Foreign Affairs
Why Negotiations With Russia Seem So Difficult
Russia’s historical fears mix badly with Western fecklessness.
Russia is more than a millennium old with a long diplomatic history. Some of Russia’s difficulty may come from the U.S. elites’ ignorance of Russian history and its sensitivities to real or perceived threats of foreign invasion. Many Americans remember the huge drama which arose during the Kennedy presidency when the Soviets put a few missiles in Cuba. Foreign policy wonks still talk about how close we came to World War III.
Americans who do not know or acknowledge Russia’s history are unable to understand Russian thinking, thus compromising their ability to consummate agreements with Russia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. political elites promised not to move NATO east into former Warsaw Pact countries. Every time another former Warsaw Pact nation was added into NATO, the Russians complained and the West shrugged off the complaints. They believed Russia was too weak due to their struggle to recover from the ruinous Soviet years. Washington’s attitude was, “So what are you going to do about it?”
U.S. leaders also have spent years engaging ad nauseam in threats to weaken or break up Russia, to ruin the Russian economy, to change the Russian regime—and, of course, have levied decades of never-ending sanctions. This behavior has eroded the trust necessary to negotiate in good faith.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians desired to be included as a member of the West. (They foolishly believed our narrative of peace, democracy, and freedom even while we were engaging in nonstop wars.) George H.W. Bush assured Gorbachev the U.S. had no intentions of antagonism toward Russia and that NATO was a defensive organization. Gorbachev was given assurances when the Russians withdrew their troops from what had been the Warsaw Pact nations, that NATO would not take advantage of the withdrawal. The Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955 as a response to the creation of NATO in 1949. From the beginning, they viewed NATO as a threat.
Even after U.S. experts helped wreck the post-Soviet Russian economy, the Russians wanted to be our friends.
Some Russians were and are still wary of American motives and actions. Their fears that NATO was not strictly defensive were vindicated during the 1993–1995 Operation Deny Flight, 1995 Operation Deliberate Force, and in 1999 when the Clinton administration used NATO to bomb parts of former Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslavian example was not just a one-off. NATO, which Gorbachev and Yeltsin were assured was defensive, has participated in the occupation of Iraq (2003) and the destruction of Libya (2011) as well.
This aggressive use of a notionally defensive alliance was paired with American diplomatic fecklessness. The U.S violated and canceled Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework deal with North Korea and the Founding Act deal with Russia.
In 2002, George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the result of the SALT I. At the time, Vladimir Putin offered a joint venture to create a universal anti-ballistic missile system in order to avoid a new arms race. The Bush administration rebuffed that offer.
George W. Bush’s 2003 normalization deal with Libya was ignored in 2011, when the Obama administration’s bombing campaign (using NATO) wrecked that country. Libya has not yet recovered.
In 2014, the U.S. supported a coup in Ukraine that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, who was deemed too friendly with Russia. Russia entered the Donbas to protect the Russian-speaking people who were being attacked by Ukrainian forces. When the Russians encircled the Ukrainian forces in the Battle of Ilovaisk, the West asked for a cease fire, which was codified in the Minsk I agreement. In 2015, the resulting Minsk II agreement was created to end the hostilities.
The Russians complained for years that the Ukrainians were not following the Minsk II agreement and that the West was arming and integrating the Ukrainian army into NATO. Larry Johnson has published lists of the NATO exercises in and around Ukraine over the past two decades. In 2023 Angela Merkel, who was a lead participant in the Minsk negotiations, admitted they were just buying time to strengthen the Ukraine military to fight Russia. This is a major reason that Russia refuses to be fooled by another ceasefire agreement.
In 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. This treaty was designed to assure the world that Iran was not creating nuclear weapons.
In 2019, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. That same year, the U.S. government–financed Rand Corporation published a report titled Extending Russia, which is 350 pages of possible actions designed to hurt or weaken Russia.
In 2020, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, which was intended to create some transparency to the deployment of nuclear forces.
The Russians also do not forget the various color revolutions instigated on their periphery by the U.S. and their proxies.
In December 2021 Russia made a peace offer to stop the advancement of NATO in Ukraine. The U.S. completely ignored it, again assuming the tired pose, “So what are you going to do about it?” Russian leaders are showing the U.S. and the NATO coalition what Russia can and will do. The world has been subjected to a relentless propaganda campaign declaring the Russian economy to be weak and about to collapse, the Russian Federation Army to be ill-trained and ill-equipped, fighting with shovels. The claim that Russia would run out of missiles by the summer of 2022 looks silly now. The Ukrainian Army has steadily lost ground since the failure of the U.S.-orchestrated summer 2023 offensive.
The March/April 2022 Istanbul agreement to end the war in the first weeks was opposed by the West.
In 2022 Victoria Nuland revealed the U.S. supported bio labs in Ukraine.
There is also a list of painful historical experiences which color Russian thinking.
In 1941, when the Nazi German Army invaded the Soviet Union, they crossed what is now Ukraine with their southern thrust towards Stalingrad. More than a million Soviets died defending Stalingrad alone.
The Nazi northern thrust towards the edge of Moscow crossed what is now Poland and Belarus. Napoleon’s army had taken a similar route on its way to Moscow in 1812, and hundreds of thousands of Russians died fighting to drive his army back to France. The Russians suffered nearly one million casualties defending Moscow against the Nazis.
All in all, 26 million Soviet citizens died fighting the Nazis in the Second World War. The Soviet Army was also responsible for approximately 80 percent of the casualties on the Wehrmacht. The U.S. lost over 400,000 Americans in both theaters of the Second World War, which is a huge tragedy, but only a small fraction of the Soviet losses.
The impact that horrific historical experience has had on the Russian psyche is incomprehensible to Americans. Americans still look with horror at the deaths of 3,000 citizens killed on September 11, 2001 and in the 1941 Pearl Harbor attacks. The Soviet World War losses and suffering were many times greater than all of the U.S. losses in all of our wars during the entirety of our 250-year history.
The existence of offensive troops and weapons in Ukraine and Poland represent a real threat to the Russians. It is a visceral fear from a bitter history of invasion, especially the Nazi invasion in 1941, and the monstrous suffering they experienced during that war. The addition of the long history of broken agreements and Western provocations all cause further hesitancy in negotiations.
While it is clear that the Russians have acted badly over the years, one can not dismiss the threats, provocations, and material support for the war provided by the U.S. and NATO as real obstacles to settling the conflict. Scott Horton has recently written an 800-page book describing the decades of U.S. provocations.
In addition to the numerous treaties and agreements the U.S. has broken, American leaders recently inflicted an especially serious blow to the country’s international credibility. During loud calls for cease fires, an end to wars, negotiated settlements, etc., the U.S. is suspected of having enabled a Ukrainian attack deep in Russian territory. This attack promised no serious effect on the Russo–Ukrainian War’s outcome, but it damaged Russian strategic bombers that form a part of the country’s nuclear triad. Imagine if any country staged an attack on a U.S. strategic air command base and damaged American B-52 bombers. There would be a huge outcry for war.
Shortly after that disaster, during negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program, American leadership enabled an Israeli decapitation strike on the leadership of Iran. Many Iranian leaders were killed and more were targeted, including one of the negotiators who was preparing to meet with an American diplomatic team a few days later. Subsequent to the Israeli attack, the U.S., with much fanfare from the usual warmongers, bombed some Iranian nuclear facilities. Is this the way negotiations are going to be conducted in the future?
This kind of behavior violates centuries-old diplomatic norms. After witnessing this devious and destructive behavior, who will trust the U.S. to negotiate in good faith? What does an agreement with the U.S. mean?
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