Refused to sign a previously agreed-on document spelling out the details of close Russian participation with NATO, protesting what they claimed was the alliance’s overhasty plans to grant membership to the former communist nations of Central and Eastern Europe.
Hamstrung the five-nation Contact Group that is struggling to bring peace to Bosnia. Kozyrev refused all changes in the group’s proposals that would have required concessions from rump Yugoslavia or the Bosnian Serbs.
Vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have renewed the embargo on fuel to rump Yugoslavia.
Shocked and enraged Russia’s partners in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) by stonewalling a series of statements on Bosnia because they all assigned a measure of guilt to the Serbs.
Future historians needn’t grope for a defining moment in which East-West cooperation gave way to renewed rivalry and mistrust. They can look back at the disastrous summit meeting of the CSCE in Budapest last week. They will focus on a red-faced Yeltsin admonishing a stunned Bill Clinton that ““the destinies . . . of the world community [cannot] be managed from a single capital [i.e., Washington].’’ And they may well borrow Yeltsin’s coinage for the uneasy period that has replaced the euphoria following the fall of the Berlin wall. ““Europe is in danger of plunging,’’ the Russian president warned, ““into a cold peace.''
The Clinton administration hopes to take off the chill. At previous scheduled meetings in Moscow this week, a high-level U.S. delegation – led by Vice President Al Gore, Defense Secretary William Perry and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott – will try to smooth things over. Their mission is to convince the Russians that NATO’s timetable for expansion should be no surprise, and that Moscow is still welcome to join at some later date. Gore will talk money, too – $400 million in U.S. aid, despite what the Republicans may be muttering about cutoffs. And they will try to persuade the Russians to keep the pressure on Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic until he recognizes Bosnia’s sovereignty.
But the threat of a cold peace extends far beyond the Balkans. It seems clear from Yeltsin’s new stance that Moscow will insist even more than in the past on its right to intervene unilaterally in what it calls the ““near abroad,’’ the nations along it west-ern and southern borders that gained independence when the Soviet Union broke up. U.S. officials admit that the Russian Army is the only organization with the military means and the political will to act in those countries – as it already has in Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan and the Azerbaijani enclave Na-gorno-Karabakh – events that deeply trouble the West.
But could the new cold peace degenerate into a new, full-blown cold war? Almost certainly not. As German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said recently, ““The Russians are so dependent on trade and aid from the West that they will never renounce it. They have nowhere else to look.’’ Totalitarian Marxism is dead (though old communists have come back to power in a number of ““ex-communist’’ countries). The Russian Army, impressive as it is in Moldova, is in no position to move against the NATO juggernaut. But the Russians can still annoy and harass the West, either directly or via the near-abroad countries, where they still have influence. The main effect of continued Russian obstreperousness would be a long string of missed opportunities for dealing with those devastating small wars that erupt throughout the world out of ethnic and territorial conflicts. A widening gap between Western and Russian interests could kill the dream of a peaceful world order supported by all the nations of Europe and North America.
