After the terrorist attack in Paris, President of France Francois Hollande encouraged Russia and the USA to unite efforts in the struggle against international terrorism. At the same time, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan, stated that the U.S. should help Russia in preventing an inflow of extremists to its territory, and President of the USA Barack Obama said that with an appropriate diplomatic approach Russia could realize that the activities of the coalition headed by the U.S. meet Russia’s interests. However, is it possible to unite efforts in the struggle against a common enemy without a settlement of bilateral disputes?
Sergei Mikhailov, Senior Research Fellow of the Department of the USA and the countries of Latin America and the Euro-Atlantic Center for Defense Studies of the RISS, reminds that “it is the Americans who have unofficially begun quite actively inviting Russia to intervene in the Syrian conflict since the beginning of this year. There were such conversations, like, let's leave aside Ukraine, and you, comrades, you have good leverage with Assad, you have good access to Iran, you can help constructively. That is, it was a question if assigning Russia the same role played at one time by Viktor Chernomyrdin, of blessed memory, in Kosovo. That means, to deal to surrender.”
Russia intervened in the Syrian crisis. However, it was on different terms. According to the expert, it happened because “the United States has made so many mistakes lately. The US sees the chapel of their power, in any case, the current administration. Maybe there will come people who will be more ideologically motivated, ideologically minded, then maybe they will decide that there is still space for a more active foreign policy. So far, the whole policy of Obama is an organized, not retreat, but an attempt to fix their positions, an attempt to cut the costs of American foreign policy, an attempt to make it more rational, less costly and more effective. But so far it results in the fact that both the previous and Obama’s administrations have stirred up all these Middle Eastern conflicts and now do not want to invest sufficient funds to manage the situation at least in some way.”
Sergei Mikhailov thinks that “in this sense, Russia receives opportunities against the background of the endless errors and the chaos that has been staged by the United States, to offer a position which will be listened to due to the vacuum that has been formed. And here, of course, the situation is very complicated, there may be an opportunity for some kind of convergence, if the United States realizes that it is senseless to have another round of the Cold War, an arms race with Russia, whatever you want to call it. And there may be the next stage and a Cold War, and an arms race.”
