Putin, NATO Expansion and the Missing Context in McFaul’s Narrative | Philippe Lemoine
▻https://www.cspicenter.com/p/putin-nato-expansion-and-mcfauls
Texte très convaincant sur le rôle de l’#OTAN dans le déclenchement de la guerre en #Ukraine, qui part de la critique d’un article coécrit par Michael McFaul, ancien ambassadeur US en Russie et figure importante des spécialistes de la Russie. Celui-ci y soutient que l’OTAN n’a rien à voir là-dedans, une preuve étant les déclarations apaisées de Putin à l’égard de l’alliance au début des années 2000. Pour Lemoine, McFaul évacue le contexte qui permet d’interpréter ces déclarations différemment : non seulement le ton apaisé n’empêche pas de voir l’élargissement comme négatif, mais surtout elles datent d’une période où la Russie espérait y trouver une réelle coopération - espoir qui a été vite déçu.
Indeed, what most people miss in this debate is that it’s not so much NATO expansion per se that Russia opposed as much as the exclusion of Moscow from the post-Cold War European security architecture that it entailed, because the Alliance, despite what the Russians had been led to believe at the end of the Cold War (but that’s a story for another time), had become the cornerstone of that architecture. If NATO became a more political organization and a mechanism could be found to include Russia in the decision-making process, then it would have no reason to fear NATO expansion. In fact, this is exactly what Putin was alluding to in the statement quoted by McFaul and Person, in which he said that if the “quality of the relationship” with NATO changed then enlargement would cease to be an issue. But you wouldn’t know that from reading their paper, because although they are perfectly aware of it, they carefully omit this context.
[...] Obviously, once you know the context of the statements quoted by McFaul and Person in their paper, they take on a very different meaning. If Putin made so many conciliatory statements on NATO expansion in the first years of his presidency, it’s not because he didn’t see it as a security threat if it implied Russia’s exclusion from the post-Cold War European security architecture, but because he thought that by adopting a cooperative stance on the issue Russia would be included in the decision-making process. For a while, it seemed that his strategy had paid off as NATO promised a new framework for cooperation that would have gone some way toward realizing this ambition, but in the end it didn’t happen because the US didn’t hold up its part of the bargain. Of course, McFaul and Person know about this, but they omit this context even though it undermines the simplistic narrative they are promoting. Nor is this episode the only legitimate grievance that Russia has toward the West, but as Russia scholar Marlène Laruelle recently noted, people are no longer interested in nuance when it comes to the degradation of relations between the two sides:
For me, the war is Putin’s responsibility, but the strategic deadlock that preceded it has been co-created by Russia and the West, with misunderstanding on both sides, and responsibilities on both sides. Whenever you try to bring in some nuance, then you get the accusation of being on Putin’s side.
Unfortunately, she is right about that, which is a huge problem for the public discourse about the origins of the war.
In particular, the notion that NATO expansion has “nothing to do” with it has become a dogma that nobody can question in polite company, yet it’s not only false but preposterous. There are hundreds of memoirs, cables, memos, etc. spanning decades attesting that Russian elites have been genuinely frightened by the expansion of NATO. Nor is it the case, as people sometimes claim when you point that out, that if Russian officials have feared NATO expansion it’s only because it prevents Moscow from dominating its neighbors. I’m not saying that neo-imperialist considerations play no role, which would also be ridiculous, but Russian elites actually think that NATO expansion threatens Russia’s security. Now, I agree that their fears are to a large extent irrational (though not entirely), but Russian officials are not the first policymakers to have exaggerated security concerns, and nor will they be the last.
It’s ironic that many people who 20 years ago were convinced that Iraq posed such an imminent threat to the US that it had to be taken out immediately can’t even fathom the possibility that Russian elites might have a similarly inflated perception of the threat posed by NATO expansion. The notion that Putin just made this up and that Russian officials don’t really see NATO expansion as a security threat is so ridiculous that, if the public discourse about Russia were even minimally based in reality, nobody could make such a claim without suffering a serious reputational cost. However, as things are, it’s people who point that out whose reputations suffer because they’re accused of laundering Russian propaganda. Russia scholars bear a large responsibility for this state of affairs, because most of them know things are more complicated than what the dominant narrative claims, but they don’t speak up or even pretend that is not the case because they don’t want to pay the cost. While at some level their behavior is understandable, because in the current environment it’s very difficult to speak up against that narrative, I still think it’s a dereliction of duty.
Now, as I said at the beginning of this article, the way in which NATO expansion played a role in the origins of the war is more complicated than people on both sides commonly assume. In particular, it’s not so much that it was the proximate cause of the war, but rather that it contributed towards creating the conditions that made the war possible. The story of how this happened is complicated and Russia obviously has a huge share of responsibility in the degradations of relations with the West prior to the invasion, but it’s impossible to understand this process without acknowledging that Moscow has legitimate grievances against the West, as the episode I discussed in this article illustrates. The problem is that not only are those grievances never discussed, but when the Russians bring them up they are accused of making things up, which just adds insult to injury. If you were previously unaware of the history presented in this article, I hope that it has convinced you that things are more complicated than you thought.
Soon, I will publish the first part of a larger project on the history of post-Cold War relations between Russia, the West and Ukraine, in which I will give my interpretation of this complicated story.