When did the West and Russia go different ways?

Sholto Byrnes reviews Russia's fiery relations with western countries

Russian president Vladimir Putin attends a session of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation in St. Petersburg, Russia. Michael Klimentyev / Reuters

On Christmas Day 25 years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, called United States president George HW Bush to say that he would shortly be announcing his resignation.

In some ways, this was the moment of Mr Gorbachev’s most abject failure. As Gennady Burbulis, a former deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation, recalls: “Our aim was not to allow the chaotic dissolution of the USSR, but to transform it.”

In his phone call to Mr Bush, Mr Gorbachev acknowledged that dissolution was inevitable, and asked for Mr Bush’s help in managing it. Nevertheless, the conversation between the two men was warm and congratulatory. Mr Bush told “Mikhail” that he saluted him and wanted to thank him “for what you have done for world peace”.

Above all the tone was of hope – of a new beginning that was not without risks, but which, with the continuance of friendship and partnership with the West, could lead to a new era. The Cold War, it seemed, could end with all being victors.

In the light of relations today, one has to ask: what on earth went wrong?

In 2012, Mitt Romney declared Russia to be America’s “number one geopolitical foe”, and despite the incoming administration’s Putinphilia, there are plenty who would agree with him – not least president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defence secretary, general James Mattis, who has called Russia president Vladimir Putin “delusional”.

In December, the European Union extended economic sanctions on Russia. In October, a Russian flotilla was – very unusually – denied refuelling facilities in the Mediterranean and had to carry out the move at sea.

Amid all the talk of escalating tensions globally, and the added uncertainty caused by the election of Donald Trump, perhaps we tend to forget how unprecedented it was for Russia to be thrown out of the G8 in 2014 over its annexation of Crimea.

The Baltic states worry they could be next. War games carried out by the Rand Corporation in October suggested that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania could be overrun by their former masters in 36 hours. Such a scenario was once unthinkable. Now, a former deputy supreme commander of Nato, Sir Richard Shirreff, has gone so far as to write a book with the title 2017: War with Russia.

If you think that makes Sir Richard a maverick outlier, think again. In his foreword to the book, US admiral James Stavridis writes that if Russia does not change course, that “may lead inexorably to a clash with Nato. And that will mean a war that could so easily go nuclear.”

Admiral Stavridis appears to blame Mr Putin. But that conversation between the Kremlin and the White House a quarter of a century ago should remind us that there was another culprit: a West that missed the opportunity to forge a new and inclusive world order with Russia.

For Russia did not want to be close to war-readiness with Nato – it wanted to join. Mr Putin, no less, argued that Russia should be allowed into the organisation; and if not, that it should be disbanded.

“There is no more Warsaw Pact, no more Soviet Union, but Nato continues to exist and develop,” he said in 2001. “We do not see a tragedy in its existence, but we also see no need for it.”

Instead, the misguided encircling of Russia by new Nato members – countries it once ruled – has fed a nationalist narrative that the West wishes to see its old adversary isolated and humiliated.

Far from wishing to undermine the European Union, it was not so long ago that Mr Putin was musing about the possibility of Russia being in a currency union with the EU. But, as the British conservative Peter Hitchens has pointed out: “If the EU had ever been intended to be a Europe-wide organisation, with a general European aim, it would have set out to include Russia. It didn’t.”

Russia’s institutions and the state of its democracy were given as reasons why it could not be welcomed into the EU, but plenty of eastern states with more parlous political cultures have been set on the path to entry.

Instead, Russia was only allowed into lesser groupings, such as the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Every time that Russia has tried to reach out, it has been rebuffed, or treated at best as the “regional power” that Mr Obama termed it. That is not how Russia sees itself.

Was it that the West could not stomach dealing on equal terms with a global power with a long history and great civilisation that led it to treat that country with such suspicion and disdain time and again?

That has only provoked and reinforced the notion that Russia must assert its interests unilaterally, as no proper recognition will ever be given by the West.

And so we witness the betrayal of that sense of promise of 25 years ago. Did Mr Gorbachev – or Mr Putin, when he asked to join Nato – want a new Cold War, as many believe we now face? If the answer is no, then we must ask who did; and if we have arrived at one by carelessness, that is no excuse.

We must hope presidents Trump and Putin can salvage something of the amity of 1991.

If they do, it will be out of pragmatism rather than the high-minded principle of 25 years ago. But given how devastating the consequences of missing the original opportunity has been, that will be enough.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia