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There once was a dream of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. On Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued draft treaties for both the United States and NATO to consider that, if adopted, would tear that dream to shreds. While the drafts might generously be interpreted as opening gambits in a negotiation, the Biden administration and America’s NATO allies should quickly and firmly reject Vladimir Putin’s efforts to revive the Cold War by redrawing the lines of Europe.

Among other demands, the Russian proposals include promises by NATO that the alliance will admit no new members and will even abstain from military cooperation with states bordering Russia. Notably, they contain no promises on the Russian side not to cooperate militarily with states bordering NATO members. In effect, the Russian government has claimed a sphere of exclusive influence in Europe, not unlike that which it maintained by force and violence from 1945 to 1989. But the Iron Curtain’s division of Europe was emphatically rejected, not only by the United States and the peoples of Europe, but by the USSR and its successor states themselves.

There was also a growing consensus that liberal democracy and free markets represented a better future.

Thirty years ago this month, the fifteen republics of the USSR became independent states. They had watched as, two years before, the countries of the Warsaw Pact sloughed off communism and declared themselves free from the domination of the Soviet Union. There was more than just independence in the air then. There was also a growing consensus that liberal democracy and free markets represented a better future. Soviet citizens unfavorably compared the USSR’s decades of economic stagnation and political repression with the West’s growing prosperity and freedoms. People were tired as well of the zero-sum, confrontational approach of the Cold War.

Read the full article at The Bulwark