autonomous ethnic Rus-led state. As such, it is the primary driving goal of the Russians to defend against invasion at all costs. The desire of the Russian-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to gain control of the nations of Eastern Europe and establish “friendly” (read: puppet) governments was far less due to the expansionist Marxist ideology (particularly in the post-Lenin era) and more about providing a vast buffer zone between itself and potential invaders from the West, a fact that high level analysts and policymakers frequently failed to consider. Ditto the border wars in Mongolia and Sino-Soviet split in the East. Viewed from that lens, a comparative analogy between the former Cold War opponents and the parties in the American Civil War is shown to be superficial and inapt.
With regard to the continued existence and expansion of NATO into former East Bloc nations, the purpose from a Western (and predominately American) perspective is to create a regional extragovernmental authority with sufficient teeth and wherewithal to intercede on security and economic issues that the United Nations has proved ineffectual at addressing. Russia, on the other hand, views NATO as an extension of Western (and predominately American) expansion into an independent and nominally ethnically and culturally sympathetic buffer zone, and a potential threat to Russian sovereignty. The Kosovo War is an exemplar for this, for both good and bad; after the UN failed to take any effective action, NATO took (some would say stole) the reigns and inserted peacekeeping troops and later engaged in bombing campaigns under its own auspices. Even though it was not directed at Russia, the use of force against fellow Slavic peoples (as it was perceived in the East) and the imposition of a order by a force that did not represent all of Europe against what was otherwise considered to be an internal disorder in an established sovereignty was viewed as both threatening and hypocritical, especially after Western condemnation of Russian military force in Chechnya.
From that standpoint, it is understandable that Russia is concerned about the expansion of NATO–and organization originally chartered specifically to oversee security and oppose Soviet interests in Europe–into the Baltic and Slavic nations of Eastern Europe, especially given that the Russians believed (whether literally true or not) that the United States had agreed not to expand NATO beyond the traditional eastern borders in exchange for not contesting the reunification of East Germany into a Western-friendly state. In addition, there is much resentment (and quite legitimate in my opinion) in Russia over the lack of political and economic support for fledgling democratic and open market reforms from the West and especially the American-dominated World Bank and and International Monetary Fund. Instead of taking a former enemy in hand and helping them to a position of friendly competition, it is the perspective from Russia that the West took the opportunity to exploit and cripple Russia and her adjacent republics. The truth, I think, is far less vengeful in intent, to wit that American and Western goverments were taking a “wait and see” approach to the success of democracy and market reform in the former Soviet Union and East Bloc, but the net effect is that the truely reform-minded Boris Yeltsin was forced to desperate circumstances to keep the country marginally solvent and ended up ceding power to corrupt interests, and the Russian Federation, as the successor to the USSR, has ended up as a second rate (at best) economic power with a massive nuclear arsenal and historical concerns about being surrounded, threatened, invaded, and conquered.
See Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott’s At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War for more detail on the perceived betrayal. Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century by Robert McNamara and James Blight, published in 2001, has been remarkably prescient in describing the then-future developments of NATO expansion and attempts at a unilateral Pax Americana in the 21st Century.
Stranger
