Military-Political Aspects of the US Strategy towards the V4 Countries (1991–2008)

The article is devoted to the relevant issue in the history of modern Europe and the history of international relations. Major changes took place in the foreign policy and foreign economic relations of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia formed the Visegrad Group – the first alliance of states in the European post-communist space – four months before the dissolving of the Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) and the Warsaw Pact in 1991. The contradictions in the military-political area within the region became one of the factors, that had a destructive influence on the global security agenda, including the process of the Russian-American negotiations on disarmament. Special focus in the article is on the consequences of joining the V4 countries to NATO in 1999–2006 and on the phases of the deployment of the US anti-ballistic missile defense system. The article analyses the US allied strategies toward the V4 countries implemented mainly through the military and defense spheres – from the collapse of the socialist system to the end of George W. Bush’s presidential term (after that the plans for the deployment of the ABM defense system in CEE were fundamentally revised). At the same time the author makes an attempt to evaluate the strategic position of Russia in the region of Central Europe against the background of its inclusion in the system of Euro-Atlantic security and European integration. The novelty of the research is determined by the chosen perspective of studying the foreign policy development of the Visegrad Group and the countries forming it, through the internal evolution of the approaches to US and NATO security, as well as through their particularity of military and political interests in the region. The author used historical research methods to meet the posed challenges and to study various categories of sources. The historical-genetic method was used to identify the factors and causes that had affected the choice of the foreign policy of the Central European countries after the dissolution of the Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. The narrative method was used to study the plans for the deployment of the US anti-ballistic missile defense system in the V4 countries during George W. Bush’s presidential term.

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