CNN Meanwhile in America., February 16, 2022
'A less complex time'?
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech on February 9, 2007, in Munich during the 43rd Conference on Security Policy.
European leaders, US Vice President Kamala Harris and lawmakers flock to the Munich Security Conference this week, which will serve as a rallying point as the West faces its sternest test in decades.
Attendees trying to get in President Vladimir Putin’s head as he holds Ukraine hostage might want to remember what happened at the same venue 15 years ago. The Russian leader shook the world with a savage critique of “unipolar” US power and accused Washington, then mired in its post-9/11 wars, of an “almost uncontained hyper use of force.”
Putin also lashed out at NATO expansion to include ex-Soviet satellite states, which he saw as a serious provocation. “We have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended,” he said, and protested that the former Soviet Union had allowed walls and divides to tumble but that NATO’s march eastward had erected new ones. Then-US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former top intelligence official, quipped: “As an old Cold Warrior, one of yesterday's speeches almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time. Almost.”
For those who recall his Munich tirade, none of Putin’s hard, hostile turn against the United States, his incursion into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, interventions in US elections and current thuggery toward Ukraine are a surprise. That speech also contains clues for what happens next.
Putin has already shown he’ll never allow Ukraine to join the Western club even if he doesn’t invade. He can turn up the heat again anytime he thinks Russia’s demands for recognition and a say in Europe's security architecture are being ignored. The idea that the US can just look past Russia and get on with its new clash with China has been shattered in the last few weeks.
While the crisis may cool, allowing Americans to get back to tearing their own democracy apart, it's not going away. Putin will be a constant headache. The US might think the Cold War ended 30 years ago. But the Russian leader is still waging something very much like it because it is a way to demand respect for his country’s power, status and goals.
“Now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us,” Putin said of NATO during his 2007 speech in Munich. “Is it possible that we will once again require many years and decades, as well as several generations of politicians, to dissemble and dismantle these new walls?”
