The West’s century-long war against Russia — part one

Part one of a series of articles in which I argue that the current NATO-Russia confrontation is simply the latest chapter in a century-long Western campaign to weaken, isolate and contain Russia

In the wake of Trump’s 28-point peace proposal for Ukraine, the transatlantic pro-war establishment has once again succumbed to a severe bout of Peace Derangement Syndrome: reflexively denouncing what is, at this stage, the best achievable deal for Ukraine as a “capitulation”, while doubling down on maximalist demands (such as keeping the door open to NATO membership) that Russia, which is winning the war on the battlefield, is certain to reject — and which, in fact, are designed not to end the war, but to prolong it.

The aim is clear: to derail any settlement that might actually halt the bloodshed in Ukraine. It’s a familiar script, one that we’ve seen play out time and again during previous US-Russia attempts at negotiation. It remains to be seen whether things will play out differently this time, or whether the war pro-war party will prevail once again.

Now, one may speculate on whether this reflects a genuine rift within the transatlantic establishment — i.e., whether Trump is truly attempting to challenge to the pro-war faction, at home and in Europe, at least on the Ukraine issue — or whether this is just a good cop-bad cop act ultimately intended to ensure that the responsibility for keeping the war smouldering a while longer falls squarely on Europe’s shoulders.

However, this is not what I intend to focus on here: I’ve analysed such dynamics in the past and I don’t intend to repeat myself here. The point I want to make here is a different one: that even if a ceasefire is eventually reached in Ukraine, this will be a very fragile arrangement at best, in which Russia and the West, including the US, will remain locked in a hostile and militarised Cold War-style standoff, with the potential for renewed conflict at any time.

And this is not merely because powerful interests stand to gain from a permanent standoff with Russia — from the military-industrial complex and defence establishment, which rely on it to justify ever-expanding military budgets, to Europe’s increasingly delegitimised leaders, who need the spectre of a looming “Russian threat” to rationalise their ongoing assaults on democratic norms and increasingly authoritarian governance.

More broadly, it has to do with the fact that Western leaders — including Trump — remain beholden to a fundamentally supremacist view of their role in the world, in which Western dominance must be preserved at all costs. Within this framework, Russia remains a central challenge. As a pivotal ally of both China and Iran, it is embedded in the architecture of the emerging multipolar order that threatens US (and Western) hegemony. For the Western establishment, Moscow is not simply a regional actor but a key node in a broader strategic realignment.

However — and this is the aspect I want to concentrate on — there is a uniquely Russian specificity that renders it particularly intolerable to the psyche of Western elites. In a series of articles — accessible only to paid subscribers — I intend to argue that the current NATO-Russia confrontation is simply the latest chapter in a century-long Western campaign to weaken, isolate and contain Russia. This antagonism long predates the Soviet Union and is rooted in both geopolitical and civilisational motives: Western powers have historically viewed Russia as too large, too independent and too culturally distinct to integrate into a Western-led order.

This hostility can be traced from early European invasions of Russia, through the West’s attempts to overturn the 1917 Revolution, to interwar support for Nazi Germany as an anti-Soviet bulwark. Even the post-1945 Western alignment with the USSR was temporary and strategic, quickly giving way to the Cold War — marked by nuclear war planning, the rehabilitation of Nazi structures in West Germany and within NATO, and a massive cultural-ideological offensive to secure US dominance in Europe.

This policy continued even after the end of the Cold War, as Washington pursued a unipolar strategy aimed at preventing any rival Eurasian power from emerging. This involved NATO enlargement, support for “colour revolutions” in the post-Soviet sphere, economic shock therapy, the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and ultimately the destabilisation of Ukraine leading up to the 2014 Western-backed coup and the 2022 war.

Furthermore, I contend that the West’s hostility is not only geopolitical but also psychological and civilisational: Russia’s historical resistance to Western imperialism — especially through the Soviet era — created a deep “hereditary enmity” within Western elites, who still seek to punish Russia for thwarting Western global supremacy. Today’s conflict can therefore be framed as the final stage of a century-long Western effort to prevent the rise of a sovereign Eurasian pole — one that, barring “regime change” in the West, is likely to continue regardless of whether a ceasefire in Ukraine is reached or not.

Introduction

Critics of the mainstream narrative on Ukraine tend to emphasise that the conflict did not begin in 2022. As I myself have argued on several occasions, its roots lie in the decades-long Western strategy of destabilisation along Russia’s borders — from NATO’s relentless eastward expansion to the US’s attempts at achieving nuclear dominance (by deploying missile defence systems intended to enhance first-strike capability), the orchestration of “colour revolutions” across post-Soviet states and the extensive Western interference in Ukraine itself. This culminated in the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kyiv, which ignited the civil war and set Ukraine on a path of de facto integration into NATO. Taken together, these were not isolated events but successive phases of a geopolitical offensive waged by the West against Russia — a silent war that unfolded across Europe largely unnoticed by most Europeans.

But the roots of this war run far deeper. In many respects, the NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine — which carries the very real risk of escalating into a direct confrontation — represents the final stage, or rather the logical culmination, of a war the West has been waging against Russia in various forms for well over a century.

Early invasions: from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War

This war began in earnest in 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet Western antagonism towards Russia long predates that epochal event. As early as the eighteenth century, European powers regarded the rise of Tsarist Russia as a dual threat: a geopolitical one, because of its immense size, demographic weight and reach into both Europe and Asia; and a civilisational one, because it represented an alternative model — autocratic, Orthodox, non-liberal — that resisted the Western European order of commerce, parliamentarism and maritime power. Russia’s role in the Holy Alliance, which sought to defend monarchical legitimacy after the Napoleonic Wars, only reinforced Western suspicions. This Euro-Orientalist — indeed openly Russophobic — discourse ran deep. As the Swiss journalist Guy Mettan observes in his book Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria, it was a manifestation of a “thousand-year ostracism” reaching all the way back to the time of Charlemagne.

In short, Russia was seen as the great “Other” of Europe — too powerful to ignore, too alien to integrate and too vast to conquer easily. A consensus therefore emerged among European powers that it had to be, at the very least, contained and weakened. As Franz von Kuhn, the Austrian minister of war, put it in 1870: “We must weaken this giant and confine him to Asia, otherwise the earth will sooner or later be divided up among two powers, the North Americans and the Russians”.

This led to several European invasion or coalition wars, all aimed, in different ways, at disciplining or containing Russia’s rise: Napoleon’s French invasion in 1812, the British and French invasion of Russia in 1853-1856 (the Crimean War), and the German declaration of war against Russia in 1914, during the First World War.

Each conflict represented a new iteration of the same anxiety: that Russia — due to its scale, geography and independence — might unify the Eurasian landmass under its influence, undermining Western (and especially British) maritime and capitalist dominance. Despite different eras, ideologies and actors, the common thread behind these invasions was the same: to prevent Russia from emerging as a dominant Eurasian power capable of reshaping the European balance and challenging Western hegemony.

Beyond geopolitics, these invasions also carried a civilisational dimension, as noted: Western Europe identified itself with “civilisation”, progress and commerce; Russia was cast as “Asiatic”, despotic and backward — the “barbaric East” within Europe. Thus, the wars against Russia were not only military campaigns but moral crusades, justifying Western aggression as the defence of “Europe” against its shadow, much like today. In short, even before the Bolshevik Revolution, we can find a remarkable continuity in the Western geopolitical logic towards Russia.

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Western attempts to sabotage it

However, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 transformed this historic rivalry into an existential ideological struggle. One cannot overemphasise the profound psychological and ideological trauma that that event represented for Western elites. For the first time ever, a revolutionary movement had not only overthrown a monarchy, as had already occurred in several European countries, but had also abolished private ownership of capital, rejected liberal parliamentarism and called for a worldwide proletarian revolution. And this hadn’t occurred in any country, but in the largest country in the world, sitting right on Western Europe’s doorstep.

This overturned the entire political, economic and moral order on which Western power rested: for centuries, Europe’s ruling classes — aristocratic, capitalist and imperial — had regarded social hierarchy and private property as the natural foundations of civilisation. Thus, to Western elites, the Russian revolution represented at once an ideological heresy, a geopolitical heresy and a mortal threat to capitalism itself. The entire subsequent century of Western policy towards Russia — from intervention and isolation to the Cold War and beyond — can be understood as an attempt to contain and erase that trauma.

Western attempts to subvert the nascent communist government began virtually overnight. In the early years following the 1917 revolution, Western powers — particularly Britain, France, the United States and Japan — took a series of political, military and economic measures to undermine, contain or overthrow the new Soviet regime. These actions, taken between roughly 1917 and the early 1920s, reflected both ideological hostility towards communism and fear of its spread to other countries. The anti-Russian narrative in the West was thus turned on its head: Russia was no longer too reactionary but too revolutionary, and had to be excluded from Europe for this reason.

Western intervention against revolutionary Russia took several forms, including: military interventions to support the anti-Bolshevik “White” forces, which ultimately failed but prolonged the Civil War and devastated the Russian economy; economic blockades and trade embargoes aimed at strangling the Russian economy, by cutting off trade, credit and access to Western technology; covert operations (notably by British MI6 and French intelligence) aimed at destabilising the Bolshevik regime by funding and arming counterrevolutionary and separatist regional separatists, supporting sabotage operations against railways, factories and supply lines, and even fomenting local uprisings; propaganda campaigns that portrayed the Soviet regime as barbaric, tyrannical and a threat to civilisation; and, of course, diplomatic isolation — what by 1922 had become the Soviet government was not recognised diplomatically by any major Western state until the mid-1920s, while the US did not recognise the USSR until 1933.

These early interventions failed to overthrow the communist regime, but they set the tone for decades, as anti-communism became the central organising logic of Western power: the Soviet Union would be treated not as a state among others, but as an ideological contagion to be contained, subverted or destroyed.