Valdai Club

In his interview Amb. Jack Matlock discusses the mistakes that were made in the Post-Cold war period by both the US and Russia, which eventually resulted in the confrontational state of their relations today. These mistakes, as he claims, were made already after the Cold war had been ended by negotiation and to the benefit of all in 1988 – 1989, and were based on several myths the West and the US elaborated already after the USSR had broke up. He disagrees, that part of the problems of Post-Cold war US-Russia relations result from an unbalanced ending of the Cold war itself, and claims that the USSR also benefited from the end of the Cold war and from how it ended. At the same time, he argues that Russia overreacted to the mistakes that the West made in the post-Cold war period, and misperceived many of the Western steps and decisions. For instance, he argued that NATO was preserved to keep Germany under control, while Bill Clinton took the decision to enlarge NATO to get re-elected, not against Russia. He also dwells upon the problems of Russia’s market and democratic transformation after the breakup of the USSR, identifying the ways of how Russian domestic troubles impacted US-Russia relations. Finally, he describes the ways to overcome the new US-Russian confrontation and build sustainable partnership, above all a fundamental broadening of the US-Russian agenda and a recognition of diffusion of power in the world of today and tomorrow.