Are Russia and the United States trying to destroy each other? Each side seems to think the other is. “The Plot Against America: Inside Putin’s Campaign to Destroy US Democracy,” which appeared as a cover story in Newsweek in 2017, has become emblematic of American perceptions of the Kremlin’s aims. And Russians have long been convinced that Washington seeks to encircle their country with hostile puppet regimes as part of its plan to overthrow their government and break their nation into pieces. But each side also believes its intentions are badly misunderstood by the other side. In fact, there are perhaps no two countries in the world whose views of their own behavior contrast more starkly with the perceptions of the other side than the United States and Russia. Understanding the reasons for that contrast, and how the perceptions of each side are amplifying those of the other, is a critical part of grasping the dangers of inadvertent escalation.
America views itself as an exceptional nation, playing a unique and salutary role in the world. Abraham Lincoln memorably called America “the last best hope of earth” and summed up our mission as “maintaining in the world, that form and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of all men.” Through the eyes of Americans, our purpose in that outside world has been, since our country’s inception, the noble advancement of self-government and liberty. Henry Kissinger observes that “America’s foreign policy has reflected the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary. The real challenge of American engagement abroad was not foreign policy in the traditional sense but a project of spreading values that it believed all other peoples aspired to replicate.”1 We believe, with utmost sincerity, that we are not pursuing our narrow self-interest but are, in Kissinger’s words, “acting for all mankind.” This conviction deepened with the end of the Cold War, both because Americans believed our system of government had clearly triumphed in the arena of ideological competition and because the United States faced few external constraints on its efforts to advance the cause of democracy abroad.
The view of America’s international agenda looks quite different from Moscow. Russian officials have come to see “instability and destabilization” as the defining characteristic of US foreign policy.2 American advisers brought disorder and libertinism to Russia in the 1990s, not prosperity and virtue. Rather than advancing the cause of enlightened governance, the Kosovo and Iraq wars were “the beginning of the accelerated destruction of regional and global stability, undermining the last principles of sustainable world order.” The United States’ support for the Arab Spring, intervention in Libya, and opposition to Syrian president Assad all appear to Russians like “destabilization that will overwhelm all, including Russia.”3 Russian president Vladimir Putin bitterly summed up this view in a national address in 2014. The United States and its allies, he charged, “prefer not to be guided by international law but by the rule of the gun. They act as they please,” believing that “they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right.” Washington may think it is spreading peace, prosperity, and democracy, but according to Putin, it is producing “chaos” and swelling the ranks of “neo-fascists and Islamic radicals.”4
Like America, Russia has traditionally seen itself as a virtuous outsider in the world, but for much different reasons. The foundation of Russia’s self-image, from the time of Peter the Great through Gorbachev and Yeltsin to Putin, has been that of a great power vital to world stability. Without Russia playing this prominent role, “geopolitical turbulence will begin.”5 Yet the world has often been slow to recognize Russia’s importance. Russia sees itself figuratively as an uninvited guest looking in on an elegant dinner party of the world’s leading Western nations, alternately demanding a seat at their table and assuring himself that he should not deign to join them. With the notable exception of the Soviet period, Russians historically have seen their uniqueness not in new and better approaches to governance but in their ability to bridge East and West and uphold tried-and-true tradition.6 Where America has carried aloft the banner of liberalism, embracing the trendy Silicon Valley concept of creative disruption, Russia has sounded the cautionary notes of conservatism, often viewing change more as threat than opportunity.7 From Moscow’s vantage point, Russia is a status quo power, seeking to preserve the established Westphalian order against reckless revisionists who claim an obligation to intervene in the sovereign affairs of other governments despite the instability that ensues.
To say that Washington sees Russia in a different light would be a vast understatement. Through American eyes, Russia is a revisionist power seeking to upend the international order, not preserve it. “Putin is a calculating master of geo-politics with a master plan to divide Europe, destroy NATO, reestablish Russian influence in the world, and, most of all, marginalize the US and the West,” according to a veteran Democratic political consultant.8 Former vice president Joe Biden lamented that America had extended the hand of friendship throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but Russia “has chosen a different path,” combining repression at home with disdain for the interests and sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors. Echoing this theme, the Trump administration has accused Moscow of a “pattern of behavior in which Russia disregards the international rules-based order, undermines the sovereignty and security of countries worldwide, and attempts to subvert and discredit Western democratic institutions and processes.”9
The tendency to view oneself as virtuous, attributing any ethical lapses or bad outcomes to one’s circumstances, but discounting the good intentions of others—something psychologists call the fundamental attribution error—is more the norm than the exception in international relations and, indeed, in human affairs more broadly. Russia and the United States have begun to exhibit an extreme form of this tendency, however. Each side is not simply convinced that what it is doing is legitimate, defensive, and benign, while the actions of the other are illegitimate, aggressive, and dangerous. More alarmingly, each side is increasingly persuaded that the other is actually intent on its demise. These perceptions of existential threat are ominously raising the stakes in the US-Russian relationship well beyond the limited geopolitical competition that should flow from the objective mix of conflicting and compatible American and Russian interests. They have created a self-reinforcing loop of suspicions and mistrust that is impeding steps that could manage risks in the relationship and removing important brakes on escalatory spirals. Ironically, these perceptions are helping to create the very existential peril that each side fears yet neither country actually intends.
This was the pithy sound bite that James Clapper, the recently retired director of national intelligence, employed in the spring of 2017 to sum up Russian intentions toward the United States. And Clapper is far from alone in this assessment. The late Republican senator John McCain charged that Russia is attempting to “destroy democracy” in the United States.10 Conservative columnist George Will avers that “Russia hopes to fatally undermine a distracted West.”11 Liberal pundit Paul Waldman argues that Putin’s fundamental goal is “undermining American democracy.”12 Democratic senator Ben Cardin warns that Russia is trying to “bring down our way of government.”13 Yale University historian Timothy Snyder accuses Russia of using “cyber warfare to destroy the United States of America.”14 Americans may not be able to agree on much in our increasingly polarized society, but we all seem to concur that Russia has deadly things in mind for the United States. This perception has spanned American political parties, institutions of government, media outlets, geographic regions, and demographic groups, quickly becoming so widespread that the burden of proof is now assumed to lie on those who think otherwise. Chicago Council on Global Affairs surveys taken in 2017 showed that nearly three-quarters of Americans believed Russia was working actively to undermine US influence and power, and more than 80 percent believed Russian influence in American elections posed a critical or important threat.15 The near unanimous passage in 2017 of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a law imposing new sanctions on Russia that not only formally defined it as an American adversary but lumped it together with notorious “rogue states” Iran and North Korea, testified to the depth and breadth of the perception that Moscow poses a fundamental threat to American security. Russia may not aspire to the physical incineration of American territory, according to this view, but it certainly hopes to undermine our democratic institutions and to set Americans against each other, subduing our nation by exacerbating divisions and dysfunction.
The belief that Moscow poses an existential threat is relatively recent for post–Cold War America, despite the fact that Russia is the one country whose strategic nuclear capabilities rival those of the United States. Less than thirty years ago, in 1992, US president George H. W. Bush and Russian president Yeltsin formally declared an end to the Cold War, signing a joint statement avowing that “Russia and the United States do not regard each other as potential adversaries. From now on, the relationship will be characterized by friendship and partnership founded on mutual trust and respect and a common commitment to democracy and economic freedom.” Gallup surveys from that period showed that two-thirds of Americans had favorable views of Russia, while vanishingly few saw Moscow as an enemy. Almost no one thought that nuclear war posed any realistic danger, according to another Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey.16 Reflecting this view, the Clinton presidency drew heavily on what it called “the peace dividend” to enact large cuts in defense spending and other national security outlays. Optimism abounded that the United States could midwife democracy in Russia and integrate it into the Western world. But the euphoria fueled by visions of a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic new world order was short-lived.
American suspicions of Moscow’s intentions in the world, and particularly toward Russia’s neighbors, started to rekindle fairly early in the post-Soviet relationship as conflicts flared in several newly independent former Soviet republics, Russian peacekeeping forces began playing more prominent roles beyond Russia’s borders, and Moscow seemed to drag its feet over returning Soviet-era military forces to Russia from their old bases in the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere. These developments played on lingering American concerns that some in Moscow might harbor residual hopes of rebuilding the Soviet empire and reconstituting a geopolitical threat to Europe and the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski summed up these concerns in an article he published in Foreign Affairs in 1994:
Regrettably, the imperial impulse remains strong and even appears to be strengthening. This is not only a matter of political rhetoric. Particularly troubling is the growing assertiveness of the Russian military in the effort to retain or regain control over the old Soviet empire. Initially, these efforts may have been the spontaneous acts of rogue military commanders in the field. However, military self-assertion in such places as Moldova, Crimea, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Georgia and Tajikistan, as well as military opposition to any territorial concessions in the Kuriles and to the reduction of Russian forces in the Kaliningrad region and to a prompt withdrawal from all the Baltic republics, perpetuates imperial enclaves on the outer edges of the former empire.
In addition, the last two years have seen a concerted effort by Moscow to rebuild some of the institutional links that used to bind the old Soviet Union together. Much energy has been invested in promoting a host of new agreements and ties, including the CIS charter, a collective security treaty (which in several cases also gives Russia control over the external frontiers of the former Soviet Union), a collective peacekeeping agreement (used to justify intervention in Tajikistan), a new ruble zone (meant to give the Russian central bank the decisive role in monetary matters), and a formal economic union (transferring key economic decision-making to Moscow), to a common CIS parliamentary institution.17
As indecisive hot wars in Georgia, Moldova, and Nagorno-Karabakh turned into long-term “frozen conflicts” in the mid-1990s, and Russia began staking out positions in the Balkans that were at odds with American preferences, Washington increasingly worried that Russia was becoming more spoiler than partner in resolving regional conflicts. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott acknowledged these concerns in a speech in 1997: “Will [Russia] play by the rules? There is still a lot of skepticism on this point that resonates in our national debate about Russia and US policy. Many experts and commentators start from a presumption of guilt about Russia’s strategic intentions. They nurture a suspicion that Russians are predisposed genetically, or at least historically, to aggression and imperialism.”18
Despite this suspicion, Russia’s hostile reaction to the Kosovo war in early 1999 shocked many in Washington. Seen through Western eyes, NATO had launched the military operation in response to clear crimes by Yugoslav forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. At the time, Russian and NATO forces had been serving together cooperatively in Bosnia, having undertaken a similar mission there to prevent ethnic cleansing. But in contrast to the Bosnia effort, Moscow called the NATO bombing against Yugoslavia the worst aggression in Europe since World War II. Russia’s State Duma voted symbolically to form a new Slavic nation by uniting Yugoslavia with Russia and Belarus, and Russian peacekeeping forces attempted preemptively to seize and control a sector of Kosovo by making a mad dash to the Pristina airport without first coordinating with NATO commanders. American officials wondered, “How could a country aspiring to join the West be against stopping genocide?”19 A Clinton National Security Council staffer recalled, “The Kosovo War provoked this moment of incredible rupture that I don’t think any of us knew was coming.”20 There were now real questions in Washington about whether Russian leaders shared the values espoused by the Western community.21
American suspicions deepened in the new millennium after President Yeltsin resigned, Vladimir Putin was elected as his successor, and a disillusioned and disoriented Russia struggled to pick up the pieces following the political, economic, and societal collapse it endured in the 1990s. Some concerns flowed from circumstances and our interpretations of specific Russian actions. Talbott worried in early 2000, for example, that “the privatization of power” in Russia during the 1990s had “given a bad name to democracy, reform, the free market, even liberty itself,” putting Russia’s Westernization at risk. Moreover, renewed fighting in Chechnya had “generated fears, resentments, and frustrations” in Russia that magnified a “more general sense of grievance and vulnerability after a decade of other difficulties and setbacks, real and imagined, most conspicuously the enlargement of NATO and the Kosovo war.”22 Other concerns reflected personal impressions of Putin himself. Most US officials were skeptical of Putin’s KGB background, and what it might mean for his intentions toward the West, right from the start of his presidency, according to Talbott.23
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, marked another turning point in US perceptions of Russia. Putin had telephoned President Bush two days before the attacks to warn that Russian intelligence had detected signs of an incipient terrorist campaign, “something long in preparation,” coming out of Afghanistan. Then on September 11, Putin was the first foreign leader to call the White House to express sympathy and support following al- Qaeda’s attacks on New York City and Washington. His message was clear: “I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.”24 It was at that moment, according to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, that she “realized that the Cold War was really over.”25 Within weeks, Russia was providing the United States with intelligence and facilitating America’s establishment and use of military bases in Central Asia to support the war in Afghanistan. Rice enthusiastically praised Moscow’s assistance: “Russia has been one of our best allies in terms of intelligence sharing, in terms of support for American operations that have taken place out of Central Asia—this has been an extremely important relationship to us.”26
But American perceptions of Moscow’s intentions in the outside world, and of the potential for bilateral conflict or cooperation, were also tied inextricably to the course of liberal reforms inside Russia. Many American officials had embraced Immanuel Kant’s concept of democratic peace, believing that democracies tend not fight one another, and that by extension, the course of Russia’s democratic transformation was a critical variable affecting the chances it would revert to an aggressive foreign policy.27 Putin’s outreach to the United States following the attack of September 11 was “widely interpreted as Putin’s embrace of the West, a new course for Russia that put an end to equivocation between the East and the West.”28 The United States expected this embrace to include Russia’s liberalization domestically, in addition to its cooperation in foreign affairs. For a time, its expectations seemed justified. Putin’s advancement of land, tax, and judicial reforms early in his first term helped the Bush administration feel comfortable about a strategic partnership with Russia aimed at countering terrorism and advancing common bilateral interests. These reforms facilitated a “measured, collected response” from the White House when Russia sided with Germany and France in opposing the Iraq War in early 2003.29 A senior State Department official from that time observed:
It almost seemed like the Russians did not want to be separate from the West on Iraq. But on Iraq, the Western countries themselves divided. The United States and Britain were for using military force; France and Germany were opposed. And in the end, Russia sided with France and Germany, but I didn’t have the feeling that the Russians were wholly comfortable with that situation. I think they would have preferred actually a more unified stance that they could have aligned with.30
But Putin’s growing restrictions on press freedoms and his crackdown on prominent political opponents in late 2003 and 2004 compounded the impact of US-Russian policy differences over Iraq, Georgia, and Ukraine in shaping American perceptions of Russian intentions. A senior Bush aide recalled a conversation between Bush and Blair in October 2003 in which they were saying to each other, “You know, I’m not sure he’s the guy we thought he was. I’m worried about this throttling of the independent media. This is not good. This is not the guy we were signing up to help and bring into our inner circle of world leadership.”31 By 2005, President Bush had privately concluded, “We’ve lost him,” meaning that he believed Putin was no longer pursuing democracy. And when it became clear that Putin was not moving toward democracy, “then it’s very difficult for us to justify why we are still cooperating with the Russians.”32 As Russia grew increasingly authoritarian, Washington grew increasingly convinced that, as Bush put it, “in terms of whether or not it’s possible to reprogram the kind of basic Russian DNA, which is centralized authority, that’s hard to do.”33
These deepening American concerns about Russia’s course were reinforced by two withering blows late in the Bush administration’s second term. First, in 2007, Putin delivered a venomous indictment of US foreign policy in a speech at the annual Munich Security Conference, creating the impression within the Bush administration that Moscow was no longer interested in integration with the West and had opted for an aggressive, anti-Western foreign policy.34 Then, in August 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia. The conflict had started when Georgian military forces attempted to seize control of the separatist territory of South Ossetia, killing several Russian peacekeepers, who had long been stationed there, in the course of the attack.35 Russia responded almost immediately with a massive counterinvasion of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian region, quickly defeating the Georgians and later recognizing the independence of both regions. Many US officials were convinced that Moscow had laid a trap for Georgian president Saakashvili, baiting him into war.36 This was “a game changer,” according to then US ambassador to Russia John Beyrle. “That was really the first time that territory belonging to a sovereign neighbor of Russia, which had been recognized as part of that sovereign neighbor by Russia up to that point, suddenly changed [hands]. There were other disputed areas in [the region], but the two in Georgia and the unilateral recognition of their independence by Russia made it clear that Russia would go to some lengths to [show] that it still needed to control what happened in those countries.”37 This marked an important evolution in American perceptions. Russia had become more than just an increasingly authoritarian state lamenting its lost superpower status and wielding a long list of grievances toward Washington. It was now actively using force to bolster its influence in neighboring states and oppose NATO enlargement and US involvement around its borders.
Obama’s first term in office featured a reset of bilateral relations and renewed optimism about Russia’s course, after Putin had orchestrated the transfer of the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev and moved to the post of prime minister. American concerns came roaring back, however, after Putin announced in late 2011 that he would run for the presidency in the 2012 election and cracked down hard on pre- and postelection protests, political opposition, and civil society in general. Putin had run much of his campaign on crude anti-American themes. “On good days, Putin saw the United States as a competitor. On bad days, the United States was his enemy,” according to Michael McFaul, who had moved from a senior position on Obama’s National Security Council staff to become US ambassador to Russia just a few months prior to Putin’s election victory.38 Putin’s return to presidency was a key moment, according to former Washington Post Moscow bureau chief Susan Glasser, in understanding his real intentions. His second inauguration, she observes, was very different from his first. “His speech is different. He never mentions the word ‘democracy’ in his second inaugural address. He did in the first. He walks in by himself into this gilded hall in the Kremlin, down this endless red carpet in a way that suggests the crowning of the old kings and that no one else can put the crown on their head.”39 If Putin envisioned himself as tsar, would he not also be longing for an empire to rule beyond Russian borders?
As the Obama team attempted to make progress in bilateral cooperation following Putin’s return to the presidency, it increasingly saw a gap between Moscow’s words and its actions. “Both sides were saying, ‘Yes, we want to be partners,’” recalls an Obama Pentagon official, “but we started to see, in the Pentagon, well perhaps [the Russians] are not so fully engaged in being our partner. It took some time before we got to the [realization that] they’re actually an adversary. That happened, though, relatively quickly in my office, once we started really doing a deep dive, after Putin came [back] into office.”40 Moscow’s decision in the summer of 2013 to offer political asylum to Edward Snowden, an American intelligence contractor who had illegally provided over a million classified documents to WikiLeaks and was charged under the US Espionage Act, enraged many Washington officials. American media reacted harshly to a Russian law passed in June that criminalized the distribution to minors of materials promoting what Russia called nontraditional sexual relationships. Increasingly frustrated, President Obama canceled his planned summit with Putin in the fall of 2013 and “took Russia off his desk,” delegating management of the vexing relationship to his secretaries of defense and state. In explaining his decision, Obama accused the Russians of slipping “back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality.”41
Russia forced its way back onto Obama’s desk quickly, however. Its annexation of Crimea and launch of a separatist war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 created a crisis in relations with the West and produced another quantum leap in American perceptions of Russian aims, persuading Obama officials that Moscow sought to undo the Helsinki Rules that had been codified in 1975 by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) stipulating, among other things, that borders could be changed only by peaceful means. The Ukraine operation showed that Putin “was not only speaking out against the international order and international institutions and the status quo, but that he was going to act against it.” According to a senior State Department official, Putin’s aggression in Ukraine “made clear the challenge Russia was posing. One of the fundamental tenets of any international order is that big countries don’t get to swallow up parts of small countries just because they can.”42 But Russia was done with “trying to be a normal nation. [It] wants to be a nation that makes its own rules and is surrounded by satellites.”43 It “no longer worried about what the West or the rest of the world said or thought about it.”44
Still, while American officials had come to view Russia as an aggressive revisionist power, they believed its ambitions were much more regional than global, even after Moscow launched a military intervention in support of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2015. A Pentagon official cautioned in the wake of the Ukraine crisis that Americans needed to keep the Russian threat in perspective: “Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around sixty years old. The population is shrinking. And so, we have to respond with resolve in what are effectively regional challenges that Russia presents.” President Obama was even blunter: “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength but out of weakness,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question about whether his 2012 election opponent, Mitt Romney, had been right to characterize Russia as America’s biggest geopolitical foe. “[The Russians] don’t pose the number one national security threat to the United States. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”45
Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election catapulted these perceptions of Russia across an important threshold, transforming concerns about Russia’s authoritarian governance and regional aggression into an alarming new belief that Moscow poses an existential threat to the United States, not through nuclear attack but by undermining the very foundations of our democratic political system and our society. It was one thing to oppose key US foreign policy objectives in the Middle East or to seize and annex neighboring territories. But interfering with an American presidential election was another thing altogether, an act striking at the heart of our nation. “The Russians violated our sovereignty over one of the most sacred things we do,” explains McFaul. “We choose our leaders. That’s the most sacred thing you do as a democracy. And they meddled in that.” Through McFaul’s eyes, it was an act of aggression comparable to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and al-Qaeda’s terrorist campaign. “Thankfully, people didn’t die as they did in 1941 or September 11, but it was a violation of our sovereignty.”46
Russian hackers had allegedly penetrated the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and helped to publish embarrassing emails revealing corrupt favoritism toward Hillary Clinton’s election campaign. Russia had also launched a propaganda campaign on social media, websites, and television. All this had been directed, according to the US Intelligence Community, by Putin himself, with the explicit purposes of damaging Clinton and “undermining our democracy and the liberal international order.”47 It was, in the words of The Washington Post, the “Crime of the Century.” Former CIA director Michael Hayden dubbed it the “most successful covert operation in the history of intelligence.”48
What could motivate such aggression? In a word, ideology. “Putin wants to make the world safe for Russian autocracy, which means compromising every democratic center of power he can find, and crushing democracy closer to home, like Ukraine,”49 explained one senior American official. Clapper agreed: “I think fundamentally there is an aversion to our whole system, an aversion to democracy. [Putin] doesn’t believe in it and views it as threatening to him, personally. That is what it all boils down to in Russia. I just think that’s almost in his genes, in the Russian genes, to do what they did [in meddling in the US election], and they’ll continue to do it.”50 Tony Blinken, who served in the Obama administration as National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden, explained Russian motivations in similar terms:
For Putin, when Western democracy is successful, it’s the most profound indictment of the system that he’s built in Russia, a country that started to embrace democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War, but now it’s turned into this kleptocracy, this illiberal democracy, and, indeed, self-recognized illiberal democracy. Putin, I think, came to the conclusion that the more he could do to undermine the Western democratic model, to foment trouble, to create tension, difficulties within the West, between the United States and Europe, within Western European countries, within the United States, the better [off] he would be.51
In sum, by 2018, America’s natural optimism about the arc of history bending toward progress had turned to deep pessimism that this perceived Russian objective—to torpedo democracy—would change anytime soon. American officials had concluded that under Putin, Russia’s leadership had come to view democracy itself as a mortal threat to be countered not only inside Russia and its neighboring regions but in the United States. Russian hostility toward America was not seen as a function of what we do but rather as a reaction to the essence of what we are, and it flowed from the very nature of the regime that Putin had constructed. That hostility would continue, therefore, until Russia’s political system changed fundamentally.52 American officials had spent much of the past decade denying Russian accusations that they sought regime change in Moscow. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, many were telling themselves that relations with Russia could not improve without it.
If by 2017 Americans were convinced that Moscow was seeking their country’s demise, then they were only making up conceptual ground that Russians had already covered years before in their perceptions of US intentions. Russian president Putin had come into office at the turn of the millennium hoping that a strategic partnership with the world’s foremost power would help to accelerate Russia’s recovery from the collapse of the 1990s, address terrorist threats to Russia’s security, and hasten its return to great-power status. He began studying the English language, and he even mooted the possibility of Russia’s membership in NATO. In May 2002, he and President Bush signed a strategic framework agreement that announced that the “era in which the United States and Russia saw each other as an enemy or strategic threat has ended” and that they would work as partners to counter global challenges and resolve regional conflicts.53 But by early 2004, he had concluded that Washington wanted to lock Russia into permanent subordinate standing or worse.
Putin is not an outlier in such perceptions, which are widely shared among Russia’s most knowledgeable elites. Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov argues the US “goal is to liquidate the statehood of undesirable countries, to undermine their sovereignty and replace their legally elected governments.… The Pentagon has started developing a completely new strategy of military action, which has already been called ‘Trojan Horse.’ It’s based on the active use of the ‘fifth column protest potential’ to destabilize the situation along with precision strikes on the most important targets.”54 Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev alleges that “Americans are trying to involve the Russian Federation in an interstate military conflict, cause regime change and ultimately dismember our country.”55 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claims that America “does not merely seek to change Russian policy … but it seeks to change the regime—and practically nobody denies this.”56 Sergey Glazyev, an economist who has served in the Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin administrations, argues that the United States is using “depopulation techniques” to prevent “reunification of the Russian people” and provoke “further dismemberment of Russia.”57 Andrei Kostin, head of Russia’s External Trade Bank (VTB), calls US economic sanctions “a full-scale attack on Russia … so that Russia changes its government and its president to someone more suitable.”58 State Duma deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov, a well-educated, fluent English-speaker who has traveled widely in the West, avers that America’s aim is for Russia “to cease to exist as a state.”59 Even former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, still revered in the West as the author of glasnost and perestroika and partner of US president Ronald Reagan in ending the Cold War, has charged that Americans have sought to create “a new empire headed by themselves.” They “patted us on the shoulder, they kept saying, ‘Well done, well done.’ But all the while they were tearing us down, looting us, tearing us apart.”60
Like American perceptions of Russia, Russia’s belief that Washington poses an existential threat evolved over time, though it advanced more quickly. Russia’s unhappy experience with American advice on domestic reforms during the 1990s laid the basis for many contemporary Russian perceptions of Washington’s intent, with many Russians suspecting that the United States wanted Russia to collapse rather than recover. But there is little evidence that Putin had anti-American views when he first entered public life in the early 1990s as deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, which had a reputation as Russia’s most European metropolis. Unlike some hard-line Russians and most KGB veterans, he did not blame the United States for destroying the Soviet Union, which he attributed to mistakes made by Soviet leaders. His interactions with US officials and businessmen while in the Saint Petersburg government were reportedly pragmatic and helpful, and he was perceived as pro-business. According to Russian journalist Irina Borogan, generally a Putin skeptic, “Putin [at that time] was not furious about the West. He worked with a prominent democrat, and he didn’t leave him.… His career was dependent on [Saint Petersburg mayor] Anatoly Sobchak, who was a really big friend of the West.”61 But Putin received a lesson in American power politics after he had been promoted to head Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in 1998.
That lesson revolved around NATO. Russian officials, almost to a man, opposed NATO’s possible expansion when it was first being discussed in the early 1990s. Russian hard-liners regarded the alliance as a genuine military threat. Russian liberals, aware of lingering popular perceptions of NATO as a Cold War foe, feared that expansion would fatally compromise their political position relative to the hard-liners.62 Ex-Soviet officials such as Mikhail Gorbachev averred (despite American denials) that Washington had orally pledged not to move NATO eastward in return for Moscow’s agreement that a united Germany could be part of the alliance.
Clinton administration officials sought to assuage Russian concerns by creating the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, which would give Moscow “a voice but not a veto” in NATO affairs, and by arguing that it was much better for Russia to have prosperous democratic neighbors within NATO than to have those countries untethered, nationalistic, and unstable. Few Russians were persuaded. President Yeltsin made his anger plain over the prospect of NATO expansion in a speech at the Budapest summit meeting of the CSCE in 1994. “We hear explanations to the effect that this is allegedly the expansion of stability, just in case there are undesirable developments in Russia,” he said, but “history demonstrates that it is a dangerous delusion to suppose that the destinies of continents and of the world community in general can somehow be managed from one single capital.” He warned that the plan to expand NATO threatened to plunge Europe “into a cold peace.”63
Russian skeptics did not have to wait long for events to justify their fears. America’s assurances that NATO posed no military threat and that it would operate in consultation with Moscow were almost immediately proved wrong, in Russia’s eyes, when NATO unilaterally launched bombing operations against Yugoslavia—Russia’s “Slavic brother”—only two weeks after Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were admitted as new members in early 1999. Many in Russia were “stunned that NATO took the unprecedented step of bypassing the UN Security Council to attack Yugoslavia not for actions it took against another sovereign state” but rather for actions against ethnic Albanians inside the country.64 Russian hard-liners felt vindicated in their suspicions; Russian liberals felt betrayed. Yeltsin lamented that all international “rules of the game” had been thrown out the window. Opinion polls indicated that some 90 percent of Russians viewed NATO’s bombing as a mistake, and nearly two-thirds regarded NATO as the aggressor.65
Russian officials strongly objected to NATO’s actions but felt powerless to prevent them. Prime Minister Primakov, in a plane en route to Washington to negotiate debt relief with the International Monetary Fund when the bombing started, dramatically reversed course in protest and returned to Moscow. Russia “interpreted the intervention as a means of expanding NATO’s influence in the Balkans, not as an effort to deal with a humanitarian crisis” in Kosovo.66 Years later, State Duma vice speaker Pyotr Tolstoy asked the Serbs to forgive Russia’s inability to protect them. “We were both taught a lesson,” he said, “that we will never forget.”67 To many Russians, that lesson was an affirmation of the infamous Athenian counsel to the Melians recorded by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War centuries ago: “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” Absent Russian strength, Kremlin officials fretted, nothing would prevent NATO from carrying out a similar operation against Moscow.
Russia could not regain its strength, however, without first taming the centrifugal forces inside Russia exemplified by the conflict in Chechnya. Chechen separatism had long roots in Russian and Soviet history, but it intensified in the early 1990s as the central government weakened and power devolved from Moscow to the country’s constituent regions, and it erupted into full-scale war in 1994. Following a cease-fire and an inconclusive peace accord signed in 1996, the republic had become a hotbed for organized crime and Islamic extremism that posed significant challenges to Russia beyond the confines of Chechnya itself. Then, in the summer of 1999, a notorious Chechen warlord launched several armed raids into neighboring Dagestan, which were accompanied by a series of terrorist bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities that were blamed on Chechens. Putin, whom Yeltsin had just named as prime minister, oversaw a massive air-and-ground offensive against Chechnya in response, ultimately blockading its capital, Grozny, and reducing it to near rubble.
In Putin’s eyes, dealing decisively with the Chechen uprising was a critical part of halting the disintegration of the Russian state and restoring law and order in the country. The war drew widespread support in Russia, quickly boosting Putin’s popularity and contributing to his successful election to the presidency. But unlike in the case of Yeltsin’s unpopular use of tanks to shell his opponents in the Russian legislature in 1993, the United States strongly criticized Putin’s conduct of the war. It insisted on referring to the Chechen fighters not as bandits or terrorists, as Russia preferred, but as separatists, implying a measure of political legitimacy. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted that “Russia could not consider this war simply an internal affair.”68 Sensing potential American receptivity, Chechen president Maskhadov asked NATO for help in the war in October 1999, stoking Russian fears of Western intervention that were already simmering over NATO’s Kosovo operation.69 If NATO would use force to help Kosovar Albanians against the central Yugoslav government, might it not do the same to help Chechens against Moscow? Russian officials accused the United States of abetting terrorism by criticizing Russia’s Chechnya policy while supporting Kosovar Albanians who were themselves employing terrorist tactics.70 In frustration, Putin sought to help Americans understand Russia’s perspective in an op-ed penned for The New York Times in November entitled “Why We Must Act”:
I ask you to put aside for a moment the dramatic news reports from the Caucasus and imagine something more placid: ordinary New Yorkers or Washingtonians, asleep in their homes. Then, in a flash, hundreds perish in explosions at the Watergate, or at an apartment complex on Manhattan’s West Side. Thousands are injured, some horribly disfigured. Panic engulfs a neighborhood, then a nation.
Russians do not have to imagine such a calamity. More than 300 of our citizens in Moscow and elsewhere suffered that fate earlier this year when bombs detonated by terrorists demolished five apartment blocks.…
The antiterrorist campaign was forced upon us. Sadly, decisive armed intervention was the only way to prevent further casualties both within and far outside the borders of Chechnya, further suffering by so many people enslaved by terrorists. As the United States media frequently point out, we have other pressing challenges that demand our resources.
But when a society’s core interests are besieged by violent elements, responsible leaders must respond. That is our purpose in Chechnya, and we are determined to see it through. The understanding of our friends abroad would be helpful.71
The inexorable exercise of American power in Kosovo, coupled with Washington’s reluctance to support Russia’s war in Chechnya, prompted Putin to make an important strategic calculation: “The only way to sustain [Russia’s] great power status and influence was to be inside the Western decision-making structures and with the West.”72 If the world was indeed unipolar, increasingly run out of Washington, then “to be someone, you have to be an ally or partner of the US.”73 Putin got an opportunity to press his case in September 2001, as terrorism struck the United States in the form of al-Qaeda’s attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. Surely, in the wake of this tragedy, Americans could see that the United States and Russia faced a common terrorist enemy. Despite the private objections of nearly all his senior advisers, Putin announced in a nationally televised address that Russia would provide logistical, intelligence, humanitarian, and diplomatic support in America’s war against terrorists in Afghanistan.74 Shortly afterward, he decided that Russia would close its intelligence collection site in Lourdes, Cuba, and its naval base in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, sending a clear signal to Washington that Moscow had made a strategic choice to align itself with the West. “At the same time,” relates Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, “Putin asks [President] Bush and Lord George Robertson, ex-secretary general of NATO, to invite Russia to NATO. That’s probably the most bold idea [sic] that any Russian leader could have. [At] that time, Putin was the most pro-Western leader of Russia.”75
Putin undertook significant domestic political risk in his unilateral steps to support Washington, but he saw important upsides in these moves.76 As he attempted to resurrect Russia from its political, economic, and spiritual collapse in the 1990s, Putin hoped that recasting Moscow’s relationship with the United States into a partnership against terrorism could help spur Russia more quickly toward regaining its status as an acknowledged great power, with a voice in key international issues and a privileged role in its neighborhood. According to then Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov, “We wanted an anti-terrorist international coalition like the anti-Nazi coalition. That would be the basis for a new world order.”77 But Russian leaders soon came to believe that Washington had much different goals in mind.
Several developments dashed Russian expectations. The first came in December 2001 in the form of Washington’s unilateral announcement that it would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty signed in 1972. The treaty had for nearly three decades served its intended purpose of preventing a destabilizing “defensive” arms race that might cause Washington and Moscow to doubt the reliability of their retaliatory nuclear capability and undermine the assurances of mutually assured destruction. But the prospect of Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons coupled to strategic missile systems prompted Washington to rethink this approach. Fanatics in Teheran and Pyongyang might not be deterred the way the Soviets had been. Americans needed national missile defense as an added layer of protection in case deterrence failed. To deploy such a system, the ABM Treaty had to go. American officials discussed the move with the Russians well in advance of the announcement, and together they carefully orchestrated the public rollout and Moscow’s response. Putin said that the Bush administration had been clear about its intentions and had not deceived him. Still, Moscow called the decision “a mistake,” and viewed the withdrawal as a sign that Washington “had put Russia in its place” and would push ahead with its plans irrespective of Moscow’s views.78 Privately, the Russians suspected that US missile defense was aimed more at weakening Russia’s second-strike capability than countering prospective missile launches from North Korea and Iran.79 How could Moscow be sure its nuclear forces would deter a Kosovo-style intervention by NATO inside Russia if US missile defenses changed the strategic equation?
The timing of Bush’s ABM announcement, coming on the heels of the first major victories over the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, also stoked broader Russian suspicions that Washington would exploit Russian help when it wanted but reject Moscow’s input on key issues when it clashed with American preferences.80 Foreign Minister Ivanov hinted at Russian concerns in a New York Times op-ed in January 2002, “Organizing the World to Fight Terror,” in which he called for “constructing a system of international security adequate to address 21st-century threats.” Russian-American cooperation should play a decisive role in creating that system, he said, but “such cooperation can be effective only if it is based on the principles of equality.”81
Less than four months after the events of September 11, however, Russian doubts about whether Washington shared that vision were growing. Putin’s advisers had warned him that facilitating the establishment of US bases in Central Asia would lead to a long-term American military presence in Russia’s southern neighbors.82 He had pressed for and received assurances from Washington that these bases would be temporary, tied to progress in the Afghan war. But as the Taliban’s defeat was growing clearer, the American presence was looking more rather than less permanent to Moscow. Why, Russian officials asked, was America fortifying its allegedly temporary military bases in Central Asia? American officials explained that temporary did not necessarily mean short- term. The United States wanted access to the bases “for as long as we need them,” which was undefined and could be for a long period.83 Russian fears flared that US and NATO forces were starting to encircle Russia’s borders.84
Those fears deepened further in November 2002 in response to NATO’s summit meeting in Prague, where the alliance announced that it would undertake a second round of enlargement and invite Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia to join in 2004. In inviting the Baltic states, the alliance was for the first time offering membership to ex-Soviet republics. Much like its reaction to the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, Russia muted its public response to the announcement. But below the surface, Russian consternation was clear. Enlargement seemed to be driven by the oft-articulated American vision of “Europe whole and free,” and it was not evident to Moscow where the alliance’s eastward momentum would stop. Dmitry Suslov, a foreign policy expert at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), observes that NATO expansion was not simply a military threat: “For Moscow, NATO expansion symbolized that the US was treating Russia as the Cold War loser rather than its second winner. Instead of building a new security order in Europe with Russia as a codesigner, the US was just institutionalizing its own ‘victory.’”85
American power could be an asset for Russia when it could bandwagon on Washington’s international clout to bolster Moscow’s own prominence, and when it could exploit US military capabilities to tackle security threats that Russia could not handle alone, as in Afghanistan. But that power could pose big problems for Moscow when misdirected. For Russia, the US intervention in Iraq in the spring of 2003 was just such a misdirection, aimed at enhancing the US geopolitical position rather than at addressing a legitimate security challenge. “Putin and his intelligence officials knew that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was bluffing about his possession of chemical and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Indeed, they stated this bluntly to US officials on numerous occasions.”86 For Moscow, the Iraq War was a disturbing manifestation of what later became known as the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda—to “support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”87 Through Russian eyes, this agenda appeared both destabilizing and cynical. In removing functioning, albeit authoritarian, governments, Washington risked losing any semblance of governance whatsoever and producing chaos. Russian officials warned against such a result in Iraq, only to be dismissed by their American counterparts. And tellingly, Americans only seemed to push for regime change in countries that provided geostrategic advantages against Russia, rather than in dictatorial US friends like Saudi Arabia. This suggested to Moscow that Washington’s true motive was not advancing democracy but bolstering US global hegemony. The Iraq War, together with America’s ABM withdrawal and the second round of NATO enlargement, convinced Russians that the United States was a difficult partner, prone to creating instability through mistaken policies and incompetent intelligence, reluctant to listen to the cautionary advice of others, and unwilling to view Moscow as a partner worthy of respect.
Russian views continued to darken as new developments unfolded. Four closely packed events in late 2003 and 2004 combined cumulatively to push Moscow’s perceptions across an important threshold: the belief that Washington was not just a troublesome partner but was actively seeking to weaken Russia and overthrow its government. The first took place, oddly enough, in Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, landlocked and located far from anything Europeans or Americans would consider important. The western (culturally and linguistically Romanian) and eastern (Slavic and Russian-speaking) portions of the ex-Soviet republic had been locked in a frozen conflict since 1992, when the eastern portion had declared its independence as “Transnistria.” Transnistrians feared that the central Moldovan government planned to reunite with Romania, and they sought protection against this eventuality by separating from Moldova and seeking the help of Russian military forces that had been stationed in the region since Soviet times. A joint peacekeeping force comprising Russian, Moldovan, and Transnistrian units, monitored by an observer mission from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), effectively ended the fighting.88
Nonetheless, little progress had been made in resolving the broader dispute until the fall of 2003, when Russia achieved a breakthrough. One of Putin’s close Kremlin aides, Dmitry Kozak, succeeded in persuading Moldovan president Voronin and Transnistrian leader Smirnov to settle the conflict by reunifying Moldova as a federation under what became known as the Kozak Memorandum. The two leaders scheduled a signing ceremony for the accord, and Putin indicated that he would attend amid considerable pomp and circumstance. But when the Moldovan government notified the United States and asked for Washington’s support shortly before the signing, American diplomats refused, complaining that they had not been consulted, arguing that the plan would provide Transnistria with too much leverage over Moldovan policy decisions, and objecting to an unpublished provision that allowed for a small Russian military presence in Transnistria. US objections were quickly followed by street protests against the plan. Voronin backed away on the eve of the ceremony, and a chagrined Putin called off his travel at the last minute.89 Russian officials concluded bitterly that Washington viewed its interests as so far-reaching that “even the most distant and strategically marginal areas in the post-Soviet space” should be subject to American hegemony.90 What did it say about American intentions that eradicating Russian influence in lowly Moldova was so important? In this context, how could Moscow trust American assurances that NATO expansion was not directed against Russia?
The second event occurred only weeks later in Georgia, a country that bridges the oil-rich Caspian basin and Russia’s volatile North Caucasus. Georgia’s relations with Moscow had long been problematic. Ethnic separatists in Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, persecuted under Georgia’s first post-Soviet leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, had for years counted on Moscow for protection, angering Tbilisi. In turn, former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who had ruled Georgia since 1992, looked to US and European support as a counterweight to Russia, riling Moscow. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Chechen fighters had used Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge as a refuge from which to launch attacks in Russia, and Moscow accused Tbilisi of aiding and abetting their activities. In 2002, the United States began training, equipping, and modernizing the Georgian military for counterterrorism operations, in part to reduce the likelihood that Russia would take action of its own in the Pankisi.
Against this backdrop of tension, Georgia held legislative elections in early November 2003. The elections pitted government loyalists under the increasingly unpopular Shevardnadze against self-proclaimed liberals playing upon the public’s growing unhappiness with bureaucratic corruption. Official results indicated that Shevardnadze’s ruling party had won, but opposition groups alleged massive fraud in the vote tabulation. Citing independent exit polls conducted by US-trained and -funded nongovernment organizations, Mikheil Saakashvili, an American-educated former Georgian official who had gone into political exile after a falling out with Shevardnadze, claimed that his party had won the election. Rallying around Saakashvili’s claims, massive anti-government demonstrations erupted in Georgia’s major cities, inspired and organized by an American-backed youth movement. On November 22, when Shevardnadze attempted to open the new session of the parliament, Saakashvili and other protestors burst in holding roses in their hands. Shevardnadze fled the building and resigned the next day. A presidential election was quickly scheduled for January 2004, and Saakashvili won an overwhelming 96 percent of the vote, promising in the course of his short campaign to impose Tbilisi’s writ on Georgia’s separatist regions. The “Rose Revolution” had triumphed.
Moscow viewed Shevardnadze’s departure with ambivalence. Russians shed few tears for a man who had nudged along the Soviet Union’s collapse and who had long been a thorn in Russia’s side while governing Georgia. But they looked askance as Saakashvili quickly became the darling of Washington, drawing upon his fluent English and extensive roster of high-level contacts to press Georgia’s case for joining NATO and the EU. Suspicion spread in Moscow that the Rose Revolution was no accident, that behind the scenes, American democracy-builders and intelligence officers had carefully trained and funded Georgia’s opposition for just such a moment. Through Russian eyes, Washington’s undisguised glee over the revolution was not mere jubilation over the advance of democracy; it reflected an important strategic advance in checking Russia’s influence in its former empire.
The third event took place in Beslan, a town in Russia’s North Caucasus, where a small group of heavily armed Chechen and Ingush terrorists seized control of an elementary school on the first day of classes in September 2004 and held nearly 1,200 children, parents, and teachers hostage for three days. Russian forces finally stormed the school and killed the terrorists, but the assault resulted in the deaths of 332 people, including 186 children. The incident was emotionally and politically wrenching. The nation watched the tragedy unfold in real time. Putin had made anti-terrorism a central theme of his domestic and foreign policies, but it now appeared that all his efforts had fallen short. He addressed the nation mournfully, hours after the bloody rescue operation, articulating some bitter lessons.
We have to admit that we failed to recognize the complexity and danger of the processes going on in our own country and the world as a whole. At any rate, we failed to react to them adequately. We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten. Some want to tear off a big chunk of our country. Others help them to do it. They help because they think that Russia, as one of the greatest nuclear powers of the world, is still a threat, and this threat has to be eliminated. And terrorism is only an instrument to achieve these goals. In these conditions, we simply cannot, we should not, live as carelessly as before. We must create a more effective security system, and demand from our law enforcement agencies actions adequate in level and scale to the new threats.91
One target of that more effective security system would be the United States. Putin had all but expressly pointed his finger at Washington for abetting terrorism. Russians bristled at the fact that Chechen government-in-exile officials were living openly in the United States and that some private American organizations supported and funded the Chechen rebellion. Imagine, they asked, how Americans would feel if Moscow allowed al-Qaeda members to live and raise funds in Russia?92 Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin consultant at the time, claims that “Bush did not fully control his secret services, or he did not think he needed to fully control [them], so in the Caucasus, American intelligence services had been sometimes helping the Chechens. Putin certainly thought that this came at Bush’s order, and that Bush was a hypocrite.”93 Unofficial American support for the Chechen cause, Russian intelligence allegations of US meddling in the Caucasus, and the strong emotions attending the Beslan tragedy proved to be a toxic mix for Russian perceptions of the United States.
A handful of months after the Beslan attack, Ukraine plunged into a political crisis. Moscow regarded Ukraine as its top foreign policy priority. The largest country in Europe, Ukraine had deep historical and cultural ties to Russia, and it housed pipelines that delivered some 80 percent of Russia’s gas exports to Europe, accounting for almost a quarter of Russia’s overall state revenues. As NATO and the EU moved eastward, however, Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation was very much up in the air. Western portions of the country were largely Ukrainian-speaking, predominantly Catholic, and favorably oriented toward Europe and the United States. The country’s eastern regions were dominated by Russophones, primarily Russian Orthodox, well disposed toward Moscow. The Crimean peninsula, where the Russians leased a base hosting their Black Sea Fleet, had been officially part of the USSR’s Russian republic until 1954, when Soviet leader Khrushchev had gifted it to the Ukrainian republic, and it had long been a part of the Russian Empire before Soviet times. Each of Ukraine’s presidential elections since post-Soviet independence in 1992 had been closely contested races pivoting on turnout in the eastern and western regions. In the fall of 2004, the election pitted a dynamic pro-European reformer from the west, Viktor Yushchenko, against Viktor Yanukovych, the lumbering hardscrabble governor of the Donetsk region in the east.
In view of the high stakes in the election, Putin opted for a hands-on approach. A flood of Russian experts and money poured into Kiev to help the Yanukovych campaign, Russian television blanketed the Ukrainian airwaves with pro-Yanukovych advertising and news coverage, and Putin himself (who at the time ranked as the most popular politician in Ukrainian opinion polls) visited Ukraine seven times during the campaign and explicitly endorsed Yanukovych, campaigning with him on the eve of the election. On election day in November 2004, the efforts appeared to pay off in a narrow Yanukovych victory. But exit polls and parallel vote counts by American-trained and -funded nongovernmental organizations indicated that the official results had been falsified. Thousands of orange-clad protestors occupied Kiev’s central square, demanding that elections be rerun. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the United States “cannot accept the Ukrainian election as legitimate.”94 After weeks of protest-fueled political turbulence, the Supreme Court of Ukraine declared the election null and void. A new election was held on December 26, and Yushchenko emerged as the clear winner. Washington rejoiced. Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” had triumphed, apparently setting the country on a Westward trajectory.
For Putin, the Orange Revolution could only have happened with outside orchestration. As in the Rose Revolution several months earlier, American-trained and -funded nongovernmental organizations had played a pivotal role in the outcome. Washington had been working to bolster Ukrainian independence from Russia since early in the Clinton administration, making Kiev the third-largest recipient of American foreign aid after Israel and Egypt.95 From the Kremlin’s perspective, Ukraine and Russia had essentially been one country, ruled from Moscow, for almost the entire time that the United States had been a nation. Their union had not affected America’s security. What did it say about US intentions toward Russia that Washington now devoted such effort to driving a wedge between them? It could mean only one thing: the United States aimed to surround Russia with NATO-allied puppets, imperil Russia’s vital trade links to the outside world, and ultimately foment regime change in Moscow itself. Russian foreign affairs expert Vladimir Frolov summed up Russia’s concerns about the Orange Revolution shortly after the events in Ukraine:
Elections in the CIS countries are turning from an instrument of the people’s will into a convenient pretext for outside multilateral interference. This new environment is aimed at creating international legal conditions for changing a regime by challenging election results, claiming as illegitimate the existing constitutional procedures and provoking an acute political crisis. As a rule, the crisis either turns into a “color” revolution, that is, an unconstitutional change of power through a coup that is automatically recognized by the “international community,” or else it leads to long-lasting political destabilization that is controlled from outside and which ultimately paralyzes the legally elected power.96
If such an approach could topple the government in Ukraine, it could do the same thing in Russia. By early 2005, Russia’s belief that the United States posed an existential threat was fully formed. At the same time, rising oil prices, China’s escalating power, and signs of friction within the Western alliance suggested to Moscow that the unipolar world was becoming multipolar and that Russia had broader strategic options than hitching its wagon to a duplicitous Washington. Putin changed course, using engagement with Washington not as a promising path toward great-power status but as a means of influencing America’s exercise of power in areas important to Russian interests. He stepped up Russia’s courtship of China and other non-Western powers. More strikingly, he battened down the hatches inside Russia, cracking down on NGOs and American democratization programs while launching new initiatives designed to thwart nascent opposition movements, hoping to reduce Russia’s vulnerability to meddling.
The Kremlin decided that now the [US had] found a way how to get people to the streets without trade unions, without opposition parties, just building some youth movement very quickly out of scratch. And they thought, look, we need to do something about it. And they came up with their own ideas. They launched their own pro-Kremlin youth movements to have someone to send to the streets, to counter [the] threat of color revolutions. They turned to informal actors. They turned to some people who officially are not part of the government, but they enjoy direct access to the Kremlin, and these people [were] tasked to deal with the new threat. That was a moment when we got these trolls, troll factories, lots of people who started contaminating the space of public debate.97
Subsequent events over the course of the next decade only served to turn Russia’s belief about hostile US intentions into an unshakable and widely held conviction: the West’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence over Moscow’s objections in 2008, the US emergency airlift of Georgian troops serving in Iraq to fight against Russians in their war later that year, America’s support for violent regime change in Libya in 2011, Washington’s undisguised sympathy for massive street protests in Russia in 2011 and 2012, and American backing for what Moscow called a “coup d’état,” displacing Ukraine’s president with a pro-NATO leadership in 2014.
Putin dramatically articulated these perceptions in a speech delivered in 2007 at the annual Munich Security Conference, in which he bitterly criticized American unilateralism and illegitimate interference in the sovereign affairs of other states.98 Washington had repeatedly betrayed Russia, first by expanding NATO despite assurances to Gorbachev that it would not, and later by establishing permanent bases in Central Asia that it pledged would be temporary, all the while fighting against Russian influence despite purporting to be a strategic partner. The United States clearly could not be trusted. It wanted to weaken Russia and overthrow its government; the only question was how best to defend the country against this formidable foe. For Moscow, the best defense included a good offense.
How accurate are these mutual fears of existential threat? Does Russia really hope to hasten America’s demise by fatally undermining its democracy and provoking internal conflict? Does Washington actually intend to encircle Russia with NATO forces and foment regime change, ultimately breaking Russia into pieces? It is difficult to tackle subjective perceptions in an objective way, to juxtapose feelings and opinions to concrete realities. But one sign that there is a gap between these perceptions and reality is the derision with which each side regards the perceptions of the other. Each dismisses the other’s fears as mistaken at best, if not completely disingenuous. Each believes its intentions are misperceived.
Americans generally find Russian accusations that we have intentionally sought to ring Russia’s borders with NATO allies and US military bases to be risible. Americans are of course aware that Russia has objected to NATO’s eastward enlargement, but they tend to regard Russian concerns as exaggerations, frequently using the word paranoia in their discourse on the subject. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum discounts Russian fears of NATO expansion altogether. “There is no way that Putin believed that NATO was a genuine military threat,” she states. “This is propaganda he has been using at home as a way to consolidate his power.”99 A former US ambassador takes a similar view. “NATO is good for Russia. NATO maintains stability on Russia’s west, and that allows Russia to focus its attention on other places. As much as they complain about NATO, there’s no threat that Poland is going to invade Russia, and they know that. I mean, they may not admit that, but deep down they know that.” Others take a more nuanced view, accepting Moscow’s fears as genuinely felt, but rejecting the notion that the United States and NATO have been implementing a master plan to encircle and weaken Russia. From the start, “NATO enlargement was driven by demand, not supply,” according to another former State Department official.100 The aspirant members sought NATO, not the other way around. And the alliance’s objectives were, in fact, not aimed at hurting Russia. “Enlargement served Wilsonian goals of democracy promotion in central and eastern Europe, which was not detrimental but actually beneficial to Russia’s long-term interests,” according to Michael McFaul and James Goldgeier, a former Clinton administration official.
Americans are similarly dismissive of Russian claims that the United States is cynically employing democratization programs to foment regime change in and around Russia. Former CIA acting director Michael Morell denies the Russian accusation point-blank: “Russian president Putin believes that the United States was behind the protests in the streets of Kiev that began the Russia-Ukraine crisis. That is not true.”101 A former senior State Department official notes wryly, “Were the CIA half as effective as [Putin] seems to think, we’d run the world. In the Maidan revolution, at one point there were estimates of 300,000 to 700,000 people on the streets of Kiev, a city of less than 3 million. You don’t organize that from outside.”102 A former Bush White House official relates that Putin “thought we were the puppet masters. Like, man, we are not that good. I even told Russian television once, when they were accusing me personally of being the ‘gray cardinal’ of the color revolutions, I said: ‘I wish. How come you see America with a massive budget being unable to do anything much, to stop the political deterioration and security deterioration in Iraq, and you think, on no budget at all, we can overthrow Moscow-supported governments in Kiev and Tbilisi?’ Are you kidding me?”103
Along similar lines, McFaul describes President Obama’s unsuccessful efforts to dissuade Putin’s belief that the United States was driving regime change in the Middle East and along Russia’s periphery. “The president explained to him, he said, ‘Look, we’re not behind this. I’m not a regime-change guy. We are responding to these events, and in our view, we’re better to engage, to try to push these things toward peaceful evolutionary change, because if we don’t, they’ll end up as violent revolutionary change.’”104 America’s advocates of Wilsonian democracy promotion candidly acknowledge that they have supported democratization in and around Russia, but they aver that, far from seeking Russia’s demise, they have long envisioned a strong, prosperous, and well-governed Russia. “We believed close ties between Russia and the West would make both Russia and the West better off.”105 This belief, which contrasts so strongly with Russia’s perceptions of American intent, reflects a strong general American tendency “to assume that the exercise of US power in places less enlightened than America means the betterment of those places and the people who live there.”106
For their part, Russians are dismissive of American accusations that they seek to undermine democracy and fatally subvert the United States. The term Russophobia appears in Russian discourse about American perceptions nearly as often as paranoia occurs in US analysis of Russian views.107 Even Putin detractors in Russia and in Russian émigré communities in the West claim not to recognize their country in American media descriptions of Russia’s objectives. “Anything they publish about Russia is, as a general rule, total garbage,” wrote Oleg Kashin, an opposition journalist, in 2017. “The image of Putin’s Russia constructed by Western and, above all, American media outlets over the past 18 months shocks even the most anti-Putin reader in Russia.… They flood [us] with a wave of accusations [that] sounds like a joke warranting no response except for a laugh of derision.”108 Maxim Trudolyubov, another Russian journalist who is a Putin skeptic, doubts US allegations that Russia is fighting a global battle against democracy. “What this hype is really doing is elevating the Kremlin to the position of the world’s meddler in chief by reading a coherent strategy into isolated and disparate trolling and propaganda efforts by various Russian institutions and individuals. I am an agnostic as to whether a strategy aimed at undermining democracies all over the world exists. Everything I know about how Russia and its government work makes me doubt it.”109 Andranik Migranyan, a senior Russian foreign policy expert and a Putin supporter, similarly disparages the notion that Russia is fighting against democracy in the Middle East and other regions: “Only a blind man would not see that Russia and its diplomats are fixated not on preserving dictatorship, but on observing principles. Russia is aware that regime change could result in chaos and anarchy, as was the case in Iraq and Libya. More often than not, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”110
Dmitry Suslov, one of Russia’s leading experts on the United States and Europe, calls allegations that Moscow seeks to stamp out democracy in the United States and beyond “completely bizarre.”111 Russia has strong relations, he points out, with Israel, India, and Japan, all of which are developed democracies, none of which has alleged any Russian interference in its internal affairs. Moreover, Russians scoff at the notion that they hope to crush democracy in such countries as Ukraine and Georgia. They do not regard the polities in Ukraine and Georgia, long plagued by cronyism and corruption, as democratic or on a path toward democracy, according to Suslov. Russians reason, therefore, that the appeal of these countries for Washington must lie not in their illusory democratic progress but in their willingness to subordinate themselves to the United States and serve as bulwarks against Russia. Russians are similarly dismissive of the argument that the Russian regime requires an external enemy—the United States—to justify internal repression. Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, points out that during the era of Russian-Western cooperation, “the Kremlin was using good relations with the West to legitimize its rule. The Kremlin can thrive politically on both good and bad relations with the West.”112
Given the pivotal role of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections in shaping American perceptions of Russia as an existential threat, it is important to examine Russia’s own perceptions of the motives behind those activities. Many Russians (though not the Russian government) candidly acknowledge the election interference, although most believe that Americans have overreacted to it, largely for domestic political reasons. “Yes, of course Russia has interfered in the internal affairs of the US and other Western countries, if you call the Facebook and Twitter campaigns and Russia Today broadcasts and so on interference,” according to Suslov. “But the purpose of this interference is not to destroy or undermine Western democracy. This purpose is to send a message that the West is not immune when it interferes in Russia, when it supports regime change policies all over the Middle East.”113 Frolov makes similar points:
It is unlikely that the Kremlin really hoped to influence the results of the US presidential election or viewed Trump’s victory as likely. That would have signaled a degree of incompetence that Moscow is still incapable of. Rather, the point of the exercise was to send a message that Russia mattered and could do bad things that the US, in Moscow’s view, has been doing to Russia. It worked, but not exactly how Russia had hoped.114
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while not acknowledging election interference, hints that Moscow is looking for a change in America’s approach to encouraging democratization around the world. “The founding fathers of the United States, they also spoke of their leadership, and they believed that the American nation was exceptional, but they wanted others just to take the American experience as an example and to follow suit. They never suggested that the United States should impose, including by force, its values on others.”115 In other words, contrary to American perceptions, Russians say they are reacting to what we do and how we do it, not to what we are.
Significantly, Russians largely disagree with the consensus American view that the interference was an unmitigated success—that, as Clapper puts it, “the Russians succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.”116 Many have been happy to see Washington get what they regard as a well-deserved comeuppance, and some are pleased that Russia matters to the United States in ways that it had not since the Cold War, even if negatively. Being feared is preferable, in many ways, to being ignored or disrespected. But very few believe that American disarray serves Russian interests. Frolov criticizes the Kremlin for “refusing to discuss with the US what soured our relations and blaming everything on the long-gone Obama administration,” but he says that Russian officials have bemoaned, not celebrated, America’s reaction to the election interference. “‘Russian meddling’ has become a snowball in the US. Now that it’s been released, it’s been rolling downhill, destroying everything in its path, including Russian foreign policy interests.”117 He explains, “Détente with America was a necessary condition for transitioning to a peaceful domestic development agenda [inside Russia]. Now it seems to have been postponed indefinitely. It’s the sense of a historical impasse that is driving the panic [in Moscow].”118
Suslov claims that the American belief that Moscow is celebrating the success of its election interference campaign is “misperceiving the real Russian attitude. Russia did not anticipate such a great and negative backlash for US-Russian relations. ‘Russiagate’ has consolidated an anti-Russia consensus in the United States. It has doomed us to a long-term continuation of this confrontation. This is absolutely not what Russia wanted.”119 He argues that if Hillary Clinton had won the election, as Moscow expected, there would have been considerably less furor about Russia’s activities. And if Moscow’s goal was to demonstrate that American elections are charades, stage-managed by entrenched elites, it could hardly have been cheered by the outcome. As Kirill Martynov observed in the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, “For a year, 90% of US media outlets claimed that Trump was the spawn of the devil, and that his election would be catastrophic for the country. However, voters decided otherwise. Therefore, this destroys the notion that democracy is a mere spectacle put on by the elite to serve their interests.”120 All this suggests that Russia’s election interference, if it was indeed the result of a conscious Kremlin strategy and not the product of uncoordinated steps taken at lower levels, flowed from a significant misestimation of the likely American response.
Another way to compare perception and reality is to explore whether there are instances of Russian and American behavior that are inconsistent with each side’s purported intentions. Are there examples of American policies that contradict the belief that the United States is fomenting color revolutions to advance its global hegemony and topple adversary regimes? Are there important instances in which Russia has not fought against democratic movements in geostrategically significant regions? In both cases, the answer is yes. Washington’s reaction to the protest movement in Egypt in 2011 is an example not of American officials’ masterminding regime change to outmaneuver an adversary nation but rather struggling to keep pace with an unanticipated popular uprising in an important ally. The US decision to press President Mubarak to step down amid growing protests and to insist on legitimate national elections—paving the way to the electoral success of the anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood—could hardly be described as a cynical effort to advance American hegemony. In many ways, it proved to be a setback for US influence in the region and strongly suggests that US officials were guided much more by a genuine belief in the principles of democracy than by hegemonic aspirations as they attempted to navigate a messy and complex situation.
Similarly, Russia’s response to the color revolution in Armenia in 2018 suggests that it does not object to democratic movements or popular protests per se but rather to the rise of anti-Russian governments on its periphery, and particularly to those intent on joining NATO. In May of that year, Armenian prime minister Serzh Sargsyan resigned after more than a week of fist-pounding mass protests reminiscent of the uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine. Simon Saradzhyan, a Harvard-based expert who has closely followed Russian-Armenian relations, explains that Armenia rated at the time as more democratic than Russia, had friendly relations with the West, had recently signed an EU Association Agreement, participated in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, and had troops in the NATO-led campaign in Afghanistan. Had Russia sought reasons for worry, it would not have been difficult to find them. But Moscow neither intervened in Armenia nor displayed particular concern about the implications of the political instability for Russia’s national security. Why? Because Armenia’s leadership evinced no ambition to join NATO, and its elites showed little antagonism toward Moscow.121
If they are to some degree distortions, what is the significance of these perceptions of deadly intent in Moscow and Washington? Despite deep mistrust and suspicion, neither side truly expects an imminent nuclear or conventional military attack designed to destroy the other. The stakes are too great, and the odds of success are too long, for anyone to contemplate such a suicidal course. But these perceptions nonetheless make unplanned disaster more likely. For one thing, when each side believes the essence of the threat derives from the very nature of the other side, which cannot change, there is little incentive to seek compromise. Indeed, aiming for a negotiated settlement is seen as dangerous appeasement. Such efforts are viewed as “worse than useless; they contribute to weakening of national will and reduce a country’s readiness to win the inevitable conflict when it finally comes. By this logic, it seems more prudent and certainly more politically advantageous to abandon any effort to avoid that conflict.”122
More ominously, these perceptions are reinforcing each other in a vicious cycle of interaction. They shape the narratives that determine how events are interpreted, and they provide the cognitive filters that determine which facts are salient and which are disregarded. This in turn drives statements and actions that reinforce the threat perceptions on each side and heighten each side’s sense of vulnerability. Russia’s great power aspirations fuel American concerns about imperialism, which strengthens US support for building West-leaning bulwarks against Russia’s influence along the country’s periphery. This stokes fears in Russia of hostile encirclement and regime change, which encourages Russian aggression in neighboring states and internal crackdowns on media and opposition groups, further convincing Americans that the Kremlin has imperial designs and sees democracy as an ideological foe. Russia tries to cool America’s ardor for democratization crusades by cybermeddling, which the United States interprets as an existential threat and responds with punitive economic sanctions and stepped-up cyberactivity of its own, all meant to deter further Russian meddling. This, however, only further convinces Moscow that Washington is accelerating its aggressive bid to weaken and destroy Russia.
Left unaddressed, this cycle of perception is likely to deepen, increasing the likelihood that the two sides will misinterpret the signals each sends in a crisis and overreact to the actions of the other side. When a state believes its very existence is at stake, its resolve and willingness to take risks in conflict or crisis situations run startlingly high. Failure to appreciate that resolve can have serious consequences, as Europe and the United States experienced in 2014 in underestimating Moscow’s likely response to the Maidan uprising in Ukraine, and as Russians encountered in 2016 in failing to anticipate the ways America might react to election meddling. And when this strong resolve and high risk tolerance are overlaid against a background of increasingly unconstrained shadow warfare between two nuclear powers in the cyber, military, economic, and information domains, they assume disproportionately dangerous implications.