Strongman, The

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Under-Secretary of State John Bolton, Dan Fried, who handled European and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council, and Nick Burns, US ambassador to NATO (and later under-secretary of state). Somewhere between the two camps were national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley.
    The insider went on: ‘Some of the policy makers understood a lot, but they understood it from a particular perspective. The real drivers behind Russia policy were people who had been working on European security issues all the way through the 1990s, and the goal was to continue the unfinished business of the 1990s – a Europe free, undivided and peaceful and all the rest of it. And there was a view that if you took in the Russia perspective you were somehow affirming its right to assert certain interests or privileges.’
    So Bush’s Russia policy was largely forged by people who were above all concerned with the security of Central and Eastern Europe, who believed the West had ‘won’ the Cold War, and were determined to cement the former Soviet satellites into the free West, including NATO and the European Union – even at the risk of alienating Russia in the process. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary had already joined NATO in 1999, and now the alliance was about to embark on a second wave of enlargement, to include Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania, plus – most controversially as far as Russia was concerned – the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had once been part of the USSR and stood right on Russia’s present borders.
    Dan Fried said in an interview: ‘It was not sustainable to argue that the interests and freedoms of other countries, which suffered under Soviet occupation, should be held hostage to a Russian sense of deprivation of empire. I mean, to some degree the Soviets had achieved a sphere of influence in Europe thanks to Mr Molotov and Mr Ribbentrop, or if you prefer, Hitler and Stalin.’ 3
    Over breakfast in a London hotel I put it to Nick Burns that Russia might have legitimate concerns in seeing NATO expand right up to its doorstep, and America installing new weaponry there. It was, after all, their ‘backyard’. His answer was quite uncompromising: ‘Tough! They lost that right. This was in the American national interest.’ 4 It was an answer that seemed to me to preclude accommodating even a reformed, ‘democratic’ Russia: it had ‘lost the right’ to influence affairs in its backyard, apparently by having inherited the sins of the Soviet Union, whereas the USA did have the right to influence affairs there because it was ‘in the American national interest’.
    He went on: ‘When it came to admitting the Baltic countries into NATO, there were really furious arguments about it – both with the Europeans and within Washington. Even George Tenet [the CIA director], for example, was against it. But many of us had essentially lost hope that we could trust the Russians or integrate them into the West. By 2002, there was a growing suspicion that Putin wasn’t the person they thought he was, that he couldn’t make Russia a reliable ally. We concluded that we wanted a good relationship with Russia, but the most important target in the region, post-Cold War, was the freedom and liberation of Eastern and Central Europe. There was lots of opposition in the US, and we had to fight hard, but we thought we had to be careful about the Russians. We thought it was more important to lock in the one real gain of the fall of the USSR. George W. Bush was a strong believer in that argument.’
    The neo-cons believed the policy of putting faith in Russia in the 1990s had failed. ‘I knew Russia would try to become dominant in Europe again, and we had to protect the Eastern and Central Europeans,’ said Burns. ‘Putin is all about bringing power back to Russia. This was becoming clear by late 2002.’ 5
    That phrase was revealing: making Russia powerful again was precisely what Putin wanted – and precisely what many in Washington could not stomach.
    The administration’s ‘Russophiles’ found their views echoed in Western Europe, but not in Washington. One of them says: ‘There seemed to be a viewpoint that by understanding and laying out the Russian point of view you were endorsing it and legitimising it. This was not the view you find in Europe. This is why we were at odds with the Germans and even the UK