The post-Soviet era foreign minister warned that US democracy itself is at stake with the challenge of some Republican senators to the election victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
Andrei Kozyrev, who was Foreign Minister for President Boris Yeltsin between 1991 and 1996, compared the challenge of President Donald Trump and his allies to the result of the November 4 election with the concessions made in Russia in the 1990s that destroyed his democracy nascent and initiated Vladimir Putin’s control over power.
In August 1991, Kozyrev wrote an article in The Washington Post who appealed to the USA to help his country’s new democracy. There followed a constitutional crisis in which the communist hardline tried to strike a coup.
“The US administration stood out in our support,” said Kozyrev Newsweek. But, referring to Iéltzin, he added that Russian politicians and observers gave in to political pressure from the “demanding leader who came to power in the late 1990s”.
“In defense of their cowardice, they promised that it would be just a one-off concession, not a change in the constitutional order,” Kozyrev said in comments via e-mail.
“Democracy is easy to lose, but difficult to win back. Free and fair elections, together with the subsequent orderly transitions of power, have never returned.”
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Congress is expected to certify the results of the Electoral College on Wednesday by formalizing Biden’s electoral victory. However, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is among a group of Republican lawmakers who say they will contest the outcome.
“The behavior of President Trump’s supporters is also painfully familiar,” said Kozyrev, with lawmakers “fearful of following the Constitution against the will of their party leader” and a “powerful media ready to attack everything … to justify the takeover. of the power autocrat. “
Kozyrev, whose book Firebird details Russia’s post-Soviet democratic development, said the path its country took in the 1990s led to a “stagnant economy” chaired by lawmakers who are “reduced to servants of the strong man and his acolytes”.
Although it took several weeks, Putin congratulated Biden on his victory amid speculation about what it will mean for relations between Moscow and Washington, DC, which are already at an all-time low.
The highlight of Biden’s foreign policy after his inauguration will be what to do with the New START Treaty, which expires in February, and which limits the nuclear warheads, missiles and strategic bombers that the two countries can use.
Kozyrev worked with two US administrations to mediate the predecessor of the bilateral treaty, START 1. He said the agreement, which covered the administrations of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton between the agreement and the implementation, was never hampered by the change of president , although he is concerned about the lack of cooperation in this transition.
“I must confess that I took this orderly transition of power for granted because the United States was known as the beacon of stability and constitutional order,” he said. “I hate to say that those times seem to have passed – hopefully not forever – for both the United States and Russia.”
Kozyrev, who now lives in the United States, said: “I still bet on America, my country of choice, and here’s my plea: Support the US, maintain the US Constitution. Confirm the Biden-Harris victory.”
The graph below Statista shows how long Vladimir Putin has been in power.
Statista