Tensions with Russia - A Retrospective (Thesis Introduction continued)

During the Cold War, international relations were easy for the lay person to understand. The United States was and much of the western world was united against a common enemy: the Soviet Union. This enemy was unquestionably a military threat, but it was not this merely this military threat that the United States challenged during the Cold War, it was the idea of Soviet communism. For years, the United States embarked on a strategy of containment of this significant threat. On the surface it seemed to be a Manichaean world, the United States and Russia competed in the build-up of nuclear arms, in space programs, and even competed for the favor of third world countries, sometimes with military consequences.

This world-view was shattered in the early 1970s when the United States began to negotiate and even agree upon nuclear weapon limitations with the Soviet Union. By 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed upon their first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT1) and an Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (ABM). In 1975, Russians and Americans shook hands in orbit in the first international space mission, Apollo-Soyuz. The Conventional Forces in Europe treaty limited conventional military deployment throughout Europe in the late 1980s, and by the early 1990s, the Soviet Union dissolved and Russia gave up its communist ways. By definition, this was not a military, but a diplomatic victory for the United States. Despite Russia's identical nuclear arsenal, America learned to work with its former enemy on economic issues and further strategic arms reduction. In 1998, the United States even invited Russia to enter the G8.

Yet in recent years, tensions have begun to increase again with Russia. Why?