Why August 1991 failed to bring peace between Russia and the West

The Cold War ended without Russia’s military defeat.

How did that unresolved outcome shape NATO expansion and today’s tensions? Thirty-five years have passed since the dramatic events of August 1991 in Moscow which marked, more clearly than any later declaration or diplomatic ceremony, the end of the era we call the Cold War.

The failed ‘August Coup’ attempt to preserve the Soviet Union made continuation of the old confrontation impossible given one of its principal participants had effectively left the battlefield.

Everything that followed, including the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, merely recorded a change that had already taken place.

The essential fact was that the Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia, could no longer sustain the material and political foundations required to continue the struggle.

There were many reasons for this, but foremost among them was the exhaustion of the Soviet model of state governance.

Moscow therefore chose to end the confrontation.

This was historically unusual because Russia hadn’t been defeated on the battlefield or forced to surrender, and the Cold War ended because of internal political change and a voluntary decision by the Soviet leadership.

Paradoxically, this peaceful ending helped make a future confrontation more likely.

The principal reason was simple: the Western powers, led by the United States, regarded the end of the Cold War as a victory, but Russia didn’t regard itself as a defeated country.

That contradiction became one of the central problems of the post-Cold War order.

Read more USSR Collapse: A Crash Course Great nuclear powers such as Russia, the United States, and China cannot realistically be defeated militarily without risking mutual destruction, thus the greatest threats to such states therefore tend to come from within through political dysfunction, economic weakness, poor governance, and social instability.

We can see something similar today in the United States.

It remains the strongest individual power in the international system, but domestic conflict increasingly limits the effectiveness of its foreign policy.