Great Hopes Lost

In early April, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of NATO’s founding treaty, some documents relating to USA – NATO – Russia relations between 1992 and 1995 were declassified. This was a period of “high hopes.” With the Berlin Wall fallen, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War behind us, the world was optimistic about the New International Order. A hope that soon turned out to be an illusion.

With Bill Clinton in the White House and Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, who liked to call themselves friends, the world barely had time to savor this heady atmosphere. Documents released in recent weeks by the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, explain just how legitimate the general positive orientation was at the time. Among the declassified documents is the first published transcript of NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner’s (a German) long conversation in Moscow with Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov in February 1992, in which Woerner outlined the vision of NATO as “a new security environment” from the Urals to the Atlantic, “built on three pillars”: the Helsinki Process, the European Economic Community, and NATO. A vision very similar to the Moscow vision, first pursued by Gorbachev and later supported by Yeltsin.

It is interesting to see how quickly the cement of this agreement is crumbling. The Clinton agenda, driven by the doctrines of a very strong neo-conservative lobby that was forming in the centers of military and political power, did not envision an equal relationship between the USA and the rest of the world. And even more so with Yeltsin’s Russia, however post-communist it might be. Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Perle had another horizon developed by political scientist Robert Kagan, namely PNAC, the Project for a New American Century. This implied strengthening of American military dominance, the main instrument of which was NATO with its expansion to the East. A dynamic that in the following thirty years defined the resurgence of frictions, antagonisms, contrasts, and conflicts. And so it is today.

An involution compared to the radiant expectations of 1992, accompanied by the constant recommendation that the Western world has given itself: to defend “our principles and our values” everywhere. An endeavor not without risk, which has led to the gradual detachment of the rest of the world from the Euro-Atlantic “beacon.” The emergence of new and relevant economic, technological, demographic, and military realities has shattered a confidence that seemed unshakable. Today, not only activists at American universities, but also a host of analysts argue that “US policy toward the wars in Gaza and Ukraine suggests that the United States selectively decides to whom to apply the rules.”

On this topic, highly divisive in the USA, and of strong impact on the Biden’s electoral campaign, Foreign Affairs decided this week to republish the essay by international law expert Thomas M. Franck, which first appeared in January 2001. Title: “Are Human Rights Universal?” From this question another question arose: “Are human rights truly universal, or are they a product of a decaying West that has no meaning in other societies?”

The exceptionalism claimed by the first world presupposes claims of other and opposite exclusivities by peoples, nations, governments, and states that recognize themselves in other precepts. Thus, Islamic fundamentalists oppose religious tolerance because followers of Islam cannot abandon the “true” religion, and blasphemy must be severely punished. But paradoxically, Franck wrote, “there is nothing even remotely Western about religious freedom and tolerance.”

The examples given range from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Calvin to Cromwell’s Great Britain: all are inspired by the ruthlessness against dissenters, heretics, and blasphemers against whom any torture was considered legal. So, there’s not much to teach. One cultural exceptionalism versus another means a battle of ideas that calls into question the pillars of History. It will involve governments, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, businesses and workers, military and financial resources to win. The conclusion Franck came to was also a suggestion: “Thinkers lulled by the warm and confused triumph of liberalism and the supposed end of ideology will need an intellectual rearmament.”