By Barend ter Haar.
In international relations, the costs of a misunderstanding can be extremely high. If only the US would have in time understood that Saddam Hussein intended to invade Kuwait or if only Saddam Hussein would have understood that the US would use force to reverse that invasion, the Gulf wars might have been prevented and the Middle East might look differently today.
During the Cold War the governments in Moscow and the West were well aware of such risks. Their worldviews differed fundamentally, but they took great care to prevent fateful misunderstandings, inter alia by implementing a number of confidence and security building measures (CSBMs).
Now this relation has been turned upside down. There is no fundamental ideological disagreement between Moscow and Western capitals about pressing global issues such as climate change, terrorism and proliferation, but at the practical level it proves very difficult to agree on CSBMs that could help to prevent dangerous accidents or misunderstandings.
This is a potential dangerous situation. Western governments and think tanks have difficulty in understanding Russia´s intentions. Is there a grand strategy behind its involvement in the Crimea, in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Eastern Ukraine? Or is Russia just improvising and using every opportunity to enlarge its territory or its exclusive zone of influence, without any clear idea of the strategic consequences of its decisions?
The most probable answer is that foreign policy is made in Moscow like it is made in most Western capitals: on the basis of contradictory ideas reacting to the opportunities and challenges of the moment without paying much attention to the longer term consequences. (Take for example the contradiction between the view of West-European governments that refugees should be taken care of in their own region and their unwillingness to provide sufficient funds to make this possible.)
Moscow does accept in principle that all the successor states of the Soviet Union are independent, but seemingly feels it has a special obligation towards people of Russian origin and/or Russian speakers in those states. It somehow realizes that its long term interest is to be surrounded by stable and prospering neighbors, but it seems to have difficulty to withstand the temptation to interfere in those states and thereby destabilize them.
As a result, Russian actions are difficult to predict and the risk of dangerous misunderstandings is real. To end with an optimistic note: the current problems are not insurmountable, provided all governments are willing to address the contradictions in their policies.
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