Thomas Friedman is bitter.
Recently, as a reaction to the US peace plan in Ukraine, he awarded the President the fictional ‘Neville Chamberlain Prize’. Chamberlain wanted to preserve the empire by not going to war, and when he realized that he cannot do it because of externalities uncontrolled by him, he played for time to rapidly rearm the empire; the last true-blue Tory realist. Even Churchill considered him one of the finest imperial elites. John Charmley’s book on Chamberlain, for example, is one of the best examples of revisionist history. And Churchill did lose the empire after all. But let’s ignore all that for a moment.
Even for someone commenting on the narrow topic of Russian–American relations, Friedman’s history needs a little bit of polish. The idea that Russians are the orcs, the savage others in European policy, is to put it diplomatically, a post-Cold War midwittery. A true history of Russian–American relations would perhaps shed light on the historical rationale behind Russian threat perceptions, and its stance in the ongoing peace talks with Europe and the US. Relations between Russia and other major Western powers have historically been characterized less by consistent friendship or hostility than by shifting strategic calculations. Although often described as culturally aligned with Europe, Russia’s geopolitical behaviour has long been shaped by pragmatic concerns rather than stable affinities.
‘Relations between Russia and other major Western powers have historically been characterized less by consistent friendship or hostility than by shifting strategic calculations’
Consider the 18th and 19th-century history. Russia frequently aligned with France, opposed Britain and Persia, and later confronted the Ottoman Empire; yet it also cooperated with Britain against Napoleon and resisted British influence in Central Asia. Russia supported the American Revolution, and later, the Union during the US Civil War, largely to constrain British power. For much of the 19th century it functioned as a largely ‘satiated’ great power until the rise of Germany unsettled the European equilibrium, a dynamic well documented in scholarship on Russian realism and the Concert of Europe.
The Cold War introduced periods of intense confrontation, détente, and moments of acute nuclear risk, followed by episodic cooperation—such as Russia’s immediate support for the United States after the attacks of 9/11. At the same time, longstanding antagonisms toward regional neighbours, the legacies of a multiethnic imperial structure, and relatively low levels of religious observance complicate common assumptions about Russian identity and strategic culture. The prevailing narrative about Ukraine, in much of Western policy and academic writing, likewise, has long insisted on a straightforward causal chain: NATO moved east, Russia felt betrayed and encircled, and a revanchist Kremlin was the inevitable result. That monocausal interpretation is historically flawed.
Carefully correlating Russian evolving military doctrine and observable balancing behaviour with each distinct phase of NATO enlargement demonstrates that Moscow’s opposition has been overwhelmingly material, geographically grounded, and pragmatic rather than ideologically reflexive or revisionist. Russia has repeatedly shown itself capable of acquiescence when enlargement affected territories that did not directly infringe on vital, entrenched strategic assets. Russian aggression only materializes when it feels that something has jeopardized concrete interests: the naval access to the Black Sea through Crimea, defensible depth in the South Caucasus, secure land corridors to Kaliningrad, or the military–logistical lifeline running through eastern Ukraine. In short, Russian behaviour has been driven far more by classical great-power concerns over geography and relative capability than by an irrepressible urge to restore the Soviet empire or avenge a supposed civilizational humiliation.
‘Russian behaviour has been driven…by classical great-power concerns over geography and relative capability’
The range of verbal assurances offered to Soviet and later Russian leaders between 1990 and 1991, from Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Helmut Kohl to James Baker, François Mitterrand, Margaret Thatcher, Douglas Hurd, and George H W Bush, Western statesmen repeatedly insisted that German unification and the liberation of Eastern Europe would not be exploited to shift NATO’s military frontier eastward or impair Soviet security interests. Though never formalized in a binding treaty, these assurances were understood in Moscow as political commitments shaping the post-Cold War European order. The subsequent decision to enlarge NATO was therefore a profound breach of trust, even if Western legal scholars continue to maintain that no enforceable obligation ever existed, as the entity USSR itself collapsed, making any pledge void.
Moscow’s relative equanimity at the first wave of enlargement was also due to visible Western force reductions, institutional accommodation through the NATO–Russia Founding Act and Permanent Joint Council, and Russia’s own acute military weakness in the immediate post-Soviet decade. Boris Yeltsin publicly described the process as inevitable while quietly shifting Russia’s declared red line to the borders of the former Soviet Union itself.
A similar pattern of pragmatic accommodation characterized Russia’s response to the far more provocative second wave, completed in 2004, which for the first time incorporated former Soviet republics, most notably the three Baltic states. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 had temporarily aligned Russian and Western priorities around counter-terrorism, Vladimir Putin’s early foreign policy was overtly Western, and NATO continued to abstain from permanent combat deployments or nuclear weapons on the territory of new members. Russian political rhetoric during this period repeatedly emphasized that a NATO focused on fighting terrorism rather than containing Russia no longer constituted a meaningful threat.
Everything however changed with the prospect of Ukrainian and Georgian membership, explicitly endorsed in principle at the Bucharest Summit of 2008. Permanent air-policing missions over the Baltic, growing Western rhetorical and financial support for the colour revolutions, American missile-defence plans in Poland and the legal precedent of Kosovo of unilateral intervention convinced Moscow that vital interests are not menaced.
Interestingly, Russia used the exact same Kosovo-war rhetoric—though in reverse—during the brief war with Georgia in August 2008. Its subsequent sustained campaign to prevent Ukrainian NATO membership was not a reaction to enlargement as an abstract phenomenon, but to the imminent loss of strategic depth and critical military infrastructure. Later Russian military doctrines and national security strategies have consistently singled out the approach of NATO infrastructure to Russian borders and the hypothetical incorporation of Ukraine as primary threats, without retroactively decrying the earlier absorption of Central Europe or even the Baltic states as casus belli.
‘Moscow has repeatedly demonstrated a capacity for pragmatic accommodation’
Russia has therefore not reacted uniformly or indiscriminately to every eastward step taken by the Alliance. Moscow has repeatedly demonstrated a capacity for pragmatic accommodation when its core material interests remain undisturbed and when NATO’s posture appears defensively oriented rather than offensively configured. Aggression has been selective, geographically limited, and triggered only when those vital interests appeared imminently compromised.
For any future Western grand strategy, this historical record poses three interlocking strategic questions. First, whether the logic of perpetual enlargement contains within itself a natural limit beyond which further expansion becomes counter-productive. Second, whether an increasingly autonomous Europe will ever prove willing and able to assume primary responsibility for balancing Russia without permanent Anglo–American stewardship. Third, and most consequential, whether a stable European security architecture can ultimately accommodate a modest and clearly defined Russian sphere of influence in territories where Moscow already possesses entrenched bases and lines of communication, or whether the complete exclusion of Russia from the European balance is worth the manifest risk of protracted conflict.
The Russian–Western relationship is basically about geography. Culture, religion, or ethnicity do not form stable glues for alignment in international relations, and it’s very absurd hat Huntington’s worst book continues to gain periodic traction when virtually all historical evidence points in the opposite direction. Life—and international relations, and history—is not about ethnicity or religion; it is about interests. A Huntingtonian international relations is primitive. Any policy that mistakes moralistic or identitarian explanations for the material and territorial drivers that have shaped Moscow’s behaviour since the end of the Cold War risks becoming detached from reality—and therefore dangerously prone to miscalculation.
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