Why Russian-American
Hostility?
At the end of World War II, or shortly thereafter, there
began what came to be called the Cold War between the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics and the United States of America. Both sides had allies either
willing or unwilling, but the Cold War was primarily a conflict between the
USSR and the USA. It came about because the Soviets sought to expand their
dominance over western Europe and the Americans set out to stop them through a
policy called containment. There were hot wars during the Cold War,
particularly in Korea and Vietnam, but there was no direct military action
between the USSR and the USA. That’s why it was a “cold” war not a hot one.
The Cold War ended on December 25, 1991, when the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist. The USSR was no more. There was, of
course, still Russia, but as of that date, Russia was no longer communist. I
think nearly everyone thought that there was no longer any reason for the
Americans and the Russians to be at each others’ throats with threats of
nuclear annihilation.
Russia and the United States have a fairly long history of
at least intermittent contact and interaction. Some of the land that would eventually
become part of the United States was once occupied by Russia. As the Russian
state and nation spread out of Moscow in the sixteenth century CE or earlier,
Russians first occupied all of Siberia. Then some Russians crossed the Bering Strait
into Alaska. They occupied much of Alaska, then moved south down the west coast
of North America. Eventually, they established settlements in what became
northern California.
Russia was overextended, and it retracted out of North
America. The most significant part of that retraction was Russia’s sale of
Alaska to the United States in 1867. The United States and Russia were then
separated by the Bering Strait. Yet far eastern Siberia was a remote and
sparsely populated part of the Russian Empire. Alaska was a remote and sparsely
occupied possession of the United States. After Alaska became a US state in
1959, Russia was America’s closest noncontinuous neighbor. That truth, however,
didn’t mean much. There was little or no contact between the two countries
across the Bering Strait.
There were a few contacts between Russia and the US in the
years following Russia’s sale of Alaska to the US. US President Theodore
Roosevelt mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The US sent troops
into Siberia during the Russian Civil War after the Bolshevik coup of 1917 in
support of the forces fighting against the Bolsheviks. The US extended
diplomatic recognition to the USSR in 1933. During the Great Depression of the
1930s, some Americans flirted with Marxism, the source of the official ideology
of the Soviet Union, but most Americans who knew anything at all about the
Stalinist Soviet Union wanted nothing to do with communism. When the USSR and
Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty in 1939, nearly all American
communists abandoned the USSR and no longer saw it as the primary opponent of
fascism.
During World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States
were allies. They both waged war against Nazi Germany. The Soviet war with
Germany began when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The US
didn’t enter the war until months later. The US supplied war materials to the
Soviet Union. At least until June, 1944, the Soviets bore the brunt of the
allied battle with the Germans. The Soviet defeat of the Germans in the Battle
of Stalingrad (July 1941-February 1942) and at the battle of Kursk in the summer
of 1943 turned the tide of World War II against the Germans. US war materials could
have played some role in the battle of Kursk, but the battle of Stalingrad took
place too early in the war for the US to have any significant part in it. The
US, the United Kingdom, and the other allies provided some military relief to
the Soviets when they invaded North Africa in 1942, Italy in 1943, and France
in 1944, but by then the Soviets already had the Germans on the run. The attack
of the allies in the west only hastened the German’s run, it didn’t cause it. The
Soviet Red Army brought about the end of World War II in Europe when it took
Berlin in 1945.
In the couple of years after the war, at least the western
allies thought the Soviets would cooperate in a joint administration of
conquered Berlin. Almost from the start, however, the Soviets became
intransigent. They showed no interest in jointly administering the German
capital city, and they opposed the western allies’ plan to create a new state
in west Germany. Then, in June 1948, they closed all ground and water access
from the American, French, and British sectors of occupied western Germany to
Berlin. The western allies conducted a massive airlift of supplies into the
city. The Soviets didn’t invade west Berlin nor did they attack the transport
planes that were flying supplies into the city. Still, the more than a year of
the Berlin Airlift was a time of great tension between the Soviet Union and its
former allies. The Cold War had begun.
One of the most significant developments of the Cold War was
the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO originally
consisted of the United States, Canada, and a few countries of northwest
Europe. Over the decades, it expanded. It came to include Turkey, which
bordered on the Soviet Union though not on Russia. The purpose of NATO was
quite explicitly to stop the Soviets from taking over western Europe as they
had taken over central and eastern Europe.
Still, during the Cold War years there were peaceful
contacts between the USA and the USSR. There was some commercial trade between
them. There was a cultural exchange treaty between. Under that treaty, the west
saw and heard the USSR’s world class musicians. They heard the magnificent Red
Army Chorus. American scholars and would-be scholars, including this author,
were able to conduct research in the USSR. Soviet scholars could do the same in
the US, though they had to do it under strict Soviet surveillance and control.
The direct, peaceful connections between the USA and the USSR were sparse
during the Cold War, but they did exist.
When the USSR ceased to exist, it seemed that there was the
possibility of building friendly, constructive relations between the two
countries. Russia would no longer be trying to export Soviet communism to other
parts of the world. The US no longer had radical ideological disagreements with
the Russians. Russia had what was, on paper at least, a democratic,
constitutional government. The Russian economy, everyone thought, would develop
as a market economy in place of the Soviet one controlled by the state. It was
easy to be at least a little bit optimistic about the future of Russo-American
relations in the years between 1991 and 2000.
However, in the years just before the Soviet collapse and
during the years after that collapse and the liberations of the countries of
the Warsaw Pact (the Soviets’ response to NATO) from Soviet control, NATO began
to expand eastward. A reunified Germany joined NATO in 1990. NATO expanded to
include other Soviet-dominated states. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic
joined in 1999. Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined in 2004. The
Russian government under President Vladimir Putin saw this eastward NATO
expansion as a threat. Putin also saw it as a violation by NATO of a promise it
had made when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany and German
membership in NATO not to expand to include any territory formerly under Soviet
control.
Then, from the Russian point of view, things got worse.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined NATO also in 2004. Those three
independent nations had been Soviet Socialist Republics. They had all been part
of the Russian Empire before 1917. The Russians considered them to be in Russia’s
domain. They became independent nations after World War I, but the Soviet Union
reoccupied and incorporated them after World War II. Thus, by 2004, nations
bordering Russia (or Belorussia, which amounted to the same thing) not only had
Russia enclosed on its western border, some of those nations had formerly been
part of Russian states, either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.
The Russians saw NATO’s move eastward as a direct threat to
Russia. The NATO countries may or may not have understood it that way, but the
Russian reaction to it is not hard to understand. Why was NATO taking over
nations that used either to be part of the USSR or under the thumb of the
Soviets? Why was NATO expanding into areas that Russia considered to be Russia’s
legitimate sphere of influence? For the Russians, there could be only one
answer. NATO had its eyes on Russia itself. It is not hard to see why the
Russians came to experience NATO as an existential threat to their nation.
In Russia, starting at the beginning of the year 2000, Vladimir
Putin set out to consolidate his personal power over every aspect of Russian
life. He took over the public media. He allied himself with corrupt Russian
oligarchs who had come to control the Russian economy. He held illegitimate elections
in which his victory was assured before anyone cast a vote. He arrested,
imprisoned, and murdered his political opponents. Perhaps, after December 25,
1991, it was possible that Russia would develop in a more democratic direction.
Putin made sure that it didn’t.
Putin created an authoritarian regime in Russia, but
post-Soviet Russia didn’t have a central ideology the way the USSR had had. So
Putin created one. He proclaimed, and proclaims, Russia to be the world’s
guardian against the corrupt, immoral values of western liberalism. He formed a
close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has always been
ultraconservative. He had laws enacted against the rights of sexual minorities
under the guise of protecting children. He said that the collapse of the Soviet
Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. That
statement, other statements Putin made, and things Putin did with regard to
regions formerly part of the USSR clearly indicated that Putin would recreate
the Russian Empire if he could. The United States is, obviously, the dominant
power in NATO, so Putin’s rhetoric became anti-American not just anti-NATO.
During the first years of the twenty-first century Russia came to see NATO as a
threat to its existence, and the purpose of NATO came to be control of Russian
expansion just as its original purpose had been to control Soviet expansion.
Then Putin made things worse. He occupied Crimea, which had
been part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine.[1]
He invaded Georgia in support of Russians who wanted to break away from
Georgia. Then, in February, 2022, he sent the Russian army into Ukraine proper.
His stated intent was to remove the government the Ukrainian people had
elected, supposedly to stop Ukraine from joining NATO. He sought, and seeks, to
drag Ukraine back under Russian control.
Putin reverted to the old imperial Russian way of seeing Ukraine
and its people. The government of the Russian Empire never recognized the
Ukrainians as a people distinct from the Russians or the Ukrainian language as
distinct from the Russian one. Imperial Russia considered Ukrainians to be
Russians and the Ukrainian language to be a dialect of Russian, not a separate
language. That’s exactly how Putin sees Ukraine.
That gross misunderstanding of Ukraine, its people, and its
language, together with the Russians’ belief that NATO was a threat to their
existence, led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is completely
unjustified. It violates international law. It is an overt act of aggression by
one sovereign nation against another, something that had not happened in Europe
since the end of World War II. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a crime against
humanity, but the reasons for it are not hard to understand. NATO has not come
to the defense of Ukraine through direct military intervention. It has,
however, denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It and its member nations,
most notably the United States, have sent an enormous amount of military
equipment to the Ukrainians to assist Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Russian aggression.
Russia and the US are, thus, again in a relationship of open
antagonism. Does it have to be that way? Objective global and geopolitical
realities say no, it does not have to be that way. Russia and the US are not
geographical neighbors in any meaningful way. Russia has a massive arsenal of
nuclear weapons that they inherited from the Soviets, but though Russia is huge
geographically, its population is not all that big. The population of Russia is
around 144,000,000, less than half that of the United States. Russia is no
threat to America’s economic domination of the world. It’s economy is weak. Its
infrastructure is mostly old and inefficient. In Ukraine the Russian army has
proven itself to be nothing like the military powerhouse most in the west once
believed it to be. Russia is no threat to the US at all as long as the US doesn’t
provoke Russia into using its nuclear weapons against it.
So why have Russian and the United States been so
antagonistic toward each other? The short term answer to that question is
Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. It is inevitable that the US would
oppose that invasion in every way possible short of direct military
intervention. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is indefensible, but so, in this
author’s opinion, is NATO’s expansion toward Russia after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Perhaps NATO did that expansion simply without considering how
the Russians would react. Or perhaps they understood how Russia would react and
didn’t care. Either way, Russia’s aggressive response was perfectly
foreseeable.
It seems that Russia and the United States keep getting
crossways with each other simply because they have a history of considering the
other an enemy. Yet there is no reason why Russia and the United States need be
enemies. They see themselves as enemies because both of them have felt the need
to contain what they have seen as aggression by the other. The chronic
antagonism between Russia and the US is not the result of any geographic or geopolitical
considerations. It is the result of human actions and thoughts. It didn’t have
to happen. If Putin would get out of Ukraine, it wouldn’t have to happen now.
The Russian-American conflict is a human construct. We humans could deconstruct
it if we just understood each other better and stopped creating antagonisms
that don’t need to exist. It is unlikely that that will happen anytime soon,
and that is one of the tragedies of today’s world.
[1]
Crimea was at first part of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic. In
other words, it was Russian. Most of its people spoke Russian not Ukrainian.
The city of Sevastopol in Crimea was the home port of the Russian, then the
Soviet, Black Sea navy. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the
Russian republic to the Ukrainian one. No one is quite sure why.