By Syed Qamar Rizvi.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has recently said strains between Russia and the West have pushed the world “into a new cold war”.
“On an almost daily basis, we are being described the worst threat – be it to Nato as a whole, or to Europe, America or other countries,” Mr Medvedev said.
Russian prime minister’s apprehensions
People who experienced the key events of the conflict describe how it affected them – and Cold War expert Scott Lucas, of Birmingham University and EA WorldView, explains how they fitted into the bigger picture. The world has plunged into a “new Cold War”, the Russian premier said Saturday, as Moscow came under attack at a global security gathering over its targeting of moderate rebels in Syria.
Medvedev said Russian President Vladimir Putin told the same Munich conference in 2007 that the West’s building of a missile defense system risked restarting the Cold War, and now “the picture is more grim; the developments since 2007 have been worse than anticipated”.
Medvedev criticised the expansion of NATO and EU influence deep into formerly Soviet-ruled eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War.
“NATO’s policies related to Russia remain unfriendly and opaque… Sometimes I wonder if it’s 2016 or if we live in 1962.”
The Russian prime minister added that “creating trust is hard … but we have to start. Our positions differ, but they do not differ as much as 40 years ago when a wall was standing in Europe.”
Medvedev’s comments came three days after NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg announced the Western military alliance would increase its presence in the Black Sea, which surrounds Crimea.
Nato’s rebuttal
US Secretary of State John Kerry told the Munich Security Conference that “the vast majority of Russia’s attacks (in Syria) have been against legitimate opposition groups.”
NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg also addressed the forum, vowing to combine a firm stance against Russia with more dialogue.
“We have seen a more assertive Russia, a Russia which is destabilising the European security order,” he said. “NATO does not seek confrontation and we don’t want a new Cold War.
At the same time our response has to be firm.” But U.K. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond expressed skepticism
over the possibility of a cease-fire being implemented in Syria within the one-week deadline. Speaking Saturday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Medvedev said he sometimes found himself wondering whether this was 2016 or 1962.
“NATO’s policy with regard to Russia has remained unfriendly and opaque. One could go as far as to say that we have slid back to a new Cold War,” Medvedev said. “Almost on an everyday basis we are called one of the most terrible threats either to NATO as a whole or to Europe, or to the United States.”
Tensions between the West and Russia have increased in recent years, in large part — at least in the view of the West — due to Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and its support for separatists elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe, told CNN that NATO does not agree with Medvedev’s assessment. At an earlier briefing at the Munich Security Conference, Breedlove said Russia is not just trying to change the rules but rewrite them.
“We at NATO do not want to see a Cold War,” he said in an interview. “We do not talk about it. It’s not what we want to happen or anticipate to happen… We’re a defensive alliance who are arraying ourselves to face a challenge … [from] a nation that has once again decided it will use force to change internationally recognized borders
and so we take those appropriate actions to be able to assure, defend and deter.”
What about the new cold war narrative?
A ‘new Cold War’ narrative, increasingly popular, interprets this competition as a resumption of the Cold War. Many Western political figures and observers have asserted that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is trying to turn back the clock, even to rebuild the USSR, and therefore that the experience of the Cold War could offer useful lessons for politicians today.
This narrative, though seductive, is misleading. It too often frames the discussion in a repetitive and simplistic polemic that inhibits understanding of Russia and its relationship with the West. This makes it harder for the West to craft realistic policies with respect both to the Ukraine crisis and Russia generally. Russia and the West have competing narratives to explain Putin’s action.
Putin and those seeking to “understand” him now often argue that the United States has violated a deal made with Russia about not expanding NATO.
The British Army is to deploy 1,600 troops in Jordan to take part in war games which could be preparation for a potential ‘confrontation’ between Russia and NATO member countries in Eastern Europe, the Daily Telegraph has reported, citing sources.
Conclusion
In view of the Columbia University professor, an expert on the Russian studies, Robert Legvold the new Cold War was rooted in policies from the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. It is important to note that Obama’s reset was the fourth time the United States has tried to reset relations with Russia. The ups and the downs in the past had elements among the downs that were pushing in this direction.
Under Primakov, Russia began to have serious concerns about US policy towards Russia though this was often synthesized with considerable optimism about the future. These problems were there as early as the late Kozyrev era. But the origins of Russia’s resistance to America’s use of power in a way that undermined Russian interests came with Primakov’s depictions of a multipolar world.
In the end, Russia’s diplomacy with China and India went nowhere, and Russia was not realistically looking at this time to supplant the United States. But the grievances began with NATO enlargement in the mid-1990s. There was another flow against the relationship in 1999 during the Kosovo War, when the Russians took a critical stance against NATO in that context.
The Russians have conceded that the territory they hold now is as far as they will go in Ukraine for now. So I have described an account of Russian involvement in Ukraine
that is event-driven; it is not implementing a plan, but the events driving them are not random or an extemporaneous reaction to Maidan(Kiev).
They are driven by strategic calculations, about the fear of an anti-Russian government in Kiev and concerns about events in Ukraine were part of a much larger US strategy promoting regime change in many places. US regime change efforts would spread across the region, and to Russia itself, according to this theory. Russia saw Maidan as part of a much larger geopolitical game that did not just focus on Ukraine’s international orientation but had profound impacts for the regime in Russia itself.
