Looking back at the Camp David Declaration 30 years later

MOSCOW, February 1. /TASS/. Thirty years ago, on February 1, 1992, US President George H.W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin met at the country retreat known as Camp David, Maryland, and signed the Declaration on New Relations between the United States and Russia. This document officially ended the ideological and military-political confrontation known as the Cold War. Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech launches Cold War, 1991 ushers in end of Warsaw Pact and USSR The start of the Cold War dates back to a speech by then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946, in which he put forward the idea of an Anglo-American alliance to curb "world communism, led by Soviet Russia". For the next 45 years, the confrontation between the two superpowers, the USSR and the United States, and their respective military blocs, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), significantly influenced all world politics. This situation persisted until 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the USSR, proclaimed a policy aimed at improving relations with Western countries and the United States. In 1988, then US President Ronald Reagan, while visiting the Soviet Union, declared that he no longer considered the Soviet Union an "evil empire". In December 1989, during a meeting with US President George H.W. Bush in Malta, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said that "the USSR is no longer ready to consider the United States its adversary". In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the USSR and the United States signed agreements on intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles (INF Treaty, 1987) and strategic arms reduction (START I, 1991). NATO and the Warsaw Pact, signed the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE; 1990). On July 1, 1991, the Warsaw Pact countries signed a protocol on the complete termination of the Warsaw Treaty of 1955, subsequently, the "pro-Soviet" military bloc was dissolved. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russian leadership continued the policy of further rapprochement with the West. Camp David Talks On February 1, 1992, during his first visit to the United States, Russian President Boris Yeltsin met with US President George H.W. Bush at Camp David. They discussed the development of a new model of American-Russian relations, problems related to the USSR’s collapse, the process of strategic nuclear arms reduction, cooperation in the field of arms trade and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and much more. As a result of the meeting, the sides decided to develop the partnership relations and this was reflected in the declaration signed that same day. Camp David Declaration The declaration on new relations stated that Russia and the US "do not regard each other as potential adversaries" and that they "are charting a new relationship, and it’s based on trust". It declared that the parties would "work to remove any remnants of Cold War hostility" and do "all we can to promote a mutual well-being of our peoples and to expand as widely as possible the ties that now bind our peoples." The document mentioned for the first time an end to ideological confrontation, the willingness of Russia and the United States to cooperate in affirming "a common commitment to democracy" and to create a "new alliance of partners". Moscow and Washington also declared that they would "actively promote free trade, investment and economic cooperation" and "make every effort to support the promotion of our shared values of democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights." The declaration singled out common threats to Russia and the United States, which are terrorism, drug trafficking, and violations of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The document concluded with the statement: "The United States and Russia today launch a new era in our relationship." This enabled Moscow and Washington to talk about the transition to a new type of relationship, which implies the presence of common aspirations, an orientation towards cooperation and mutual tolerance, which was a step forward compared to the period from the late 1960s to the 1970s (the detente of international tensions) when the principle of peaceful coexistence was proclaimed as the basis for relations between the USSR and the United States. At the same time, the declaration lacked specific proposals for the implementation of a new course in bilateral relations and its wording was extremely vague. Later on, the principles of the Camp David Declaration were reflected in the Charter for American-Russian Partnership and Friendship of June 17, 1992, signed during the next visit by Boris Yeltsin to the US. It also interpreted the whole system of Russian-American relations as being based on partnership and friendship. What emerged after the declaration? In the West, the Camp David Declaration was seen as the final victory of the capitalist world over communism and the Soviet Union. The Russian political establishment saw the outcome of the meeting between the presidents as the beginning of a new non-confrontational phase in relations with the United States. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the talks symbolized an "essentially new relationship between Russia and the United States, a transition from confrontation to, hopefully, an alliance". However, some experts spotlighted the declarative, not legally binding nature of the document and the absence of security guarantees. As time passed, it became clear that the secure world order proclaimed in the Declaration was never established, and the foreign policy situation since the mid-1990s did not correspond to the national interests of the Russian Federation. As the bipolar system of international relations vanished, the problem of global instability and the deterioration of European security emerged. Remaining the world's lone superpower, the US managed to foist its world order viewpoint on the rest of the globe, while the opinion of the Russian Federation on many international issues, in particular, on NATO expansion, was ignored. In the 2000s, Moscow and Washington periodically experienced both a thaw and a chill in relations, but after the coup d'etat in Ukraine and the 2014 reunification of Crimea with Russia, bilateral ties entered a phase of lengthy, drawn-out crisis, accompanied by a diplomatic standoff between Russia and the United States, Washington's withdrawal from several international agreements (including arms limitations), and increased NATO activity near Russia's borders. On January 27, 2022, commenting on the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that today "one can only dream of signing documents similar to the Camp David Declaration," and added that the current tensions in Russian-US relations "in many aspects resemble those of the Cold War." Read more