Washington and Moscow spent years engaging each other on the basis of entirely incompatible objectives, producing a mutual misunderstanding that paved the way for eventual confrontation, Michael Kofman has argued.
Kofman outlined this dynamic in a conversation with Michael Kimmage, director of the Kennan Institute, as reported by "Hvylya".
The pattern, according to Kofman, was consistent: US and Western elites engaged with Russia with the ultimate goal of getting Moscow "back on a path of democratization and Western integration." Russian elites, meanwhile, pursued two entirely different objectives - "to achieve a new detente, a new condominium" and "to renegotiate the post-Cold War settlement." Neither side was interested in what the other was actually offering.
This misunderstanding was especially visible during the Obama administration's attempted "reset" with Russia. Kofman argued that after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Russian elites believed "they actually did achieve some degree of condominium and that the US had halted the process of NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia because of it." Western elites, meanwhile, believed they were trying to resume the path toward Russian integration into Western institutions.
The baseline Western assumption, Kofman said, was that "Russia just wasn't going to be that much of a problem." The expectation was that Russia would eventually democratize - "perhaps after Putin or over time" - and in the meantime, it was treated as "a blip, a hiccup, a rough patch." This assumption persisted through the second-term Obama administration and into the first Trump administration, with Russia ranking very low on the list of world problems.
The consequences of this misunderstanding proved catastrophic. Even after intelligence emerged in late 2021 that Russia intended to invade Ukraine, European leaders found it impossible to believe. "The disbelief is itself a fascinating circumstance," Kimmage noted, to which Kofman agreed - the inability to take Russia's offensive intentions seriously was itself a product of years of mutual misreading.
Earlier, "Hvylya" reported: Foreign Affairs Warns: EU's "Strategic Autonomy" Push Risks an Internal Collapse.