The following excerpts are taken from “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” by Robert M. Gates 2014. The year was 2007 and Robert Gates, then Secretary of Defense, describes an event that took place at the Munich Security Conference.
“Putin spoke next and, to everyone’s surprise, launched a diatribe against the United States. He claimed the United States had used its uncontested military power to create and exploit a ‘unipolar world and that, because of U S. ‘dominance, the world had become more destabilized and was seeing ‘more wars and regional conflicts.’ He said that ‘almost uncontained hyper-use of force’ by the United States and its disdain for the basic principles of international law had stimulated an arms race as insecure countries turned to weapons for security including weapons of mass destruction. Putin asked why the United States was creating frontline bases with up to 5,000 troops on Russia’s borders; why NATO was expanding aggressively toward a nonthreatening Russia; and why a missile defense system was being deployed in Poland close to the Russian border. He concluded by saying that Russia with a thousand year of history,’ hardly needed advance on how to act on the international scene.”…
“What I didn’t tell the President [George W. Bush] was hat I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush 41 left office in 1993. Getting Gorbachev go acquiesce to a unified Germany as a member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states in NATO was a mistake. Including the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary quickly was the right thing to do, but I believe the process should then have slowed…Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots o f the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation…
“We did a poor job of seeing the world from their point of view, and of managing the relationship for the long term.”
