Turning a Friend Into an Enemy—a Brief Historical Digression

Russia repeatedly tried, albeit with some interruptions, to be America’s friend from 1776 until recently close times. After the American Revolutionary War against the British Empire outbreak, King George III formally requested 20,000 troops from Russian Empress Catherine the Great, plus offered her a bribe in the form of the island Minorca in the Mediterranean, which belonged to Britain at the time. It was a large naval base and a warm water port (now Spanish territory) for joining the fight against the American rebels, but the Empress refused.

During the 1861-65 American Civil War, Russian Tsar Alexander II helped save the Union by sending two naval squadrons to New York and San Francisco and placing them at the service of President Lincoln. A symbolic statue of these events, showing the two men shaking hands, is located in downtown Moscow.

After the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia, America broke diplomatic relations between the two nations, which were restored only in 1933, this time with the USSR—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the new name Russia had used from 1922 till 1991.

In 1941-45 the United States and USSR became allies in the war against Nazi Germany. Next to the Lincoln and Alexander II statue is another sculpture of American and Soviet soldiers shaking hands on the Elbe River in Germany on the eve of their joint victory in World War II.

Regrettably, the “Elbe Spirit” in the relations between the two nations didn’t last long. While American and Soviet soldiers were still celebrating their joint victory, the US gave asylum to thousands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and other members of the Ukraine nationalist movement to sabotage, divide, and destabilize its WWII ally.

The Cold War began on March 12, 1947, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, which pledged American “support for democracies against authoritarian threats.” This doctrine shifted US policy toward the USSR from a wartime alliance to containment, as advocated by diplomat George Kennan. Ironically, since 1987, George Kennan has become one of the strongest critics of US foreign policy, calling NATO Easter expansion the greatest geopolitical mistake.

The Cold War brought us to the first major nuclear crisis. NATO was placing nuclear missiles in Europe, including in Russia’s neighbor Turkey. Moscow attempted to respond by doing the same in Cuba, which brought the two nations to the brink of nuclear war. Fortunately,  John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev reached a peace deal.

There was another brief historical moment when America and Russia could return to the good old days of friendship or even alliance. This was when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, realizing that his country needed fundamental political and economic reforms, stopped the war in Afghanistan and negotiated with Reagan and Bush on arms control. He also kept sending messages to Washington about a desire for broader cooperation through regular diplomatic and Track II public diplomacy efforts. In April 1989, a large group of influential American politicians and public opinion makers met with Soviet leadership, who told them that Moscow was ready to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, let the East European countries go free, no longer spread communism worldwide, and be prepared for a full rapprochement with the West.

Following this meeting, many Russian and American organizations and individuals jumped in to formulate concrete cooperation proposals. It was a colossal effort that included many back-and-forth trips, exploring areas ranging from business, science, education, culture, medicine, and agriculture to cooperation in space, security, and the military.

Moscow provided a downtown mansion for the Track II meetings, while in Washington, money was raised to buy a townhouse in the Dupont Circle area for the same purpose. Both buildings placed American and Russian flags on their outside walls. In Washington, it was named “Russia House,” where we installed a bust of Andrei Sakharov, the famous Russian nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Laureate who advocated US-Russia rapprochement on its front.

Drafts of “Track II” proposals were discussed during regular US-Russia forums on Capitol Hill and at the Russian Academy of Sciences, with the participation of Members of Congress and the Russian Duma deputies, as well as with government officials and experts in particular fields of both countries.

There were direct talks in the White House with President George Bush, Sr., his Vice President, Dan Quayle, and in the Kremlin with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who became Russian President after Gorby resigned on December 25, 1991. Even the US mainstream media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, wrote laudatory articles about these activities at the time.

As it turned out, while some Americans preferred to have Russia as a friend instead of an enemy, others had different ideas, which had been described by a less naive and more realistic thinker mentioned above, George Kennan: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”

Still, with Bush-Quayle in the White House, the “good guys” had some leverage, but after Bill Clinton won the 1992 elections, the Washington foreign policy establishment, sometimes called the “deep state,” had different ideas. The euphoria about winning the Cold War and the dawning of what they saw as an era of a unipolar world under total American leadership, some called it hegemony, made them believe that Russia and her interests were no longer relevant. In their calculations, from now on, Moscow would have no choice but to obey orders from Washington since it had nowhere else to go. As Kennan predicted, our mutually beneficial win-win business and security cooperation proposals were largely ignored.

As early as 1993, Clinton started pushing for NATO expansion, including Ukraine, to which many strategically thinking Americans strongly objected, and this is how the slippery road to the current crisis that might escalate into nuclear WWIII began. After gaining its independence in 1991, Ukraine could expect a bright future. Having vital industrial and agricultural sectors, a favorable climate, and fertile land, the country needed effective anti-corruption reforms, a certain level of autonomy for the regions with large Russian ethnic populations, and, most importantly, neutral status with no membership in any military blocs to become one of the most prosperous European states within its 1991 borders.

Instead, billions from the US, Canada, other Western countries, and George Soros were poured into Ukraine, not to boost its economy but to reformat public opinion, which overwhelmingly favored neutral status and against joining NATO. This money helped to instigate the regime change “Orange” revolution in 2004 and “Maidan” in 2014, which was directly coordinated by then-Vice President Joe Biden from the White House with Victoria Nuland on location in Kyiv. The new Ukrainian government that Washington selected immediately declared its intention to join NATO, but if not for this coup, there would be no war in Ukraine and no risk of nuclear WWIII.

To summarize, the US and Western policy of using Ukrainians as cannon fodder to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia denigrates and contradicts the fundamental spirit and soul of America itself. The country that claims its adherence to Western, or in broader terms Judeo-Christian, values provoked and keeps funding to prolong a war between two Christian nations that have lived together for over three centuries and are bound together by close historical, religious, economic, cultural, and family ties.

No one knows how it will end, but as the drums of World War III keep banging, those who are not among decision-makers or on the battlefields should at least try to clear the smog of this war.