Post-Soviet space used to be a symbol of the U.S. victory

By Vestnik Kavkaza

In early April, the USA stopped several joint projects with Russia within the bilateral presidential commission, and resources for their implementation were sent to support of Ukraine. Moreover, the Foreign Ministers of the NATO members also decided to “cease military and practical cooperation with Russia” due to the Ukrainian events. The Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs states that the USA intends to stop projects which are beneficial for the Americans. “Washington makes it clear that in the context of the events in Crimea and Ukraine the USA administration changes cooperation with us in various spheres. It breaks contracts which are beneficial for the USA, first of all,” the deputy Foreign Ministry Sergei Ryabkov told Interfax. In this situation experts began to talk about a new stage of the Cold War.

“Since 1991 we have been confronted by a new variety of Cold War,” Alexei Pilko, director of the Eurasian Communications Center, states. “The Cold War has not ended, it continued, but if the Cold War before 1991 had been regulated by some rules, with the collapse of the bipolar model the Cold War has become unpredictable. The West began acting in a very one-sided way which led to the elimination of the fragile international law.”

According to Pilko, now “everything is moving towards a multipolar world, but on what rules will this multipolarity operate? In general, international relations are characterized by a system, and currently there are absolutely no rules. Do what you want! The US has decided to appoint Assad as the main villain? Let's do it, let's strike at him! Perhaps we do not even need a big conference. It is necessary to follow at least some principles in the international game, because a lack of principles in world politics will not do any good.”

“The idea of the victory of the United States in the Cold War has been its imperative, a starting point for American politics in the last 25 years,” Dmitry Suslov, Deputy Director of research programs of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, thinks. “In this regard, it is very important to understand that the post-Soviet space for the U.S. is not only one of the platforms, one of the regions where they would like to assert their leadership. The post-Soviet space being in a fragmented state is a symbol and visible proof of the U.S. victory.

I would really like the events to develop according to the Georgian scenario so that after a few months everything would go back to normal and the model of selective cooperation and electoral competition would triumph in Russian-Western and Russian-American relations.”

However, Suslov understands there is a fundamental difference between the events in Georgia and the events in Ukraine: “Today, the stakes for Obama's administration are very high. From the U.S. perspective, it is about revising their victory in the Cold War. Furthermore, from the standpoint of the United States, Russia's behavior is a dangerous signal to other rising power centers, including China, which seeing the inability of the weakening hegemon to block such actions, might initiate a revisionist foreign policy in its region. This jeopardizes and puts into question the remaining power of the American leadership in the world, which is becoming more and more multipolar. Therefore the Obama administration will take a tough stance in this regard.”