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

Part two 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

This is part two (part one can be found here) of a series of articles on the West’s century-long war against Russia. In it, I intend to argue that the current NATO-Russia confrontation is simply the latest chapter in a long Western campaign to weaken, isolate and contain Russia. In part one, I looked at how this pattern extends back well before the Cold War: at how Western powers repeatedly sought to contain Russia throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opposed the Bolshevik Revolution through intervention and sabotage, and later supported Germany (and even the Nazi regime in its early stages) as an anti-Soviet bulwark.

In this second article, I look at how the Western “shift” against Hitler and alliance with the Soviet Union was not a moral awakening, but rather a case of strategic realignment, and how Western hostility towards Russia resumed almost immediately after the war’s end. I then turn my attention to the birth of the Cold War, and how the latter was rooted in the American refusal to demilitarise Europe or to de-escalate tensions with Moscow, as a means of keeping Europe locked in a militarised standoff with the Soviet Union to justify a permanent military presence on the continent and exert de facto control over the foreign policies of European countries through NATO.

The Western “shift” against Hitler and alliance with the Soviet Union: a case of strategic realignment, not moral awakening

As seen in the previous article, throughout the 1930s, powerful political elites in Britain and the US argued that Hitler could be “managed” and steered against the Soviet Union. Western diplomats and media figures often portrayed Hitler as a “defender of civilisation” against Bolshevik chaos. In this sense, Western elites didn’t appease Hitler throughout the 1930s in a misguided attempt to avoid another global conflict with Germany, for peace’s sake — as the contemporary narrative holds — but because in many respects they viewed the Nazis as Western allies against a common enemy. Meanwhile, from 1935 onwards, many Western corporations actively supported Hitler’s rearmament.

This policy of appeasement, culminating in the 1938 Munich Agreement, effectively gave Germany a free hand in Central and Eastern Europe, signalling that that as long as his aggression was directed eastward — towards the USSR — the West would look the other way. Hitler’s ambitions, however, soon outgrew Western control. The occupation of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, exposed his drive for continental domination, not just anti-Bolshevism. When Germany invaded Poland, that same year, Britain and France had no choice but to declare war — not to defend democracy, but for credibility’s sake and to protect their own geopolitical interests. This marked the beginning of the Second World War in Europe.

In short, only when Nazi power threatened Western hegemony itself did the policy of appeasement collapse. This “shift” wasn’t a moral awakening, but a strategic realignment: Hitler was supported as long as he was seen as a tool against communism, but once he became an independent imperial competitor, the West turned on him. This means that, had Hitler not overplayed his hand, history might have taken a very different course: we very well may have witnessed the birth of an anti-communist Anglo-Nazi global empire.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that not only did Western corporations play a crucial role in enabling the Nazi military buildup that eventually led to war, but many of them maintained ties with Germany even after the formal declaration of war by Britain and France. When Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941 — the infamous Operation Barbarossa — several American subsidiaries were still producing for the Nazi war effort. As one German commentator provocatively put it, that war too may be regarded, to some extent, as a US-Western proxy war, at least in its planning phase.

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union transformed the geopolitical landscape: the USSR became the main military force resisting Nazi expansion, and Britain (and later the US) realised that only Soviet manpower could absorb the Wehrmacht’s strength. At that point they had little choice but to ally themselves with the Soviet Union, but the “anti-fascist” alliance of World War II was always intended to be temporary and conditional — a pragmatic interlude in a longer anti-communist crusade.

The scale of Operation Barbarossa — the largest and costliest military offensive in human history — is almost impossible to fathom: around 10 million soldiers took part in the opening phase of the operation; by the end of it, in December 1941, more than a million soldiers had died, 800,000 of which on the Soviet side, on top of millions of casualties (wounded or disabled) on both sides. The invasion opened the Eastern Front, the war’s largest theatre, which saw clashes of unprecedented violence and destruction for four years and killed over 26 million Soviet people, including around 8.6 million Red Army soldiers. Damage to both the economy and landscape was enormous, with approximately 1,700 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages razed to the ground.

One can thus understand why the trauma of Operation Barbarossa is seared into the Russian collective consciousness, instilling in generations of Russian leaders a deep — and, one might add, entirely justified — fear of Western aggression.

The birth of the Cold War

As if to confirm Russian fears, Western hostility towards Russia resumed almost immediately after the war’s end. Indeed, as early as May 1945 — three months before the official end of World War II — Winston Churchill instructed his chiefs of staff to draw up plans for a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Unthinkable, to be launched in the summer of that same year. Although British military planners quickly concluded that such a war was impractical, the idea that the United States and Britain should prepare for an eventual conflict with Moscow soon took hold. Strategic assessments suggested that a confrontation might occur in the early 1950s.

In Washington as well, leading military and intelligence officials began to identify the Soviet Union as America’s next adversary within weeks of Germany’s surrender. In September 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower conceived Plan Totality, the first known US contingency plan envisioning a pre-emptive atomic strike on the USSR in the event of conflict. It proposed targeting around 20 major Soviet cities, including Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. The goal was to “eliminate the USSR as a functioning state” before it could rebuild its military capacity. At that point, the US had only a handful of atomic bombs, so this was mostly conceptual — or, as was subsequently claimed, should be understood primarily as a disinformation ploy intended to intimidate the Soviets — but it nonetheless marked the beginning of systematic nuclear planning against the USSR.

Both the United States and Britain moved swiftly to recruit former Nazi scientists and intelligence officers as part of their preparations for the coming war with the Soviet Union. Under Operation Paperclip, more than 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers were imported into the US, sanitised of their past and integrated into NASA, the US Air Force and defence research. The rocket, aviation and medical programs that fuelled the Nazi war machine became cornerstones of American technological supremacy.

Meanwhile, within just a few years, Britain and the United States abandoned the principles agreed with the Soviet Union at the 1945 Potsdam Conference. Under the Potsdam Agreement, Germany was to be treated as a single economic and political unit under joint Allied administration. Its armed forces and armaments industries were to be dismantled, its Nazi institutions abolished and its political life rebuilt from the ground up on democratic lines. The ultimate goal was a peaceful, united and neutral Germany that would never again threaten Europe — or Russia.

By 1947, however, these principles were quietly discarded — not by Moscow, but by London and Washington. As tensions between the Western powers and the Soviet Union deepened, the American and British governments concluded that the postwar demilitarisation of Germany was no longer in their strategic interest: Western policy shifted from “keeping Germany weak” to “rebuilding Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union”. The Western occupation zones were thus merged into a single economic unit — the so-called Bizone — in open defiance of the Potsdam commitment to treat Germany as an indivisible whole. The Marshall Plan and Western refusal to allow joint economic management deepened the split.

This policy reversal accelerated with the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1949, formed from the three Western occupation zones. The Western powers now openly embraced the very policy they had condemned during the war: rebuilding Germany as a bulwark against Russia. Under American protectorship, West Germany was to be rapidly reindustrialised and remilitarised — and soon thereafter, integrated into NATO. What had begun as a promise to demilitarise and reunify a defeated aggressor thus ended with its transformation into a frontline state of a new military bloc. The spirit of Potsdam, based on collective security and cooperation among the wartime Allies, was replaced by the logic of containment. The Cold War had begun. As Jeffrey Sachs wrote:

While historians ardently debate who did and did not live up to the agreements at Potsdam (e.g., with the West pointing to the Soviet refusal to allow a truly representative government in Poland, as agreed at Potsdam), there is no doubt that the West’s remilitarization of the Federal Republic of Germany was the key cause of the Cold War.

It is also worth noting that Russia had every reason to seek a buffer zone and friendly regimes along its western frontier, given the near-annihilation it had just suffered at Germany’s hands — the latest in a long succession of Western invasions — and the new war plans already being drawn up in London and Washington. Indeed, after the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in August 1949, the US expanded its war planning: Operation Dropshot, drawn up that same years, envisaged a massive nuclear bombardment of around 200 Soviet cities and military targets using 300+ atomic bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional explosives. The objective was to destroy 85% of the USSR’s industrial capacity and cripple its ability to retaliate. The plan also included a subsequent ground invasion of the Soviet Union by US and NATO forces. As the German political scientist Hauke Ritz notes in his book Vom Niedergang des Westens zur Neuerfindung Europas (From the decline of the West to the reinvention of Europe):

Had the Soviet Union renounced its presence in Eastern Europe while the United States was consolidating its position in Western Europe, what happened after 1989 — namely the eastward expansion of the American sphere of influence — would simply have occurred decades earlier. In this light, the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe after 1945 appears more like a defensive measure than the realisation of a declared foreign policy goal.

Nonetheless, “Russia’s goal was never to permanently control Europe”, argues Ritz, “but rather to establish a long-term partnership that was beneficial to both sides within the framework of a balance of power”. For this reason, the Soviet Union, even under Stalin, was willing to consider German reunification, provided the new state remained neutral. From Moscow’s standpoint, even the creation of socialist governments in East Germany and across Eastern Europe was ultimately a matter open to negotiation.