Eugene P Trani & Donald E Davis. World Affairs. Volume 180, Issue 4, Winter 2017.
American-Russian relations have been troubled from Lenin to Putin, from Wilson to Trump. Woodrow Wilson insisted that no one power should dominate Europe. This detailed analysis shows that Wilson was the first “Cold War Warrior,” and his “quarantine” policy toward Russia was the precursor of the policy the United States has generally followed toward Russia since the end of World War II. Wilson tried to avoid taking sides in the Bolshevik Revolution but finally was drawn into it from relentless Allied pressure. Yet he kept intervention minimal. Afterward, he quarantined communism until FDR recognized Russia and, later, allied with Stalin against Hitler. Truman and his successors renewed “quarantine,” calling it “containment.” With the USSR’s collapse, the shape and stability of Wilson’s Europe reappeared. The West has preserved that Europe through the EU, NATO, and sanctions against Putin’s restoring a Soviet sphere. America should now be clear, as Wilson once was, in supporting European security.
Just over one hundred years ago, in November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia. In the period of time since 1917, American-Russian relations have been troubled but generally consistent. From Lenin to Putin and Wilson to Trump, no matter who the leader, relations have been difficult, and it all started with Woodrow Wilson. He was the first Cold War Warrior, and his influence continues today. Let us review Wilson’s presidency and his views and actions regarding Russia.
President Wilson believed that no one power should dominate Europe, but rather that there must be a balance of power, always including America. It must continue to be in America’s primary interest to participate in this balance. That meant preventing not only Germany from dominating Europe—whether it would be the Kaiser or Hitler—but also Russia—whether it would be Stalin or Putin. In this sense, Wilson was a realist and an internationalist.
This Wilsonian awareness that America could no longer be isolationist but must be an integral part of Europe remains today. For instance, just recently by a margin of 98 to 2, the U.S. Senate approved legislation that would increase economic sanctions against Russia because of its interference in America’s election campaign. This legislation will also prevent President Donald J. Trump, without first getting congressional approval, from removing the original and subsequent sanctions levied against President Vladimir Putin’s government beginning in 2014. The House of Representatives also approved this action by a vote of 419 to 3. Trump was forced to sign it or his veto would have easily been overturned (Dewan 2017). In January 2018, the Trump Administration did not increase the sanctions, but the existing sanctions remain in effect.
Wilson would smile approvingly at these sanctions. It was he who, over a century ago, established a similar policy against the newly founded Soviet government. His administration termed this policy quarantine, but other administrations eventually renamed it containment. In either case, we closely identify quarantine with a later era, from 1945 to 1991, one that we call the “Cold War.” Wilson is the father of those later policies associated with the “Cold War.” Why is this so?
December 1917
Although President Wilson preferred to ignore the Bolshevik Revolution, others pressed him to act. Alternatives were proposed. The British considered aid to Lenin’s Russian enemies to restore the Eastern Front. The French concurred and talked about allied intervention to restore the Provisional Government. Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued for some form of aid to those Russians still willing to fight. Colonel Edward M. House, the president’s confidant, considered reconciliation, not recognition, in order not to force the Russians into the Germans’ hands. Americans in Petrograd had their own ideas about what U.S. policy toward the Bolsheviks should be: everything from the total irreconcilability of Ambassador David Francis to the Bolsheviks to accommodation to the Bolsheviks by military attache General William Judson to preserve the Eastern Front as long as possible and prevent Russia from falling completely into German hands. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, all of these points of view were weighed.
At first, doing nothing, as Ambassador Francis correctly assumed, became President Wilson’s principal way of dealing with the Bolsheviks. The president expected that their government would soon collapse. But selecting that procedure created a sort of policy vacuum in the sense that something might have been done to try to retain the Eastern Front: overthrow the Bolsheviks with a pro-Allied government, or convince Lenin that it was in his group’s interest to fight on, or make the Germans pay a very high price for Russia’s neutrality.
In December 1917, alternatives to Wilson’s doing nothing and watching-and-waiting emerged. The British, with French assistance, increasingly advocated a plan for reconstructing a front in southern Russia, perhaps overthrowing the Bolsheviks, and another plan for Russia’s Far East that involved a Japanese intervention. These propositions required Wilson’s participation to be effective. Other American nationals in Petrograd and Moscow, as well as advisors in Washington, offered their alternatives to the administration. And Colonel House returned from one of his transatlantic trips with his own alternative. Then there was Secretary Lansing and the State Department, where calls could be heard for an anti-Bolshevik policy.
To summarize, many alternatives for dealing with Bolshevism confronted President Wilson in December 1917. Ambassador Francis supported the watching-and-waiting policy of Wilson and Lansing. General Judson and Ray Robins, head of the U.S. Red Cross Mission, preferred offering an olive branch to the Bolsheviks in the hopes of keeping them in the war or belligerently neutral. Wilson rejected the olive branch alternative. The British and French supported aiding counterrevolution (Link 1966-1993, vol. 45, 309). Wilson put that alternative on hold. Similarly, Secretary Lansing’s belief, though Wilson inclined toward him, remained speculation for the time being. What intrigued Wilson was House’s newest suggestion: mobilize, democratize, and rejoin Russia through an appeal to ideals. The president must wage a propaganda campaign to this end similar to George Creel’s (of the Committee on Public Information) strategy. That campaign must stress the fairness and reasonableness of Wilson’s gospel for all belligerents: territorial integrity and self-determination. All that remained was for Wilson to speak directly to the Russian people, promising them their territorial integrity and self-determination while bypassing the Bolsheviks.
January 1918
Bolshevik clamor for a clear enunciation of Allied war aims forced a statement out of President Wilson. There was a chance that the Bolsheviks might remain in the war if they feared German peace terms and believed in a fair deal from the Allies. Recognition and massive aid were essential components of any deal. Wilson countenanced neither. Rather, Wilson intended to offer all belligerents territorial integrity and self-determination. These principles, applied to Russia, constituted Wilson’s famous “acid test” of Allied goodwill in Point VI of his “Fourteen Points Address” of January 8, 1918.
The last minute reprieve of Raymond Robins for Lenin, offering aid and recognition, failed. The Soviets ratified the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers. The German army, finally freed in the East, mounted its great spring offensive of 1918 in the West. Secretary Lansing’s anti-Bolshevik view now began to prevail in the Wilson Administration. Wilson’s Allies threatened military intervention in Russia to reconstitute the Eastern Front, thereby relieving German military pressure in the West. If President Wilson failed to intervene in Russia, perhaps Japan would. Victory over the Central Powers seemed to hang in the balance. All eyes focused on the president, beginning with the eyes of the Bolsheviks.
The Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lev Trotsky, taunted the peoples and governments of the Western Allies and especially the United States by touting the Bolshevik peace program. “It is necessary,” Trotsky said, “to say clearly and precisely what is the peace program of France, Italy, Great Britain, the United States” (Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 1918, Russia I, 406). If it was necessary to liberate Alsace-Lorraine, Galicia, and Poznan, then what about Ireland, Egypt, and India? The Russian Revolution granted self-determination to Finland, Ukraine, and Belorussia. It was necessary to construct the international basis for peace on self-determination for all peoples (FRUS 1918, Russia I, 406).
No sooner had Trotsky thrown down the gauntlet before the Allies than he discovered that the Germans proposed retention of their conquests in Eastern Europe. The Germans also refused to allow the Russians to check the prohibition of troop transfers or permit commercial navigation on the White Sea. These German proposals threw the Bolsheviks into a fury. Speeches at the executive committee of the Soviet indicated a readiness to resume the war (see Judson 1918, January 1).
The prospects of a break at Brest-Litovsk seemed great. Ambassador Francis confessed to Lansing that he was willing to “swallow pride, sacrifice dignity, and with discretion do all that is necessary to prevent Russia’s becoming an ally of Germany” (in Judson 1918, Box 8). But in the end, the Soviet government on March 15, 1918 ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (FRUS 1918, Russia I, 325).
A Fateful Decision
In the early months of 1918, American officials began to fear that munitions’ stockpiles in Murmansk and Archangel would fall into German hands. To protect these munitions was no easy task, however, given the political turmoil within Russia and the Allies’ lack of formal relations with the Bolshevik government. The waiting period for Bolshevism’s collapse so that Russia would continue its war effort had ended with the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Therefore, President Wilson’s propaganda initiative to get Russia back into the war by Point VI of his Fourteen Points Address had also failed. The great German offensive against France began on March 21, 1918. Allied pressure to resurrect some sort of Eastern Front or prevent Germany’s full exploitation of Russian resources intensified. Wilson held the key to Allied hopes in Russia because intervention would require American resources.
Pressure for American support of intervention in northern Russia and Siberia, especially from the British, was continually increasing. It is useful, therefore, to review the nature of that pressure, as it was the one decision of Wilson’s that caused the most controversy in his entire Russian policy. Had there been no Allied pressure, there probably would have been no American intervention. London’s interest in intervention derived from a fear of a German victory, concern about investments, alarm as to German or Bolshevik advances into British possessions (especially India), and, of course, the threat of Bolshevism.
The British believed American participation necessary if intervention were to have success, as the Americans would have to provide manpower, supplies, and the finances. There were feelers as early as December 1917 concerning American and Japanese willingness to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and to supply food to Russia. Lansing hoped no action would be necessary, especially by the Japanese. Already Wilson and Lansing had established the first theme of American policy toward Russia after the revolution: Do Nothing!
According to a communication to the U.K. Foreign Office (1918, April 25) from Lord Reading, British Ambassador to Washington, Wilson’s policy was to let events work themselves out and to oppose every plan to intervene. Events were moving too fast—they were “kaleidoscopic,” so he told financier Thomas W. Lamont (Wilson 1918, January 31). Writing to Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot, Wilson (1918, January 21) unburdened himself: “I wish most earnestly that it were possible to find some way to help, but as soon as we have thought out a working plan there is a new dissolution of the few crystals that had formed there.” During the months between January and April 1918, he had become increasingly unhappy with the Bolsheviks, especially when they broke up the Russian Constituent Assembly in January and signed a final treaty with the Germans in March. But his policy still was to do nothing.
He was especially irritated when the Allies tried to involve themselves politically in the internal politics of Russia. In February, he had seen nothing “wise or practicable” in the British plans for Siberia. When the British pushed for American presence in Siberia in late March, the president could not find “sufficient cause for altering our position” (FRUS 1918, February 2).
By April and May, Wilson realized he would have to give in on Russia. He had considered possible intervention in northern Russia. That campaign had more—though not much more—military value: it bypassed the Japanese, it had the possibility of being approved by the Bolsheviks, it had more support from the American military, and, so he thought, it could be severely limited, thus blocking any possible Allied plans for intervention in the civil war there. Wilson may have hoped that he could forestall Allied pressure by concessions in northern Russia.
A stronger Allied push for American participation in Russian intervention began with adoption by the Supreme War Council of Joint Note 25 (War Department RG120) tided “Transportation of Czech Troops from Siberia.” The note called for Allied support of the Czech troops—a stranded legion that had been fighting in the tsar’s army, which were to concentrate at Vladivostok, Murmansk, and Archangel. These plans caused General Tasker Bliss, U.S. representative to the Supreme War Council in Paris, a good deal of anguish. He warned Secretary of War Newton Baker that Japanese troops would throw the Russians into the arms of the Germans. The president insisted on the principles of Russian territorial integrity and political independence. Intervention via Vladivostok, the president told General Peyton C. March, U.S. Army chief of staff, was impracticable “because of the vast distance involved, the size of the forces necessary to be effective, and financing such an expedition would mean a burden which the United States at this time ought not assume” (Link 1985, vol. 48, 182). The president approved “any practical military efforts which can be made at and from Murmansk or Archangel” (Link 1985, vol. 48, 601). Even in northern Russia, such efforts had to have the “sure sympathy of the Russian people and should not have as their ultimate objects any restoration of the ancient regime or any other interference with the political liberty of the Russian people” (Link 1985, vol. 48, 601).
The meeting of the Supreme War Council on June 1 to 3 had concerned both northern Russia and Siberia. It had seized on Wilson’s possible concession on northern Russia. Allied troops were to take Murmansk and Archangel. Allied pressure had finally drawn Wilson’s reluctant concurrence to the operation. Even here, the president insisted that France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces, go on record in support of the operation. Dutifully, Foch replied that the value of the planned occupation was “indisputable” (Joint Note 31, 6/3/18). The Allies moved quickly on Wilson’s concession. Soon, Allied troops were in northern Russia. Wilson gave in to Allied pressure and eventually dispatched several thousand American troops to northern Russia.
If the beleaguered president thought that his concession on northern Russia would be enough, he was mistaken. The Allies wanted intervention in Siberia and decided to discover whether the Japanese were prepared to carry it out. British plans for Siberia were reinforced by a turn in American opinion, which now seemed to favor intervention because of sympathy for the plight of the Czechoslovak Legion. British pressure remained. Wilson told William Wiseman, the British Diplomat, that no military man had convinced him an Eastern Front could be restored. He remarked that “he would go as far as intervening against the wishes of the Russian people—knowing that it was eventually for their good—providing he thought the scheme had any practical chance of success,” which Wiseman related to Eric Drummond, assistant to the foreign secretary, in a June 3 communication (U.K. Foreign Office 1918). But the only result would be to rally Russians against the Allies. Wilson’s solution in early June was to “watch the situation carefully and sympathetically, and be ready to move whenever the right time arrived” (Wiseman to Drummond, June 3, U.K. Foreign Office 1918).
The French also were busy trying to convince Wilson, and he told the French General Berthelot in a June 20 communication that he awaited “the advice of General Foch: I have been the first to desire unity in the High Command. It is not for me to give a bad example and refuse to recognize his authority” (Davis and Trani 2002, 156-157, and footnotes 99, 100).
The Allies prepared well for the July meeting of the Supreme War Council. Foch anticipated Wilson’s desire for his approval, cabling the president: “More than ever, in the interest of military success in Europe, I consider the expedition to Siberia as a very important factor for victory, provided action be immediate.” The Japanese agreed to intervene as far as Irkutsk, provided the U.S. government approved. The Allies now presented their most forceful case. The British, French, and Italian prime ministers appealed directly to Wilson.
All the while, Wilson had hoped that Russia would solve its own problems. Now he realized that the Allies would not stop the pressure until there was action in Siberia. He began to consider a kind of relief expedition for Russia. After it became clear that relief without military aid would fail and the Allies had made plain that relief was not enough, he seized on the Czechoslovak issue, even gaining concurrence of the Czech leader, Thomas G. Masaryk. When the American minister to China, Paul S. Reinsch, cabled Wilson about Czechoslovak troops, Wilson finally saw “the shadow of a plan that might be worked” (Wilson to Lansing, with enclosure, June 17, 1918 in Link 1985, vol. 48, 335). Wilson viewed the Czechoslovaks as an instrument to end Allied pressure (Lansing 1918, private memorandum 4 [July]; U.S. State Department 1918, SD, RG59, 861.00/3130a [Wilson Aide Memoire, July 17, 1918, SD, RG 59, 861.00/3130a, NA (National Archives)]).
The president set severe limits on intervention and attempted to restrict political involvement. He did not accept Lansing’s suggestion of a political High Commissioner (Lansing 1918, private memorandum 4 [July]). He agreed to provide a limited force to guard supplies in northern Russia and to assemble seven thousand troops at Vladivostok, along with that many Japanese, to guard stores and help the Czechs embark for France. His aide memoire claimed that victory would be won or lost on the Western Front (U.S. State Department 1918, SD, RG59, 861.00/3130a [Wilson Aide Memoire, July 17]). Furthermore, no sooner had the Allied intervention begun in September 1918 than World War I ended in November. A major part of the Allied rationale for its troops being in Russia collapsed.
Wilson’s Quarantine
Initially, Wilson, even though a PhD-trained political scientist, had little understanding of Russia. To make matters worse, he made poor appointments in choosing the diplomats he sent there. Nonetheless, the United States was the first country to recognize Russia’s democratic Provisional Government in March 1917 after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. Wilson then faced a major decision—whether or not to recognize the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and Lenin’s communist government. Wilson’s vacillation finally ended in a form of repudiation of the Bolsheviks, and he opted for nonrecognition and a diplomatic quarantine—a quarantine having many of the ingredients of the later “Cold War” that emerged after World War II.
The result was Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby’s Note (Link 1985, vol. 66, 20-23) and its subsequent extension by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes during President Warren Harding’s Administration. The United States would do the following: not extend recognition to Russia, limit talks to pragmatic items, and restrict trade to approved private enterprises with no U.S. government guarantees. Again, this is reminiscent of today’s sanctions regime against Putin. The revised Colby Note put Russia on notice that the United States would wait until Lenin’s government either fell or significantly changed its behavior. True, there was no arms race, but there was suspicion, misunderstanding, and fear. It was only right that Wilson himself be the author of America’s first formally announced “cold war” doctrine and, as such, its first cold war warrior (Colby to Wilson, with enclosure, August 9, 1920 in Link 1985, vol. 66, 20-23).
Wilson believed that until the Bolshevik regime became more moderate, it was useless for America to engage it diplomatically or otherwise. His republican presidential successors agreed. Their refusal to recognize the Soviet Union came from a strong belief that its influence was harmful and would spread into Western Europe if not quarantined. Wilson’s Soviet policy—the first “Cold War”—lasted until President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) extended diplomatic recognition in 1933. FDR’s recognition was an experiment in the hope that collaboration would make for a more moderate USSR that would join the family of nations. That hope persisted during, and briefly after, World War II. It saw the Soviet Union and the Western Allies jointly fighting and defeating Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Then, given post-World War II Soviet intransigence over Poland and German partitioning, Wilson’s “quarantine” policy returned as “containment” under President Harry Truman in the late 1940s, a period that came to be labeled as the “Cold War.”
Truman, who became president in 1945 after the death of FDR, had served as senator from Missouri and then vice president. He surrounded himself with very knowledgeable aides in foreign affairs, with General George C. Marshall first as Secretary of State and then as his Secretary of Defense and then with Dean Acheson serving as his Secretary of State. He came to believe that the most important job for the United States was to restore Europe after the ravages of World War II. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Blockade and Airlift, and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were all parts of that vision of Truman and his associates. Truman was emphatic that the USSR was no friend of the United States or its Western European allies. He reversed much of FDR’s rapprochement with the USSR, though he had supported cooperation during the war to defeat Nazi Germany. In all of this, as with Wilson before him, Truman believed that America’s primary commitment must always be to Europe as an integral piece of that whole, while never allowing any one power to dominate it.
Wilson’s intellectual reputation lent credibility to the American “Cold War” policy from Truman to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. It can be seen as having a direct connection from Wilson to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. After “Reagan-Bush I,” there were efforts by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama to change American-Russian relations for the better, for an FDR-like collaboration. History shows that, as with FDR, those efforts have not worked out well.
All this means that, in 1920, Wilson had come close to the conclusion that diplomat George F Kennan arrived after World War II. Wilson’s notion of a policy to “quarantine” Bolshevism was broadly construed in the Colby Note, Allied collective security, and his own road away from revolution. America had to be strong, flexible, and patient. If Russia were contained, the communist system would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Kennan’s policy was nothing if not exerted from the outside. It consisted of the Colby Note, patiently waiting, and the use of selective counterforce. No sweet-talk, no promises.
Wilson’s policy of informed containment had intellectual respectability. Because of this, it lent the containment policies of President Truman and Secretary of State George C. Marshall credibility, years before President Ronald Reagan’s concept of an evil empire. It is, thus, possible to draw a straight line from Wilson and his collaborators down to Kennan and on to Reagan. The Wilsonians were the first cold war warriors, and in the era of Wilson, the first cold war began.
Interpretations
Interpretations are often divided between what were labeled as “realists” and “idealists” or “orthodox” and “revisionists.” As applied to Russia, these divisions represented those who sided with efforts at accommodation—even cooperation—with Russia, tsarist, or communist, and those who viewed America’s Russian relationship suspiciously or with hostility. On both sides of the divide, scholars were called pragmatists, apologists, fellow travelers, true believers, doubters, irreconcilables, and “softs” and “hards”—to name but a few ill-fitting terms. More than fifty years of research and the seeming end of the Cold War have taught us to begin putting aside these negative labels so that we may see the actual nature of the relationship Wilson established, however complicated and contradictory it may appear.
It is important for us to gain a clear understanding of Wilson’s relationship with Russia because it contributed to a later rationale for the Cold War. It may come as a surprise to some that his administration employed similar Cold War tactics: ideological warfare, espionage, armed intervention, blockade, economic isolation, laundering money, and quarantine. There was no arms race. It may further startle students of the debate that, at the same time that Wilson’s administration employed these tactics, he himself insisted on Russia’s self-determination and territorial integrity. On what grounds can we reconcile interference in the internal affairs of Russia and at the same time maintain that Wilson was true to his ideals?
The glaring contradictions in Wilson’s Russian policy can be explained in a variety of ways. Wilson was sometimes poorly informed, even misinformed, about Russia. The result was that he often assumed an ambiguous position as he looked with bafflement on the additional argument that American intervention would aid the Czechoslovak Legion’s exodus from Russia. These Legionnaires had been recruited into the tsar’s army during World War I and wanted to continue the struggle against Germany. It was British, and to some extent French, pressure that really forced Wilson’s hand in each instance, with the later addition of Japanese complications in the Far East. At the Paris Peace Conference, the president attempted unsuccessfully to reconcile the Reds and the Whites, contenders in the Russian Civil War. He tried to get the Reds and Whites to negotiate a peace settlement at Prinkipo. William C. Bullitt, House advisor, went to Moscow to explore a possible deal with Lenin. The Allies offered food relief to Lenin through the auspices of Fridtjof Nansen, the famous Norwegian arctic explorer. The president then adopted a watch-and-wait policy toward the counterrevolutionary Admiral Alexander V. Kolchak’s Omsk government (see Davis and Trani 2002, 194-97). He hoped it would succeed. It failed. All this time, he preached the principles of Russian territorial integrity and self-determination (Davis and Trani 2002).
Wilson never tried to abridge Russia’s territorial integrity or limit Russian national sovereignty. To these principles he remained true. They help explain why he vigorously resisted intervention and, when the British and French pressed it on him, he placed the strictest limitations on American military involvement. Wilson went along with his Allies’ wish for a reconstitution of the Eastern Front. But if Bolshevism had collapsed on its own or with a push, Wilson would have rejoiced.
Wilson concluded that diplomatic relations with the Soviets, calling as they did for the destruction of capitalism, were impossible. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, Lansing’s replacement in early 1920, announced nonrecognition as Wilson’s final Russian policy Colby’s successor, Charles Evans Hughes, extended this to commerce. Both Colby and Hughes believed that their diplomatic and commercial quarantine would be imitated by other nations. It was not. Britain and France recognized Soviet Russia in 1924. Eventually, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did likewise in 1933. Roosevelt’s recognition broadened into wartime collaboration against Nazi Germany. In 1946, America reverted to a Wilsonian-like quarantine, some calling it containment, and, at the same time, the United States played the savior of freedom and democracy. Containment blossomed with a new feature—a full-scale arms race.
George F. Kennan (1961, 388-89), the architect of containment, contended that Bolshevik hostility to the West invited a similar reaction “equivalent to the creation of a state of war” that may even have been “part of the rationale for the Allied intervention in 1918.” He pointed out that this was not the “classic concept” of a state of war: “[Russia] has not, in other words, sought to obtain its objectives by the traditional processes of open and outright warfare” (Kennan 1961, 397). This non-classical war, a variant of the later “Cold War,” existed from Wilson’s time and throughout the 1920s. Wilson met initial Bolshevik hostility in much the same way that his successors did, that is, by taking measures to contain the Bolshevik menace. Wilson’s misunderstandings of Russia, his desire not to deal with Bolshevism, his various tactics to undermine or eliminate Bolshevism, and his highflying idealism, were foundation stones for the post-1945 Cold War.
It may seem contradictory that sometimes Wilson searched for accommodation with Russia. He was somewhat successful with the tsar, did not have a long enough time with the Provisional Government, and failed with the Bolsheviks. Exasperated, he finally moved to Lansing’s position as exemplified in the Colby Note. Nonrecognition was broadened by the “Hoover-Hughes” doctrine of restricting commerce with Soviet Russia. In retirement, Wilson acknowledged the broad challenge of the Bolshevik Revolution and recommended facing its implications by embarking on an effort to improve capitalism. Wilsonian Cold War tactics welded to the high idealism of national self-determination and territorial integrity were his legacy. They were enough for Kennan (1961, 144-45) and all the other Cold War Warriors to build on (Davis and Trani 2002, 202-206, 210).
After 1991
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the pre-1939 shape of Eastern Europe—that is, the one created by Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919—reappeared. Today, the West seeks to preserve that shape against President Vladimir Putin’s presumed efforts to restore the Soviet sphere. From Presidents Bill Clinton to Barrack Obama, America and its European allies have brought the resurrected or newly created countries of Eastern Europe into the European Union (EU) and NATO. Their eastern borders form a new “red line” of demarcation between the East and the West—a line not to be modified or crossed by either side. Putin’s Russia challenges that new “red line.”
Much diplomacy, a surprising amount of it, fills over a quarter century of post-Soviet international relations and the Russo-American status since die fall of communism in 1991. Yet little of it rises to the hoped-for level of collaboration. One scholar, Angela E. Stent (2014), rightly terms these relations as “limited partnerships.” Some would label them “very” limited, because each country’s opinion of the other, Russia or America, remains negative. Their foreign policies cruise on “automatic Cold War pilot,” said former Senator Sam Nunn, despite cooperation on nuclear security and Islamic terrorism (Stent 2014, x). Both countries are driven: Russia claims Great Power status, pursues political spheres-of-influence, and demands noninterference. America promotes global democracy and champions capitalism. Their joint challenge is to create a stable, post-Cold War international order. To do so, an understanding must first be reached about where the West’s security zone ends and where Russia’s neighborhood begins, that is, building a new “Ring Fence” rather than an old “Iron Curtain.” But how does one go about constructing a new ring fence? Russo-American relations since 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union have not been encouraging, especially since Russia’s Crimean annexation.
Putin immediately called Bush ’43 soon after the World Trade Towers attack of September 11, 2001 (9/11). He promised partnership on Islamic terrorism. But for Bush ’43, partnership did not equal parity. It meant restraining Russia by substituting missile defense (MD) systems in Eastern Europe for the older antiballistic missiles. Putin arranged for U.S. military bases in Central Asia as well as sharing some military intelligence on terrorism. In November, they met informally at Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch. Putin may have had higher expectations: U.S. support for the Chechen War; recognition of Russia’s traditional Eastern European sphere-of-influence; equal partnership, instead of an American imposed agenda; an end to U.S. sermonizing over Chechnya; U.S. recognition of “temporary” bases in Central Asia; and U.S. help in Russia’s modernization. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan shortly after “9/11,” and NATO’s entry in 2003, Putin’s hopes for cooperation with the West seemed to have faded. In hindsight, this may have marked the moment when the high tide of Russia’s western reorientation ended (see especially Stent 2014, 49-83).
Suspicious of Russian aims, Bush had unilaterally canceled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), but he offered Russia the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) (16) in May 2002 to reduce nuclear warheads from 2,200 to 1,700 by the end of 2012. Excesses could be stored. There was no verification.
Since Russia’s Crimean annexation in 2014, the EU and the United States have introduced sanctions limiting the role of Russian banks, corporations, officials, and Ukrainian separatists in the West. State banks cannot raise long-term loans there, the export of military equipment is restricted from there to Russia, future EU-Russian arms deals are banned, Russia is excluded from new oil technology (Thompson 2015; see also Sonne 2016; Walsh 2015).
The 2007 U.S. decision to place radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, eventually adding them to Romania and Bulgaria, disturbed Russia. Putin spoke of countermeasures and stopped talking about Russia joining NATO. Furthermore, he suspended Russia’s participation in the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). The United States had claimed that these radars and interceptors were defending Europe against Iran. Russia complained that they compromised its defenses (see Stent 2014, 155-56).
There was some agreement as Bush and Putin signed a Strategic Framework Declaration in April 2008 at the Sochi Summit and met for the last time at the Beijing Olympics in August. But any arming of NATO’s newly gained eastern members continued to rankle Russia. The New York Times reported Moscow’s fury even over NATO’s membership invitation to tiny Montenegro (Editorial 2015; Whittall and Ostroukh 2016).
Just as Putin acted to prevent further NATO encroachment, so also did NATO find unacceptable Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and involvement in eastern Ukraine. Both seemed to violate a stable post-Cold War order, one in which each side understood where the “ring fence” was. Of course, NATO has found a “renewed rationale” for its existence in the reemergence of the Russian threat. NATO must now reassure its new eastern members and beef up their defenses. After all, the U.S. accounts for 75 percent of all NATO’s military spending and only five of its twenty-eight members meet the 2-percent requirement. Once again, Trump has challenged NATO as obsolete and complained that some of its members were not paying their fair share (Erlanger 2015).
By 2011, a new Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START) became enforceable when the U.S. Senate and Russian Duma approved it. Negotiated by President Barack Obama and in effect since February 2011, the New Start Treaty limits the United States and Russia each to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads on more than seven hundred deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear bombers. The deadline for complying is February 2018. The United States is down to 1,367 deployed nuclear warheads, but that number will edge up when the process is completed. Russia is at 1,796. Each country is expected to end up at 1,550. The treaty also has important verification requirements, such as semiannual data exchanges on the two nations’ weapons systems. Both countries agreed to notify each other of certain nuclear-related actions and could conduct up to eighteen inspections annually of the other’s strategic forces. The Senate ratified it seventy-one to twenty-six (Editorial 2017; see also Editorial 2014, 2016; U.S. European Command (EUCOM) 2016; Goldberg 2016; Katz 2016). It will be interesting to see how this treaty has been complied with and whether it will be extended beyond 2021.
If anything, this brief summary shows the steady deterioration of Russo-American relations in the post-Soviet period. Whether they have yet reached the point of a “Cold War” status—quarantine/containment—may still be open to debate. In that debate, Wilson remains relevant.
Conclusion
Here, in 2018, one hundred years after Wilson decided that the differences between the United States and Soviet Russia were so vast and difficult as to prevent normal relations, Americans, generally, are beginning to see that to be true again today.
In October 2017, the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post, in which he appealed to the presidents of Russia and the United States. Gorbachev wrote that, “the relations between the two nations are in a severe crisis.” He noted that 2017 was the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the treaty on the elimination of intermediate and shorter-range nuclear missiles, and if the treaties governing nuclear weapons are scrapped, “the consequences, both direct and indirect, will be disastrous…. Today,” he wrote, “we face a dual challenge of preventing the collapse of the system of nuclear agreements and reversing the downward spiral in U.S.-Russia relations” (Gorbachev 2017).
Nonetheless, there are major issues that the United States has with Russia. In an excellent article in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Ivo Daalder (2017, 30), president of the Chicago Council of World Affairs and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013, wrote that,
under Vladimir Putin, Russia has embarked on a systematic challenge to the West. The goal is to weaken the bonds between Europe and the United States and among EU members, undermine NATO’s solidarity, and strengthen Russia’s strategic position in its immediate neighborhood and beyond. Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War.
As a result, Daalder (2017, 38) notes, the United States and its NATO allies must be clear to the Kremlin “that it will not tolerate further Russian aggression or expansionism,” especially since Russia’s military has undergone radical reform and a massive modernization program. Daalder concludes his article by saying,
Today, Russia poses a threat unlike any the United States and its allies have faced since the end of the Cold War. It is a challenge the United States and its European allies can meet only through unity and strength. If they fail to unite and bolster NATO’s defense capabilities, Europe’s future stability and security may well be imperiled. (Daalder 2017, 38)
In a recent Council on Foreign Relations Special Report (No. 80), “Containing Russia,” Blackwill and Gordon (2018), distinguished former officials in the Bush and Clinton/Obama administrations, respectively, maintain that, “The United States is currently in a second Cold War with Russia” (Blackwill and Gordon 2018, 6). And they continue, “Putin has apparently concluded that a larger Russian regional and global role depends on the decline of American power projection” (15). They state the evidence that Russia interfered in our presidential election is “overwhelming” but part of a “wider Russian challenge” (28). They recommend three broad policies to counter these Russian efforts: expanding sanctions aimed at Russia, greatly expanding electoral and cyber countermeasures, and increasing European security by bolstering NATO (18-27). But they also argue for a continuation of New Start as a means of dialogue through 2026. Here potentially are the outlines of a future Kennan’s “containment” or Wilson’s “quarantine” (Blackwill and Gordon 2018, 43).
One hopes that we have finally come to understand that America must remain an integral part of the European balance of power and never a part-time player whose primary attentions have drifted elsewhere. Wilson’s influence remains, but will his policy, if needed, prevail? We may be optimistic, but we cannot exactly be joyful at the prospects in the era of Trump.