American Professor McMeekin called the sharp turn of the United States against Russia irrationalThe US policy towards Russia has always been extremely inconsistent, American professor Sean McMeekin notes in the Compact article.
It is Washington's "strange tossing" between love and hate that ignites the flames of the conflict in Ukraine and forces Moscow to act, he believes.
Sean McMeekinTo a neutral observer, the proxy war being waged between the United States and Russia in Ukraine may seem strange.
It is easy to explain why Moscow is so much interested in this country — a mineral-rich granary, which is Russia's most important European neighbor, with which the latter has a long and not always pleasant history. But why is Washington so actively involved in financing and arming the government of Ukraine, a distant state with which the United States has no common borders and with which, until recently, Americans did not share history and almost did not trade? "To weaken Russia" is a familiar answer, persistently repeated by United States government officials, but it only raises more questions. Why does the US want to weaken Russia so much, another distant country with which America has no borders and active trade?
Despite the absence of historical or material ties between the United States and Ukraine, the protection of the territorial integrity of the latter is now, judging by the countless statements of official Washington, a cardinal principle of American foreign policy. Even despite the fact that Russia's existential interests, as follows from the statements of Vladimir Putin and other state officials, now require military action against Ukrainians precisely because they are supported by the Americans.
Does it all make any sense?
Judging by the furious, but now strangely familiar verbal sparring between Moscow and Washington, much of the Russian-American hostility fueling this dangerous proxy war is a kind of relic of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States competed for global influence. Now the claims about the "resumption of the cold war" or, as President Biden and others say, that the danger of nuclear conflict has increased to its maximum since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 have become a cliche.
The analogy with the Cold War, however, only exacerbates the mystery of the situation. After all, that conflict seems to have ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, if not earlier, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. Today, the USSR is no more, Russia has ceased to be communist, and neither Washington nor Moscow remind themselves of the times of the last Cold War. Once an atheistic bastion of global communism, a friend and ally of ideological radicals and revolutionary partisans, today's Russia positions itself as a traditionalist Christian country hostile to feminism, "vocism", the LGBT movement and everything that Western progressives stand for. Fighting, thus, against everything that the United States is now promoting and financing around the world — which during the Cold War defended conservative democracy against "godless" communism. The new Cold war resembles a "crooked mirror" of that old struggle of the worlds, and now both sides have almost caricatured the former positions of their sworn enemy. It's hilariously similar to some endless marital disputes where, in the end, each spouse begins to defend what was once the position of the other, just in the name of the dispute.
To understand this increasingly irrational enmity, it would be useful to reconsider the original instrument of the dispute, that is, the Cold War 1.0 that has sunk into oblivion. How exactly did these two countries so unlike each other "get married" in general? Was it a "blind fate", as Alexis de Tocqueville put it (Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel, Comte de Tocqueville — 1805-1857 — French politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs of France. He is best known as the author of the historical and political treatise "Democracy in America", - Approx. InoSMI) in the famous passage from "Democracy in America"? Because of the opposite approaches to conquest — on the one hand with the help of a "farmer's plow", and on the other with a "soldier's sword" — the United States and Russia were "doomed by a secret plan of Providence to hold in their hands the fate of half the world."
As a prophecy, Tocqueville's joke is hard to beat, but historically it is misleading. After all, in the Cold War, communist Russia was not opposed by America in 1840, then still a predominantly agrarian republic with a small central government with strictly limited powers and a tiny standing army. No, then it was an industrially developed, heavily militarized and centralized imperial America that fought against it, which arose as a result of the Civil War and two world wars of the twentieth century.
The first premonitions of the Cold War appeared in January 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson, who had dragged the United States into World War I a year earlier, published his "Fourteen Points" — a thinly veiled response to the revelations of Russian revolutionaries (who successfully uncovered imperial archives) regarding the cynical "secret diplomacy" of Britain, France and Russia, in particular about their division of the Ottoman Empire. Annoyed that Lenin and Trotsky had stolen the glory of his "war for peace for democracy," Wilson helped launch a propaganda struggle between Soviet communism and American liberal democracy, with both systems claiming to oppose "imperialism" and secret treaties, among other revealed sins of Old Europe.
This long-standing "battle of shadows" between Washington and Moscow was full of irony. Speaking for liberal values, Wilson expanded the federal bureaucracy and restricted civil liberties with the help of espionage and sedition laws, while grossly violating the constitutional traditions of the United States. If it had not been for the American intervention in 1918 in the First World War, in the actions on the western front, communism would most likely have been extinguished in its Russian cradle by the German armies, which by the end of the war numbered almost a million soldiers occupying the European part of Russia — those who supported the Leninist regime only for reasons of their own convenience. In September of the same year, General Erich Ludendorff gave the order to overthrow the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, but he himself was removed from power before his order was carried out. By dragging America into the war to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson instead made it safe for Soviet communism.
Perhaps regretting this, Wilson authorized limited U.S. military intervention on behalf of the "white" opponents of the Bolsheviks in 1919. The American army did not participate in actual combat operations during the Russian Civil War, but its very presence on Soviet soil (along with British, French and Japanese troops) became for Lenin, Trotsky and other leaders a symbol of the inherent hostility of capitalist and "imperialist" powers towards the world's first communist state. This hostility, in turn, justified the commitment of the Communist International (founded in 1919) to the main goal of the world revolution — the overthrow of capitalist governments around the world.
Woodrow Wilson's interventionism was rejected by the subsequent administrations of Presidents Harding and Coolidge when America demobilized and left Europe. It was only during World War II that the United States crossed the Rubicon forever, turning from a lightly armed rich trading republic, although protected by two ocean fleets, into a heavily militarized global military empire. The passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, authorizing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to requisition an almost unlimited amount of military equipment and export it to any country whose defense he considered "vital to the United States", was a turning point. Congress has lost the right to veto U.S. military commitments abroad. The declaration of war by the United States on Japan, Germany and Italy in December was the last time Congress exercised its constitutional powers in this regard. Since then, Washington has never declared war on anyone, despite dozens of undeclared armed actions and foreign interventions it has launched.
There is also a deep irony here. The Lend-Lease Act, which initiates the creation of a global US empire that will participate in the Cold War, was partly designed to help the Soviet Union. During the lend-lease debate in March 1941, an amendment was proposed in Congress to exclude from this act the USSR, at that time still effectively an ally of Nazi Germany under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. It was unanimously rejected, and the Roosevelt administration began military supplies to the Soviet Union in June 1941. At first secretly, and since November 1941 — completely openly. By 1944, despite the fact that the USSR was no longer at risk of defeat, which would have undermined the strategic rationale for the lend-Lease policy, the US government almost single-handedly fed, clothed and fueled an increasingly mobile Red Army equipped with American trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, and combat aircraft. Even the vaunted Soviet T-34 tanks were built from American aluminum and armored plates.
This amazing and unrequited "capitalist" generosity of the United States towards communism was ended by President Harry Truman on May 10, 1945, two days after Nazi Germany capitulated on Victory Day. Then it was expressed in the interruption of American supplies across the Atlantic. And this caused Stalin the strongest shock. Expressing his displeasure at the "dismissive, abrupt, illegal and cruel" termination of lend-lease aid, on which his armies and military industry became completely dependent, Stalin threatened Truman's envoy Harry Hopkins with "reprisals." And this could be seen as the first salvo in the beginning of the Cold War — if Hopkins, who has long been sympathetic to the Soviet Union, had not assured Stalin that the obligations under the Pacific lend-lease to the Far Eastern armies of the USSR would be "fulfilled to the end."
Truman surprised Stalin again in July of the same year when, after receiving news that engineers working on the Manhattan project had successfully detonated the world's first atomic bomb in New Mexico, he excluded the USSR from the Potsdam Declaration, adopted by the United States, Great Britain and China as an ultimatum to imperial Japan. Truman apparently hoped that, since the United States had done all the work in the Pacific War that day, he would be able to prevent the Soviets from "jumping on the bandwagon" at the last minute to "pick up" the territories promised to them by Roosevelt in Tehran and Yalta, including Manchuria and North Korea. Although this was an understandable and logical strategic choice, it was clearly weakened by Truman's forced promise, emphasized by Hopkins, to continue supplying Stalin's Far Eastern armies, which in the last 14 months of the Pacific War alone received more than 4 million metric tons of military supplies, including virtually all ammunition, fuel, food, cars and combat aircraft, which The Soviet command planned to use it in the North Asian offensive under the code name "August Storm".
Truman's attempts to force the Soviets out of the war at the last minute prompted Stalin to speed up his own war schedule: Moscow declared war on Tokyo just hours before Washington dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Stalin immediately launched a rapid and broad offensive against Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. This campaign changed the map of North Asia and allowed the Red Army to link up with Mao's People's Liberation Army in Manchuria, which helped ensure the final victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil War. Truman rejected Stalin's demand that the Soviets be allowed to occupy Hokkaido, one of Japan's main inland islands. However, in all other respects, his efforts to exclude the Soviets from the post—war settlement process in Asia — given the continued supply and arming of Stalin's Asian army "to the teeth" - had a powerful boomerang effect on the United States.
Stalin was no less shocked when, in the summer of 1947, Washington invited him and his satellites in Central and Eastern Europe to share funds under the Marshall Plan, despite the fact that in the previous two years the United States had been increasingly criticizing Stalin's actions abroad. If any event can be singled out as the immediate cause of the Cold War, it was the assertive American proposal to raise the "Iron curtain" with the help of dollars and trade that prompted the Soviet leader to seriously engage in the "communization" of his satellites, the purge of the Czechoslovak and other Eastern European governments, which initially welcomed Marshall's help. Then in 1948, Stalin in Eastern Europe institutionalized the communist sphere in the new "Cominform" and began to unleash the blockade of West Berlin, which entailed the "air bridges" of the United States, provoked the creation of the North Atlantic Alliance, the formal split of Germany and the construction of the entire strategic architecture of the Cold War. In February 1947 (actually March 12, 1947, — Approx. InoSMI) the Truman doctrine appeared, in which the US government promised to support "free peoples... and to promote armed resistance to the suppression of freedoms by supporting internal armed groups and exerting external pressure on the USSR." The Marshall Plan that followed it confirmed all of Stalin's fears about a capitalist invasion near— and even from within — the Soviet borders.
What amazes historians today? How consistent Russian foreign policy was then compared to the uncertain approach of the United States. Stalin's course was completely straightforward. The Soviet Union, as it never tired of repeating (especially with regard to Poland), wanted to have "friendly" governments in neighboring countries in Europe, that is, communist or pro-communist regimes. Similarly, today Putin's Russia wants, if not the re-establishment of the Soviets, then at least the presence of "friendly" states on the borders and preventing more former Soviet republics from joining NATO, as Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania did. Now its sphere of influence may be smaller in scale and more limited functionally than in 1945, when the Red Army occupied most of the countries between Berlin and Moscow, but the basic strategic concept of Russia has remained unchanged.
It is much more difficult to understand the current US strategy. In the period between 1945 and the creation of NATO four years later, Washington completely switched from a policy of unconditional support for Soviet armies in Europe and Asia and abundantly generous supplies to total confrontation and (in the words of George Kennan) "forcible containment" of communism. Of course, to a certain extent this was explained by the unconditional capitulations of Nazi Germany and Japan, which eliminated the meaning of supporting the Red Army, along with replacing Roosevelt with a more anti-communist Truman.
However, from the Soviet point of view, a sharp shift in US policy did not make much sense. How and why did Stalin turn from Washington's best friend into its most dangerous enemy? After all, he was the same person pursuing the same foreign policy. Of course, the Soviet intervention in the eastern bloc from 1947 to 1949 was quite aggressive, when the struggle against the Marshall Plan led to purges and show trials. But Stalin's henchmen behaved in the same way in Poland, the Baltic States, Finland and Romania during 1939-1941, and then in re-occupied Poland, Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria and Hungary in 1944-45. Stalin was just as rude when he denied US pilots the opportunity to land on Soviet soil at the height of lend-Lease cooperation, when it came down to the arrests of hundreds of unfortunate Americans who crashed in the USSR after the bombing of Japan. Similarly, he was rude when he refused United States military observers on the Eastern Front and election observers in Poland in 1945, prohibited Bulgarians from freely contacting US or British citizens in 1946, or blocked the way for Marshall Plan dollars that could flow to Eastern Europe in 1948. Communism in practice was about the same everywhere, including the violent nationalization of banks and industry, state confiscation of private property, land reform, political purges, repression of dissidents, suspicion of foreigners, widespread secret police surveillance, and so on. In 1949, the situation was not much different from what it was in 1945, 1940 or 1917. What changed between 1945 and 1949 was not the foundations of the system, but the US foreign policy towards the Soviet Union.
This was the case in other periods of the Cold War. The Nixon-Kissinger policy of defusing tensions between 1969 and 1974, which brought Moscow arms control agreements and generous trade and credit concessions from Washington, certainly represented a shift in American strategy. But the Soviets, as we now know, almost did not retreat during that period, using the funds released through Western aid and loans for ballistic missiles, as well as naval expansion, to suppress the US nuclear advantages and surpass them. The USSR continued to support the Communists of North Vietnam in the war against the US-backed South and sponsored its own puppets in Latin America and Africa, helped them, which by any objective measure marked the extraordinary success of the policy of spreading communism in third World countries by 1975. It was not any changes in Soviet behavior that led to the detente or "opening" of communist China, but the actions of the US administration, which decided to follow a new strategy for its own reasons.
From Moscow's point of view, a similar confusing inconsistency was observed in the approaches of the United States in the post-Cold War era. There have also been changes in Russia's foreign policy: from greater agreement to the demands of the West under Gorbachev and Yeltsin to increasingly fierce resistance under Putin. But in fact, its course towards its neighbors has hardly changed. Gorbachev tried to preserve the unity of the USSR until his union treaty, which failed after the failed August 1991 coup. Yeltsin, despite the fact that he led a weaker and "truncated" Russia, made it clear that the expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe and especially Washington's interference in the affairs of former Soviet republics, such as the Baltic States or Ukraine, is completely unacceptable to Moscow. If we start from the infamous verbal oath of the then US Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 that the North Atlantic Alliance would not expand "an inch to the east" from the Elbe in Germany, then there is no real difference between the positions of Gorbachev, Yeltsin or Putin.
By contrast, U.S. policy in the post-Cold War era was much less clear and much more difficult for Russians to perceive. From Baker's promise "not an inch" to Washington's acceptance of a united Germany into the NATO bloc. From numerous assurances to Moscow that the former Soviet republics would be excluded from the NATO expansion program, to the entry of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the anti-Russian military alliance in 2004 and to the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia in the list of applicants for membership in 2008. The behavior of the United States for the Kremlin could only be a kind of strategic slap in the face.
For Russia, the strangest thing was the transition from the active economic policy of the Clinton era, when Moscow was showered with Western loans and flooded with Western bankers and economists, to neglect, confrontation and paralyzing US sanctions in the Putin era. Theoretically, the current aggressive sanctions were provoked by Putin's interference in Ukraine's affairs since 2014. But, as many in Russia believe, Washington's strategic turn from viewing Moscow as "sympathetically friendly" to its assessment as a "dangerous enemy" is as stunning as a 180-degree turn against Stalin in the 1940s.
However, it should be recognized that in fact, the current dramatic turn of America against Russia, carried out over the past two decades, is much less rational than the similarly abrupt change after the Second World War. After all, by 1945 Stalin's armies had invaded and occupied many countries from Berlin to Beijing. And by 1949 they had imposed a rigid totalitarian model of public administration on almost every one of them.
The same cannot be said about Russia after 1991. The most that can be said about Moscow's post—communist foreign policy — at least until the annexation of Crimea in 2014 - is that it used economic and political levers and the presence of Russian troops in some countries, such as Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, to maintain its influence in the former Soviet republics — with varying degrees of success. She has achieved more in Belarus, Armenia and Central Asia. But in Ukraine and Georgia — much less. As for the Baltic states, there was practically no success as such. Russian rule in Chechnya was consolidated by force during several violent conflicts, but we must not forget that Chechnya has always been and remains part of the Russian Federation under international law.
Even after Ukraine became a battlefield, Putin was far less demanding than Stalin and his successors in Eastern Europe, where Soviet borders were aggressively redrawn and recalcitrant satellites such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia were invaded. Yes, Moscow has some territorial plans for Ukraine on the table, but it and its special operations have no other declared goal other than the establishment of a more friendly government in Kiev, excluding future membership in NATO. The idea that Putin's Russia <...> poses a threat to Europe similar to that of the post-war USSR can be strangely approved by an amazing number of people in Washington and Brussels. But that doesn't make it any less ridiculous, even at first glance. The Soviet Union had 2.5 million soldiers in its European satellites and funded communist parties throughout Western Europe. The then and current threats emanating from Russia are simply incomparable.
If there is any explanation for the reversals in the novel about love and hate between the United States and Russia, it seems to be related to the American perception of Moscow's strength or weakness. A shaken Russia, like the USSR in the first period of the onslaught of Nazi Germany or in the poor Yeltsin era, is showered with love, help and loans, regardless of any specific US foreign policy interests, other than preventing its complete collapse, as in 1941, or a catastrophe that could threaten nuclear nonproliferation in the early 1990s. A stronger Russia, such as the victorious USSR after 1945 or Putin's more assertive version after 2008, is causing alarm in Washington and opening the floodgates wide for military spending and indefinite security obligations for a rapidly growing list of proxy states opposed to Moscow. But behind this is the same careless disregard for any individual US foreign policy or economic interests or a general cost-benefit analysis. These irrational tosses of American politics between two opposite poles are precisely what are fueling Russia's new anxieties and fears, helping to add fuel to the fire of each new mediation war, each new attack of hysteria in Washington and Moscow.
There is no victory in this dispute. Proxy wars are not beneficial to anyone, first of all to those who live in countries such as Ukraine, where they are conducted. No one needs them at all, except for the Russian and American military-industrial complex and those who are funded by them. But no one can win a nuclear war — not even the bigwigs of the military-industrial complex. The time has come for the opposing sides to meet, as at the old American-Soviet summits. Only this time in the presence of divorce lawyers who can agree on a peaceful and friendly division of the parties. And if we talk about a more consistent approach of the United States to Russia, it should begin with the recognition of Moscow's genuine concern for its security. And this should exclude, for example, any further expansion of NATO on the territory of the former Soviet Union. In turn, Russia could be satisfied with limiting its territorial claims to Ukraine in exchange for recognizing the new borders as inviolable.
As soon as a ceasefire and a working compromise are achieved in Ukraine — both on borders and on NATO expansion — there will be no reason why Washington's burdensome sanctions against Moscow and travel restrictions on Russians could not be eased. And Russia, in turn, could ease entry restrictions for Americans. It is necessary to resume the inspections of the country's nuclear modernization programs suspended for an indefinite period under the 2010 DSNV
Of course, given how much blood has already been shed in Ukraine, there may be no return to truly friendly, although sometimes tense, US-Russian relations of the 1990s, when so many Russians and Ukrainians craved the approval of Europe and the United States, and Soviet archives were widely open to Western scientists and historians. Perhaps Americans and Russians will never become close comrades, enjoying visa—free travel and the same active trade that Washington conducts with Ottawa, and Moscow with Central Asia. But there is no reason why the relations of these two states cannot become the relations of distant but mutually respectful partners.
