دانلود کتاب Hubris – ریشه های آمریکایی جنگ روسیه علیه اوکراین

You might have thought that a book about the origins of Putin’s war against Ukraine is all about them. But, certainly in the first instance, paradoxical though it may appear, it is also about us. And us means the United States and its allies in Western Europe. How could this be so? The Cold War ended abruptly, and the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself. The foundations of Russia’s communist empire had long been unsound. And it had weathered badly. Undoubtedly pressure from the West made its continuation increasingly difficult. But we did not bring the empire down. It fell of its own accord, at our feet. And how we responded was bound to make a great deal of difference to what rose up in its place. The situation was complicated by the fact that the states of Eastern Europe liberated from the Nazis were reconstructed in the Soviet image after the Second World War. They were now unsurprisingly not content to wait and see what would emerge, given over forty years’ subjugation to Soviet rule. Russia had always been an empire, in fact if not in name; it had no experience of democracy in our meaning of the term; and not since 1928 had Russia experienced even minimally a market economy as we would understand it. Eastern Europe, which the Germans hastily renamed Central Europe in a diplomatic gesture of respect, did not hold the initiative, however. That lay with others, above all the country that remained the sole Superpower: the United States. But potentially also it lay with what had now become the European Union, an aspirant entity dominated by the Germans and the French. Germany reunited was distracted, however. It was preoccupied with economic and social reconstruction, so it was not in a position to create a new security architecture that would find a place for Russia. France on its own lacked heft. Britain invariably deferred to the United States. And the United States was afraid that if Western Europe reconstructed the continent along its own lines, the Americans would sooner or later be shut out. To avert this alarming scenario, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had to be given new purpose. The former members of the Warsaw Pact – excluding Russia – were already looking for military integration with the West; something seen as more reassuring than being merely distant appendages of the European Union. An additional issue was whether former republics of the Soviet Union, which were determined to go their own way, would remain aligned with Russia, and, if so, at what cost to themselves. Ukraine, the most important of these, promptly decided on undiluted sovereignty, but also on non-alignment between Russia and the West. The problem was that neither Russia nor the United States was prepared to see this happen.