The West is reaping the benefits of two decades of misunderstanding Putin

For the second time in 8 years, Russian President Vladimir Putin is forcibly redrawing Ukraine's borders, annexing an area of ​​its territory to Russia equal to the size of Lithuania and Estonia combined, and the West should not pretend to be shocked above all.

With a lot of candor, I see that Westerners are prejudiced against Putin when they complain that he is a mysterious and unpredictable figure;

Over the past two decades, Putin has sent signal after signal that he is intent on reshaping Russia's borders with Europe, but the West has often taken it lightly.

17 years ago, in his annual State of the Nation address to the Russian parliament, Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

Two years later, in his famous speech to the Munich Security Conference, he criticized the West and described NATO expansion as a threat to Russia.

Barely a year after the Munich speech, Russia launched an attack on its neighbor Georgia, separating Abkhazia and South Ossetia from it in response to promises to join NATO, and then, six years later, Russia annexed the Ukrainian Crimea in response to its efforts to join NATO as well.

These facts clearly indicate the extent to which the obsession with the Atlantic blockade has affected Putin's policies toward the West, and how Westerners have misunderstood the thinking of the master of the Kremlin.

Take, for example, US President Joe Biden, who described the recent Russian annexation steps as a trampling on the United Nations Charter and a threat to the rules that run the international system.

Although this description is realistic, it condemns the West like Russia;

Why didn't the Westerners realize this threat so much when Russia attacked Georgia and annexed Crimea?

The West responded to the Georgia war by temporarily suspending dialogue with Russia before returning to business with it as usual.

Nor were the sanctions he imposed on Moscow after the Crimea annexation to be harsh enough to make it too weak to wage direct war on Ukraine.

Biden was naive when he believed, after his first summit with Putin in June last year, that Washington and Moscow could forge a predictable relationship.

Indeed, Biden was no exception among his predecessors in their limited understanding of Russia.

George W. Bush tells of Putin after their meeting in Slovenia in June 2001 that he looked into the man's eyes and found him very clear and trustworthy.

Barack Obama also refused to view Russia's annexation of Crimea as the actions of a regional power threatening its neighbors out of force, while Donald Trump found Europe's stinginess on military spending far worse than the potential risks from Russia.

The West can blame Putin's deviation for the collapse of the post-Cold War peace, but the truth is that it played a major role in cultivating Putin's aggressiveness and pushing him to rebel against the geopolitical situation established by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Europe is in an unenviable position while Putin manipulates the geography of its eastern belt, destroys its security structure, and puts its economies and citizens at risk of freezing this winter by arming energy supplies.

Although the Europeans have recently begun to formulate contingency plans to get rid of Russian gas, they should not pretend to be shocked by the weaponization of energy supplies.

They are simply reaping what they sowed for decades from their dependence on Russian gas and oil.

Angela Merkel may have been a bit realistic about deepening economic ties with Russia as a way to make peace with it in the post-Cold War era, but she, like other European leaders, never realized the dangers of keeping Europe hostage to pipelines from Russia, even as it showed In an early stage of his rule, Putin had his hatred of the West and his desire to revive Soviet geopolitics.

The formation of the European Union was an ideal model for a bloc that quickly recovered from World War II and transformed into a global economic power, but the Europeans never thought until recently of turning into a military force in its own right capable of dealing alone with security challenges, especially those coming from Russia.

Emmanuel Macron was the only European leader who spoke openly about the necessity of achieving European strategic independence, but he also did not realize this need because of the dangers posed by Russia, but rather because of the "Oxus" alliance formed by the United States at the expense of France's ambitions in the Pacific Ocean.

So, it is not surprising that the United States is driving European policies toward Putin, forcing European countries to increase military spending on their militaries, and to abandon pipeline diplomacy with Russia.

The West can blame Putin's deviation for the collapse of the post-Cold War peace, but the truth is that it played a major role in cultivating Putin's aggressiveness and pushing him to rebel against the geopolitical situation established by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That collapse could have been turned into an opportunity to establish a sustainable peace and push Moscow to a final break with its Soviet past, but the opposite happened.

The West saw the failure of Russian pride as an opportunity for more Atlantic expansion and reshaping the world according to its interests, and two decades of Western arrogance in the world - as a result of the victory of the Cold War - contributed to the fermentation of the global situation of a new, broader geopolitical rivalry than the Cold War period.

Many of the West's friends in the world are now on the sidelines, and Moscow and Beijing are working together to undermine Western supremacy even though they are geopolitical rivals rather than allies.

NATO's expansion was an explicit example of the West's limited understanding of Putin, which contributed to a breakdown in Russian-Western relations not seen even at the height of the Cuban missile crisis.

Kennedy and Khrushchev's cunning prevented a nuclear conflict, but today's leaders' diplomacy between Moscow and Washington is stalled with nuclear dangers looming.

Before the war, Westerners tried to listen to Putin, but they failed to tame him after they helped turn him into a hungry bear.

As tragic as the war was, the West needed to get involved not only to deter Russia, but also to atone for the sins of two decades of policies that underestimated Putin.

As much as the Ukrainians are paying the price for Russian bullying, they are also bearing the costs of the West's failure to accurately understand and act decisively with Putin at an early stage.

If Russia and the West deal with the realism of great-power politics, as Kennedy and Khrushchev did;

Perhaps Georgia and Ukraine would have been less likely to lose part of their territory, had the West dealt more firmly with Putin after the annexation of Crimea;

Perhaps the prospects of a new war in Europe diminished.

Some might argue that Putin, who is obsessed with history and summoned in this era to provide a nationalist framework for neo-expansionism, does not even need a lot of aggressive stimuli to rebel against the post-Cold War peace;

That may be true, but it is wise to acknowledge that the West has contributed to making Putin so aggressive that it threatens peace in Europe.