here are, at the present time, two great nations in the world which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started from different points; I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly assumed a most prominent place among the nations; and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.

“All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and only to be charged with the maintenance of their power; but these are still in the act of growth; all the others are stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these are proceeding with ease and with celerity along a path to which the human eye can assign no term…. Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe” (Democracy in America; Alexis de Tocqueville).

There are three positions from which politics, especially the flow of international affairs, can be viewed – the angler, the trekker and the hermit. The angler is interested in the waters immediately before him in which he casts his line to catch fish. The journalist’s calling is not to be underrated. It is another matter that the diplomatic correspondent is an endangered species – Wickham Steed, Henry Brandon, Nicholas Carroll and James Reston have no successors. The trekker studies the lie of the land, walking good distances. The diplomatic historian draws on documents and interviews and also influences policy – Charles Webster, Gooch, Temperley and Louis Namier with his classic Diplomatic Prelude come to mind. The political philosopher, the hermit, towers over both, viewing matters from the heights of his hamlet. He is aware of the immediate, learned in history and endowed with a reflective disposition, and rises above the immediate to recall the past in order to warn of what lies ahead. Rienhold Niebuhr and Hans J. Morgenthau are outstanding examples. Some cross the divide. Walter Lippmann was both a philosopher and a journalist immersed in the immediate. Reston reported and reflected all the time. George F. Kennan was a diplomat and historian blessed with a reflective bent of mind.

What is one to say of the insights of a man who wrote as de Tocqueville did in 1835? Not all his statements were correct. He was wrong, for instance, in asserting that America’s conquests were “gained by the ploughshare”. The imperial quest was never absent. But the main thrust was remarkably prophetic.

As indeed was Kennan’s warning in 1997, over a decade earlier, that “expanding NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post Cold-War era”. Mark his predictions: “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma’s ratification of Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.

“It is, of course, unfortunate that Russia should be confronted with such a challenge at a time when its executive power is in a state of high uncertainty and near-paralysis. And it is doubly unfortunate considering the total lack of any necessity for this move” (The New York Times; February 5, 1997).

The roots of the Georgian crisis lie in that decision, in the triumphant, celebratory mindset of the United States which regarded the end of the Cold War as a victory for the West. On March 8, 1992, The New York Times reported the Pentagon’s Defence Planning Guidance, which declared: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere.”

GERALD HERBERT/AP

President George W. Bush failed to win Russia's acceptance of the deployment of a U.S. missile defence system in Eastern Europe, at his summit with Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort of Sochi in early April during Putin's last days as President. Here, the two leaders before a press conference at Sochi on April 6.

From this doctrine flowed NATO’s expansion, the war on Iraq, and much else. It is a threat to the stability of the international system. The world order rests on both legitimacy and balance of power. Legitimacy curbs the desire to overthrow it; balance deters the ambitious. No one is better equipped to deliver the truths to power – as Niebuhr, Morgenthau and others did – than Henry Kissinger. His, sadly, is the classic case of what Julian Benda called The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs; 1927). He knows the truth but will not utter it and sacrifice proximity to power. Read this: “The stability of an international system depends on the degree to which it combines the need for security with the obligation of self-restraint. For absolute security for one country must mean absolute insecurity for all others.”

The central issue since 1919 has been the reconciliation of the security concerns of Western Europe with those of Russia. Hitler threatened both. The West’s indifference drove Stalin to forge a pact with Hitler on August 23, 1939, giving Russia a big chunk of Poland and “spheres of influence” in Finland, Estonia, Latin Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia (Moldova). But they split on Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Turkey. Russian Prime Minister Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov and Hitler could not settle the differences when they met in Berlin on November 13, 1940. On December 18, 1940, Hitler issued a directive for war on the Soviet Union. It was launched on June 22, 1941. Germany offered British India to Russia, while claiming northern Africa for itself and Italy and Eastern Asia for Japan. Russia demanded German withdrawal from Finland, bases in Bulgaria and on the Bosphorous and the Dardanelles plus “the area south of the Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf” and Japan’s renunciation of oil and coal concessions to Northern Sakhalin.

Stalin pursued these very interests immediately after the war ended in May 1945. He was fortified by a pact with Churchill in Moscow on October 9, 1944. Churchill recorded, “I wrote out on a half sheet of paper. Romania/Russia 90 per cent, the others 10 per cent, Greece/ Great Britain 90 per cent (in accord with the U.S). Russia 10 per cent, Yogoslavia 50-50 per cent, Bulgaria/ Russia 75 per cent, the others 25 per cent. He [Stalin] made a tick upon it and passed it back to us.” Churchill suggested, “Let us burn this paper.” “No, you keep it,” said Stalin. The U.S. opposed the deal. But nor did it address Stalin’s security concerns (see the writer’s article “From war to Cold War”; Frontline, September 21, 2007).

A historic opportunity was lost once again when the Cold War ended. Mikhail Gorbachev told George H.W. Bush at Malta in December 1989 that he did not regard the U.S. as an adversary and accepted the presence of its troops in Europe. He yielded on Germany’s reunification. Vladislav Surkov, Deputy Chief of Vladimir Putin’s administration, said on June 28, 2006, “We do not believe that we were defeated in the Cold War. We defeated our own totalitarian regime.”

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s lament reflected his people’s hurt when he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy that befell his nation. Georgi Arbatov was adviser to every Soviet President from Brezhnev to Gorbachev. In an interview to Jonathan Power, he blamed Gorbachev. “He allowed the Soviet Union to disintegrate. Three drunken men plotted in the forest – Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kranchuk from the Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushkevich from Belorussia met in the Bialowieza forest. This meeting is well known, but that they were very drunk is not so well known” (World Policy Journal; Fall 2007).

One must not overlook Moscow’s record in Eastern Europe, the stridency with which it espoused the cause of the near abroad after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the crudeness with which the “sphere of interest” doctrine was revived. Its legitimate kernel was overlaid with formulations disturbing to its former Warsaw Pact allies who had suffered a lot. Russia has legitimate interests, by no means incompatible with the freedom of its neighbours. Moscow’s failure to craft a sound compromise played into the hands of the West and aroused legitimate fears of Russian expansionism in the West’s new and ardent allies in Eastern Europe: the USSR’s former and memories-laden allies.

In 1999, NATO created the Membership Action Plan (MAP) stipulating conditions. The new members are: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Slovenia. Ukraine and Georgia aspire to join them. Albania and Croatia will become the 27th and 28th members next April.

VLADIMIR RODIONOV/AFP

Putin's successor, Dmitry Medvedev, told a television channel on August 26 that Russia was not afraid of a new cold War.

The Czech Republic agreed to host a missile defence radar system near its border with Germany at Jince. Poland agreed to site U.S. interceptor missiles in northern Poland. The reason: protection of the U.S. and Europe from possible ballistic missile attack by, of all countries, Iran. Russia proposed radar sites in Georgia or Azerbaijan, which made sense.

Olivier Zajec, a consultant for the Compagnie Europeenne d’ Intelligence Strategique (CEIS), Paris, has spelt out what this means for Russia in the long run. Right now, it is in a position to protect itself from a pre-emptive U.S. strike. It is, however, “worried about a widening gap between Russia and the U.S. in the long run”. Russia perceives a U.S. “desire to contain a re-emergent Russia within its borders… The anti-missile defence programme in Europe is a chess game in which each side is thinking several moves ahead. On the Kremlin’s side, the long term extends beyond 2025, when the disparity between Moscow and Washington’s capability and technology could threaten Russian strategic autonomy. Despite its comparatively good financial position, Russia does not want to repeat the mistakes it made during the Star Wars era, when it had to struggle to catch up with the U.S., ultimately costing the USSR its empire. Vladimir Putin and his successor as President, Dmitri Medvedev, would prefer to intervene preventively at this stage and dissuade possible European partners from getting too intimately involved with the U.S. in the first place.

“This explains recent Russian threats to turn its missiles towards Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states, if they go ahead with the U.S. system. At a meeting with the Ukrainian Prime Minister on 13 January 2008, Putin warned, ‘We will be obliged to redirect our missiles at installations which we firmly believe pose a threat to our national security. I am obliged to say this openly and honestly today.’”

It also explains a major decision taken by Russia in December 2007 to suspend its adherence to the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. (Russia will no longer permit inspection or exchange information on its deployments, which caused consternation across Europe.)

“It explains the constant stream of comments by Russian generals, from reasoned (if not always reasonable) statements from the current top brass to aggressive posturing by Cold War dinosaurs. While it has moderated some of the dinosaurs’ roaring, the Kremlin hasn’t denounced their substance. It has steered a middle course appearing to be holding its anti-U.S. old guard in check, while keeping up the pressure on Washington during the dying days of a weakened U.S. administration bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The effects of the Russian counter-offensive are beginning to be felt; already the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, as well as Donald Tusk’s new Polish government, which has been keen to improve relations with the E.U. [European Union], Germany and Russia since coming to power in 2007, are worrying about what the U.S. will do after the presidential elections. A Democratic administration wouldn’t abandon the principle of a National Missile Defence; but will it press ahead with a plan which has marginalised NATO and been the cause of European concern and Russian anger?” (Le Monde Diplomatique; April 2008.)

NATO affords no protection, as the former British Defence Minister Michael Rifkind points out. It makes no sense for the West to extend NATO membership to nations it has no intention of defending. “The Caucasus are vital to the security of Russia’s most southerly regions. Had deterrence failed, there is very little chance that the Russian invasion could have been repelled. As a result, the guarantee of Article Five which Western European countries have relied on since the dawn of the Cold War would have been shattered, together with NATO’s credibility. The issue at hand, at least for political leaders in Western Europe, is not just whether it is in the interests of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. It is whether it is in the interests of existing members to admit them” (International Herald Tribune; September 6, 2008).

The North Atlantic Treaty has lost its raison d’etre. On April 4, 2009, it will be 60 years since it was concluded. Article 5 says that an armed attack on one or more of the parties in Europe or North America “shall be considered an attack against them all” and consequently each will assist the victim of the attack. How? “By taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other parties, such action as it deems necessary including the use of armed force…” It is an individual decision.

Shortly after the treaty was signed, the U.S. State Department prepared an erudite paper to prove that it was no replica of the military alliance of old. In hearings on the treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, was asked by the Chairman: “Is there or is there not anything in the treaty that pledges us to an automatic declaration of war in any event?” He replied: “There is nothing in the treaty which has that effect, Senator.” Asked again “Those are matters still residing in the discretion and judgement of the Government and the Senate?” Acheson said: “That is true.” The Chairman repeated: “Even after the occurrence of events, we would still have that freedom, would we not?” “That is true” was Acheson’s categorical reply. There is simply no guarantee of military help. Interests will determine the response. (Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations; U.S. Senate, 81st Congress; Part I Administration Witnesses; U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C.; 1949; pages 334-337.) After 9/11, NATO rushed to pledge its support to the U.S. The offer was brushed aside. It is a different U.S.-led coalition that is at work in Afghanistan.

In this setting, Georgia sensed an opportunity to attack South Ossetia, on August 7, providing Russia an opportunity to teach it a lesson, though the lesson was taught at a price that Russia has had to pay. It was foolishly encouraged by the NATO Summit Declaration at Bucharest on April 4, 2008: “We agreed that these countries [Georgia and Ukraine] will become members of NATO” – a done thing without reference to the MAP. The Bush-Putin summit at Sochi proved of no avail, nor did Putin’s meeting with NATO’s leaders. The media were barred from reporting his opening remarks at the NATO-Russian Council. His angry remarks on April 4 reflected the strain. “The main thing is that real negotiations have stopped,” Arbatov remarked. He has a point, but how can one negotiate when one side adopts a stand that is not amenable to compromise? The dilemma is resolved, seemingly, by talking but not negotiating.

Arbatov made an interesting disclosure. “When [in 1945] Stalin met the French and Italian Communist leaders, Maurice Thorez and Palmiro Togliatti, they were asking for his advice. They said they had revolutionary situations in their countries and wasn’t it the moment to make a revolution? But Stalin replied, ‘Under no circumstance. It will not be tolerated by the West.’” Stalin was an awful figure, but he was a realist.

This view is confirmed in this outstanding work by Prof. Melvyn P. Leffler. Stalin tried to restrain Mao and urged a coalition with Chiang Kai Shek.

“Neither Truman nor Stalin wanted a cold war. Yet it came. Why? The Cold War came because conditions in the international system created risks that Truman and Stalin could not accept and opportunities they could not resist. Neither the President of the most powerful country the world had ever known nor the cruellest dictator the world had ever witnessed was in control of events. And the beliefs and experiences of both men magnified their perception of threat and fear of betrayal. Each felt he had to act because danger loomed. Each felt he had to act because opportunity beckoned.”

The book is based on archival material in Russia and the U.S., minutes of Gorbachev-Reagan talks and the rest. No democracy suppresses records as India does. “Soviet records reveal that on many issues Stalin had no clear policy. On many matters he suspended action. Top officials discussed complex, often intersecting issues among themselves and with him – relations with the United States, the security of the Soviet Union, the future of Germany, the orientation of the communist parties abroad, the allocation of resources to industry and agriculture, the degree of national and cultural self-expression. But Stalin intervened only episodically and inconsistently.” He had no grand design for conquering Western Europe.

The author says: “It was Gorbachev who ended the Cold War. Among all the leaders we have examined, it was his thinking that shifted most fundamentally. He came to feel that Soviet security was not endangered by capitalist adversaries. Nor were there many opportunities for communist advances abroad. He could focus, therefore, on restructuring communist society in the USSR.

“Gorbachev would not have persevered had he not found empathetic interlocutors in Washington. Ironically, Reagan’s greatest contribution to ending the Cold War was not the fear he engendered but the trust he inspired. At the time Gorbachev took office he was told that America’s rearmament effort had reached its peak and was likely to be constrained thereafter by economic woes, fiscal exigencies, and political partnership. Gorbachev was not awed by America’s power or Reagan’s ideological zealotry, but he was impressed with the President’s personal character, political strength, and desire to eliminate nuclear weapons. Reagan seemed to want to get to know us personally, Shevardnadze recalled. While ‘adhering to his convictions,’ Gorbachev wrote, the President ‘was not dogmatic.’ He wanted to negotiate and cooperate. Most of all, Reagan had the trust of the American people. The Soviet leader knew that if he struck a deal with Reagan, it would stick.

“To his relations with Reagan, America’s most renowned ideologue, Gorbachev could apply his own considerable personal skills. He could try to shatter the image of the evil empire, and to a considerable degree, he did. But the substantive outcomes were always on American terms, since Reagan did not compromise much… The affection that characterised Gorbachev’s relations with Bush and, even more, the warmth that developed between Baker and Shevardnadze were conditioned by the weakness of the Soviets’ position domestically and internationally. They were supplicants. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze made most of the concessions. At the outset of the Cold War, Truman had said that there could be cooperation between Moscow and Washington if the United States got its way 85 per cent of the time. Now that was happening. Rather than compete for the soul of mankind in a global competition, Gorbachev wanted mostly to rekindle the real promise of communism, now reconceived as democratic socialism, in the Soviet Union. To do so, he needed to end the Cold War.” He did but was cheated.

Domestic problems robbed him of the opportunity, as did Reagan’s small-minded successor, George H.W. Bush. “Militarism in the West, Gorbachev explained, enjoyed support mainly as a result of the Soviet military threat. If Soviet leaders allayed that perception of threat, they could reshape their foes’ foreign policies. If the Kremlin demonstrated that shared values united, rather than divided, mankind, it could relax tensions and nurture more peaceful relationships. But Kremlin leaders could take these risks only if they, too, believed their security was not threatened.”

The U.S. not only failed to provide such assurance to the USSR but reneged on its promise. That breach of faith is at the root of the present crisis

YURI KADOBNOV/AFP

Mikhail Gorbachev. Leffler says he ended the Cold War.

:“Soviet and U.S. leaders agreed that a united Germany needed to be bound by supranational institutions and structures. ‘[W]e needed a safety net which would protect us and the rest of Europe from any “surprises” from the Germans,’ Gorbachev told Baker. But the appropriate security mechanism, he stressed, ‘should be provided not by NATO but by new structures created within a pan-European framework’.”

He accepted a reunified Germany’s membership of NATO on one condition – NATO would not expand eastwards. “Kohl travelled to Moscow in mid-July 1990 to see if he could negotiate a treaty governing relations between a unifying Germany and a rapidly changing Soviet Union. During the previous weeks, NATO leaders had agreed to recast the alliance along more political and defensive lines, and the government of the Western industrialised nations had decided to make credits available to East European governments and the Soviet Union if they continued to make the transition to free-market economics and open societies…. Talking to Kohl, Gorbachev reaffirmed his new attitude towards the presence of U.S. troops in Europe. They could play a stabilising role. He was pleased, moreover, that the NATO powers had agreed to restructure the alliance. ‘The transformation of NATO is apparent,’ said Gorbachev, ‘as is its emphasis on a political accent in its activities. A great step towards casting off the fetters of the past [has been taken]… The fact that the West does not see the Soviet Union as an enemy has great importance for the future’…. The ‘basic mission’ of Soviet foreign policy, Shevardnadze reminded his colleagues in April 1990, was to create ‘the conditions most conducive to internal transformations in the country’. Their goal was to ensure that external circumstances are ‘nowhere an impediment to our perestroika’.

“This attitude shaped Gorbachev’s approach to the treaty negotiations with Kohl. He wanted to protect Soviet security, deflect domestic criticism, gain financial assistance, and most of all, sustain his floundering perestroika economic reforms. He agreed to a united Germany in NATO. In return, Kohl promised that Germany and NATO would provide the assurances that Baker had outlined months before: German troops would be limited in size; the sphere of NATO activities would be restricted to the former West Germany, so long as Soviet troops remained in the eastern part of the country.” James Carroll makes the perfect comment on this perfidy: “Now Putin’s soul is stained with suspicion. Why does the man act as if nothing comes from the West but military threat? Might it be because, at the end of the Cold War, the non-violent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was matched by a beefing up of its counterpart, the Atlantic alliance? Instead of dismantling a military juggernaut defined by enmity with Moscow, Washington flexed it, like a muscle, as if Moscow were still an enemy.

“When Mikhail Gorbachev took at face value American assurances that, if Russia acquiesced before reunified Germany’s membership in NATO, the alliance would move no further east, why should new assurances be trusted?” (International Herald Tribune; April 7, 2008.)

AP

November 28, 1943: (From left) Soviet leader Josef Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Teheran Conference.

President Medvedev has formulated five principles which are unlikely to please the West. Speaking to Russian television on August 31, 2008, in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, he said his government would adhere to five principles.

Russia would observe international law, reject U.S. dominance in a unipolar world, seek friendly relations with other nations, and defend Russian citizens and business interests abroad; and it would claim a sphere of influence in the world. “Russia, like other countries in the world, has regions where it has privileged interests. These are regions where countries with which we have friendly relations are located.” Asked whether this sphere of influence would be the border states around Russia, he answered: “It is the border region, but not only” (International Herald Tribune; September 2, 2008)

The great merit of Leffler’s survey of the Cold War is its exposition of the possibilities of reconciliation of the conflicting interests. Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a Counsellor in the State Department, who was called “Kissinger’s Kissinger” by Kissinger himself, spoke at a conference of U.S. Ambassadors in April 1978, at which Kissinger also spoke. Sonnenfeldt suggested that the U.S. should “strive for an evolution that makes the relationship between the East Europeans and the Soviet Union an organic one”. The existing relationship was “unnatural”. The U.S. must adopt “a policy of responding to the clearly visible aspirations in Eastern Europe for a more autonomous existence within the context of a strong Soviet geopolitical influence”.

In 1944, Churchill agreed to spheres of influence. In 1945, the Yalta accord provided for free elections. The Cold War might have been averted in 1945-46 by a blend of both. Finland remained independent yet respectful of Soviet concerns. Could this have been arranged for Eastern Europe at Yalta or later by a modus vivendi that met Moscow’s concerns and interests, yet assured the independence of the neighbours? It implies restraint by the West also.

The West received Russia’s cooperation on Iraq, twice, Afghanistan and on other issues. It needs its support on a host of other issues of vital importance. Russia has given ample signs of willingness to compromise. Its security interests must be respected.

The West and Russia need each other. The stability of the international order depends on negotiating conflicts of interests.