{"id":49732,"date":"2022-10-10T09:14:15","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T07:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/a-protracted-war-military-analysis-vorobiov-copy\/"},"modified":"2024-06-27T16:28:57","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T14:28:57","slug":"dont-be-against-the-west-fried","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/en\/dont-be-against-the-west-fried\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Bet Against the West!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In July 2007 US President George W. Bush hosted Vladimir Putin for informal talks at his summer house in Kenneb\u00adunkport, Maine. The family atmos\u00adphere was completed by the presence of his father, former President George Bush. Photo: Imago Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The US tried to integrate Russia with the liberal inter\u00adna\u00adtional order, but Putin destroyed the basis for cooper\u00adation by disman\u00adteling democracy and seeking domination of his neighbors, writes Dan Fried.<\/h3>\n

<\/h2>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_message message_box_color=\u201cpeacoc\u201d css=\u201c\u201d]This paper is part of our Inter\u00adna\u00adtional Expert Network Russia<\/a>. Its publi\u00adcation was supported by the German Foreign Ministry. The views expressed are the author\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

Download the PDF version<\/a> \u2014 Read this paper in German\/\u200bRussian<\/a><\/p>\n

[\/vc_message][vc_column_text css=\u201c\u201d]Starting with the Admin\u00adis\u00adtration of George H. W, Bush until Putin\u2019s war against Ukraine, the United States generally sought to support the integration of post-Soviet Russia (and even the USSR, in its final year under President Mikhail Gorbachev) with the liberal inter\u00adna\u00adtional order of which the US was principal founder after 1945. That meant devel\u00adoping good bilateral relations with Russia and, to the degree possible, encour\u00adaging Russian partnership in inter\u00adna\u00adtional affairs including against terrorism after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The US advanced this policy with two condi\u00adtions, however. First, the US did not recognize a Russian sphere of domination over its neighbors and former satel\u00adlites in Central and Eastern Europe; and, second, the US predi\u00adcated its Russia policy on that country\u2019s continued evolution in the direction of democracy and the rule of law.<\/p>

\"Portrait<\/p>

Daniel (Dan) Fried<\/a> is a retired US diplomat and a distin\u00adguished fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC.<\/p><\/div>\n

Those US condi\u00adtions were generally acceptable to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, especially in his early years of better health. They were not acceptable to President Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Putin had his own condi\u00adtions for better relations with the US: these included US acqui\u00ades\u00adcence to Russia\u2019s attempts to dominate its neighbors, especially Ukraine and Georgia, the two countries most committed to finding a place in Europe and its insti\u00adtu\u00adtions; and US accep\u00adtance of Putin\u2019s deepening autocratic rule at home, the tactics of which included assassination.<\/p>\n

The rise and fall of US-Russian relations from a high point of hope in the early 1990s to a return to a hostile, adver\u00adsarial relationship between not just Russia and the US, but between Russia and almost the whole of Europe and North America is a result of the incom\u00adpat\u00adi\u00adbility of these views of Russia\u2019s place in the world.<\/p>\n

Notwith\u00adstanding arguments that the US humil\u00adiated Russia after 1991 (arguments that echo but without much basis the case that rough treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles was partly or even largely respon\u00adsible for the rise of Hitler), the US did not seek to isolate, punish, or otherwise treat Russia as a defeated foe. The US did not seek to impose repara\u00adtions on Russia; it provided assis\u00adtance. The US did not shun Russia\u2019s new leadership; it reached out to them. And Boris Yeltsin reached back. In a speech to a joint session of Congress in June 1992, Yeltsin spoke of Russia, through its own efforts, having ended \u201cseventy-five years of [communist} nightmare,\u201d thanked the American people \u201cfor their invaluable moral support,\u201d committed himself to free-market, democ\u00adratic reforms, and promised that Russia would never again lie in foreign affairs.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Western critics often cite NATO\u2019s decision to accept for membership Poland and other newly liberated countries in Central and Eastern Europe as an original sin that alienated Russia by \u201cdrawing a new line in Europe\u201d (as opponents of NATO enlargement often put it). In fact, US policy on NATO reflected its deter\u00admi\u00adnation to end the Stalinist division of Europe. Rejecting the push for NATO membership from Poland, the Baltics, and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe would have meant perpet\u00adu\u00adating the line of the Cold War into the future, tacitly recog\u00adnizing a Russian sphere of domination in Europe and signaling to Moscow that the US and Western Europe in fact regarded the former captive nations of Europe as in some sense property of Moscow, to be reclaimed when possible. Those of us making the case for NATO enlargement from inside the Clinton Admin\u00adis\u00adtration and later in the Bush Admin\u00adis\u00adtration were aware of this; in retro\u00adspect, given Russia\u2019s attack on Ukraine, its claims against that country, and official demands for NATO withdrawal from its eastern flank members, the decision to allow additional European countries to join NATO seems even more justified.<\/p>\n

NATO enlargement was not the whole story, however. The US sought to integrate its support for NATO enlargement with its inclusive policy toward Russia. The decision to enlarge NATO was made in parallel with an effort to develop a NATO-Russia relationship, an \u201calliance with the Alliance\u201d as some of us in the Clinton Admin\u00adis\u00adtration put it at the time of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, a document concluded in 1997 before NATO\u2019s decision to offer membership to Poland, Czechia, Hungary. The Founding Act not only estab\u00adlished a NATO-Russia structure to support common actions and decision making, it set limits on NATO\u2019s deploy\u00adments in Europe by eschewing \u201cadditional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.\u201d This commitment by NATO \u2014 made in parallel with an unspec\u00adified Russian commitment in the Founding Act to exercise similar restraint in its deploy\u00adments \u2014 was intended to reassure the Kremlin that NATO enlargement would not be followed by a massive buildup akin to the stationing of US, British, and other forces in Cold War West Germany. Indeed, NATO enlargement was accom\u00adpanied by a steady withdrawal, not buildup, of US forces from Europe to the point where, on the eve of Putin\u2019s war against Ukraine in 2014, there were no US tanks stationed perma\u00adnently in Europe.<\/p>\n

The Admin\u00adis\u00adtration of George W. Bush sought to deepen partnership with President Putin, starting with their famous meeting in Slovenia in June 2001. This meeting followed Bush\u2019s Warsaw speech which signaled US intent to continue with NATO enlargement.[ii]<\/a> That signal notwith\u00adstanding, the Bush-Putin meeting went well. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, Putin seemed prepared for deeper strategic partnership, with counter-terrorism and strategic arms control leading elements. The Bush Admin\u00adis\u00adtration responded with enthu\u00adsiasm and several good years of relations followed, with some achieve\u00adments in counter-terrorism and arms control.<\/p>\n

Bush\u2019s decision to continue NATO enlargement even to the Baltic States (a decision made at the Prague NATO Summit in November 2002 shortly before the US decision to attack Iraq) did not derail this US-Russian cooper\u00adation. Like the Clinton Admin\u00adis\u00adtration, the Bush policy toward Russia included an element of \u201chedging.\u201d Even in the 1990s, the Clinton Admin\u00adis\u00adtration had urged Europe to avoid energy depen\u00addence on Russia and had championed alter\u00adnative, non-Russian energy projects for Europe such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. The Bush Admin\u00adis\u00adtration continued this policy even as it built its relations with the early Putin team.<\/p>\n

What soured US-Russia relations were Putin\u2019s decisions to advance his author\u00adi\u00adtarian control at home, starting by destroying independent television in Russia, and, especially, Putin\u2019s reaction to what he perceived as US insti\u00adgation of the pro-Western \u201cColor Revolu\u00adtions\u201d in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003 and 2004, respec\u00adtively. The Bush Admin\u00adis\u00adtration started, slowly and unevenly, to realize that Putin\u2019s disman\u00adtling of Russian democracy meant that, as President Bush observed at the time, Putin might not be the reform-minded leader we thought and hoped he was.[iii]<\/a> Putin, in true Stalinist fashion, assumed that the US was behind the Color Revolu\u00adtions. He was mistaken \u2014 Georgia\u2019s Rose Revolution and Ukraine\u2019s Orange Revolution reflected genuine home-grown political forces and surprised the US \u2013 but Putin seemed convinced that the US had broken his condition of US acqui\u00ades\u00adcence in Russia\u2019s domination of its former Soviet posses\u00adsions and, with that, the basis for cooper\u00adation with the US was gone.<\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s hostile, anti-US and anti-Western speech at the February 2007 Munich Security Conference reflected his new assessment of US policy as incon\u00adsistent with Putin\u2019s view of core Russian interests. This clash \u2013 Russia\u2019s insis\u00adtence on and US resis\u00adtance to Russia\u2019s domination of Georgia and Ukraine in particular \u2013 inten\u00adsified as the US sought to gain NATO consensus on a NATO Membership Action Plan for Ukraine and Georgia at the April 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. That effort failed \u2013 the Alliance was divided over that question \u2013 but the consensus reached included a NATO statement that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually be members of the Alliance. That in turn seemed to infuriate Putin, who in a speech at the Bucharest NATO Summit (at the NATO-Russia Council portion held the day following the Summit proper), laid the basis for a Russian claim of Ukraine\u2019s Crimea territory.<\/p>\n

The Bush Admin\u00adis\u00adtration still sought to maintain good relations with Russia and, immedi\u00adately after the Bucharest Summit, Bush and his team flew to Sochi for a meeting with Putin and newly-installed temporary President Dmitry Medvedev. But Putin no longer appeared inter\u00adested in cooper\u00adation with the US. Instead, he provoked a war with Georgia in August 2008, after which the Bush Admin\u00adis\u00adtration acknowl\u00adedged the failure of its efforts to work with Putin\u2019s Russia[iv]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Obama Admin\u00adis\u00adtration, despite the Russo-Georgian War, sought to return to the early Bush assump\u00adtions that some short of partnership with Putin\u2019s Russia was possible. To this end, it launched the \u201creset\u201d with Russia based on the same Bush team assump\u00adtions: that there was room for partnership with Russia even given US condi\u00adtions about Russia\u2019s neighbors and human rights and democracy within Russia. Like the Bush policy, the Obama Reset yielded some initial results, partic\u00adu\u00adlarly in strategic arms control.<\/p>\n

But, also like the Bush policy, the Obama Reset fell afoul of Putin\u2019s deepening author\u00adi\u00adtar\u00adi\u00adanism at home and aggression against his neighbors. Putin\u2019s manip\u00adu\u00adlation of Russia\u2019s 2011 elections provoked demon\u00adstra\u00adtions inside Russia and criticism from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Putin appeared to be infuriated by this. In Ukraine, Putin overreached, not for the last time, when in late 2013 he forced his preferred ruler, Viktor Yanukovych, to break his commitment to sign a relatively modest Ukraine-EU Associ\u00adation Agreement that had wide support in Ukraine. That led to demon\u00adstra\u00adtions in Kyiv that Yanukovych attempted to suppress violently, the \u201cMaidan\u201d named after the downtown Kyiv square where they took place. This set off an escalatory cycle that ended with Yanukovych fleeing the country and a pro-European government assuming power.<\/p>\n

As with Ukraine\u2019s Orange Revolution, Putin assumed the \u201cMaidan\u201d was US controlled. He responded within days by invading Crimea; when this succeeded against the disori\u00adented new Ukraine government, Putin escalated by launching \u201cseparatist movements\u201d in the Donbas. The first phase of the Russo-Ukraine War was on.<\/p>\n

As with the Bush Admin\u00adis\u00adtration after the Russo-Georgian War, the Obama Admin\u00adis\u00adtration realized after Putin\u2019s attack on Ukraine that its outreach to Putin had failed. It shifted course, opting for sanctions against Russia as its principal instrument to resist Russia\u2019s aggression. The Obama Admin\u00adis\u00adtration did not, however, provide arms to Ukraine, concerned that doing so would be futile because (as the argument went inside the Obama NSC staff) the Russians had \u201cescalation dominance.\u201d The sanctions, joined by the EU, combined with Ukrainian resis\u00adtance on the ground, caused Putin to pull back from his initial expansive claims to vast parts of Ukraine. Putin started but shortly dropped claims to \u201cNovorossiya\u201d \u2013 vast parts of southern and Eastern Ukraine conquered by Catherine the Great in the late 18th<\/sup> century and even accepted the Minsk Accords framework negotiated with France, Germany, and Ukraine that acknowl\u00adedged that Ukraine\u2019s Donbas region, effec\u00adtively occupied by Russia, was in fact, Ukrainian territory.<\/p>\n

But Putin had no intention of honoring the Minsk Accords and, by late 2015 at least, it became clear that Russia was not taking the Minsk negoti\u00adating process seriously. Instead of escalating, the Obama Admin\u00adis\u00adtration allowed sanctions to plateau and did not respond strongly even to Russian inter\u00adference in the US 2016 Presi\u00addential elections until after those elections were over. The US had dropped its objective of outreach to Russia but had not fully replaced it with a policy of resisting Russian aggression.<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration\u2019s Russia policy was incon\u00adsistent, even incoherent. On the one hand, capable foreign policy experts, especially the NSC\u2019s Senior Director Fiona Hill, State Department Assistant Secretary for Europe Wess Mitchell, and Treasury Under\u00adsec\u00adretary Sigal Mandelker maintained the Obama Administration\u2019s sanctions pressure on Russia. The Trump Admin\u00adis\u00adtration even started sending modest amounts of weapons to Ukraine (while restricting their placement). But President Trump himself, and many of his ideological supporters in and out of government, seemed to admire Putin as a like-minded strongman and looked at Ukraine as a political irritant, something that led to Trump\u2019s first impeachment. This vitiated US pressure against Putin.<\/p>\n

The Biden Administration\u2019s foreign leadership was composed of people who had been on the more hawkish side of the Obama Admin\u00adis\u00adtration debates about Russia after Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine (including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Under\u00adsec\u00adretary Toria Nuland). Never\u00adtheless, the Biden Admin\u00adis\u00adtration sought to avoid a clash with Putin\u2019s Russia, opting instead to seek a \u201cstable and predictable\u201d relationship. That was the message from the Biden-Putin Geneva meeting in June 2021. This was no reset, as with Obama in 2009, but an effort to park the US-Russia relationship at a low but sustainable level the better to focus on China policy. The US condition was modest: that Putin refrain from escalation in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Putin was having none of it. Without even a poor excuse, Putin built up his forces, made extrav\u00adagant (and public) demands of the US and NATO, and, in February 2022, launched a full-on invasion of Ukraine. The Biden Admin\u00adis\u00adtration had cautioned Putin, first in private and then in public, not to invade. When he did, the Biden team chose to support Ukraine, including through provision of arms (slowly at first, perhaps assuming that Ukraine could not withstand a deter\u00admined Russian assault). Strate\u00adgi\u00adcally, the Biden Admin\u00adis\u00adtration effec\u00adtively ended the US policy of reaching out to Russia that had been in place since the late-1980s. The US began to regard Russia as a full-on adversary.<\/p>\n

The US, France and Germany shared mistaken assump\u00adtions about the possi\u00adbility of working with Putin\u2019s Russia<\/h2>\n

It is easy to parody the differ\u00adences between US and Polish policy toward Putin\u2019s Russia on the one hand and the French and German approach on the other. During the Cold War, the US was generally (but not always) harder edged toward the Kremlin than either France or Germany and this difference reemerged in approaches to Russia even after Putin\u2019s 2014 attack on Ukraine. The French and Germans had more faith in the Minsk negoti\u00adating process to end the war in Ukraine than was justified. German energy policy rested on a misplaced conviction in the stabi\u00adlizing effect of depen\u00addence on Russian gas; its investment in the Nord Stream gas pipelines instead of LNG infra\u00adstructure was a bad choice, belatedly recog\u00adnized by the German government.<\/p>\n

Never\u00adtheless, the US, French, and German govern\u00adments for years shared many hopeful and ultimately mistaken assump\u00adtions about the possi\u00adbility of working with Putin\u2019s Russia; all were reluctant to accept the conclusion that Putin was a dangerous and aggressive ruler close in spirit and many tactics to 20th<\/sup> century dictators. Polish govern\u00adments (as well as Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian govern\u00adments as well as others in Central and Eastern Europe), as it turns out, were right about the danger from the Kremlin and were not, as some Western critics patron\u00adiz\u00adingly put it, \u201cRusso\u00adphobic\u201d or \u201cprisoners of history.\u201d Still, Germany, France, and the US all joined in resisting Putin\u2019s initial aggression against Ukraine in 2014. None accepted Putin\u2019s claim over Ukraine. The arc of US, French, and German Russia policies have run in rough parallel, moving closer to Polish assess\u00adments of the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

German policy toward Russia has been upended and Germans are strug\u00adgling with the magnitude of the policy reori\u00aden\u00adtation needed to deal with Putin\u2019s Russia as it is. Germany\u2019s struggle to organize its foreign policy around different assump\u00adtions about Russia and a different, more forward leading German role in helping Europe resist Putin\u2019s aggression, is painful, necessary, and familiar to Americans who have had to contend with their own policy failures in past decades.<\/p>\n

Russia is a strategic adversary as long as Putin is in power<\/h2>\n

The US search for some \u201cdeal\u201d with Russia to enlist it as a partner in managing the rise of China has been a persistent specu\u00adlation that has led nowhere. With good reason. The precedent set by Henry Kissinger\u2019s successful outreach to Mao\u2019s China while pursuing d\u00e9tente with Brezhnev\u2019s Soviet Union remain attractive to some. Many in the Trump Admin\u00adis\u00adtration (and many beyond it) expressed interest in making the effort.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

The problem arises as soon as a prospective \u201cdeal\u201d with Moscow takes shape: it always seems to involve recog\u00adnition of Moscow\u2019s dominance over Ukraine and Georgia, and indif\u00adference to human rights and the rule of law inside Russia, condi\u00adtions no US Admin\u00adis\u00adtration, not even that of Donald Trump, has been willing to accept. Some tacit under\u00adstanding over Ukraine might have been possible when Yanukovych was in charge in Kyiv. The US had accepted his election and Ukraine\u2019s NATO aspira\u00adtions were going nowhere. Even after\u00adwards, in the runup to the current phase of Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine, Germany offered to maintain its effective blockage of Ukraine\u2019s NATO aspira\u00adtions as a way to head off the Russian offensive. That wasn\u2019t enough for Putin, who sought an end not just to Ukraine\u2019s NATO aspira\u00adtions but to its indepen\u00addence. A deal with Putin over Ukraine would be near impos\u00adsible under current condi\u00adtions, given Putin\u2019s escalation and the atroc\u00adities Russian forces have committed and continue to commit.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Putin is committed to an anti-American course as strategy. Russia and China see common strategic purpose in combining to weaken the US and the inter\u00adna\u00adtional system it has championed. Efforts to entice Putin to change strategic course in favor of the US and at China\u2019s expense would be futile and making the attempt would require abandoning US strategic principles in a display of weakness, giving Putin a win he has not earned either on the Ukrainian battle\u00adfield or econom\u00adi\u00adcally, at least so far.<\/p>\n

Russia is a strategic adversary and is seen as such by most govern\u00adments in Europe and the US, albeit with varying degrees of conviction. This will remain the case as long as Putin is in power. The current US Admin\u00adis\u00adtration is clear on that point.<\/p>\n

In the US, the hard left and \u2013 more worrying \u2014 the Trumpist right have sympathy for Putin<\/h2>\n

In US politics, support for Ukraine and for resisting Russia aggression includes what is left of the Reaganite Right through the pro-inter\u00adna\u00adtion\u00adalist center to much (not all) of the left. The left, histor\u00adi\u00adcally reluctant to support resis\u00adtance to Kremlin aggression, now includes many with an aversion to Putinism and supportive of Ukraine, thinking similar to that among many Greens in Germany.<\/p>\n

Opposition to this approach can be found among some on the hard left, who express an \u201canti-imperi\u00adalist\u201d approach with its origins in the 1970s that amounts to sympathy for many (and perhaps any) forces seen as reliably anti-American. These views are not strong or influ\u00adential. More worrying are views held by the Trumpist right that are outright pro-Putin and hostile to Ukraine. These views, championed by Fox media star Tucker Carlson, recall pro-fascist arguments of the late 1930s that prevailed in American rightist circles until the Japanese attack on the US in 1941. These views, once common, now almost forgotten, but revived by Trumpist circles, include sympathy for hard right, nation\u00adalist strongmen, hostility to \u201ccosmopolitan\u201d Europe and US support for Europe, and cynical hostility to appli\u00adcation of values in foreign policy as weakening American freedom of action. These views overlap to some degree with those held by a small but influ\u00adential circle of foreign policy thinkers, some serious and scholarly, who champion \u201crealism and restraint,\u201d which in the case of Russia seems to come down to acqui\u00ades\u00adcence in a Russian sphere of domination over Ukraine and other countries. The \u201crealism and restraint\u201d school, combined with the Trumpist right, appeals to a tradition in US foreign policy thinking often termed \u201cisola\u00adtionism\u201d but in fact meaning a sometimes unilat\u00ader\u00adalist, value-free foreign policy based on trans\u00adac\u00adtional relation\u00adships with other great powers.<\/p>\n

Milder versions of \u201crealist\u201d thinking had influence in the Obama Admin\u00adis\u00adtration but generally did not prevail. This school has had even less impact on the Biden Admin\u00adis\u00adtration but is making consid\u00aderable headway within on the right, e.g., the once-Reaganite Heritage Foundation think tank has shown more sympathy for Trumpist views and the Quincy Institute champions versions of \u201crealist thinking.\u201d (To be fair, other schools of realist foreign policy thinking have admirable records of achievement: Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor for President George H.W. Bush, applied many of the virtues of realist thinking, including opera\u00adtional and rhetorical caution and restraint, in the 1989\u201391 period with spectacular results.)<\/p>\n

Sanctions sceptics get little traction in the US<\/h2>\n

Support for sanctions against Russia often align with the categories of foreign policy thinking discussed above: support is generally high among those inclined to support Ukraine and oppose Putin is and weak among the Trumpist Right, \u201crealist\u201d right and center, and hard left. The Trump Admin\u00adis\u00adtration, however, was enthu\u00adsi\u00adastic about sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, and even against Russia (to little effect, however, given Trump\u2019s own sympathy for Putin that weakened their impact).<\/p>\n

The debate about the use of sanctions has its own dynamic, however. Some econo\u00admists and economic policy specialists worry about what they term sanctions overuse, including creating perverse incen\u00adtives for rival powers, e.g., China, to break from the US dollar as the accepted inter\u00adna\u00adtional reserve currency and from the US-dominated inter\u00adna\u00adtional financial system. Thus far, however, those arguments have not gained major traction either within the US government or Congress. If anything, Congress has pushed for more intense sanctions against Russia.<\/p>\n

The US and Europe defied predic\u00adtions that their resis\u00adtance to Putin\u2019s Russia would fail<\/h2>\n

US support for Ukraine\u2019s resis\u00adtance to Russia\u2019s aggression has been persistent. Whether it will continue so in the face of Russian escalation, more severe economic dislo\u00adca\u00adtions such as energy price spikes and\/\u200bor shortages, or a failure of European political support for a similarly strong approach is an open question, but the US and Europe have since 2014 defied persistent predic\u00adtions that their support for Ukraine and resis\u00adtance to Putin\u2019s Russia would fail. I would not bet against the West.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dan Fried is a retired US diplomat who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs from 2005 to 2009. Between 2013 bis 2017 he headed the US Office of Sanctions Coordi\u00adnation. He was a speaker at the LibMod conference \u201cRussia and the West\u201d in March 2022<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Link to Yeltsin June 1992 speech to the US Congress: Boris Yeltsin \u201cAddress to U.S. Congress\u201d Transcript (speeches-usa.com)<\/a><\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Link to Warsaw speech: CNN.com \u2014 Transcript: President Bush speech in Warsaw \u2014 June 15, 2001<\/a><\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Bush made this obser\u00advation to then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in October 2003 in a meeting in London in which I participated.<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> Link to Secretary Rice\u2019s GMF speech fall 2008: Secretary Rice Addresses U.S.-Russia Relations at GMF | RealClearWorld<\/a><\/p>\n

[v] I heard this a lot personally in the early weeks of the Trump Administration.<\/p>\n

\"Textende\"<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

This paper is published in the framework of the project \u201eRussia and the West: Europe\u2019s Post War Order and the Future of Relations with Russia\u201c, which is supported by the German Foreign Ministry.  The views are the author\u2019s own.<\/em><\/p>\n

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