Dangerous Tension between Russia and US

Yesterday, two days after the unexpected arrival of Edward Snowden at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected the demand by the United States the day prior that it extradite the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked information about a U.S. government telephone and cyberespionage program on millions of people from many countries. The Russian leader called the pressure exerted by the White House on the Kremlin in its demand for Snowden’s extradition “ravings and rubbish.” The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said, “We consider the attempts to accuse Russia of violating U.S. laws and even some sort of conspiracy, which on top of all that are accompanied by threats, as absolutely ungrounded and unacceptable.”

Beyond the present situation, the unusually forceful tone employed by Moscow is indicative of a growing tension in bilateral relations between the White House and the Kremlin, as well as the latter’s evident discontent due to the constant hostility and mistreatment which it has been subjected to in recent years.

In effect, although the post-Soviet Moscow governments, headed by Boris Yeltsin, Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin himself, have done as much as they could have to be accepted as partners and allies of the West, the United States has continued treating Russia as a potential enemy. Examples of said attitude include the White House’s insistence on installing a missile defense system in Eastern Europe (during the George W. Bush era), its pretensions of extending the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Russia’s borders with the incorporation of Georgia and Ukraine, its decisive push for the independence of Kosovo and the recent condemnations of the Kremlin for the support offered to the regime headed by Bashar al-Assad, in the context of the civil war that is developing in Syrian territory with increasingly clearer intervention by Washington and its allies.

As can be seen, the inappropriate pressures exerted by Washington in order to force Snowden’s extradition have ended up bringing the tense relations between both countries to a head. In that sense, the reaction and tone used by Putin and his minister, although unusual, are foreseeable and explainable.

Such reactions are neither positive nor desirable to the extent that they increase the sources of tension between Russia and Washington and evoke the dynamic of bipolar confrontation that reigned during the era of the Cold War, a dynamic supposedly overcome. At present, however, the reactivation of these diplomatic rows is owed less to the international tension generated by the Snowden case and more to Washington’s arrogance and its lack of capacity or will to understand a contemporary multipolar order in which checks and balances to the superpower’s hegemonic interests have multiplied.