Russian president’s attention-seeking diplomatic demands speak to long-held grievances
Other experts argue that Nato has become overconfident. Joshua Shifrinson, an associate professor of international relations at Boston University, said the US and the west “in the grand sweep of post-cold war relationships have become less sensitive to Russian concerns”, losing sight of the idea that the Kremlin too has vital interests.
He added: “Russia does not want other political groupings present near their homeland. That’s not a hard thing to understand. Imagine if China were to form an alliance with Canada. Powerful states don’t want other powers forming alliances near their borders.” Shifrinson, a historian, said that at the end of the cold war, US and German strategists had given “very clear signals” that Nato would not expand farther eastward if Germany were allowed to reunite. But this sphere of influence commitment was quickly dropped in the 1990s and early part of the 2000s as Russia struggled as an independent country and a string of eastern bloc countries joined Nato and the EU.
Critics of this thinking argue that if anything, Nato’s recent support for Ukraine has been too slight. “It’s a lack of resolute action in the past that has taught Russia that it [can] upmarket and descale a crisis whenever they want it,” said William Alberque, an American former Nato official and now the director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies thinktank.
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