Military aspect of evolution of the euro-atlantic relationships during the second presidential term of Barack Obama (2013-2017): The factor of Russia

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Russian factor for the changes within the Euro-Atlantic military relationships during Barack Obama's second presidential term. That was highlighted by the strengthening of the cooperation within NATO as a responsive reaction of the USA and EU to the Russian-Ukrainian events in 2014. It is noted that in a post-bipolar world NATO was lacking raison d'être due to the dissolution of the USSR. Consequently, the tendency to the political-military regionalization had significantly increased within the transatlantic alliance. These tendencies had been reflected in different approaches of the leading NATO countries towards Russia in the early 2000s. It is also highlighted that since early 2010s the prerequisites for the future deterioration of the relationships between the USA and Russia and the EU and Russia were formed. Thus, the foundation for the future improvement of the transatlantic military relations was formed, for which the Ukrainian crisis is appeared to be a turning point because it caused the changes in a post-Cold War European security system. In order to identify the consistent patterns in this process the historical-genetic method was applied. The content analysis method has been used to demonstrate changes in the conceptual design of military-political relations based on official documents and statements. The scientific novelty of this study lies in the fact that the previous works on this issue mainly analyzed changes in bilateral relations within the US - Russia and the EU - Russia frames. However, due attention was not paid to the influence of the Russian factor on the changes for the bilateral US - EU relations. Changing the perspective of analysis allowed us to get a new look, as well as attract new foreign sources and literature. The author concludes that during the second presidential term of B. Obama, NATO de facto had a raison d'être for presence in Europe, which contributed to a significant strengthening of the military-political cooperation of Euro- Atlantic relations.