After the war a year ago between Russia and Georgia, East-West relations plunged to their lowest level since Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985. Now that US-Russian ties have been reset during Barack Obama’s recent visit to Moscow, the Kremlin has the opportunity to redefine Russia’s role in the world.
Throughout the 1990s, Russia’s efforts to build western political and security structures were repeatedly thwarted by the victors of the Cold War, notably the US. Moscow’s clamour for Nato membership or, alternatively, for a new pan-European architecture as envisaged by the 1990 Paris Charter of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), fell on deaf ears.
Driven by rising oil prices and the US’s unpopularity under George Bush, Russia’s foreign policy from 2000 to 2008 combined a 19th-century focus on “great power” games and spheres of influence with a 21st-century rhetoric of multilateralism in a multipolar world. The former explains Moscow’s robust response to the reckless attempt by the Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to reclaim the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Like other global powers, Russia was not going to be humiliated in its own, postSoviet backyard.
However, the Kremlin lost more than just the media war: it played into the hands of those in the West who are vehemently opposed to any rapprochement with Russia. Ending the OSCE observer mission and other unilateral acts have undermined the Kremlin’s purported commitment to international law and multilateral institutions.
