Bill and Boris, the personal diplomacy between Clinton and Yeltsin

On 17th of June 2021, Stephan Kieninger will look into the relevance of the personal diplomacy between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin based on newly available U.S. archival sources. His lecture will investigate the ups and downs in U.S.-Russia relations arguing that the close rapport between Clinton and Yeltsin was important to faciliate partnership and cooperation in the face of open disagreements such as NATO enlargement and U.S.-Russia tensions over the Kosovo War. Moreover, the Bill and Boris bond helped to bridge the difference in expectations pertaining to the shape of the post-Cold War order and Russia’s place in it.

Stephan Kieninger is an independent historian and the author of two books on the history of détente and Euro-Atlantic security: The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (2018) and Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964–1975 (2016). His current research looks into NATO enlargement and the search for the post-Cold War order. He received his PhD from Mannheim University. Formerly, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS, a fellow at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies, and a senior researcher at the Federal German Archives.

Keywords: personal relations, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, international diplomacy.