Ups and Downs of NATO-Russia Relations: a Cognitivist Perspective

This article explains the recursive tendency to develop inimical relations between the North Atlan-tic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia by pointing at the incompatibility of their strategic cultures—here understood as broad cognitive frameworks subsuming an actor’s self-perception, worldview, and preferred way to use force. NATO and Russia have defined their roles in world politics, decoded the other’s intentions, and undertaken certain practices on the basis of divergent socio-cognitive assumptions. Incompatible strategic cultures bring about clashing grand strategies and generate conflictual relations. The two actors think differently and therefore read and react to a same situation in divergent ways. As a product of socially-embedded dynamics, NATO-Russia enmity cannot be easily overcome - if not in the long term and via sustained interaction. After pre-senting their theoretical framework, the authors reconstruct NATO’s and Russia’s strategic cul-tures, and then discuss the Ukraine crisis as a case study.