In his first speech, in September 2009, the new Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said: “I believe that, of all of NATO’s relationships with partner countries, none holds greater potential than the NATO-Russia relationship. Yet I also believe that none is so much burdened by misperceptions, mistrust and diverging political agendas … The historical baggage of the relationships between NATO and Russia and between the West and Russia cannot simply be ignored. And not all our disagreements are simply based on misunderstandings. Some of them are of a fundamental nature and, hence, will not disappear quickly.”

The sources of the rivalry

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union held unrivaled military power on the European continent and Moscow had many ideological followers in European countries. Stalin, it seems, did not think that the United States would stay in Europe after the end of the war. He was willing to agree on spheres of influence, and sought to make a deal on this, first with Churchill in Moscow in October 1944, then at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945. His prime goal, I think, was to establish a huge security zone in Eastern Europe, including Poland, through which Russia had been regularly invaded from the West. He appears to have considered this a reasonable claim, which would reflect the traditional way of pocketing the geo-political spoils of military victory.

In Russian historical memory, there were five major invasions when ‘the West’ sent its military to ‘destroy’ Russia: the Polish occupation of the Kremlin in the early 17th century, the Swedish attack in the early 18th century, the Napoleon invasion of 1812, and two wars with Germany in the first half of the 20th century. In each case, the very existence of the Russian state was threatened. In this way, suspicion and fear of the West developed in the Russian mentality, even before the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

Joseph Stalin’s insistence on giving a huge slice of eastern Germany to Poland and on the annexation of Königsberg was based, I believe, on security considerations – his desire to build ‘forward defenses’ for Russia in Eastern Europe. He probably expected that Poland, in order to retain its new ‘Western territories,’ would be forever tied to the Soviet Union. Otherwise, the Soviet zone of occupation (what later became the German Democratic Republic) would have been almost three times bigger. […]

OUTLINE

• The sources of the rivalry
• The nuclear factor
• The failure of détente
• The perestroika revolution
• Winner takes all?
• The growing rift
• Resetting US-Russian relations
• A new window of opportunity

Sergey Rogov is Director of the Institute of USA and Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Chairman of the International Security Commission of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Security Council of the Russian Federation.