The Soviet Union spent more than 40 years trying to achieve what has just been handed to Vladimir Putin on a plate. Throughout the Cold War, the Kremlin’s primary objective was to split the Atlantic Alliance (Nato) by turning America and Europe against one another.
Every crisis over the security of West Berlin, from the Soviet ultimatum for the West to leave the city in 1958 to the building of the Wall in 1961, was designed to open cracks in Nato. “To make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin,” as Nikita Khrushchev, then Soviet leader, put it in 1959.
His successor, Leonid Brezhnev, deployed a new generation of nuclear missiles – the SS20s – in the satellite states of central Europe precisely to divide the West over how to respond.
All of those efforts failed. America and Europe knew exactly what the Soviets were up to and, though they differed and argued, the allies never allowed the Kremlin the satisfaction of watching them break apart.
Today, thanks to Donald Trump, Putin can revel in that spectacle. He has spent 25 years pursuing the old Soviet policy of trying to split the West. Time and again, he has denounced Nato for supposedly trying to “encircle” or “terrorise” Russia, as if the very existence of the Atlantic Alliance posed a threat to world peace, and as though the sight of sovereign countries choosing to join its ranks somehow justified his aggression.
Now, suddenly, the fissure Putin has always yearned for is opening before his eyes.
www.bbc.co.uk
