It seems we’ve found the smoking gun. Last summer, Donald Trump Jr. met with an alleged Russian government lawyer in an attempt to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton. The revelation is the closest thing we have so far to conclusive proof that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Relations between Washington and Moscow have reached a post-Cold War low. However, amid the accusations flying in both directions, few in the West have stopped to consider why the Russo-American relationship has taken a nosedive over the past quarter-century.
At its heart, today’s crisis is the result of differing interpretations of the events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States believes that it won the Cold War, and then pursued a benign policy course of democracy promotion in Central and Eastern Europe in the years that followed. By contrast, Moscow contends that the two Cold War-era superpowers jointly agreed to end their geopolitical confrontation, after which Washington proceeded to take advantage of its erstwhile rival’s weakness to make strategic gains at its expense.
From Washington’s perspective, the end of the Cold War brought with it the dawn of a new, peaceful, American-led world order – one in which power politics no longer mattered. This view is most commonly associated with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Russia, however, continues to view itself as a great power and claims the right to a sphere of influence – a privilege it believes it earned by way of its victory in the Second World War.
From these divergent views flows much of the discord of the past twenty-five years. NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and American support for pro-Western “colour revolutions” in former Soviet republics? From Washington’s perspective, harmless attempts to “lock in” democratic gains. From Moscow’s, the growth of a potentially hostile military alliance. Interventions across the globe designed to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities? Purely humanitarian missions for the U.S., but precedent-setting violations of state sovereignty for Russia.
In short, the United States and Russia hold fundamentally different worldviews. Today’s world features a precarious balance of power and divergent sets of values. Miscommunication and misunderstandings could have dire consequences, ranging from risky confrontation to outright conflict. It is thus imperative that major powers act to generate a global climate of mutual understanding and cooperation.
Unfortunately, the Trump Russia scandal is having the opposite effect, adding salt to a wound generated by decades of mistrust and by recent events in Ukraine. Washington has found it difficult to compartmentalize disagreements with Moscow, allowing Russo-American relations to be poisoned in their entirety. Mainstream media outlets, starved for headlines, view with suspicion political figures meeting with Russians of any kind. Moscow is increasingly viewed as a pariah by leading voices, making Russia-West cooperation challenging even when shared interests exist.
All of this may reveal more about the West than it does about Russia. Unable to come to terms with defeats in the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election, it is only natural that the Western liberal elite point the finger elsewhere rather than engage in self-examination. In this sense, those calling for a tough line on Russia are exhibiting the West’s present weakness rather than its strength.
Post-Cold War Russia – reduced by the collapse of the USSR to its smallest size since the seventeenth century – has at times been compared to a wounded and cornered animal with its claws raised in self-defence. A declining power, its population is more than six times smaller than that of all NATO countries taken together, while the size of its economy and defence spending are a tiny fraction of those of the combined Western powers.
Continuing to treat such a country as an existential threat to Western values and security is unlikely to persuade it to lower its claws. Canada – Russia’s neighbour by way of the Arctic – should keep this in mind as it attempts to broaden its global influence, diversify its international partnerships, and develop a foreign policy plan fit for the 21st century.
Zachary Paikin (@zpaikin) is Assistant Lecturer in international relations at the University of Kent and an editor at Global Brief, a leading international affairs magazine.