s U.S.–Russian relations reach a post–Cold War low, a growing number of observers have concluded that Western behavior, not Russian belligerence, ultimately lies at fault. According to this analysis, the United States and its European allies “humiliated” Russia by enlarging NATO, undertaking military action in the Balkans, extending trade and other forms of soft power to the former Eastern Bloc, and generally not affording Moscow the respect it supposedly deserved as a great (albeit territorially smaller and militarily weaker than it once was) power.
“The West will find it easier to coexist with this tormented, intransigent, melancholy and oil-rich neighbor when Russia feels comfortable with itself, not when its nose is rubbed in its long history of failure,” the British military historian Max Hastings wrote in 2008 after Russia invaded Georgia. Two years later, well into Barack Obama's “reset” aimed at repairing relations with Moscow, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock blamed American hubris for the rise in tensions. “The collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a military victory, which led to a spirit of triumphalism and a feeling of omnipotence as the ‘sole superpower,'” he said. Repeating the word “triumphalist,” which has become ubiquitous in these types of appraisals, Matlock complained that “a lot of this triumphalist mythology has come from the neocons whose ideas were rejected by Reagan, who in the end was more interested in negotiating.”
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