Originally Posted by
racedo
It ended in the east with the collpse of the USSR, the mentality never ended within Senior military Intelligence in the west. Losing an opponent meant their reason for existence, their wealth and the MIC couldn't be allowed to lose out.
I cannot agree with you, and I'll tell you why. The cold war ended at the end of 1995, with the deployment of a Russian Brigade into the northern IFOR sector with an American Brigade. For a brief time, and during a period of positive engagement from East to West, both sides of the old Cold War committed themselves to a thorny European Security Problem(the mess in Bosnia)
together.
It amazed me at the time, and delighted me. I never thought I'd see it happen.
Unfortunately, that brief period of attempted shared purpose never built the kind of momentum, in part due to another case of paranoia that was notable by its absence in your post. This wasn't Russian paranoia, it was the paranoia of Russia's closest neighbors.
Russian Paranoia, by the way, goes back long before Operation Barbarosa or WW I - it is centuries old. Look to the east, and the waves of steppe riders who invaded and made Russia into the Golden Horde.
When you have been invaded from the West 3 times in just over 100 years and have lost 35 million people via that route then you make a call that a 4th time will not happen. Entirely logical when you look at it that way.
Indeed, that will induce a certain wariness in the Russian outlook, and if one imagines one's self looking from Moscow to the West I am not surprised to see a profound wariness.
So why was it that you neglected the political fact that all of their neighbors were Paranoid regarding the Russians. (Maybe not Belarus?)
Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ... shall I go on?
Wariness is a Two Way street. While there was some bad policy making after the Wall went down, in terms of attempts to exploit Russia, you are taking an overly narrow view of the geopolitical situation.
The most unfortunate tipping point, I feel, was the 1999 bombing of Serbia. I think that whatever good will had been built up between Russia and the West suffered a blow that was never recovered from in terms of building a modicum of trust.
That's two decades ago. The momentum for building a new pattern of mistrust has not been checked. It saddens me: what could have been.
Beyond that, the pivot to the Pacific that Obama initiated a few years back was, in my view, About Damned Time!
And it's about 20 years late, but I guess better late than never has to apply.