Centuries-Long History of Russophobia Opens the Doors to Cold War 2.0

Yves here. Americans, who typically have the memories and historical knowledge of goldfish, likely attribute the ease of whipping up Russophobia with the red scares of the McCarthy era, and later movies and works of fiction that depicted Russians as bad guys. Well, not all:

Sadly, The Russians Are Coming, in poking fun at anti-Soviet paranoia, was an exception that proved the rule.

Nevertheless, suspicion and antipathy towards Russia culture has deep roots, going back to the Catholic Church proselytizing Eastern Slavs. The Vatican was effective in creating a religious and cultural identity among people, many of whom were of the same genetic stock as Russians, anchored in the West. These very deep roots explain why mere dog whistles work so well.

Please note that Dr. Sotirovic repeats the neoliberal view that the US is dependent on foreigners to buy its bonds. We have explained that that is not true as far as Federal debt is concerned. But they US could suffer severe currency depreciation in an “investor revolt” scenario. Up to a point, that is what Team Trump wants. I’ve been told they would like to see the dollar 15% to 30% cheaper.

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic, Ex-University Professor, Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies Belgrade, Serbia

The 2018 Skripal Attack Case

The current orchestrated Western policy of total Russophobia, directed by Collective West, can be recorded to start by the British Cabinet of Theresa May – the focal servant-dog to US global imperialism. Followed by the creation of the War Cabinet of the US President Donald Trump (first administration), it was a nothing else than a jumping to the new stage of the post-WWII Cold War (2.0) which was originally started (1.0) by the US, It is not over since its main task of total economic, political, and financial subordination or/and occupation of Russia still is not realized. The Russian punishment, at that time just diplomatic, was a “punishment for Russia’s alleged nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian/MI6 double-agent, Sergei Skripal (66) and his daughter Yulia (33), who was visiting her father from Moscow” [1] (March, 2018).

However, it was quite obvious that “blaming Russia for Skripal attack is similar to ‘Jews poisoning our wells’ in the Middle Ages” [2] In other words, the 2018 Skripal Attack Case was just another Western “false flag” in international relations with a very precise geopolitical purpose – to continue the Cold War 1.0, revived post-Yeltsin’s Russia.

We have to remember that originally American administration started the Cold War 1.0 as it was “the Truman administration (1945−1953) used the myth of Soviet expansionism to mask the nature of American foreign policy, which included the creation of a global system to advance the interests of American capitalism”.[3] However, the current Western virus of total Russophobia (the Cold War 2.0) is a natural continuation of historical Western anti-Russian policy, which had looked as if it was over with the peaceful dismemberment of the USSR in 1989−1991.

P. Huntington’s Warnings and International Relations (IR)

Samuel P. Huntington was quite clear and correct in his opinion that the foundation of every civilization is based on religion (i.e., on metaphysical irrational beliefs).[4] S. P. Huntington’s warnings about the future development of global politics as taking the form of a direct clash of different cultures (in fact, separate and antagonistic civilizations) are, unfortunately, already on the agenda of international relations.

Here we came to the crux of the matter in regard to the Western relations with Russia from both historical and contemporary perspectives: the Western civilization, as based on the Western type of Christianity (the Roman Catholicism and all Protestant denominations) has traditional animosity and hostility toward all nations and states of the East Christian (Orthodox) confession.

As Russia was and is the biggest and most powerful Christian Orthodox country, the Eurasian geopolitical conflicts between the West and Russia started from when the German Teutonic knights and the Swedes from the Baltic were constantly attacking northern Russian territories up to the fateful battle in 1240, which the Swedes lost to the Russian Prince of Novgorod Alexander Nevski at the Battle of Neva.

However, only three decades later, the ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Algirdas (1345‒1377), started to occupy the Russian lands. That process continued with the Roman Catholic common state of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania when it launched its confessional-civilizational imperialistic wars against the Grand Duchy of Moscow at the very end of the 14th century; i.e., after 1385 when Poland and Lithuania became united as a personal union of two sovereign states (the Union of Krewo).[5]

Role of the Vatican

The present-day territories of Ukraine (which at that time did not exist under this name) and Byelorus (Belarus, White Russia) became the first victims of Vatican policy to proselytize the Eastern Slavs. Therefore, the biggest part of present-day Ukraine became occupied and annexed by Lithuania till 1569[6] and after the Polish-Lithuanian 1569 Lublin Union by Poland. In the period from 1522 to 1569, there were 63% of the East Slavs lived on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania out of its total population.[7]

From the Russian perspective, the only way to stop an aggressive Vatican policy of reconversion of the Christian Orthodox population and their denationalization was by military counterattacks to liberate the occupied territories. However, when it happened from the mid-17th century till the end of the 18th century, a huge number of the former Christian Orthodox population had already become Roman Catholics and the Uniates, losing their original national identity.

A conversion to the Roman Catholicism and making the Union with the Vatican on the territories occupied by the Polish-Lithuanian common state till the end of the 18th century divided the Russian national body into two parts: the Christian Orthodox and the pro-Western oriented converts who, basically, lost their initial ethnonational identity. This is especially true in Ukraine – a country with the biggest number of Uniates in the world due to the Brest Union signed in 1596 with the Vatican.

The Uniate Church in (West) Ukraine openly collaborated with the Nazi regime during WWII and for that reason, it was banned after the war till 1989. Nevertheless, it was exactly the Uniate Church in Ukraine which propagated an ideology that the “Ukrainians” were not (Little) Russians but instead a separate nation with no ethnolinguistic or confessional connection with the Russians. Therefore, a way was opened to the successful Ukrainization of the Little Russians (and Minor Russia), Ruthenians, and Carpatho-Russians during Soviet (anti-Russian) rule. After the dissolution of the USSR, the Ukrainians became an instrument of the realization of the Western anti-Russian geopolitical interests in Eastern Europe.[8]

The unscrupulous Jesuits became the fundamental West European anti-Russian and anti-Christian Orthodox hawks to propagate the idea that a Christian Orthodox Russia does not belong in a real (Western) Europe.

Due to such Vatican propaganda activity, the West gradually became antagonistic to Russia. Russian culture was seen as disgusting and inferior, i.e., barbaric, as a continuation of the Byzantine Christian Orthodox civilization. Unfortunately, such a negative attitude toward Russia and the East Christianity is accepted by a contemporary US-led Collective West for whom Russophobia has become an ideological foundation for its geopolitical projects and ambitions.[9] Therefore, all real or potential Russia’s supporters became geopolitical enemies of a Pax Americana, like the Serbs, Armenians, Greeks, Byelorussians, etc.

Western Defeats and Russian Blowback

A new moment in the West-Russia geopolitical struggles started when the Protestant Sweden became directly involved in the Western confessional-imperialistic wars against Russia in 1700 (the Great Northern War of 1700−1721) which Sweden lost after the Battle of Poltava in 1709 when Russia of Peter the Great finally became a member of the concert of the Great European Powers.[10]

A century later, that was a Napoleonic France to take a role in the historical process of „Eurocivilizing“ of „schismatic“ Russia in 1812, that also finished by the West European fiasco[11], similar to Pan-Germanic warmongers during both world wars.

However, after 1945 up to the present, the „civilizational“ role of the Westernization of Russia is assumed by NATO and the EU. The Collective West, immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, by imposing its client satellite Boris Yeltsin as the President of Russia, achieved an enormous geopolitical achievement around Russia, especially in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.

Nevertheless, the Collective West started to experience a Russian geopolitical blowback from 2001 onward when the B. Yeltsin’s time pro-Western political clients (Russian liberals) were gradually removed from the decision-making positions in Russia’s governmental structures. What a new Russia’s political establishment correctly understood is that a Westernization policy of Russia is nothing else but an ideological mask for economic-political transformation of the country into the colony of the Collective West led by the US Neocon administration[12] alongside with the task of the US/EU to externalize their own values and norms permanently. This “externalization policy” is grounded on the thesis of The End of History by Francis Fukuyama:[13]

…that the philosophy of economic and political liberalism has triumphed throughout the world, ending the contest between market democracies and centrally planned governance.[14]

Therefore, after the formal ending of the Cold War 1.0 in 1989/1990, the fundamental Western global geopolitical project was The West and The Rest, according to which the rest of the world was obliged to accept all fundamental Western values and norms according to the Hegemonic Stability Theory of a unipolar system of the world security.[15] Nevertheless, behind such doctrinal unilateralism as a project of the US hegemony in global governance in the new century clearly stands the unipolar hegemonic concept of a Pax Americana, but with Russia and China as the crucial opponents to it.

Stability Theories and IR

According to the Hegemonic Stability Theory, a global peace can occur only when one hegemonic center of power (state) acquires enough power to deter all other expansionist and imperialistic ambitions and intentions. The theory is based on a presumption that the concentration of (hyper) power will reduce the chances of a classical world war (but not and local confrontations) as it allows a single hyperpower to maintain peace and manage the system of international relations between the states.[16]  Examples of ex-Pax Romana and Pax-Britannica clearly offered support for an imperialistic idea that (the US-led) unipolarity will bring global peace. That inspired the viewpoint that the world in a post-Cold War 1.0 era under a Pax Americana would be stable and prosperous as long as the US global dominance prevails.

Therefore, a hegemony, according to this viewpoint, is a necessary precondition for economic order and free trade in a global dimension, suggesting that the existence of a predominant hyperpower state willing and able to use its economic and military power to promote global stability is both a divine and rational order of the day.

As a tool to achieve this goal, the hegemon has to use a coercive diplomacy based on the ultimatum demand that puts a time limit on the target to comply and a threat of punishment for resistance as, for example, it was a case in January 1999 during the “negotiations” on Kosovo status between the US diplomacy and Yugoslavia’s Government in Rambouillet (France).

However, in contrast to both the Hegemonic Stability Theory and the Bipolar Stability Theory, a post-Yeltsin Russian political establishment advocates that a multipolar system of international relations is the least war-prone in comparison with all other proposed systems. This Multipolar Stability Theory is based on a concept that a polarized global politics does not concentrate power, as it is supported by the unipolar system, and does not divide the globe into two antagonistic superpower blocs, as in a bipolar system, which promote a constant struggle for global dominance (for example, during the Cold War 1.0).

The multipolarity theory perceives polarized international relations as a stable system because it encompasses a larger number of autonomous and sovereign actors in global politics, which as well as giving rise to a greater number of political alliances. This theory is, in essence, presenting a peace-through model of pacifying international relations as it is fundamentally based on counter-balancing relations between the states in the global arena. Under such a system, an aggressive policy is quite hard to implement in reality as it is prevented by the multiple power centers.[17]

A New Policy of Russia and Cold War 2.0

A new policy of international relations adopted by Moscow after 2000 is based on a principle of a globe without hegemonic leadership – a policy which started to be implemented at the time when the global power of the US as a post Cold War 1.0 hegemon declines because it makes costly global commitments above ability to fulfill them followed by the immense US trade deficit – even today the cancer of American economy which the current US President desparately wants to heal. The US share of global gross production has been in the process of constant decline since the end of WWII.

Another serious symptom of American erosion in international politics is that the US share of global financial reserves has drastically declined, especially in comparison to the Russian and Chinese shares. The US is today the largest world debtor and even the biggest debtor that ever existed in history (36.21 trillion dollars or 124 percent of the GDP), mainly, but not exclusively, due to huge military spending, alongside tax cuts that reduced the US federal revenue. The deficit in the current account balance with the rest of the world (in 2004, for instance, it was $650 billion), the US administration is covering by borrowing from private investors (mostly from abroad) and foreign central banks (most important are those of China and Japan). Therefore, such US financial dependence on foreigners to provide the funds needed to pay the interest on the American public debt leaves the USA extremely vulnerable, especially if China and/or Japan decide to stop buying the US bonds or sell them. Subsequently, the world’s strongest military power is at the same time the greatest global debtor, with China and Japan being direct financial collaborators of the US hegemonic leadership’s policy of a Pax Americana after 1989/1990.

It is without any doubts that the US foreign policy after 1989/1990 is still unrealistically following the French concept of raison d’état that indicates the Realist justification for policies pursued by state authority, but in the American eyes, first and foremost of these justifications or criteria is the US global hegemony as the best guarantee for the national security, followed by all other interests and associated goals. Therefore, the US foreign policy is still based on a realpolitik concept that is a German term referring to the state foreign policy ordered or motivated by power politics: the strong do what they will, and the weak do what they must. However, the US is becoming weaker and weaker, and Russia and China are more and more becoming stronger and stronger.

Final Words

Finally, it seems to be true that such a reality in contemporary global politics and international relations is, unfortunately, not properly understood and recognized by the current US President Donald Trump as he is going to be just another Trojan horse of the US Neocon concept of a Pax Americana followed by the megalomanic Zionist concept of a Greater Israel of „From the River to the River“[18], and, therefore, there are no real chances to get rid of the US imperialism in the recent future and to establish international relations on a more democratic and multilateral foundation. Therefore, the US-led Western turbo Russophobia since 2014 has already driven the world into a new stage of the post-WWII Cold War–2.0.

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[1] Peter Koenig, “Russian Exodus from the West”, Global Research – Centre for Research on Globalization, 2018-03-31: https://www.globalresearch.ca/russian-exodus-from-the-west/5634121.

[2] John Laughland, “Blaming Russia for Skripal Attack is Similar to ‘Jews Poisoning our Wells’ in Middle Ages”, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, 2018-03-16: http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2018/march/16/blaming-russia-for-skripal-attack-is-similar-to-jews-poisoning-our-wells-in-middle-ages/.

[3] David Gowland, Richard Dunphy, The European Mosaic, Third Edition, Harlow, England−Pearson Education, 2006, 277.

[4] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, London: The Free Press, 2002.

[5] Zigmantas Kiaupa, Jūratė Kiaupienė, Albinas Kuncevičius, The History of Lithuania Before 1795, Vilnius: Lithuanian Institute of History, 2000, 106‒131.

[6] On the Lithuanian occupation period of the present-day Ukraine, see: [Alfredas Bumblauskas, Genutė Kirkienė, Feliksas Šabuldo (sudarytojai), Ukraina: Lietuvos epocha, 1320−1569, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2010].

[7] Ignas Kapleris, Antanas Meištas, Istorijos egzamino gidas. Nauja programa nuo A iki Ž, Vilnius: Leidykla “Briedas”, 2013, 123.

[8] About this issue, see more in [Зоран Милошевић, Од Малоруса до Украјинаца, Источно Сарајево: Завод за уџбенике и наставна средства, 2008].

[9] Срђан Перишић, Нова геополитика Русије, Београд: Медија центар „Одбрана“, 2015, 42−46.

[10] David Kirbz, Šiaurės Europa ankstyvaisiais naujaisiais amžiais: Baltijos šalys 1492−1772 metais, Vilnius: Atviros Lietuvos knyga, 2000, 333−363; Peter Englund, The Battle that Shook Europe: Poltava andthe Birth of the Russian Empire, London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2003.

[11] On Napoleon’s military campaign on Russia in 1812 and its fiasco, see [Paul Britten Austin, The Great Retreat Told by the Survivors, London−Mechanicsburg, PA: Greenhill Books, 1996; Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, New York: Harper Press, 2005].

[12] The US-led NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 is only one example of a gangster’s policy of a violation of the international law and the law on war when the civilian objects became legitimate military targets. Therefore, the attack on Serbia’s television station in the downtown of Belgrade on April 23rd, 1999 attracted criticism by many human rights activists as it was apparently selected for bombing as „media responsible for broadcasting propaganda“ [The Independent, April 1st, 2003]. By the same gangsters the same bombing policy was repeated in 2003 in Iraq when the main television station in Baghdad was hit by cruise missiles in March 2003 followed next day by the destruction of the state radio and television station in Basra [A. P. V. Rogers, Law on the Battlefield, Second edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, 82−83]. According to the international law expert Richard Falk, the 2003 Iraq War was a „crime against Peace of the sort punished at the Nuremberg trials“ [Richard Falk, Frontline, India, No. 8, April 12−25th, 2003].

[13] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.

[14] Charles W. Kegley, Jr., Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics: Trend and Transformation, Tenth edition, USA: Thomson−Wadsworth, 2006, 588; Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, Ramesh Thakur (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 54−55.

[15] David P. Forsythe, Patrice C. McMahon, Andrew Wedeman (eds.), American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World, New York−London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006, 31−50.

[16] William C. Wohlforth, „The Stability of a Unipolar World“, International Security, No. 24, 1999, 5−41.

[17] Charles W. Kegley, Jr., Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics: Trend and Transformation, Tenth edition, USA: Thomson−Wadsworth, 2006, 524.

[18] On the policy of Zionist movement, see [Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, London‒New York: Verso, 2024, 23‒49.