Why Russian-American Hostility?

 

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.

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[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.