{"id":4308,"date":"2016-09-11T12:47:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-11T09:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/russia-enigma-riddle-or-something-else\/"},"modified":"2017-11-14T21:27:38","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T19:27:38","slug":"russia-enigma-riddle-or-something-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/russia-enigma-riddle-or-something-else\/","title":{"rendered":"RUSSIA\u2014ENIGMA, RIDDLE OR SOMETHING ELSE?"},"content":{"rendered":"
(Note to Readers:\u00a0 The UPI Editors have asked for a series of articles on Russia.\u00a0 This is the first)<\/i><\/b><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
America\u2019s infatuation with Russia can formally be dated from May 1867 when the U.S. paid $7.2 million —worth about $1.3 billion today—for the purchase of Alaska.\u00a0 Called \u201cSeward\u2019s Folly\u201d after Secretary of State William Seward who negotiated the deal, one of the reasons for the sale was Russian expectation that by buying Alaska, the U.S. would become a more deeply involved Pacific power and a counter balance to Britain—the Tsar\u2019s greater worry at the time.\u00a0 Even then, geopolitics was not an unknown art to St. Petersburg outside the traditional European sphere.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
That infatuation has had many twists and turns.\u00a0 For a time in the 1930\u2019s, the Soviet Union was an idealized worker\u2019s paradise for those Americans seduced by communism.\u00a0 The Spanish Civil War, the proxy precursor for World War II, attracted a small number of Americans to fight on the Soviet side against the fascists.\u00a0 And without the Soviet Union for what Russians still call \u201cthe great patriotic war,\u201d defeating Hitler might have been impossible.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The Cold War however was nearly a half century long ideological struggle in which both sides promised, captured in the words of John Kennedy, to \u201cpay any price and bear any burden\u201d to win.\u00a0 But only one side did win—the West.\u00a0 And in the quarter of a century since the USSR imploded, relations have reverted to what some in Moscow and the West are calling a \u201cnew cold war.\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Why?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Regarding major interests, it would seem that Russia and the U.S. (and the West) have more in common than not. Averting conflict to include end of the virulent danger of radical and violent Islam should be self-evident as mutually beneficial.\u00a0 Yet, the crisis in Syria where eliminating the Islamic State (IS) is a common aim, the U.S. and Russia are bitterly divided over the continuation of President Bashar al Assad and his regime.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Similarly, East and West have common economic interests.\u00a0 Russia needs to sell its energy to the West.\u00a0 The West needs to sell its products to the East.\u00a0 But because of Russian intervention into Ukraine, heavy sanctions have been imposed on Moscow that are painful to all sides.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
President George W. Bush could look deeply into Vladimir Putin\u2019s eyes and as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher observed of Mikhail Gorbachev a generation before, believe each could be a partner.\u00a0 President Barack Obama could push the \u201creset button\u201d with Russia, even though it was misspelled, and sign a New START nuclear weapons reductions treaty.\u00a0 Still, to most observers, this new cold war has frozen a relationship at levels unseen since before the Soviet Union collapsed.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The reasons are not personality driven even though Obama and Putin display a mutual resentment.\u00a0 When Churchill made his famous \u201cenigma and riddle\u201d analogy, he went on to add that Russia was driven by interests.\u00a0 And the heart of the standoff today is the refusal of both sides to understand the interests of the other.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
When the Cold War ended, the West tried not to gloat. For better or worse, Russians came to believe that their country was perceived with less respect and hence was too often disregarded by the West.\u00a0 The expansion of NATO East to include, first, three major former members of the Warsaw Pact, Moscow\u2019s counter balancing alliance, was not well received.\u00a0 Nor was the accession of the three Baltic and two Black Sea states.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Then in 2008 at the NATO heads of government summit held in Bucharest, Romania, Bush\u201943 extended to Georgia and Ukraine the prospect of membership.\u00a0 Putin who was present at the summit issued a stern warning, a warning that was not fully appreciated.\u00a0 A few months later, Russia tricked Georgian President Mikhail Sakashvilli into sending forces into South Ossetia that prompted a brief, one-sided response that Moscow easily won.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
In early 2014 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to flee Kyiv, Russia intervened and annexed Crimea. With \u201ccontested borders\u201d in both Georgia and Ukraine, NATO membership was foreclosed by the founding Washington Treaty of 1949 that denied any state access under those circumstances. Few in the West comprehended Moscow\u2019s reasons.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Of course, in a perfect world, Moscow should not have used force in either case. Unfortunately, Washington never understood how much of a threat NATO expansion was perceived by Moscow.\u00a0 And perhaps it still doesn\u2019t.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Finally, Russia is not and will never be a Western democracy.\u00a0 That does not make it an automatic adversary. And maybe we are a riddle and enigma too!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Note to Readers:\u00a0 The UPI Editors have asked for a series of articles on Russia.\u00a0 This is the first) America\u2019s infatuation with Russia can formally be dated from May 1867 when the U.S. paid $7.2 million —worth about $1.3 billion today—for the purchase of Alaska.\u00a0 Called \u201cSeward\u2019s Folly\u201d after Secretary of State William Seward who negotiated the deal, one of the reasons for the sale was Russian expectation that by buying Alaska, the U.S. would become a more deeply involved Pacific power and a counter balance to Britain—the Tsar\u2019s greater worry at the time.\u00a0 Even then, geopolitics was not an unknown art to St. Petersburg outside the traditional European sphere. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,71,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-en","category-europerussia","category-harlan-ullman-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4309,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308\/revisions\/4309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}