The Increasingly Assertive Japan-Taiwan Axis
7by Ted Galen Carpenter | Dec 24, 2025 | ANTIWAR.COM
It is increasingly apparent that the new political leaders in both Taiwan and Japan are adopting more assertive, even explicitly confrontational, policies toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Their moves are stoking geostrategic tensions throughout the western Pacific. Washington has long regarded Taipei and Tokyo as important U.S. strategic partners. However, the Trump administration also wants to discourage any new military crises in the region. Achieving such a balance may prove to be challenging.
Lai Ching-te (William Lai) who became Taiwan’s president in May 2024 is an even more outspoken advocate of getting explicit international recognition of the island’s sovereignty than was his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen. Both leaders are members of the officially pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), but Tsai aligned with the “light green” (more restrained and pragmatic) faction. Lai openly embraces the goal of Taiwan’s formal independence that the “deep green” faction pursues. His confrontational course seems aimed at securing eventual international recognition of Taiwan’s (currently de facto) independence and a firm commitment from the United States and its allies (especially Japan) to defend Taiwan from PRC coercion.
Not surprisingly, the Beijing government dislikes Lai even more intensely than it did Tsai. One of the first manifestations of the growing hostility was that the PRC’s menacing military maneuvers became larger and even more ominous than they were during Tsai’s years in office. Lyle Goldstein, a scholar on East Asia issues and Director of the Asia Program at the Defense Priorities think tank, voices deep concern about Lai’s goals and temperament. “Instead of taking a low profile and playing down any claims to Taiwan’s independent status like his more cautious DPP predecessor,” Goldstein contends, “Lai has lurched toward formal independence with a succession of speeches making the case for Taiwanese nationhood.” Indeed, Lai devoted nearly all of his initial national address to making the case for Taiwan’s right to sovereignty. As one prominent Taiwanese columnist noted: “Never before has a Taiwanese president devoted an entire speech to laying out clearly, point-by-point and unequivocally how Taiwan is unquestionably a sovereign nation.”
Immediately after his summit meeting with PRC President Xi Jinping in early November 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump stated that that he had received a pledge from Xi that the PRC would not take any military action to change Taiwan’s political status during the remainder of Trump’s term. Even if Trump correctly assessed the PRC leader’s comment (which is uncertain, since neither the U.S. nor PRC official summaries of the summit’s proceedings mention such a promise), Xi might find it extremely difficult to adhere to a policy of restraint if Lai continues to push the envelope on formal independence.
Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, appears to share Lai’s determination to resist Beijing’s pressure tactics. Takaichi has made it clear that her country is committed to preserving at least the status quo of Taiwan’s de facto independence. During a parliamentary debate, she even crossed a longstanding line that Beijing had drawn. Asked repeatedly about a hypothetical Taiwan security contingency, Takaichi abandoned Tokyo’s usual diplomatic evasions and declared that a military crisis over the island would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, thereby potentially triggering collective self-defense and direct Japanese military involvement.
Beijing’s angry response was not long in coming. Warwick Powell, a scholar at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, noted that Chinese coastguard vessels soon “conducted prolonged patrols in the waters around the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, a reminder that Beijing can tighten the screws in the East China Sea whenever it wishes.” Moreover, “Japan suddenly looked isolated. Washington, Tokyo’s treaty ally, offered no public support and quietly proceeded with the planned withdrawal of intermediate-range missiles it had only recently deployed to Okinawa.”
Other Japanese officials, including Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi sought to clarify (modestly soften) the prime minister’s comments regarding Taiwan. Beijing did not seem mollified by Tokyo’s conciliatory gestures, however. On December 14, 2025, the PRC government imposed sanctions on the former chief of staff of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, Shigeru Iwasaki.
Writing in the December 16, 2025, issue of the National Interest, Paul Heer, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, describes some of the mounting policy dilemmas for Japan and the United States with respect to Taiwan’s current and future political status. Not surprisingly, the biggest concern of both governments is about the nightmare of a massive PRC military offensive against the island. However, Heer contends that a more subtle important development needs to receive greater attention. “The preoccupation in Washington and Tokyo with a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan obfuscates (intentionally or otherwise) the erosion of the United States and Japanese “one China” policies. It also diverts attention from Taipei’s own retreat from a “one China” policy in favor of a de facto “one China, one Taiwan” policy—which, in Beijing’s view, the United States and Japan are tacitly accepting through their apparent acquiescence.” Moreover, a focus on the apocalyptic war scenario “diverts attention from Washington’s and Tokyo’s own drift toward de facto “one China, one Taiwan” policies, as reflected by their nascent preference for Taiwan’s long-term separation from China.”
Heer is correct about the probable strong response from both Japan and the United States to an outright PRC military assault on Taiwan—despite the Trump administration’s rather surprising decision to withdraw the intermediate-range missiles from Okinawa. However, Beijing could take a number of milder coercive measures against the island, including imposing a partial naval blockade as an initial warning. Xi’s government also could escalate tensions with Japan. Intensifying the bilateral territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkako Islands could be especially tempting for Beijing. Those uninhabited spits of land occupy a strategic location, and there are credible indications that the surrounding waters may contain sizable deposits of valuable minerals. Yet, absent a Chinese attempt to seize the islands from Japan’s administrative control, both Tokyo and Washington would be unlikely to mount a major military response to Beijing’s naval maneuvers or depredations.
The governments of Taiwan and Japan have now staked out rather hardline positions, and the level of military cooperation between Taipei and Tokyo clearly is on the rise. However, the Trump administration seems to prefer an indefinite prolongation of the status quo regarding the issue of Taiwan’s political status. A key question is whether political leaders in Taiwan and Japan are inclined to increase the current level of their strategic cooperation without a clear signal from Washington that the United States will support such a change regardless of the risk. The Trump administration needs to clarify U.S. policy—and do so soon.
Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute. He is also a contributing editor to National Security Journal and The American Conservative. He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,600 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).
Thursday, December 25, 2025
ICYMI
“Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?” asked Thierry Breton, a former EU commissioner now barred from entering the US.
Thierry Breton, then part of the European Commission, spoke during a press briefing on March 30, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium.
(Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
Jessica Corbett
Dec 24, 2025
European Union leaders and others around the world this week condemned President Donald Trump’s administration for imposing a travel ban on a former EU commissioner and leaders of nongovernmental groups that fight against disinformation and hate speech—or, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them, “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”
Rubio said in a Tuesday statement that his department “is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies.”
The five people barred from the United States are Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate; Clare Melford, another Brit from the Global Disinformation Index; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of the German group HateAid; and Thierry Breton, a French leader who helped craft the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as a commissioner.
“Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?” Breton wrote on X—a social media platform that belongs to erstwhile Trump ally Elon Musk and was recently fined €120 million, or $140 million, for violating DSA’s transparency obligations.
“As a reminder: 90% of the European Parliament—our democratically elected body—and all 27 member states unanimously voted the DSA,” Breton noted. “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’”
As Anda Bologa, a senior researcher with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, explained earlier this year, “the DSA tackles illegal or demonstrably harmful activity—terrorist propaganda, child sexual abuse material, and foreign-backed election meddling.” The 2022 law also “mandates that platforms publish transparency reports on takedown requests, justify their decisions, and offer users appeal mechanisms.”
In a Tuesday statement, the European Commission said it “strongly condemns” the US travel ban, adding: “Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe and a shared core value with the United States across the democratic world. The EU is an open, rules-based single market, with the sovereign right to regulate economic activity in line with our democratic values and international commitments.”
“Our digital rules ensure a safe, fair, and level playing field for all companies, applied fairly and without discrimination,” the commission continued. “We have requested clarifications from the US authorities and remain engaged. If needed, we will respond swiftly and decisively to defend our regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted the statement on X, and various other EU leaders shared similar messages.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said that “the entry bans imposed by the USA, including those against the chairpersons of HateAid, are not acceptable. The Digital Services Act ensures that everything that is illegal offline is also illegal online.”
“The DSA was democratically adopted by the EU for the EU—it does not have extraterritorial effect,” he continued. “We intend to address other interpretations fundamentally with the USA in the transatlantic dialogue, in order to strengthen our partnership.”
The German campaigners, Ballon and von Hodenberg, said in a statement that “we will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression.”
French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that “I have just spoken with Thierry Breton and thanked him for his significant contributions in the service of Europe. We will stand firm against pressure and will protect Europeans.”
Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International—which supports the DSA—wrote on X: “Now the US is sanctioning a former EU official and several heads of NGOs monitoring hate speech and disinformation—on the ground that they are censoring American speech! Laughable. Social media platforms must be regulated. Better and more. Not less.”
Due to Brexit, the DSA notably does not apply to the United Kingdom, but that didn’t spare the two UK campaigners targeted by the Trump administration. A spokesperson from Melford’s group told the BBC that “the visa sanctions announced today are an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.”
“The Trump administration is, once again, using the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with,” the spokeperson added. “Their actions today are immoral, unlawful, and un-American.”
Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey running to return to the House of Reprentatives, called out the State Deparment he previously served in under the Obama administration for sanctioning leaders of groups “that flag instances of antisemitism, harm to children, deep fakes, and vaccine disinformation online.”
“Most Americans want online platforms that are safer for our kids, with less hateful and harmful content,” he added. “It is not censorship to urge social media and AI companies to enforce their own rules against these things! The State Department’s action is a blatant attack on free speech.”
“Most Americans want online platforms that are safer for our kids, with less hateful and harmful content,” he added. “It is not censorship to urge social media and AI companies to enforce their own rules against these things! The State Department’s action is a blatant attack on free speech.”
Earlier this month, the US advocacy group Free Press released a report detailing Trump’s “war on free speech” based on “more than 500 reports of verbal threats, executive orders, presidential memoranda, statements from the White House, actions by regulators and agencies, military and law enforcement deployment and activities, litigation, removal of website language on .gov websites, removal of official history and information at national parks and museums, and discontinued data collection by the federal government.”
The report says that “while the US government has made efforts throughout this nation’s history to censor people’s expression and association—be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress—the Trump administration’s incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive, and escalating.”
Kafkaesque West: From the Rule of Law to the Age of Unpersons
December 25, 2025
Photo by Rene Böhmer
A passage from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale haunts me often: “That was when they suspended the Constitution… There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home… watching television… There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.” Today, the enemy list is long: Russia, China, Iran, Hamas—you choose! Our screens have changed, but our passivity hasn’t. We no longer watch TV; we scroll, distracted and numb, as freedoms erode in silence. From this passivity, society has been hollowed out: what remains are not citizens, but masses—zombified, compliant, and increasingly disposable.
The immediate trigger for this reflection is the EU’s recent adoption of so-called “restrictive measures,” championed by Kaja Kallas and wrapped in Ursula von der Leyen’s Orwellian “Democracy Shield.” Yet the phenomenon is not new, only more visible. The quiet, extrajudicial punishment of individuals has been unfolding for years. The recent sanctioning of Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss intelligence officer and frequent podcast guest, disturbed parts of the alternative media precisely because he is “one of us” (a Westerner, not a foreign dissident). His case is not unique; he is one of nearly sixty individuals now branded as threats simply for speaking critically.
What do these “measures” involve? A total freeze on assets, a ban on earning income, and revocation of freedom of movement within the EU. Imagine being cut off from your own bank account, unable to work, stranded wherever you happened to be when the order dropped. Sounds scary indeed! Orwell had a word for such people: unperson.
This is especially jarring given the EU’s self-image as a “value-based community,” an exporter of democracy and rule of law. How did it reach a point where critical intellectuals are treated as security threats? The EU extends its punitive arm beyond its borders, pressuring Western Balkan states, at summits and in communiqués, to adopt similar measures as a condition of alignment. In effect, it is saying: “to be like us, you must first learn to erase your own.” Some of us are already potential unpersons.
Worse still, these measures operate outside the law. The decisions of the Council of the EU on foreign and security policy are exempt from judicial review. There is no trial, no appeal, no definition of the offense. Acts like “spreading disinformation” or promoting “pro-Russian narratives” become grounds for punishment—not because they are crimes, but because they are deemed inconvenient. This violates foundational legal principles: nullum crimen sine lege (no crime without law), presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, and the right to due process. We are witnessing the collapse of justice into arbitrary power. A reality so absurd it is Kafkaesque.
Sadly, this is nothing new. Recall Julian Assange, imprisoned for exposing war crimes. Or more recently, French ICC judge Nicolas Guillou, sanctioned by the US for seeking arrest warrants against Israeli leaders over Gaza. As Varoufakis pointed out, Europe failed to defend its own citizens. Previously, Germany had banned Varoufakis from speaking on genocide; similar threats target UN officials like Francesca Albanese. The EU, under Kallas, has not resisted this drift; it has refined it, sanctioning its own citizens alongside Russians and Ukrainians. Once, we mocked Kyiv for compiling “pro-Russian”blacklists. Now, the EU has “Ukrainized” itself, adopting and upgrading those very practices.
We don’t even have records or know how many have been sanctioned. An Italian colleague recently recounted how her foundation’s funds were frozen years ago for collaborating with peace groups from Iran and Palestine. Today, people lose jobs for wearing a keffiyeh or expressing solidarity with Gaza. The pattern is clear: dissent is being criminalized under the guise of security.
The fault is ours. We react only to individual cases—usually when the threat nears us. But this is systemic violence against freedom itself. It reminds us of the old warning: “First they came for…”
I live in what can only be described as a semi-colony of the US, the EU, or both (the distinction blurs daily). In the “damned yard” of Balkan political life, sovereignty was surrendered long ago, with little protest. Cancellation is routine. The old servant mentality prevails: “stay quiet; it could be worse.” Now, the worst arrives not with tanks, but with soft power: NGOs, embassies, and technocratic projects that reframe censorship as “resilience.”
Narratives are shaped from abroad. USAID, NED, and Western NGOs and foundations mold young minds. One of my best students just received a human rights award from the German Embassy, days after “restrictive measures” were unveiled. He envisions himself as a future leader, yet says nothing about the rights suspended in the EU he idolizes.
Even more alarming is when local elites internalize this logic. The Macedonian parliament recently passed a resolution banning the opposition from spreading “disinformation”—a euphemism for thought control. Years ago, an NGO carried out a project called ШТЕТ-НА (“Harm-Tive”), aimed at identifying narratives “harmful” to democracy in a state where democracy is already captured. Recently, the UK ambassador announced a new two-year TRACE project along similar lines, with the prime minister smiling beside them. The irony is cruel: society is already silent. Intellectuals hide in ivory towers or mouse holes —or profiteer. Media self-censor. People scroll.
Figures like Baud or Guillou matter not as individuals, but as warnings. Speaking the truth has become dangerous. Months ago, while helping build a multipolar peace network, I argued that solidarity mechanisms were essential, because commitment to peace is now a risk. Some Western colleagues probably perceived me as a coward or paranoid. They didn’t know my second name is Cassandra.
The greatest irony? I learned courage, critical thinking, and intellectual honesty under socialism in Yugoslavia. My father’s ethos was to speak truth to power. That remains mine. For decades, I taught a university course on the European political system and never failed to understand the EU for what it truly is: a corporate-colonial-imperial project cloaked in the rhetoric of peace and justice. Not because I am particularly clever, but because I retained the childlike freedom to declare: the emperor has no clothes.
Now that we all see him naked, will we act? Or will we hide, scroll, and stay silent… until they come for us too?
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
European Russophobia and Europe’s Rejection of Peace
A Two-Century Failure
LONG READ
Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven profoundly self-defeating. From the nineteenth century to the present, Russia’s security concerns have been treated not as legitimate interests to be negotiated within a broader European order, but as moral transgressions to be resisted, contained, or overridden. This pattern has persisted across radically different Russian regimes—Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet—suggesting that the problem lies not primarily in Russian ideology, but in Europe’s enduring refusal to recognize Russia as a legitimate and equal security actor.
My argument is not that Russia has been entirely benign or trustworthy. Rather, it is that Europe has consistently applied double standards in the interpretation of security. Europe treats its own use of force, alliance-building, and imperial or post-imperial influence as normal and legitimate, while construing comparable Russian behavior—especially near Russia’s own borders—as inherently destabilizing and invalid. This asymmetry has narrowed diplomatic space, delegitimized compromise, and made war more likely. Likewise, this self-defeating cycle remains the defining characteristic of European-Russian relations in the twenty-first century.
A recurring failure throughout this history has been Europe’s inability—or refusal—to distinguish between Russian aggression and Russian security-seeking behavior. In multiple periods, actions interpreted in Europe as evidence of inherent Russian expansionism were, from Moscow’s perspective, attempts to reduce vulnerability in an environment perceived as increasingly hostile. Meanwhile, Europe consistently interpreted its own alliance building, military deployments, and institutional expansion as benign and defensive, even when these measures directly reduced Russian strategic depth. This asymmetry lies at the heart of the security dilemma that has repeatedly escalated into conflict: one side’s defense is treated as legitimate, while the other side’s fear is dismissed as paranoia or bad faith.
Western Russophobia should not be understood primarily as emotional hostility toward Russians or Russian culture. Instead, it operates as a structural prejudice embedded in European security thinking: the assumption that Russia is the exception to normal diplomatic rules. While other great powers are presumed to have legitimate security interests that must be balanced and accommodated, Russia’s interests are presumed illegitimate unless proven otherwise. This assumption survives changes in regime, ideology, and leadership. It transforms policy disagreements into moral absolutes and renders compromise as suspect. As a result, Russophobia functions less as a sentiment than as a systemic distortion—one that repeatedly undermines Europe’s own security.
I trace this pattern across four major historical arcs. First, I examine the nineteenth century, beginning with Russia’s central role in the Concert of Europe after 1815 and its subsequent transformation into Europe’s designated menace. The Crimean War emerges as the founding trauma of modern Russophobia: a war of choice pursued by Britain and France despite the availability of diplomatic compromise, driven by the West’s moralized hostility and imperial anxiety rather than unavoidable necessity. The Pogodin memorandum of 1853 on the West’s double standard, featuring Tsar Nicholas I’s famous marginal note—“This is the whole point”—serves not merely as an anecdote, but as an analytical key to Europe’s double standards and Russia’s understandable fears and resentments.
Second, I turn to the revolutionary and interwar periods, when Europe and the United States moved from rivalry with Russia to direct intervention in Russia’s internal affairs. I examine in detail the Western military interventions during the Russian Civil War, the refusal to integrate the Soviet Union into a durable collective-security system in the 1920s and 1930s, and the catastrophic failure to ally against fascism, drawing especially on the archival work of Michael Jabara Carley. The result was not the containment of Soviet power, but the collapse of European security and the devastation of the continent itself in World War II.
Third, the early Cold War presented what should have been a decisive corrective moment; yet, Europe again rejected peace when it could have been secured. Although the Potsdam conference reached an agreement on German demilitarization, the West subsequently reneged. Seven years later, the West similarly rejected the Stalin Note, which offered German reunification based on neutrality. The dismissal of reunification by Chancellor Adenauer—despite clear evidence that Stalin’s offer was genuine—cemented Germany’s postwar division, entrenched the bloc confrontation, and locked Europe into decades of militarization.
Finally, I analyze the post-Cold War era, when Europe was offered its clearest opportunity to escape this destructive cycle. Gorbachev’s vision of a “Common European Home” and the Charter of Paris articulated a security order based on inclusion and indivisibility. Instead, Europe chose NATO expansion, institutional asymmetry, and a security architecture built around Russia rather than with it. This choice was not accidental. It reflected an Anglo-American grand strategy—articulated most explicitly by Zbigniew Brzezinski—that treated Eurasia as the central arena of global competition and Russia as a power to be prevented from consolidating security or influence.
The consequences of this long pattern of disdain for Russian security concerns are now visible with brutal clarity. The war in Ukraine, the collapse of nuclear arms control, Europe’s energy and industrial shocks, Europe’s new arms race, the EU’s political fragmentation, and Europe’s loss of strategic autonomy are not aberrations. They are the cumulative costs of two centuries of Europe’s refusal to take Russia’s security concerns seriously.
My conclusion is that peace with Russia does not require naïve trust. It requires the recognition that durable European security cannot be built by denying the legitimacy of Russian security interests. Until Europe abandons this reflex, it will remain trapped in a cycle of rejecting peace when it is available—and paying ever higher prices for doing so.
The Origins of Structural Russophobia
The recurrent European failure to build peace with Russia is not primarily a product of Putin, communism, or even twentieth-century ideology. It is much older—and it is structural. Repeatedly, Russia’s security concerns have been treated by Europe not as legitimate interests subject to negotiation, but as moral transgressions. In this sense, the story begins with the nineteenth-century transformation of Russia from a co-guarantor of Europe’s balance into the continent’s designated menace.
After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Russia was not peripheral to Europe; it was central. Russia bore a decisive share of the burden in defeating Napoleon, and the Tsar was a principal architect of the post-Napoleonic settlement. The Concert of Europe was built on an implicit proposition: peace requires the great powers to accept one another as legitimate stakeholders and to manage crises by consultation rather than by moralized demonology. Yet, within a generation, a counterproposition gained strength in British and French political culture: that Russia was not a normal great power but a civilizational danger—one whose demands, even when local and defensive, should be treated as inherently expansionist and therefore unacceptable.
That shift is captured with extraordinary clarity in a document highlighted by Orlando Figes in The Crimean War: A History (2010) as being written at the hinge point between diplomacy and war: Mikhail Pogodin’s memorandum to Tsar Nicholas I in 1853. Pogodin lists episodes of Western coercion and imperial violence—far-flung conquests and wars of choice—and contrasts them with Europe’s outrage at Russian actions in adjacent regions:
France takes Algeria from Turkey, and almost every year England annexes another Indian principality: none of this disturbs the balance of power; but when Russia occupies Moldavia and Wallachia, albeit only temporarily, that disturbs the balance of power. France occupies Rome and stays there several years during peacetime: that is nothing; but Russia only thinks of occupying Constantinople, and the peace of Europe is threatened. The English declare war on the Chinese, who have, it seems, offended them: no one has the right to intervene; but Russia is obliged to ask Europe for permission if it quarrels with its neighbour. England threatens Greece to support the false claims of a miserable Jew and burns its fleet: that is a lawful action; but Russia demands a treaty to protect millions of Christians, and that is deemed to strengthen its position in the East at the expense of the balance of power.
Pogodin concludes: “We can expect nothing from the West but blind hatred and malice,” to which Nicholas famously wrote in the margin: “This is the whole point.”
The Pogodin–Nicholas exchange matters because it frames the recurring pathology that returns in every major episode that follows. Europe would repeatedly insist on the universal legitimacy of its own security claims while treating Russia’s security claims as phony or suspect. This stance creates a particular kind of instability: it makes compromise politically illegitimate in Western capitals, causing diplomacy to collapse not because a bargain is impossible, but because acknowledging Russia’s interests is treated as a moral error.
The Crimean War is the first decisive manifestation of this dynamic. While the proximate crisis involved the Ottoman Empire’s decline and disputes over religious sites, the deeper issue was whether Russia would be allowed to secure a recognized position in the Black Sea–Balkan sphere without being treated as a predator. Modern diplomatic reconstructions emphasize that the Crimean crisis differed from earlier “Eastern crises” because the Concert’s cooperative habits were already eroding, and British opinion had swung toward an extreme anti-Russian posture that narrowed the room for settlement.
What makes the episode so telling is that a negotiated outcome was available. The Vienna Note was intended to reconcile Russian concerns with Ottoman sovereignty and preserve peace. However, it collapsed amid distrust and political incentives for escalation. The Crimean War followed. It was not “necessary” in any strict strategic sense; it was made likely because British and French compromise with Russia had become politically toxic. The consequences were self-defeating for Europe: massive casualties, no durable security architecture, and the entrenchment of an ideological reflex that treated Russia as the exception to normal great-power bargaining. In other words, Europe did not achieve security by rejecting Russia’s security concerns. Rather, it created a longer cycle of hostility that made later crises harder to manage
The West’s Military Campaign Against Bolshevism
This cycle carried forward into the revolutionary rupture of 1917. When Russia’s regime type changed, the West did not shift from rivalry to neutrality; instead, it moved toward active intervention, treating the existence of a sovereign Russian state outside Western tutelage as intolerable.
The Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War produced a complex conflict involving Reds, Whites, nationalist movements, and foreign armies. Crucially, the Western powers did not simply “watch” the outcome. They intervened militarily in Russia across vast spaces—North Russia, the Baltic approaches, the Black Sea, Siberia, and the Far East—under justifications that rapidly shifted from wartime logistics to regime change.
One can acknowledge the standard “official” rationale for initial intervention: the fear that war supplies would fall into German hands after Russia’s exit from World War I, and the desire to re-open an Eastern Front. Yet, once Germany surrendered in November 1918, the intervention did not cease; it mutated. This transformation explains why the episode matters so profoundly: it reveals a willingness, even amidst the devastation of World War I, to use force to shape Russia’s internal political future.
David Foglesong’s America’s Secret War against Bolshevism (1995)—published by UNC Press and still the standard scholarly reference for U.S. policy—captures this precisely. Foglesong frames the U.S. intervention not as a confused side-show, but as a sustained effort aimed at preventing Bolshevism from consolidating power. Recent high-quality narrative history has further brought this episode back into public view; notably, Anna Reid’s A Nasty Little War (2024) describes the Western intervention as a poorly executed yet deliberate effort to overturn the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The geographic scope itself is instructive, for it undermines later Western claims that Russia’s fears were mere paranoia. Allied forces landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk to operate in North Russia; in Siberia, they entered through Vladivostok and along the rail corridors; Japanese forces deployed on a massive scale in the Far East; and in the south, landings and operations around Odessa and Sevastopol. Even a basic overview of the intervention’s dates and theaters—from November 1917 through the early 1920s—demonstrates the persistence of the foreign presence and the vastness of its range.
Nor was this merely “advice” or a symbolic presence. Western forces supplied, armed, and in some instances effectively supervised White formations. The intervening powers became enmeshed in the moral and political ugliness of White politics, including reactionary programs and violent atrocities. This reality renders the episode particularly corrosive to Western moral narratives: the West did not merely oppose Bolshevism; it often did so by aligning with forces whose brutality and war aims sat uneasily with later Western claims to liberal legitimacy.
From Moscow’s perspective, this intervention confirmed the warning issued by Pogodin decades earlier: Europe and the United States were prepared to use force to determine whether Russia would be allowed to exist as an autonomous power. This episode became foundational to Soviet memory, reinforcing the conviction that Western powers had attempted to strangle the revolution in its cradle. It demonstrated that Western moral rhetoric concerning peace and order could seamlessly coexist with coercive campaigns when Russian sovereignty was at stake.
The intervention also produced a decisive second-order consequence. By entering Russia’s civil war, the West inadvertently strengthened Bolshevik legitimacy domestically. The presence of foreign armies and foreign-backed White forces allowed the Bolsheviks to claim they were defending Russian independence against imperial encirclement. Historical accounts consistently note how effectively the Bolsheviks exploited the Allied presence for propaganda and legitimacy. In other words, the attempt to “break” Bolshevism helped consolidate the very regime it sought to destroy
This dynamic reveals the precise cycle of history: Russophobia proves strategically counterproductive for Europe. It drives Western powers toward coercive policies that do not resolve the challenge but exacerbate it. It generates Russian grievances and security fears that later Western leaders will dismiss as irrational paranoia. Furthermore, it narrows future diplomatic space by teaching Russia—regardless of its regime—that Western promises of settlement may be insincere.
By the early 1920s, as foreign forces withdrew and the Soviet state consolidated, Europe had already made two fateful choices that would resonate for the next century. First, it had helped foster a political culture that transformed manageable disputes—like the Crimean crisis—into major wars by refusing to treat Russian interests as legitimate. Second, it demonstrated through military intervention a willingness to use force not merely to counter Russian expansion, but to shape Russian sovereignty and regime outcomes. These choices did not stabilize Europe; rather, they sowed the seeds for subsequent catastrophes: the interwar breakdown of collective security, the Cold War’s permanent militarization, and the post-Cold War order’s return to frontier escalation.
Collective Security and the Choice Against Russia
By the mid-1920s, Europe confronted a Russia that had survived every attempt—revolution, civil war, famine, and direct foreign military intervention—to destroy it. The Soviet state that emerged was poor, traumatized, and deeply suspicious—but also unmistakably sovereign. At precisely this moment, Europe faced a choice that would recur repeatedly: whether to treat this Russia as a legitimate security actor whose interests had to be incorporated into European order, or as a permanent outsider whose concerns could be ignored, deferred, or overridden. Europe chose the latter, and the costs proved enormous.
The legacy of the Allied interventions during the Russian Civil War cast a long shadow over all subsequent diplomacy. From Moscow’s perspective, Europe had not merely disagreed with Bolshevik ideology; it had attempted to decide Russia’s internal political future by force. This experience mattered profoundly. It shaped Soviet assumptions about Western intentions and created a deep skepticism toward Western assurances. Rather than recognizing this history and seeking reconciliation, European diplomacy often behaved as if Soviet mistrust were irrational—a pattern that would persist into the Cold War and beyond.
Throughout the 1920s, Europe oscillated between tactical engagement and strategic exclusion. Treaties such as Rapallo (1922) demonstrated that Germany, itself a pariah after Versailles, could pragmatically engage with Soviet Russia. Yet for Britain and France, engagement with Moscow remained provisional and instrumental. The USSR was tolerated when it served British and French interests and sidelined when it did not. No serious effort was made to integrate Russia into a durable European security architecture as an equal.
This ambivalence hardened into something far more dangerous and self-destructive in the 1930s. While the rise of Hitler posed an existential threat to Europe, the continent’s leading powers repeatedly treated Bolshevism as the greater danger. This was not merely rhetorical; it shaped concrete policy choices—alliances foregone, guarantees delayed, and deterrence undermined.
It is essential to underscore that this was not merely an Anglo-American failure, nor a story in which Europe was passively swept along by ideological currents. European governments exercised agency, and they did so decisively—and disastrously. France, Britain, and Poland repeatedly made strategic choices that excluded the Soviet Union from European security arrangements, even when Soviet participation would have strengthened deterrence against Hitler’s Germany. French leaders preferred a system of bilateral guarantees in Eastern Europe that preserved French influence but avoided security integration with Moscow. Poland, with the tacit backing of London and Paris, refused transit rights to Soviet forces even to defend Czechoslovakia, prioritizing its fear of Soviet presence over the imminent danger of German aggression. These were not small decisions. They reflected a European preference for managing Hitlerian revisionism over incorporating Soviet power, and for risking Nazi expansion rather than legitimizing Russia as a security partner. In this sense, Europe did not merely fail to build collective security with Russia; it actively chose an alternative security logic that excluded Russia and ultimately collapsed under its own contradictions.
Here, Michael Jabara Carley’s archival work is decisive. His scholarship demonstrates that the Soviet Union, particularly under Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, made sustained, explicit, and well-documented efforts to build a system of collective security against Nazi Germany. These were not vague gestures. They included proposals for mutual assistance treaties, military coordination, and explicit guarantees for states such as Czechoslovakia. Carley shows that Soviet entry into the League of Nations in 1934 was accompanied by genuine Russian attempts to operationalize collective deterrence, not simply to seek legitimacy.
However, these efforts collided with a Western ideological hierarchy in which anti-communism trumped anti-fascism. In London and Paris, political elites feared that an alliance with Moscow would legitimize Bolshevism domestically and internationally. As Carley documents, British and French policymakers repeatedly worried less about Hitler’s threats than about the political consequences of cooperation with the USSR. The Soviet Union was treated not as a necessary partner against a common threat, but as a liability whose inclusion would “contaminate” European politics.
This hierarchy had profound strategic consequences. The policy of appeasement toward Germany was not merely a misreading of Hitler; it was the product of a worldview that treated Nazi revisionism as potentially manageable, while treating Soviet power as inherently subversive. Poland’s refusal to allow Soviet troops transit rights to defend Czechoslovakia—maintained with tacit Western support—is emblematic. European states preferred the risk of German aggression to the certainty of Soviet involvement, even when Soviet involvement was explicitly defensive.
The culmination of this failure came in 1939. The Anglo-French negotiations with the Soviet Union in Moscow were not sabotaged by Soviet duplicity, contrary to later mythology. They failed because Britain and France were unwilling to make binding commitments or to recognize the USSR as an equal military partner. Carley’s reconstruction shows that the Western delegations to Moscow arrived without negotiating authority, without urgency, and without political backing to conclude a real alliance. When the Soviets repeatedly asked the essential question of any alliance—Are you prepared to act?—the answer, in practice, was no.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that followed has been used ever since as retroactive justification for Western distrust. Carley’s work reverses that logic. The pact was not the cause of Europe’s failure; it was the consequence. It emerged after years of the West’s refusal to build collective security with Russia. It was a brutal, cynical, and tragic decision—but one taken in a context where Britain, France, and Poland had already rejected peace with Russia in the only form that might have stopped Hitler.
The result was catastrophic. Europe paid the price not only in blood and destruction but in the loss of agency. The war that Europe failed to prevent destroyed its power, exhausted its societies, and reduced the continent to the primary battlefield of superpower rivalry. Once again, rejecting peace with Russia did not produce security; it produced a far worse war under far worse conditions.
One might have expected that the sheer scale of this disaster would have forced a rethinking of Europe’s approach to Russia after 1945. It did not.
From Potsdam to NATO: The Architecture of Exclusion
The immediate postwar years were marked by a rapid transition from alliance to confrontation. Even before Germany surrendered, Churchill shockingly instructed British war planners to consider an immediate conflict with the Soviet Union. “Operation Unthinkable,” drafted in 1945, envisioned using Anglo-American power—and even rearmed German units—to impose Western will on Russia in 1945 or soon after. While the plan was deemed to be militarily unrealistic and was ultimately shelved, its very existence reveals how deeply ingrained the assumption had become that Russian power was illegitimate and must be constrained by force if necessary.
Western diplomacy with the Soviet Union similarly failed. Europe should have recognized that the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of defeating Hitler—suffering 27 million casualties—and that Russia’s security concerns regarding German rearmament were entirely real. Europe should have internalized the lesson that durable peace required the explicit accommodation of Russia’s core security concerns, above all the prevention of a remilitarized Germany that could once again threaten the eastern plains of Europe.
In formal diplomatic terms, that lesson was initially accepted. At Yalta and, more decisively, at Potsdam in the summer of 1945, the victorious Allies reached a clear consensus on the basic principles governing postwar Germany: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decartelization, and reparations. Germany was to be treated as a single economic unit; its armed forces were to be dismantled; and its future political orientation was to be determined without rearmament or alliance commitments.
For the Soviet Union, these principles were not abstract; they were existential. Twice within thirty years, Germany had invaded Russia, inflicting devastation on a scale without parallel in European history. Soviet losses in World War II gave Moscow a security perspective that cannot be understood without acknowledging that trauma. Neutrality and permanent demilitarization of Germany were not bargaining chips; they were the minimum conditions for a stable postwar order from the Soviet point of view.
At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, these concerns were formally recognized. The Allies agreed that Germany would not be allowed to reconstitute military power. The language of the conference was explicit: Germany was to be prevented from “ever again threatening its neighbors or the peace of the world.” The Soviet Union accepted the temporary division of Germany into occupation zones precisely because this division was framed as an administrative necessity, not a permanent geopolitical settlement.
Yet almost immediately, the Western powers began to reinterpret—and then quietly dismantle—these commitments. The shift occurred because U.S. and British strategic priorities changed. As Melvyn Leffler demonstrates in A Preponderance of Power (1992), American planners rapidly came to view German economic recovery and political alignment with the West as more important than maintaining a demilitarized Germany acceptable to Moscow. The Soviet Union, once an indispensable ally, was recast as a potential adversary whose influence in Europe needed to be contained.
This reorientation preceded any formal Cold War military crisis. Long before the Berlin Blockade, Western policy began to consolidate the western zones economically and politically. The creation of the Bizone in 1947, followed by the Trizone, directly contradicted the Potsdam principle that Germany would be treated as a single economic unit. The introduction of a separate currency in the western zones in 1948 was not a technical adjustment; it was a decisive political act that made German division functionally irreversible. From Moscow’s perspective, these steps were unilateral revisions of the postwar settlement.
The Soviet response—the Berlin Blockade—has often been portrayed as the opening salvo of Cold War aggression. Yet, in context, it appears less as an attempt to seize Western Berlin than as a coercive effort to force a return to four-power governance and prevent the consolidation of a separate West German state. Regardless of whether one judges the blockade wise, its logic was rooted in the fear that the Potsdam framework was being dismantled by the West without negotiation. While the airlift resolved the immediate crisis, it did not address the underlying issue: the abandonment of a unified, demilitarized German.
The decisive break came with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The conflict was interpreted in Washington not as a regional war with specific causes, but as evidence of a monolithic global communist offensive. This reductionist interpretation had profound consequences for Europe. It provided the strong political justification for West German rearmament—something that had been explicitly ruled out only a few years earlier. The logic was now framed in stark terms: without German military participation, Western Europe could not be defended.
This moment was a watershed. The remilitarization of West Germany was not forced by Soviet action in Europe; it was a strategic choice made by the United States and its allies in response to a globalized Cold War framework the U.S. had constructed. Britain and France, despite deep historical anxieties about German power, acquiesced under American pressure. When the proposed European Defense Community—a means of controlling German rearmament—collapsed, the solution adopted was even more consequential: West Germany’s accession to NATO in 1955.
From the Soviet perspective, this represented the definitive collapse of the Potsdam settlement. Germany was no longer neutral. It was no longer demilitarized. It was now embedded in a military alliance explicitly oriented against the USSR. This was precisely the outcome that Soviet leaders had sought to prevent since 1945, and which the Potsdam Agreement had been designed to forestall.
It is essential to underline the sequence, as it is often misunderstood or inverted. The division and remilitarization of Germany were not the result of Russian actions. By the time Stalin made his 1952 offer of German reunification based on neutrality, the Western powers had already set Germany on a path toward alliance integration and rearmament. The Stalin Note was not an attempt to derail a neutral Germany; it was a serious, documented, and ultimately rejected attempt to reverse a process already underway.
Seen in this light, the early Cold War settlement appears not as an inevitable response to Soviet intransigence, but as another instance in which Europe and the U.S. chose to subordinate Russian security concerns to the NATO alliance architecture. Germany’s neutrality was not rejected because it was unworkable; it was rejected because it conflicted with a Western strategic vision that prioritized bloc cohesion and U.S. leadership over an inclusive European security order.
The costs of this choice were immense and enduring. Germany’s division became the central fault line of the Cold War. Europe was permanently militarized, and nuclear weapons were deployed across the continent. European security was externalized to Washington, with all the dependency and loss of strategic autonomy that entailed. Furthermore, the Soviet conviction that the West would reinterpret agreements when convenient was reinforced once again.
This context is indispensable for understanding the Stalin Note in 1952. It was not a “bolt from the blue,” nor a cynical maneuver detached from prior history. It was an urgent response to a postwar settlement that had already been broken—another attempt, like so many before and after, to secure peace through neutrality, only to see that offer rejected by the West.
1952: The Rejection of German Reunification
It is worth examining the Stalin Note in greater detail. Stalin’s call for a reunified and neutral Germany was neither ambiguous, tentative, nor insincere. As Rolf Steininger has demonstrated conclusively in The German Question: The Stalin Note of 1952 and the Problem of Reunification (1990), Stalin proposed German reunification under conditions of permanent neutrality, free elections, the withdrawal of occupation forces, and a peace treaty guaranteed by the great powers. This was not a propaganda gesture; it was a strategic offer rooted in a genuine Soviet fear of German rearmament and NATO expansion.
Steininger’s archival research is devastating to the standard Western narrative. Particularly decisive is the 1955 secret memorandum by Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, in which he reports the German ambassador’s admission that Chancellor Adenauer knew the Stalin Note was genuine. Adenauer rejected it regardless. He feared not Soviet bad faith, but German democracy. He worried that a future German government might choose neutrality and reconciliation with Moscow, undermining West Germany’s integration into the Western bloc.
In essence, peace and reunification were rejected by the West not because they were impossible, but because they were politically inconvenient for the Western alliance system. Because neutrality threatened NATO’s emerging architecture, it had to be dismissed as a “trap.”
European elites were not merely coerced into Atlantic alignment; they actively embraced it. Chancellor Adenauer’s rejection of German neutrality was not an isolated act of deference to Washington but reflected a broader consensus among West European elites who preferred American tutelage to strategic autonomy and a unified Europe. Neutrality threatened not only NATO’s architecture but also the postwar political order in which these elites derived security, legitimacy, and economic reconstruction through U.S. leadership. A neutral Germany would have required European states to negotiate directly with Moscow as equals, rather than operating within a U.S.-led framework that insulated them from such engagement. In this sense, Europe’s rejection of neutrality was also a rejection of responsibility: Atlanticism offered security without the burdens of diplomatic coexistence with Russia, even at the price of Europe’s permanent division and militarization of the continent.
In March 1954, the Soviet Union applied to join NATO, arguing that NATO would thereby become an institution for European collective security. The US and its allies immediately rejected the application on the grounds that it would dilute the alliance and forestall Germany’s accession to NATO. The US and its allies, including West Germany itself, once again rejected the idea of a neutral, demilitarized Germany and a Europe security system built on collective security rather than military blocs.
The Austrian State Treaty of 1955 further exposed the cynicism of this logic. Austria accepted neutrality, Soviet troops withdrew, and the country became stable and prosperous. The predicted geopolitical “dominoes” did not fall. The Austrian model demonstrates that what was achieved there could have been achieved in Germany, potentially ending the Cold War decades earlier. The distinction between Austria and Germany lay not in feasibility, but in strategic preference. Europe accepted neutrality in Austria, where it did not threaten the U.S.-led hegemonic order, but rejected it in Germany, where it did.
The consequences of these decisions were immense and enduring. Germany remained divided for nearly four decades. The continent was militarized along a fault line running through its center, and nuclear weapons were deployed across European soil. European security became dependent on American power and American strategic priorities, rendering the continent, once again, the primary arena of great-power confrontation.
By 1955, the pattern was firmly established. Europe would accept peace with Russia only when it aligned seamlessly with the U.S.-led, Western strategic architecture. When peace required genuine accommodation of Russian security interests—German neutrality, non-alignment, demilitarization, or shared guarantees—it was systematically rejected. The consequences of this refusal would unfold over the ensuing decades.
The 30-Year Refusal of Russian Security Concerns
If there was ever a moment when Europe could have broken decisively with its long tradition of rejecting peace with Russia, it was the end of the Cold War. Unlike 1815, 1919, or 1945, this was not a moment imposed by military defeat alone; it was a moment shaped by choice. The Soviet Union did not collapse in a hail of artillery fire; it withdrew and unilaterally disarmed. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union renounced force as an organizing principle of European order. Both the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia under Boris Yeltsin accepted the loss of military control over Central and Eastern Europe and proposed a new security framework based on inclusion rather than competing blocs. What followed was not a failure of Russian imagination, but a failure of Europe and the U.S.-led Atlantic system to take that offer seriously.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s concept of a “Common European Home” was not a mere rhetorical flourish. It was a strategic doctrine grounded in the recognition that nuclear weapons had rendered traditional balance-of-power politics suicidal. Gorbachev envisioned a Europe in which security was indivisible, where no state enhanced its security at the expense of another, and where Cold War alliance structures would gradually yield to a pan-European framework. His 1989 address to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg made this vision explicit, emphasizing cooperation, mutual security guarantees, and the abandonment of force as a political instrument. The Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed in November 1990, codified these principles, committing Europe to democracy, human rights, and a new era of cooperative security.
At this juncture, Europe faced a fundamental choice. It could have treated these commitments seriously and built a security architecture centered on the OSCE, in which Russia was a co-equal participant—a guarantor of peace rather than an object of containment. Alternatively, it could preserve the Cold War institutional hierarchy while rhetorically embracing post-Cold War ideals. Europe chose the latter.
NATO did not dissolve, transform itself into a political forum, or subordinate itself to a pan-European security institution. On the contrary, it expanded. The rationale offered publicly was defensive: NATO enlargement would stabilize Eastern Europe, consolidate democracy, and prevent a security vacuum. Yet, this explanation ignored a crucial fact that Russia repeatedly articulated and that Western policymakers privately acknowledged: NATO expansion directly implicated Russia’s core security concerns—not abstractly, but geographically, historically, and psychologically.
The controversy over assurances given by the U.S. and Germany during German reunification negotiations illustrates the deeper issue. Western leaders later insisted that no legally binding promises had been made regarding NATO expansion because no agreement was codified in writing. However, diplomacy operates not only through signed treaties but through expectations, understandings, and good faith. Declassified documents and contemporaneous accounts confirm that Soviet leaders were repeatedly told that NATO would not move eastward beyond Germany. These assurances shaped Soviet acquiescence to German reunification—a concession of immense strategic significance. When NATO expanded regardless, initially at America’s behest, Russia experienced this not as a technical legal adjustment, but as a deep betrayal of the settlement that had facilitated German reunification.
Over time, European governments increasingly internalized NATO expansion as a European project, not merely an American one. German reunification within NATO became the template rather than the exception. EU enlargement and NATO enlargement proceeded in tandem, reinforcing one another and crowding out alternative security arrangements such as neutrality or non-alignment. Even Germany, with its Ostpolitik tradition and deepening economic ties to Russia, progressively subordinated its policies favoring accommodation to alliance logic. European leaders framed expansion as a moral imperative rather than a strategic choice, thereby insulating it from scrutiny and rendering Russian objections illegitimate. In doing so, Europe surrendered much of its capacity to act as an independent security actor, tying its fate ever more tightly to an Atlantic strategy that privileged expansion over stability.
This is where Europe’s failure becomes most stark. Rather than acknowledging that NATO expansion contradicted the logic of indivisible security articulated in the Charter of Paris, European leaders treated Russian objections as illegitimate—as residues of imperial nostalgia rather than expressions of genuine security anxiety. Russia was invited to consult, but not to decide. The 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act institutionalized this asymmetry: dialogue without a Russian veto, partnership without Russian parity. The architecture of European security was being built around Russia, and despite Russia, not with Russia.
George Kennan’s 1997 warning that NATO expansion would be a “fateful error” captured the strategic risk with remarkable clarity. Kennan did not argue that Russia was virtuous; he argued that humiliating and marginalizing a great power at a moment of weakness would produce resentment, revanchism, and militarization. His warning was dismissed as outdated realism, yet subsequent history has vindicated his logic almost point by point.
The ideological underpinning of this dismissal can be found explicitly in the writings of Zbigniew Brzezinski. In The Grand Chessboard (1997) and in his Foreign Affairs essay “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” (1997) Brzezinski articulated a vision of American primacy grounded in control over Eurasia. He argued that Eurasia was the “axial supercontinent,” and U.S. global dominance depended on preventing the emergence of any power capable of dominating it. In this framework, Ukraine was not merely a sovereign state with its own trajectory; it was a geopolitical pivot. “Without Ukraine,” Brzezinski famously wrote, “Russia ceases to be an empire.”
This was not an academic aside; it was a programmatic statement of U.S. imperial grand strategy. In such a worldview, Russia’s security concerns are not legitimate interests to be accommodated in the name of peace; they are obstacles to be overcome in the name of U.S. primacy. Europe, deeply embedded in the Atlantic system and dependent on U.S. security guarantees, internalized this logic—often without acknowledging its full implications. The result was a European security policy that consistently privileged alliance expansion over stability, and moral signaling over durable settlement.
The consequences became unmistakable in 2008. At NATO’s Bucharest Summit, the alliance declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” This statement was not accompanied by a clear timeline, but its political meaning was unequivocal. It crossed what Russian officials across the political spectrum had long described as a red line. That this was understood in advance is beyond dispute. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Moscow, reported in a cable titled “NYET MEANS NYET” that Ukrainian NATO membership was perceived in Russia as an existential threat, uniting liberals, nationalists, and hardliners alike. The warning was explicit. It was ignored.
From Russia’s perspective, the pattern was now unmistakable. Europe and the United States invoked the language of rules and sovereignty when it suited them but dismissed Russia’s core security concerns as illegitimate. The lesson Russia drew was the same lesson it had drawn after the Crimean War, after the Allied interventions, after the failure of collective security, and after the rejection of the Stalin Note: peace would be offered only on terms that preserved Western strategic dominance.
The crisis that erupted in Ukraine in 2014 was therefore not an aberration but a culmination. The Maidan uprising, the collapse of the Yanukovych government, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas unfolded within a security architecture already strained to the breaking point. The U.S. actively encouraged the coup that overthrew Yanukovych, even plotting in the background regarding the composition of the new government. When the Donbas region erupted in opposition to the Maidan coup, Europe responded with sanctions and diplomatic condemnation, framing the conflict as a simple morality play. Yet even at this stage, a negotiated settlement was possible. The Minsk agreements, particularly Minsk II in 2015, provided a framework for de-escalation of the conflict, autonomy for the Donbas, and reintegration of Ukraine and Russia within an expanded European economic order.
Minsk II represented an acknowledgment—however reluctant—that peace required compromise and that Ukraine’s stability depended on addressing both internal divisions and external security concerns. What ultimately destroyed Minsk II was Western resistance. When Western leaders later suggested that Minsk II had functioned primarily to “buy time” for Ukraine to strengthen militarily, the strategic damage was severe. From Moscow’s perspective, this confirmed the suspicion that Western diplomacy was cynical and instrumental rather than sincere—that agreements were not meant to be implemented, only to manage optics.
By 2021, the European security architecture had become untenable. Russia presented draft proposals calling for negotiations over NATO expansion, missile deployments, and military exercises—precisely the issues it had warned about for decades. These proposals were dismissed by the U.S. and NATO out of hand. NATO expansion was declared non-negotiable. Once again, Europe and the United States refused to engage Russia’s core security concerns as legitimate subjects of negotiation. War followed.
When Russian forces entered Ukraine in February 2022, Europe described the invasion as “unprovoked.” While this absurd description may serve a propaganda narrative, it utterly obscures history. The Russian action hardly emerged from a vacuum. It emerged from a security order that had systematically refused to integrate Russia’s concerns and from a diplomatic process that had ruled out negotiation on the very issues that mattered most to Russia.
Even then, peace was not impossible. In March and April 2022, Russia and Ukraine engaged in negotiations in Istanbul that produced a detailed draft framework. Ukraine proposed permanent neutrality with international security guarantees; Russia accepted the principle. The framework addressed force limitations, guarantees, and a longer process for territorial questions. These were not fantasy documents. They were serious drafts reflecting the realities of the battlefield and the structural constraints of geography.
Yet the Istanbul talks collapsed when the U.S. and U.K. stepped in and told Ukraine not to sign. As Boris Johnson later explained, nothing less than Western hegemony was on the line. The collapsed Istanbul Process demonstrates concretely that peace in Ukraine was possible soon after the start of Russia’s special military operation. The agreement was drafted and nearly completed, only to be abandoned at the behest of the U.S. and U.K.
By 2025, the grim irony became clear. The same Istanbul framework resurfaced as a reference point in renewed diplomatic efforts. After immense bloodshed, diplomacy circled back to plausible compromise. This is a familiar pattern in wars shaped by security dilemmas: early settlements that are rejected as premature later reappear as tragic necessities. Yet even now, Europe resists a negotiated peace.
For Europe, the costs of this long refusal to take Russia’s security concerns seriously are now unavoidable and massive. Europe has borne severe economic losses from energy disruption and de-industrialization pressures. It has committed itself to long-term rearmament with profound fiscal, social, and political consequences. Political cohesion within European societies is badly frayed under the strain of inflation, migration pressures, war fatigue, and diverging viewpoints across European governments. Europe’s strategic autonomy has diminished as Europe once again becomes the primary theater of great-power confrontation rather than an independent pole.
Perhaps most dangerously, nuclear risk has returned to the center of European security calculations. For the first time since the Cold War, European publics are once again living under the shadow of potential escalation between nuclear-armed powers. This is not the result of moral failure alone. It is the result of the West’s structural refusal, stretching back to Pogodin’s time, to recognize that peace in Europe cannot be built by denying Russia’s security concerns. Peace can only be built by negotiating them.
The tragedy of Europe’s denial of Russia’s security concerns is that it becomes self-reinforcing. When Russian security concerns are dismissed as illegitimate, Russian leaders have fewer incentives to pursue diplomacy and greater incentives to change facts on the ground. European policymakers then interpret these actions as confirmation of their original suspicions, rather than as the utterly predictable outcome of a security dilemma they themselves created and then denied. Over time, this dynamic narrows the diplomatic space until war appears to many not as a choice but as an inevitability. Yet the inevitability is manufactured. It arises not from immutable hostility but from the persistent European refusal to recognize that durable peace requires acknowledging the other side’s fears as real, even when those fears are inconvenient.
The tragedy is that Europe has repeatedly paid heavily for this refusal. It paid in the Crimean War and its aftermath, in the catastrophes of the first-half of the twentieth century, and in decades of Cold War division. And it is paying again now. Russophobia has not made Europe safer. It has made Europe poorer, more divided, more militarized, and more dependent on external power.
The added irony is that while this structural Russophobia has not weakened Russia in the long run, it has repeatedly weakened Europe. By refusing to treat Russia as a normal security actor, Europe has helped generate the very instability it fears, while incurring mounting costs in blood, treasure, autonomy, and cohesion. Each cycle ends the same way: a belated recognition that peace requires negotiation after immense damage has already been done. The lesson Europe has yet to absorb is that recognizing Russia’s security concerns is not a concession to power, but a prerequisite for preventing its destructive uses.
The lesson, written in blood across two centuries, is not that Russia or any other country must be trusted in all regards. It is that Russia and its security interests must be taken seriously. Europe has rejected peace with Russia repeatedly, not because it was unavailable, but because acknowledging Russia’s security concerns was wrongly treated as illegitimate. Until Europe abandons that reflex, it will remain trapped in a cycle of self-defeating confrontation—rejecting peace when it is possible and bearing the costs long after.
- First published at CIRSD.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)