On September 30, 2016, the Valdai Discussion Club held a panel discussion titled "The State of Russia-West Relations and Prospects for the Future", which was attended by distinguished scholars, former government officials and diplomats from the United States and European countries. The discussion took place in the framework of the First Annual conference of the University Consortium, which is held in the HSE on September 30 – October 1, 2016.
At the beginning of the discussion British Defense Minister (2006-2008) Desmond Browne answered the opening question of Valdai Club Programme Director and discussion moderator Dmitry Suslov, who asked whether the standoff between Russia and the West started with the 2008 conflict in Georgia.
Browne replied that the path toward the deterioration of relations began long ago, but the Georgia conflict was enabled by the 2008 NATO summit, where Ukraine and Georgia were told about promised membership in NATO in the future. The decision, itself a compromise, was seen by Georgia as a guarantee .
Robert Legvold, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University continued the discussion by looking at the deterioration of the Russia-West relationship. He noted that the situation was not a new cold war, although it shared some of its qualities.
“Each side blamed the other side almost exclusively for what happened in the deteriorating relationship. And it wasn’t simply that they assigned 99 percent of the blame to the other side, it was the reason why they did. The reason was not merely the behavior of the other side, it was in the essence of the other side’s system. That’s true today. That’s what’s been happening since Maidan and the Ukraine war,” Legvold said.
Legvold said that the deterioration of relations began in a series of stages, which he called “three resets and four failures,” with “malignant seeds” sowed as far back as the 1994 de-arming of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons and the 1999 NATO operation in Serbia.
“This process is like this because there were malignant seeds from the beginning, that grew, and the real problem is that the national leadership on neither side were conscious of it,” Legvold added.
On Russia’s side, Legvold noted, Russia never dealt with its neighbors in the ex-USSR Near Abroad the way that the West expected, while the West, led by the US, expanded NATO beyond what Russia was prepared to handle.
Sir Roderick Lyne, former British Ambassador to Russia (2000-2004), said that Russia and the West enjoyed a relatively cordial relationship from 1988 to 2003 or 2004, where the two parties were on convergent paths. The key point, at which the two diverged, however, was the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, according to Lyne.
Lyne continued Legvold’s argument that the major point of disagreement between Russia and the West was the status of post-Soviet Near Abroad states. Whereas the West understood the status of new states as that of new states after decolonialization of Western colonial empires, Russia saw things differently.
“One day you have borders, and then in 1991 you find that your security perimeter, your economic perimeter, a lot of your ethnic perimeters are now in what are called sovereign independent states. It takes a long time to get around that idea, and this was the fundamental fault line,” Lyne said.
Replying to Suslov’s question about the demonization of Vladimir Putin in western media and demonization of Hillary Clinton in Russian media, Legvold cited Henry Kissinger, who recently said that the demonization of Vladimir Putin is an alibi for the absence of policy. Legvold also noted that there is a great absence of mutual respect between leaders in Russia and the West.
Legvold noted that all ongoing diplomacy is transactional, and that the potential synergies are all negative. He also noted that both Russia and the United States have an issue with all media, public and experts pushing toward confrontation, while opponents of confrontation are labeled as a fifth column.
Legvold concluded by saying that layered mistrust has not prevented some cooperation, but Ukraine has now becomes the most dangerous conflict in Europe, and the situation in Syria deepens the confrontation.
