Former rivals, uncertain friends

By Ralph Begleiter
CNN World Affairs Correspondent

When American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe River at the end of World War II, they regarded one another as strangers -- almost strangers from another planet. The United States and Soviet Union had no shared experiences, no binding ties. They were allies in a military sense, but their alliance was essentially limited to the single goal of defeating Nazi Germany.

Once the war was over, that uneasy alliance dissolved quickly, leaving the two world powers as enemies for most of the remainder of the century.

Yet when the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse at the end of the century, Russia found itself returning to an alliance with the United States. And when the Kremlin's Soviet government yielded in the 1990s to a fledgling democracy, the United States became one of Moscow's staunchest supporters.

Other former enemies of the Soviet Union became Russia's strong political friends after the Cold War. Germany, anchored in the Western military alliance NATO, spent billions of dollars to finance construction of housing and other facilities for millions of Soviet troops who were recalled to Russia after the end of the Cold War. Likewise, France, Britain and Canada, key members of the anti-Soviet alliance throughout the Cold War, are today counted among Moscow's best friends. Washington and Moscow began the Cold War era as "comrades." Today, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, their relationship is far broader and deeper than their ties of the 1940s.

In the Middle East, the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, joined the United States in late 1990 to oppose, militarily, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. That cooperation became the bedrock on which an unprecedented military and political coalition reversed Saddam Hussein's aggression.

Following the brief Gulf War in 1991, the White House and Kremlin maintained their alliance, establishing an unprecedented Arab-Israeli peace process and cosponsoring the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, which brought Israel and the Arabs together in a wide array of negotiations on peace, environmental and economic cooperation and other issues. Cooperation between Moscow and Washington contributed substantially to the historic reconciliation of Israel with the Palestinians in 1993 and to Israel's second peace treaty with an Arab state, Jordan, in 1995.

Moscow and Washington developed such close ties that a CIA director was invited to KGB headquarters, remarking that it was the first time he'd seen the place from the ground. Technicians of both sides were working to dismantle thousands of nuclear weapons the superpowers had amassed during the Cold War.

By the mid-1990s, Washington and Moscow were in another military alliance, this time in the heart of Europe. Top-flight Russian troops, once drilled in defeating the capitalist American enemy, were soldiering alongside U.S. forces in Bosnia, keeping the tenuous peace between Serbs and Muslims in the Balkans. One of the Kremlin's most respected military generals shared a command post with the NATO commander, something else that would have been unheard of during the Cold War. Politically, the Russians served a crucial role in the management of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia by dealing with their historic ethnic compatriots. Although Russia's dealings with the Serbs were not always seen as contributing to peace in the Balkans, history will probably note that without Russia's backing, the U.N. peacekeeping mission -- later assumed by NATO -- would have failed.

Elsewhere in Europe, the new cooperation between Russia and the Western alliance is yielding results unthinkable even a decade ago. At the end of the Cold War, when the Soviets and Americans were negotiating the future of Germany, Kremlin leaders initially insisted that a reunified Germany be "neutral." But an intense negotiating effort -- and West Germany's financial promises to Moscow -- persuaded the Kremlin to let Germany remain in NATO. Even as NATO has expanded to include former Soviet satellites Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, Moscow has cooperated. Today, the Kremlin maintains a full-time military and political liaison office at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

But while military and political cooperation was developing, Russia's bankrupt Soviet-built economy was slipping toward disaster. Stumbling Russian leaders, unaccustomed to the free market system, called on the United States to bankroll the heart of the old Soviet empire. The result: at the end of the 20th century, the United States and its Western allies are supporting the very Russian scientists, soldiers, intellectuals and politicians who were trained to destroy the West during the Cold War.

Russia's economic problems have been resistant to a simple Western bailout. Almost a decade of cooperation between Washington and Moscow has failed to improve the lot of most Russian people. Optimism about the future of a democratic Russia tied in friendship to the West is under severe strain, as Russian politicians gravitate to the only economics they know: those of the Soviet era.