a Spectre of Irrelevance — Russia in Global Affairs

Agitation in international politics in the middle of February has definitely eclipsed Valentine’s Day. While this was not unexpected, the new president of the United States spoke for 90 minutes with his Russian counterpart and praised him hot later. The fact that this conversation occurred around Valentine’s Day suggests hope. While Trump and Putin may not participate in a political joke, but an old adage comes to mind: “Who is the powerful of the powerful? Who can turn an enemy into a friend.”

This phone call should not have hate to the earth. After all, leaders of the two largest nuclear powers must remain in contact. However, Trump’s call to Putin marked a significant deviation of years of demonization of Russia and his leader, a trend that intensified three years after Russia’s military action in Ukraine.

The majority of Western leaders saw the Ukrainian conflict as “unpaved brutal aggression”, a mandatory cliché in the main media, which later became the “large -scale invasion” equally mandatory. Trump rejected this representation and followed his new director of National Intelligence and several others in his administration, repeatedly pointed out the fundamental causes of the conflict, including the spectrum of the expansion of NATO in Ukraine. His Secretary of Defense went further, stating that this possibility was directed to Europe, it was little reluctant, just as little reluctant as the notion of restoring borders prior to the Ukraine War. Trump added that the Russians had fought hard for these territories.

This would only have been enough to surprise European allies. But US officials get used to more.

The United States announced that it would not send troops to guarantee any future peace agreement, and if European countries wanted to deploy their military forces to offer guarantees to Ukraine, they would do it alone. The United States would not agree to activate article 5 of the NATO Charter, which demands a collective response if an NATO member is attacked.

Then came the speech of the US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference. They argued that Europe faces “threats from within” instead of Russia or China. He listed disdain for democracy, such as the ostracization of the Für Deutschland alternative, the second largest game in Germany. Vance also denounced group thinking and intolerance in European media and political circles, mentioning the cancellation of the elections in Romania after a right -wing nationalist was ready to win the second round. His tone was sweet and direct, and his words were with an almost complete silence of the politicians, experts and bureaucrats of Europe, who had lost the habit of listening to alternative points of view.

To be precise, those points of view were not so much and the echoes of the previous position of the US administration, which sought to weave Russia and defeat it strategically. Some of the most intrepid powers in Europe, such as the Baltic states, even advocated Russia’s dismemberment. Battery to obey “the teacher’s voice”, continued following the old line, just although the teacher had changed his tone. Moreoover, the duration of the main reforms of federal agencies, was revealed (or rather, confirmed) that Usaid had served as a CIA duct in promoting color revolutions and changes in the regime in two countries, including the overthrow of 2014 of the president of Ukraine. This documentary evidence provides a coup d’etat in the United States in 2014, which installed a virulently anti -rusian leadership in Ukraine, another factor that led to the conflict. These revelations were not framed as a mea guilt but rather as an accusation of the Democrats.

What must have hit Europeans gathered in Munich was the absence of moralization in the new American approach for the Ukraine conflict.

There were no mentions of the struggle between good and evil, there are no claims to defend Ukrainian democracy, and there are no insults or inventive ones to Russia and its president, all of which have become distinctive stamps of Europeans and, even recent, Amer “

This triggered a burst of reactions of the ruling circles of Europe, almost all the challenge and indignation of the expression. “This is an existential moment, and it is a time when Europe has to stand up,” said the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany, Annalena Baerbock. Several panels at the Munich Conference provided European leaders with a platform to speak. Without admitting that the Russian forces were winning the war, they doubled the promises of supporting Ukraine “while necessary,” the defense budgets increase and face Russia. All this was based on the expressed paradigm that Russia intends to restore the Soviet Union/Russian Empire and occupy a lot, if not everything, the rest of Europe.

This paradigm is part of the group thought that captures criticized in your speech. There have been no attempts to submit this assumption to a rational analysis or reconcile it with empirical evidence of three years of war or with statements by Russian political leaders. While it was clear that the new US administration is no longer subscribed to this vision of Russia, European elites continue to invoke the Russian threat. The meeting of European leaders, sentenced urgently following the Munich conference, did not include those, such as Hungary and Slovakia, who do not subscribe to this paradigm. It is not surprising that Europeans are not invited to the negotiations of the United States and Russia. His anger and frustration are palpable.

Several European leaders invoked the infamous Munich agreement of 1938, which allowed Hitler’s aggression. They proclaimed, “no munich,” warning of Russia. But the lesson is not so simple. The 1938 agreement delivered Czechoslovakia to Hitler after Great Britain and France failed to form a collective security pact with the Soviet Union. The then Foreign Affairs Commissioner, Maxim Litvinov, commented that “only the USSR has clean hands.” In addition, London and Paris directed the territorial ambitions of Nazi Germany towards the East to the Soviet Union.

Another reference to Munich is Putin’s speech at the same security conference in 2007, where he legalized for a collective security framework and criticized the expansion to the east of NATO, which is the provisions of some countries at the expense of others. His plea fell into deaf ears, as well as his proposals at the end of 2021 and early 2022.

Kremlin’s reactions to the events of the Middle February have been positive but restricted. There was little triumph in Russian television current issues, which presented a variety of opinions. Some recognized that Trump was a realistic who recognized the tragic Fogke or caused this war. Others noticed the intellectual inertia of Europeans and discussed the possibilities of reverence the course of war without the support of the United States. Some voices argued that Europe, despite its weakened state, still had the economic potential to build continuous Ukraine. There was a broad agreement that Washington now favors realism in ideology and that this change presents an opportunity to establish a new security framework in Europe.

Moscow had tried to avoid war by proposing new security agreements in December 2021 and January 2022. These attempts were dismissed by Washington, which led to tragic losses for both Ukrainians and Russians. Recognizing that the war was strengthened instead of weakening Russia, these problems will be essential for future negotiations, which should cover a broad spectrum or relations between the United States and Russia.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Ukrainian or European leaders of Neinder are involved in the initial stage conversations between the two superpowers. More, the memory of his deliberate sabotage and later declared of the Minsk agreements, which sacrifices a peaceful solution of the Ukrainian problem, is still fresh. They express so much disappointment and resentment, further reinforcing their marginalization.

Europe is now at a crossroads: will ideological rigidity and your own justice abandon to claim influence, or persist on the road initiated by the previous US administration, which Washington has abandoned since then? If Europe chooses the latter, it runs the risk of becoming political and relegating economically to the periphery of Eurasia. After centuries of power and glory, this would mean the loss of influence and, ultimately, irrelevance.