The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked the bankruptcy of an American strategy towards post-Cold War Europe. But what precisely was that strategy and where did it go wrong? Looking back on the past 30 years of American engagement with Europe shows that, after the Cold War ended, the United States pursued with remarkable consistency a set of two contradictory strategic objectives. One of them was a geopolitical partnership with Russia; the other was building stability and prosperity on the European continent by enlarging Western Cold War-era institutions into the countries of the former Eastern bloc. The contradiction was never addressed explicitly, perhaps because it was never fully realized. This led to three decades of tensions, as concrete elements of the American and Russian visions of a European future clashed, feeding into a spiral of mistrust and aggravation. This is not to say that investing in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the bedrock of European order was a mistake and that the United States should have embraced Moscow more completely—to the contrary. The reality has been, and still is, that Russian elites expected concessions that are completely incompatible with American interests in Europe, as well as the goals and desires of most European states. Only a complete capitulation to those expectations could have won the United States a post-Cold War partnership with Russia. Looking towards the future, Washington needs to realize that the way Russian elites perceive the world and their role in it makes anything but conflict over Europe highly unlikely.
Three Decades in Pursuit of Two Contradictions
Since the late 1940s, American grand strategy was guided by the need to contain expansive and irreconcilable Soviet power within its existing reach, anticipating a moment in which internal changes in the Soviet Union would allow Washington and Moscow to cast aside the Cold War and build their relationship on a benign basis. The events of 1989 to 1991 removed the rationale for this strategy. The Soviet Union did in fact attempt serious internal change but, in the process, fractured and ceased to exist. Gone along with it was the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance that faced NATO across a divided Europe. Communism itself, which for half a century frightened the American public and elites into an activist foreign policy, was discredited as a system of social organization and gone from Europe for good. In the place of that hostile but predictably stable environment emerged an uncertain Central and Eastern Europe. It consisted of newly sovereign countries of the former Warsaw Pact and seven post-Soviet republics. The latter included the Russian Federation, seemingly emancipated from its former empire and receptive to defining its relationship with the outside world anew.
In those circumstances, Washington needed to completely redefine its strategy towards the new Russia as well as the eastern half of Europe. This time, no single document like the Long Telegram nor a single strategist like George Kennan emerged to articulate this strategy. Nevertheless, the assumptions that arose in the first years of the post-Cold War period proved remarkably consistent for the following three decades: the Russian Federation is destined to play an important role in world affairs, and it will be receptive to a partnership with the United States. What followed from those assumptions was that Washington could and should attempt to form a constructive relationship with Moscow on which to stake a large geopolitical investment. It speaks to the remarkable holding power of those convictions that every U.S. administration from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden attempted to achieve some sort of benign, noncompetitive relationship with the Russian Federation, despite mounting evidence to the impossibility of such a task.
At the same time, the United States needed to figure out how to approach Eastern Europe, now liberated but also cut loose from security institutions after the implosion of communism. Washington decided that while the region was temporarily unstable, it had the potential to democratize and develop on a successful trajectory similar to that taken earlier by other American allies in Western Europe and Southeast Asia. More broadly, the United States resolved to keep investing in the transatlantic institutions created for the Cold War and turn them into a framework stabilizing the entire European continent, fostering security and economic development. The United States would pursue those two goals simultaneously—sometimes halfheartedly—for three decades, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The first president to comprehensively address the question of defining the U.S. approach to Russia in the post-Cold War period was Bill Clinton. The Clinton administration pursued what former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski critically described as “a policy of idealistic optimism” in which “the goal of containment of Soviet expansion [was] to be replaced by a partnership with a democratic Russia.”1 The basis of that policy was formed by the conviction that the emergence of a democratic system in Russia backed by a market economy was attainable and likely, and hence the regime of Boris Yeltsin was worth uncritical support despite its shortcomings. Far before it could have been said with any certainty that the Russian Federation would really become the cooperative partner that Clinton wanted it to be, his administration was already treating Moscow like a trusted geopolitical collaborator with whom to share responsibility for the world. This attitude may be best captured by Clinton’s praise for the Russian intervention in the Georgian civil war of 1991-1993, articulated during his visit to Moscow in January 1994. In his speech, Clinton imagined a great power partnership between Washington and Moscow that would steward stability in Eurasia, and encouraged Russia to throw its weight around: “You will be more likely to be involved in some of these areas near you, just like the United States has been in Panama or Grenada near our area.”2
While he pursued a wishful scenario of making Russia a responsible junior great power partner to the United States, Clinton had to make a decision of strategic proportions with regard to Central and Eastern Europe. Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 left a gaping hole in the European security architecture, the future of European security loomed over decision-makers in Washington. Proposals ranged from an enlargement of existing Western institutions to arranging permanent neutrality for the countries of the former Eastern bloc. An attempt to bridge those two alternatives was made in 1994 with the launch of Partnership for Peace (PfP), a NATO-affiliated initiative designed to gather NATO members and all former communist countries, including Russia, in a common framework.3 The advantages of PfP were that it avoided drawing new lines across Europe and, at least nominally, included everyone. Its glaring weakness was that it offered no hard guarantees, therefore not really resolving any security dilemmas, and left the question of eventual full NATO membership for its participants painfully vague.
Even before PfP was officially launched there were signs that key stakeholders were pulling in opposite directions, away from compromise. During a meeting in Warsaw with Polish President Lech Wałęsa on August 25, 1993, Yeltsin issued a declaration assuring that Russia had no objections to Polish membership in NATO.4 Although he subsequently backtracked under the pressure of his military establishment and came down hard on opposing NATO enlargement, Eastern Europeans seized on that event to lobby even harder for membership. In the next year, when the fate of PfP hung in the balance, Russia launched an exceedingly brutal war against Chechnya, weakening its own case against NATO enlargement, and the Republican party won control of Congress, putting pressure on the White House to take a bolder position on foreign policy.5 Eventually the Clinton administration eschewed plans for a security halfway house embodied by PfP and made a strategic decision to endorse immediate NATO enlargement eastwards as the best bet for stabilizing the European continent.6
Clinton’s policy of pursuing both NATO enlargement and partnership with Russia was not free of contradictions and trade-offs. By the second half of 1993, Moscow had already loudly asserted the right to have a veto over sovereign decisions of countries as far west as Poland. A great power duopoly, which Clinton openly suggested in Moscow in January 1994, could only be pursued at the expense of a Europe whole and free. The latter, conversely, could only come at the expense of seeming disingenuous to the elites in Moscow, who thought they were implicitly promised an enlightened imperial role to play at the side of Washington, but then found out that this applied only selectively (in Georgia, yes; in Poland, no). This painful dynamic was most visible in Eastern Europe, where those two promises met and clashed. The contradiction between building European security on the enlargement of Western institutions and Russia’s increasingly visible insistence on a special status that would allow it a veto over other countries’ sovereignty was never addressed under Clinton.
Succeeding him in 2001, President George W. Bush abandoned the goal of fostering democratization in Russia, but remained hopeful that—even if not conforming to American standards of democracy and the free market—Russia could be a geopolitical partner to the United States in a noncompetitive symbiosis. The Bush administration sought cooperation on points of mutual interest, reinforced by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.7 The new Russian president, Vladimir Putin, seized upon September 11 to create a platform for geopolitical collaboration, which brought about, among other things, a U.S. presence in central Asia for the purpose of fighting the war in Afghanistan. The great expectations on the Russian side for an “equal partnership of unequals” that the post September 11 partnership generated, however, fell short of reality.8 As recalled by Thomas Graham, then-senior director for Russia at the National Security Council, “at minimum, the administration didn’t want Russia to get in the way” and actually desired Russian help in its foreign policy priorities.9 It was not willing, however, to grant Moscow the role of a regional hegemon and global co-equal that the Russians desired.
While Washington juggled two contradictory visions of building order in Europe—trying to invest in Atlanticism but also keep Russia as a partner—damage was being done. The eastern edge of the European continent was falling into a gray zone of instability marked by geopolitical uncertainty, low standards of governance, corruption, and huge social aspirations fueled by the beaming example of European integration. In the mid-1990s, a fledgling democracy broke down in Belarus with the election of Alexander Lukashenko as president, who soon extinguished political opposition and aligned himself closely with like-minded elites in Russia. The fall of Belarus was shrugged off by the United States and its European allies, the strategic consequences of which still linger today as Belarus became a launching pad for Russian military aggression and a wedge aimed against NATO. More prominently—and avoidably—a lack of clear-eyed determination to stay the course on stabilizing Europe through the enlargement of Western institutions led to consigning Ukraine to a geopolitical gray zone.
The Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine exchanged nuclear stocks for useless “security assurances,” was reached in a spirit of great-power condominium, relying purely on Moscow’s good will. This essentially kicked the can down the road regarding Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. That solution proved unstable and untenable in 2004, when popular protests in Ukraine demanded European standards of governance and accountability, rejecting President Leonid Kuchma’s balancing act between the West and Russia. The 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest brought those contradictions to the fore, as Bush insisted on membership for Ukraine and Georgia, but failed to get it through Berlin and Paris, in the end undermining both his “partnership” with Moscow and European security. A day after the summit, during his visit to a NATO-Russia Council meeting, Putin told Bush: “George, you have to understand that Ukraine is not even a country.”10
When Barack Obama became president, his national security team attempted to seize on the apparent change in the Kremlin, where Dmitry Medvedev replaced Putin as president. This was an effort to steer Russia towards a partnership with the United States, seemingly shattered by the crisis over the Bucharest summit and the Russian invasion of Georgia. The “reset,” as it came to be known, was founded on the rapidly decaying assumption that the Russian state and society would follow the incentives of a non-competitive relationship with the United States based on economics, technology, arms control, and people-to-people contacts, the joint impact of which would outweigh geopolitics. For the sake of its reset policy, Obama sacrificed a robust security buildup in Eastern Europe, symbolized by his retreat on the Bush-era project of building an air defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Despite certain successes, such as the New START arms control agreement, the bilateral relationship deteriorated after the 2011-2012 protests in Russia and Putin’s return to power in 2012. Around this time, U.S. Ambassador to Russia and author of the reset policy Michael McFaul realized that Putin and the elites in the Kremlin were perceiving him and the United States with determined hostility.11 The reset was definitively buried after the Russian annexation of the Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Even then, however, the Obama team held on to its timidness towards Russia by instituting a de facto embargo on the supply of lethal weapons for Ukraine’s defense and hoping that European capitals under the leadership of Berlin would resolve that unwanted problem without the United States.12 At this point, Washington seemed tired of building stability in Central and Eastern Europe and happy to draw down its engagement in the region to avoid a confrontation with Russia, even as Moscow was embarking on a hostile campaign against the United States and NATO. This represented the low point for the double objective of stabilizing Europe through enlargement while pursuing a partnership with Russia. In 2014, the latter goal was in shambles while the former was in severe trouble.
Donald Trump, like his predecessors, came into office believing he could achieve a partnership with Russia, this time relying on personal diplomacy with the Russian leader and negotiation. Despite a much-publicized summit in Helsinki, however, U.S.-Russia relations did not improve in the period between 2017 and 2020, due to the conflict in Ukraine and allegations of Russian interference in U.S. elections looming heavily on bilateral ties. The Trump administration, perhaps more so than its predecessor, embodied the contradiction at the heart of American strategy towards post-Cold War Europe. Indeed, while the president was voicing his belief in a business-like partnership with Russia and complimenting Vladimir Putin, his administration was taking an assertive position on what was clearly a strategic competition with Russia.13 Among other reversals of Obama-era policy, Trump authorized transfers of lethal support for Ukraine. To the surprise of many, the president also expressed support for countries on the eastern flank of NATO such as Poland, praising their commitment to military spending.14 In 2017, Trump took part in a summit of the Three Seas Initiative in Warsaw, endorsing the project aimed at funding connections on the north-south axis to overcome decades of neglect and improve the geopolitical environment of post-communist Europe.15
By the time Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the American balancing act between European security and Russian geopolitical ambitions was already teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Yet even then, in May 2021, as a confrontation with Russia intensified into a war scare, the Biden administration removed sanctions imposed by Trump on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which had hindered Russia’s efforts to enhance its energy partnership with Germany while isolating Eastern and Central European countries.16 Months before a large-scale land war in Europe became inevitable, Washington was still hoping it could avoid confrontation with Russia while also not abandoning completely the security architecture built over previous decades.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 shattered the hopes that many had for a cooperative relationship between the United States and Russia, at least for a long time. The tortured experience of the past 30 years that Washington had with Moscow, culminating in a hot war, should be no surprise once the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American strategy for post-Cold War Europe is examined: seeking a partnership with Russia while at the same time building stability in Europe on the basis of transatlantic institutions. Those aims proved to be mutually exclusive. In the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, many argued that pursuing stability in Europe through eastward enlargement was a mistake that cost Washington the relationship with Russia. Criticisms ranged from implying that there was a better way to enlarge NATO without offending Russia, to squarely rejecting any American presence east of the former Iron Curtain as imperialistic and provocative.17 Before moving forward, it is important to establish that the United States was right to pursue European security on the basis of NATO enlargement and, more importantly, that the goal of partnership with Russia was most likely never attainable.
Partnership with Russia Was Always an Illusion
Much ink has been spilled on Vladimir Putin’s apparent obsession with Russian imperial history and his desire to aggrandize and protect that legacy against a malicious conspiracy of the Western powers. Putin has locked himself in a confrontation with the United States and cannot afford to exit it so long as he is in power, which may add years to the current state of open hostility. However, Russia showed symptoms of behaving this way years before Putin came to power and is unlikely to change drastically after he departs. A fixation on the person of the Russian dictator has led many to under-appreciate a larger consensus behind the Russian hostility to the United States and its allies. Russian elites shared Putin’s geopolitical outlook even before he was widely known in Russia itself, especially when it comes to the countries within the former zone of Russian imperial power. As Georgetown University scholar and former national security official Angela Stent said, Russian elites feel “a sense of entitlement towards its neighbors based on shared history, language and culture” that precludes them from taking their neighbors’ sovereignty seriously and justifies high-handed and outright interventionist behavior.18 This is true across the former Soviet Union/Romanov empire, but especially in Eastern Europe.
That basic conviction makes the Russian government view the development of nation-states with their own national political cultures and independent aspirations in its perceived sphere of influence as an affront. To make matters worse, the same principles of international order that the Kremlin despises—sovereignty and equality based on democratic, self-limiting national statehood—are also the foundational values of the United States, its allies, and institutions such as NATO and the European Union. By their very existence and the force of attraction which they radiate into societies inhabiting areas perceived as sacred property on the Russian imperial mind map, Western institutions and the Western way of life reveal themselves as a mortal threat. This intellectual outlook in the Kremlin has been putting Russia on a collision course with the United States and its allies since the earliest days of the post-Cold War world.
Recall the early 1990s when the Clinton administration tried to engage Yeltsin on the future of European security. The great Russian democrat found it hard to accept that he would have to deal with countries of the former Warsaw Pact on an equal basis within a common European security framework. Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev declared that if Russia was to join PfP, it would need to have a special status that elevated it above other members.19 The Russians have taken offense at American initiatives and torpedoed all plans for building European security in the post-1991 world but have never come up with constructive proposals of their own. Moscow expected an “equal partnership of unequals” with Washington, but would not consider treating countries in its neighborhood as equals.
Could the United States have achieved success in constructing a real partnership with the Russian Federation after 1991? Theoretically yes, if it had given the Russian leaders everything they wanted from Washington: free geopolitical reign in its perceived sphere of influence, the right to implicitly trump the sovereignty of numerous countries possibly as far west as Poland, and a special status that elevated Russia in the international pecking order to an equal of the United States and above everybody else in Europe and Eurasia–save perhaps China. One notable consequence would have been the dismantling of NATO, or turning it into a Russo-American condominium where some members are more equal than others.
In practice, this was hardly possible. Nevermind that such an arrangement would have been a net loss for the United States and Europe, that Russian power did not justify such an elevated status in 1991 or in any other subsequent year, or that numerous countries would have strongly objected, not least those in Eastern Europe. Most importantly, such a brutally deterministic concert-of-powers scheme would have been incompatible with how the United States sees itself and its role in the world. Good luck trying to convince the American public, Congress, and political and intellectual leaders that this is what the United States ought to be in the world.
America’s original sin in the post-Cold War world was not endorsing NATO as a framework for European security and admitting to it countries from across the former Iron Curtain. This is compatible with American values and turned out to be hugely beneficial for American interests, producing a number of states with robust economies, functioning democracies, and an iron-clad commitment to common security. The real mistake was not articulating the American vision for post-Cold War Europe hard enough to Moscow, and sometimes actively encouraging the Russian elites in deluding themselves that the United States would humor their fantasy of imperialistic greatness. Whenever this fantasy clashed with building a Europe whole and free under the umbrella of NATO, both sides reeled at each other, feeding into a downward spiral of mistrust that culminated in 2022. This agonizing process of discovery and disappointment lasted 30 years. The United States’ and Russia’s visions and expectations were, from the beginning, incompatible.
Expect No Change in Russia
The question that arises next is, can Russia change and accept the rules of engagement in Europe made by its western neighbors? History provides ample success stories of former imperial metropoles transforming into self-limiting nation-states that recognize and respect their neighbors and learning to function within the constraints imposed by that model, from Dutch and French to Turks, Poles and Austrians. In the end, however, success depends largely on democratization. As Benedict Anderson, a famous scholar of nationalism and the author of Imagined Communities argued, imperial projects in the present-day era of popular nationalism are sustained, and eventually mourned after, largely by the elites. After all, the elites are usually the ones basking in imperial glory and benefitting from it economically. Moreover, their children are not the ones dying in wars of imperial preservation such as the current one in Ukraine. It is the metropolitan masses, says Anderson, that usually shrug off the baggage of empire most easily—provided they have a genuine say in how their countries are run.20 So long as a narrow elite in the Kremlin is free to pursue its own geopolitical agenda and frame it to the public in an authoritarian information environment in which voices accounting for the real costs of such policies are suppressed, the Russian government will be able to pursue an adventurous foreign policy with domestic impunity. A final farewell to the imperialist mindset in Russian strategy, therefore, may be conditioned on the democratization of Russia.
Of course, democratization may not be enough. History is replete with examples of governments that went to wars of conquest with full popular support. The essence is an attitude to international relations and the readiness to say goodbye to empire by making painful concessions, such as the Germans made to the Poles in 1990 and the Poles to the Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians in 1989.21 Both of those formerly expansionist countries resolved at the outset of the post-Cold War era to renounce territorial claims on their weaker neighbors and start treating them as equal, independent partners. If the chief liberal of the Russian opposition movement, the late Alexey Navalny, told a Polish newspaper in 2021 that “my Russia will be good to you” and that “there is no difference between Russians and Ukrainians,” then such a breakthrough in Russia is indeed far away.22 Hoping that the Russian Federation will change its approach to European security anytime soon—even after the fall of Putin’s regime, which seems extremely unlikely in any case—would be at most a shaky and wishful foundation on which to build American strategy.
With revised assumptions about a long-term strategic competition with Russia, the United States should focus on aggressively building collective security around Russia. U.S. policy should invest in the post-communist and post-Soviet countries in Russia’s geopolitical surroundings who have a vital interest in building security with Russia as the main potential threat. Thirty years ago, Brzezinski argued for a similar approach in his critique of the Clinton administration’s Russia policy, advocating the building of “geopolitical plurality” in the place of a system perched only on Russian geopolitical muscle and hence susceptible to the whims of the Russian elites and their domestic politics. The ultimate goal should be the construction of a geopolitical order that does not rely on Russian goodwill and is capable of defending itself even in the face of strong Russian opposition. Taught by the experience of the past 30 years, the West should gear up for a long struggle with Russian neo-imperialism and continue investing in what works: the transatlantic security framework that includes Central and Eastern Europe.
Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama, September 29, 2015, from www.kremlin.ru, Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladimir_Putin_and_Barack_Obama_(2015-09-29)_01.jpg.
[1] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994): 67–82, https://doi.org/10.2307/20045920.
[2] Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 70.
[3] Mary Elise Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 104-107.
[4] Antoni Dudek, Historia Polityczna Polski 1989-2023, (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2023), 181.
[5] Mary Elise Sarotte, “How to Enlarge NATO: The Debate inside the Clinton Administration,” 1993–95, International Security 44, no. 1 (2019): 7–41, doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00353.
[6] Sarotte, Not One Inch, 181-210.
[7] Angela Stent, The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century, updated edition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 49-81.
[8] Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 69.
[9] Catherine Belton, Putin’s People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 278.
[10] David Remnick, “Putin’s Pique,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/17/putins-pique.
[11] Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: an American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 239-263.
[12] Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 103.
[13] Alina Polyakova and Filippos Lestas, “On the record: The U.S. administration’s actions on Russia,” Brookings Institution, 2019.
[14] Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland,” National Archives and Records Administration, July 6, 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-people-poland/.
[15] David A. Wemer, “The Three Seas Initiative Explained,” Atlantic Council, October 17, 2022, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-three-seas-initiative-explained-2/.
[16] Rebeccah L. Heinrichs, “Russia Will Remain a Chronic Threat to the US Even When the War in Ukraine Ends,” Hudson Institute, February 11, 2024, https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/russia-will-remain-chronic-threat-us-even-when-war-ukraine-ends-rebeccah-heinrichs.
[17] Sarotte, Not One Inch; John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (2014): 77–89, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306.
[18] Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 145.
[19] Stent, The Limits of Partnership, 119.
[20] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2017), 111.
[21] Timothy Snyder, Reconstruction of nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 232-255.
[22] Wiktoria Bieliaszyn and Alexey Navalny, “‘Moja Rosja Będzie Dla Was Dobra,’” Gazeta Wyborcza, November 2, 2019, https://wyborcza.pl/magazyn/7,124059,25370711,aleksiej-nawalny-moja-rosja-bedzie-dla-was-dobra-jedyny.html.
