The article appears on the website of Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news agency. Under the headline of “Unlearned History Lessons,” Medvedev wrote that current relations between Russia and the U.S. have grown confrontational again and likened it to the Cold War era. He wrote, “The sanctions pressure, threats, conflict behavior and defense of selfish interests are plunging the world into a state of permanent instability.”
Medvedev served as president of the Russian Federation from 2008 to 2012, and prime minister from 2012 to 2020. He is currently the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia. After his single term as president, from which he stepped aside to allow Vladimir Putin to succeed him, Medvedev was appointed by Putin as prime minister. He resigned from that post in January 2020, when Putin made further changes to Russia’s government.
In his Friday column, Medvedev cited other examples in American history when—in his eyes—the country’s foreign policy weakened its worldwide stature. He mentioned deployments in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Turkey, Vietnam, and Lebanon, as well as “failed polices toward Cuba that sparked the revolution and then again, in an attempt to regain control of the Island of Freedom.”
He further claimed that the Russian government, and the Soviet Union before it, “has always been in a catch-up position with the United States on the level of threats to its counterpart.”
Medvedev also wrote that diplomacy between the U.S. and Soviet Union only worked when the leaders from each country worked on “equal footing” and communicated rationally without threats. He again brought up Cuba, writing of how the two countries came very close to war because of the Caribbean island.
He said war was prevented during the Cuban Missile Crisis only because each leader—John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev—took a “sober assessment of the standoff” and realized compromise was the wisest choice and willingly entered into making concessions.
Medvedev claimed in the piece that the U.S. under President Joe Biden “does not have the fortitude to recognize that someone in the world may have infrastructural capabilities and military-political capacity comparable to them. For example, China or Russia.”
The former Russian president and prime minister also wrote: “It can speak both of the fulfillment of the Democrats’ campaign promises and a lack of unity in policymaking and decision-making in the new team, and of an American ‘holy mission.’ ‘We are always right, you must listen to us.’”
Medvedev wrote that the continuing problems between the countries could be described as a crisis and warned that “any faux pas, any lack of patience, and any strategic understanding of the ‘weight’ of each word” could result not only in a military conflict between the two countries, but also throughout the entire world.
“The question on the agenda is whether the current US administration will find the ‘wisdom of compromise,’” he wrote.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.
