The Failure to Reach US-Soviet, US-Russian Accords

Abstract

Throughout the Cold War, a number of opportunities to move toward mutual US-Soviet compromise had opened briefly, but then closed shut without any significant breakthrough. But even the diplomatic breakthrough finally reached by the United States and Europe with Mikhail Gorbachev toward the end of the Cold War has been regarded as one-sided by post-Cold War Russian leaderships. The fact that no new system of Euro-Atlantic security (as proposed by then president Dmitri Medvedev in June 2008) had been formally established in the post-Cold War has helped to provoke a Russian backlash that became evident after the United States decided to enlarge NATO in 1997–99 followed by the 1999 war “over” Kosovo. This chapter will argue that the deeper roots of the US-Russian antagonism began in Asia in the late nineteenth century given European and Japanese rivalry over a weak and divided China, and that the United States was drawn into World War I at least in part due to the collapse of the Tsarist regime. Despite US intervention in the Russian revolution, the United States and Soviet Union were nevertheless able to forge an alliance of wartime necessity with the rise of a militaristic Japan and Nazi Germany. Whether the rise of China will help nudge the United States, Europe, and Russia into a new entente or alliance relationship, or result in more intensive rivalries, depends to a large extent on the nature of defense and foreign policy decisions to be made by Washington in the next few years.