Cold War When America Still Believed In A Russian Miracle

Since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine began, some commentators have once again suggested that the West bears some sort of historical "complicity" in the Kremlin's aggressive stance Russia was not approached after the end of the Cold War; the USA in particular, as the leading power, would have had little interest in this and had neglected the topic.

At the end of December 2021 - the Russian deployment on the Ukrainian border was already in full swing - former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev accused the USA of having behaved "arrogantly and self-righteously" shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union However, recently declassified State Department documents paint a very different picture.

The National Security Archives, an establishment of George Washington University, has now published it In addition to memoirs already available from those involved, the documents illustrate that in the early 1990s there was a will in the USA to help Russia to integrate it.

For US President Bill Clinton (in office from January 1993 to January 2001), the issue was a high priority He believed he had a golden opportunity: to help Russia become a democratic, free-market state.

Clinton and his team were aware of the danger of the situation There was the vast arsenal of nuclear weapons in three former Soviet republics, a rapidly declining Russian economy, and growing tensions between President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament.

Even before Clinton took office as US President, he was interested in the development of Russia During the election campaign he called for more economic aid and criticized the incumbent government of George HW Bush for taking too hesitant a course.

In a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York on April 1, 1992, Clinton spoke about this; shortly before, Richard Nixon, the former President and Republican like Bush, had also sent a secret memo to the incumbent President In it, he stressed that aid to Russia and former communist states was not mere charity, because "what helps us overseas helps us at home".

One must prevent the scenario, which is as dangerous as it is costly, of Yeltsin being replaced by “a new, aggressive nationalist” The Bush administration then announced an aid package which, however, was only partially realised.

In June 1992, Democratic presidential candidate Clinton met Yeltsin for the first time in Washington As Clinton later wrote in his autobiography, he found the Russian leader - whose courage he greatly admired during the attempted coup in 1991 - to be "polite and friendly, but somewhat didactic".

Nonetheless, Clinton liked him immediately and made Russia a top priority of his foreign policy "Danger of armed conflict" The focus of Clinton's election campaign was on domestic politics, especially the economy (with the legendary slogan "It's the economy, stupid!").

But the issue of Russia remained high on the agenda after he took office in January 1993 Bush's outgoing Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger also contributed to this: His successor in the Clinton administration, Warren Christopher, left a memo in which he described the success of Russian reforms as "a key factor for peace and security in Eurasia".

Eagleburger expressed concern about the possible proliferation of weapons of mass destruction There is also the danger of armed conflicts between Russia and its neighboring countries, "with Ukraine as not the most likely, but certainly the most dangerous possibility".

There is an opportunity to include a reforming Russia and the Eastern Europeans in a stable European system "History will not do well on the United States unless we offer generous assistance now," he warned in the memo.

which has now been published by the national security archive (not to be confused with the identically abbreviated US secret service National Security Agency) as part of the "Freedom of Information Act" Clinton's later Russia representative and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott recalled in his memoirs how engrossed Clinton was in the subject immediately before his inauguration.

The outgoing President Bush traveled to Moscow on January 3, 1993 for the conclusion of the “Start II” disarmament treaty Clinton had thought intensively about Russia.

The primary reason was the economic crisis with high inflation and even the danger of a winter of hunger Two days after his inauguration, on January 22, 1993, he telephoned Yeltsin; the minutes of the conversation have now been published.

"I am determined, that together we can create a US-Russia partnership that is as close as possible," Clinton said He promised "a high degree of personal involvement".

However, according to Talbott, who speaks fluent Russian, the Russian president sometimes appeared to be barely listening over the phone; he was drunk and slurred Clinton, who grew up with an alcoholic stepfather, was more amused than shocked.

According to Talbott, in almost all further meetings and conversations with Yeltsin, his alcoholism was conspicuous; But that did not damage the relationship with Clinton Russia has always remained a personal concern of Clinton.

It was not for nothing that he made the expert Talbott – a former college friend and close confidant – Russia representative Talbott even considered Russia's change "no less than a miracle, the greatest political miracle of our time, and one of the greatest in human history".

He believes that with success and appropriate support, Russia could have a positive meaning comparable to that of the founding of the United States, its democratic system and role in the world That is what it says in Talbott's recently published briefing to US Secretary of State Christopher from February 1993, written before his first meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev.

The national security archive concludes that this letter from Talbott in particular shows that the Russia policy of the Clinton years was sincere and honest The government had "good intentions".

"We did the right thing at the right time" Talbott's vision of a Russian miracle, however, was not realized This was already evident in Clinton's second term in office, during which there was a dispute over NATO's eastward expansion.

In September 2022, Clinton said in retrospect, "I think we did the right thing at the right time And if we hadn't, this crisis might have happened even sooner.

" He was "more convinced today than then" that they had done the right thing "In doing what I did, I was offering Russia not only a special partnership with NATO, but also the prospect of eventual NATO membership," Clinton said.

There were new conflicts with Russia in the 1990s, not only because of the NATO expansion, but also because of the West's intervention in the Kosovo war In December 1999, during a visit to China, Yeltsin publicly brusquely rebuffed Clinton's protests against Russia's second Chechen war.

The initially good relationship with Russia had already developed deep cracks And with Putin, Nixon's fears of a "new aggressive nationalist" in Russia were soon to come true.

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