The U.S. – USSR has never been at war with one another. They fought on the same side in WW1 and were allies during WW2. As a matter of fact, the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis in WW2 with help from the UK, US, and other Allied forces. Throughout history, the U.S. and the Russian relationship has ranged from good-willed cooperation to competitive rival.

Russia played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War. Catherine the Great decided to remain neutral in the conflict. Her sympathy and continued trade with the Colonists benefited both Russian commercial interests and the American rebels.

During the American Civil War, Tsar Alexander ll of Russia announced his support of the Union and urged reunification. The Tsar dispatched part of its fleet to New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington. These actions may have prevented Britain and France from intervening. Great Britain was sympathetic to the Confederacy and was dependent upon its exports.

In 1956, after Egypt’s leader Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the Suez Canal Crisis exploded. Israel, France, and the U.K. reacted by invading Egypt. The Soviet Union threatened to enter the fray. They demanded an immediate withdrawal of troops. The U.S., under the presidency of Eisenhower, supported the Nasser-Soviet position. Eisenhower then forced a ceasefire and withdrawal of all the invading forces. His support for the Egypt-Soviet side may have prevented a WW3 scenario.

Then, in 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev, through back-door diplomacy, avoided direct confrontation over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. They worked together to solve a potential nuclear exchange between the two superpowers.

During the Reagan and Gorbachev years, the U.S. and USSR began a de-escalation of the Cold War. Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty required that their countries, by 1991, would eliminate arsenals of ground-launched, midrange nuclear missiles.

George H.W. Bush, Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin continued this working spirit, signing the START treaty, a pledge to reduce their arsenals significantly by 2009. Followed by the Open Skies Treaty, transferring the former Soviet nuclear arsenals to Russia with a $400 million United States commitment to help dismantle nuclear weapons.

The Cold War had ended, nuclear armaments were reduced, the U.S. and Russian relationship was amiable, and NATO was an organization that Russia was interested in joining. What? Putin believed NATO to be a non-threatening organization and a possible vehicle for Russia to join the European community.

In 2000, Putin had a very naive take on the hegemonic politics coming from the West. His attitude was on display during a Davis Frost interview. He told Frost that “Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world.”

George Robertson, a former UK Labour defense secretary and Nato leader, recalled his conversation with Putin in 2000. “Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ Robertson said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And he said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’” Russia is still standing in line as those other countries, that don’t matter, have become members of Nato.

What changed? NATO
In 1990, a reunified Germany joined NATO under the West German existing membership. Germany’s acceptance into NATO was accompanied by US Secretary of State James Baker promising the Soviets that NATO would not expand one inch.

Well, following the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union, the Baker promise was broken. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became NATO members. Then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania chose to join NATO in 2004.

Seven years after the Frost interview, a more veteran Putin let his frustration rip. At the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin said, “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Worner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?”

At the 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine, both ruled as part of the Soviet Union and both with borders to Russia, could join NATO. Putin called NATO’s promise of membership for Georgia and Ukraine “a direct threat” to Russian security. The Bucharest summit result heightened the Kremlin’s fears of encirclement. It also meant that Russia would lose the strategic buffer zone that enabled Russia to prevail over Western invaders twice in two centuries, Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler from 1941 to 1945.

Nato continued its creep toward Russian Borders. Two countries on the Adriatic Sea, Albania and Croatia, joined in April 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020, and Finland in 2023.

The U.S. and NATO, intoxicated by its unipolar moment, continued ignoring the warnings from Russia and NATO member countries. Former French President Jacques Chirac said, “Russia should not be humiliated,” and German Ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel believed that Moscow had “legitimate security interests”. All concerns fell on deaf ears.

Washington and NATO systematically isolated Russia from Europe while claiming that Putin’s desire to restore the Soviet empire was the problem.

Why Can’t We Be Friends? NASA beamed this song to the linking of Soviet cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts for the 1975 Apollo–Soyuz Test Project.