/lit/ - Literature

The triumphalist interpretation has had pernicious consequences. It has reinforced Russian leader Vladimir Putin's narrative of his country's recent history, which asserts that the end of the Soviet Union was an unmitigated disaster, foisted on the Russians by the West in order to weaken the Russian nation. That narrative supports Putin's autocratic domestic policies and Russia's reflexive hostility to the United States.

The incorrect reading of the Cold War's end has also contributed, by fostering an exaggerated sense of American power, to harmful foreign policies on the part of the United States. Matlock is particularly eloquent and convincing on one of them: the decision to expand NATO to former communist countries and former republics of the Soviet Union while excluding Russia. NATO expansion was not necessary to assure the security of the newly independent countries of eastern Europe, he says, and it has had devastating consequences for U.S. interests. In his view, it "increased America's exposure to risk by adding countries to its security guarantee, . . . weakened NATO (because the more members it had the more its unity was challenged by competing national interests), and . . . alarmed Russia and made it less willing to cooperate fully with the United States."

NATO expansion proved all the more offensive to Russia because Western leaders had given assurances to their Soviet counterparts that the alliance would not move eastward. Matlock was present when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker conveyed such an assurance to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990.