The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

22 DECEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL View of the Moscow Kremlin from the Moscow River, February 2016. ARTHURBONDAR The policy challenge for both the West and Russia was to manage that period of disil- lusionment so that it would lead to a more mature and well-grounded relationship, and limit the likelihood of a Russian turn toward autarky and hostility. A quarter- century later it is clear that the relationship has not been managed well. The West—and particularly the United States—bears at least as much respon- sibility for that as does Russia. Time of Troubles The 1990s were a chaotic decade in Russia’s economic and social history, a new “Time of Troubles.” Where the West saw an emerging democratic, market-oriented society in the Yelt- sin years, Russians saw criminality, disorder, poverty and the emergence of a new, corrupt and astronomically wealthy class of oligarchs. If this is what was meant by capital- ism and democracy, they did not like it. Internation- ally, the Russian leadership saw the expansion of NATO eastward as a betrayal and a potential threat. Well before 1998, Yeltsin was discredited and Kozyrev was gone, replaced by a foreign minister with far more traditional views of Russian interests. By 1998, when Putin replaced Yeltsin, the U.S.-Russian relationship had already deteriorated, driven by the NATO expansion, as well as by differences over the civil wars that stemmed from the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Russians saw in these and other developments an attempt to establish a U.S.-dominated international system in which Russia would Trying to tell other countries what their fundamental interests are is generally a futile exercise.