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

Part three 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 three (here are part one and part two) of a series of articles on the West’s century-long war against Russia. In it, I 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 part two, I looked 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 turned 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.

In this third part, I look at how, after the end of the Cold War, the US saw the Soviet collapse as a chance to establish a unipolar world — and to solve the “Russia problem” once and for all; at how this led to a strategy of using NATO and the EU to contain, encircle and destabilise Russia through eastward expansion, military interventions, “colour revolutions”, shock-therapy economics and missile-defence deployments; and how these policies ended up radicalising Russia’s stance: instead of collapsing or accepting permanent subordination, Russia regained strength under Putin, reasserted its geopolitical independence and revived aspects of its anti-imperialist diplomatic tradition.

After the Cold War: the US sees an opportunity to solve the “Russia problem” once and for all

The end of the Cold War offered a historic opportunity to finally reunite Europe and put an end to the “European civil war” that had ravaged the continent since 1914 — to pursue a lasting peace with Russia through collective demilitarisation and the strengthening of European-Russian economic, political and cultural ties.

At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, both the Russian leadership and Russian society expressed a clear desire to be part of Europe once again. This aspiration was embodied in Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a “common European home”. The idea drew inspiration from the 1975 Helsinki Accords, the landmark agreement signed by 35 states to improve relations between East and West. To this end, the Soviet leadership made extraordinary gestures of goodwill — above all, the withdrawal of Soviet troops not only from East Germany but from the entire Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Never before had a major power relinquished so much, so quickly, merely for the promise of peace and partnership with the West, and Germany in particular.

Yet these overtures were not reciprocated by Western leaders. France and Britain initially opposed reunification, and the United States accepted it only on the condition that Germany remain within NATO and continue to host American troops and nuclear weapons. Ultimately, it was the Soviet Union that cleared the way for reunification by meeting these conditions and unilaterally dismantling its military presence. In return, Western leaders gave Soviet leaders numerous verbal and written assurances that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” — promises that were soon broken.

Barely two years later, the possibility of genuine reconciliation resurfaced. In December 1991, with Gorbachev’s resignation, the Soviet Union formally dissolved, and the Russian Federation emerged as its legal successor. Just six weeks later, in February 1992, the European Union was founded. The timing seemed to invite a new beginning — a chance to integrate post-Soviet Russia into a peaceful, cooperative European order. Having abandoned socialism and embraced a market economy, Russia made clear its desire to integrate into the West. As Hauke Ritz [see part two] observes:

If this path had been taken, the two winged powers of Europe — the United States and Russia — could have joined hands on European soil. The end of the Cold War would not have been seen as the triumph of one side over the other, but as their reconciliation and unification. The scars left by the Cold War and two world wars might finally have healed, allowing Europe to attain genuine sovereignty within a tripartite order. The continent’s former vassal status vis-à-vis both the US and the Soviet Union could have given way to partnership, opening the prospect of a northern civilisation built on three sovereign pillars — the US, the Europe of the EU and Russia — bound by shared cultural and intellectual roots. Such a common historical identity would have rendered power relations more balanced and manageable.

That path, however, was not taken. Instead, the opposite course was pursued. Rather than building a new security architecture based on partnership, the US and its “allies” chose to maintain and eventually deepen their adversarial relationship with Russia — a policy that, in recent years, has escalated to perilous levels, often to the detriment of the West’s own economic, geopolitical and security interests. Why?

The geopolitical motives behind continued US opposition to Russia even after the end of the Cold War

As always, there were obvious geopolitical considerations at play. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Washington quickly grasped that the disappearance of its geopolitical rival offered a unique opportunity for global expansion. The notion of a “unipolar world” — a world dominated by the US — soon emerged. During the Cold War, the international system had been bipolar, requiring the superpowers to negotiate a balance of power. In the American strategic imagination of the early 1990s, however, a new vision took shape: the world after the Cold War could be unipolar, led exclusively by the United States — even though it was obvious that such an order could only be implement through force and, ultimately, war.

The United States moved swiftly. The “new world order” proclaimed by George H. W. Bush was symbolically inaugurated by the US assault on Iraq in 1991, followed only a few years later by NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia. The principal architects of that intervention — Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac — made no secret of the fact that their aim was to remove national sovereignty as the organising principle of international relations and to replace it with a universalist and supranational doctrine of “human rights”. In effect, they sought to overturn the post-war international system and replace it with a globalist one. This ambition was openly echoed by Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission, who in a 1992 speech at Chatham House described the European Union as “a blueprint for the creation of this new world order”.

That same year, a Pentagon policy paper drafted by Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz effectively formalised America’s strategic goal of global supremacy. It declared that the United States should ensure that “no rival superpower is allowed to emerge” in Western Europe, Asia or the former Soviet sphere — and that potential competitors should be deterred from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

Russia represented the greatest challenge to this project. Despite its economic collapse and social disintegration in the early 1990s, Russia remained the only nuclear power equal to the United States, an obstacle to the monopoly on global force — especially nuclear force — that unipolarity required.

Moreover, Russia retained a geopolitical consciousness that made Washington uneasy. Even stripped of its empire, Moscow’s diplomatic weight and strategic worldview posed a problem: it could still influence Europe. “The US feared above all that Russia might export its geopolitical perspective to its former European allies, encouraging Berlin and Paris to act more independently and think in terms of power relations”, Ritz writes. Hence Washington’s enduring interest in weakening Russia while keeping it separated from Germany and France. The postwar formula coined by NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Hastings Ismay — to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down” — remained valid as ever even in the new post-Cold War era.

Russia also presented the same geostrategic “problem” it always had: an immense continental power located at the heart of Eurasia, commanding vast territory and resources. As Zbigniew Brzezinski argued in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Eurasia remained the key to global power, and US strategy had to ensure that no rival power — above all Russia — could dominate the region. Brzezinski urged that the United States should “prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, keep tributaries pliant and protected, and prevent the barbarians from coming together”. Translated into simpler language, George Friedman of Stratfor, known as the shadow CIA, put it bluntly: the US’s goal should be to “keep Eurasia divided among as many different (preferably mutually hostile) powers as possible”.

Finally, Russia possessed immense natural resources, unmatched by any other nation. This made it not only economically valuable but geopolitically dangerous: its resource wealth could fuel both its own recovery and the rise of other potential challengers, notably China. US strategy in the 1990s and 2000s therefore focused on controlling resource extraction regions, trade routes and key industries, and integrating them into the Western financial system. In this sense, the mass-privatisation policies imposed on Russia during this period were not merely economic reforms but mechanisms for transferring Russia’s wealth into Western corporate hands.

For all these reasons, ensuring Russia’s weakness and isolation — and preventing any geoeconomic rapprochement between Europe and Russia — became essential to the US pursuit of uncontested global hegemony.