By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Cirsd
December 30, 2025
Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven profoundly self-defeating. From the nineteenth century to the present, Russia's security concerns have been treated not as legitimate interests to be negotiated within a broader European order, but as moral transgressions to be resisted, contained, or overridden. This pattern has persisted across radically different Russian regimes-Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet-suggesting that the problem lies not primarily in Russian ideology, but in Europe's enduring refusal to recognize Russia as a legitimate and equal security actor.
My argument is not that Russia has been entirely benign or trustworthy. Rather, it is that Europe has consistently applied double standards in the interpretation of security. Europe treats its own use of force, alliance-building, and imperial or post-imperial influence as normal and legitimate, while construing comparable Russian behavior-especially near Russia's own borders-as inherently destabilizing and invalid. This asymmetry has narrowed diplomatic space, delegitimized compromise, and made war more likely. Likewise, this self-defeating cycle remains the defining characteristic of European-Russian relations in the twenty-first century.
A recurring failure throughout this history has been Europe's inability-or refusal-to distinguish between Russian aggression and Russian security-seeking behavior. In multiple periods, actions interpreted in Europe as evidence of inherent Russian expansionism were, from Moscow's perspective, attempts to reduce vulnerability in an environment perceived as increasingly hostile. Meanwhile, Europe consistently interpreted its own alliance building, military deployments, and institutional expansion as benign and defensive, even when these measures directly reduced Russian strategic depth. This asymmetry lies at the heart of the security dilemma that has repeatedly escalated into conflict: one side's defense is treated as legitimate, while the other side's fear is dismissed as paranoia or bad faith.
Western Russophobia should not be understood primarily as emotional hostility toward Russians or Russian culture. Instead, it operates as a structural prejudice embedded in European security thinking: the assumption that Russia is the exception to normal diplomatic rules. While other great powers are presumed to have legitimate security interests that must be balanced and accommodated, Russia's interests are presumed illegitimate unless proven otherwise. This assumption survives changes in regime, ideology, and leadership. It transforms policy disagreements into moral absolutes and renders compromise as suspect. As a result, Russophobia functions less as a sentiment than as a systemic distortion-one that repeatedly undermines Europe's own security.
I trace this pattern across four major historical arcs. First, I examine the nineteenth century, beginning with Russia's central role in the Concert of Europe after 1815 and its subsequent transformation into Europe's designated menace. The Crimean War emerges as the founding trauma of modern Russophobia: a war of choice pursued by Britain and France despite the availability of diplomatic compromise, driven by the West's moralized hostility and imperial anxiety rather than unavoidable necessity. The Pogodin memorandum of 1853 on the West's double standard, featuring Tsar Nicholas I's famous marginal note-"This is the whole point"-serves not merely as an anecdote, but as an analytical key to Europe's double standards and Russia's understandable fears and resentments.
Second, I turn to the revolutionary and interwar periods, when Europe and the United States moved from rivalry with Russia to direct intervention in Russia's internal affairs. I examine in detail the Western military interventions during the Russian Civil War, the refusal to integrate the Soviet Union into a durable collective-security system in the 1920s and 1930s, and the catastrophic failure to ally against fascism, drawing especially on the archival work of Michael Jabara Carley. The result was not the containment of Soviet power, but the collapse of European security and the devastation of the continent itself in World War II.
Third, the early Cold War presented what should have been a decisive corrective moment; yet, Europe again rejected peace when it could have been secured. Although the Potsdam conference reached an agreement on German demilitarization, the West subsequently reneged. Seven years later, the West similarly rejected the Stalin Note, which offered German reunification based on neutrality. The dismissal of reunification by Chancellor Adenauer-despite clear evidence that Stalin's offer was genuine-cemented Germany's postwar division, entrenched the bloc confrontation, and locked Europe into decades of militarization.
Finally, I analyze the post-Cold War era, when Europe was offered its clearest opportunity to escape this destructive cycle. Gorbachev's vision of a "Common European Home" and the Charter of Paris articulated a security order based on inclusion and indivisibility. Instead, Europe chose NATO expansion, institutional asymmetry, and a security architecture built around Russia rather than with it. This choice was not accidental. It reflected an Anglo-American grand strategy-articulated most explicitly by Zbigniew Brzezinski-that treated Eurasia as the central arena of global competition and Russia as a power to be prevented from consolidating security or influence.
The consequences of this long pattern of disdain for Russian security concerns are now visible with brutal clarity. The war in Ukraine, the collapse of nuclear arms control, Europe's energy and industrial shocks, Europe's new arms race, the EU's political fragmentation, and Europe's loss of strategic autonomy are not aberrations. They are the cumulative costs of two centuries of Europe's refusal to take Russia's security concerns seriously.
My conclusion is that peace with Russia does not require naïve trust. It requires the recognition that durable European security cannot be built by denying the legitimacy of Russian security interests. Until Europe abandons this reflex, it will remain trapped in a cycle of rejecting peace when it is available-and paying ever higher prices for doing so.
The Origins of Structural Russophobia
The recurrent European failure to build peace with Russia is not primarily a product of Putin, communism, or even twentieth-century ideology. It is much older-and it is structural. Repeatedly, Russia's security concerns have been treated by Europe not as legitimate interests subject to negotiation, but as moral transgressions. In this sense, the story begins with the nineteenth-century transformation of Russia from a co-guarantor of Europe's balance into the continent's designated menace.
After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Russia was not peripheral to Europe; it was central. Russia bore a decisive share of the burden in defeating Napoleon, and the Tsar was a principal architect of the post-Napoleonic settlement. The Concert of Europe was built on an implicit proposition: peace requires the great powers to accept one another as legitimate stakeholders and to manage crises by consultation rather than by moralized demonology. Yet, within a generation, a counterproposition gained strength in British and French political culture: that Russia was not a normal great power but a civilizational danger-one whose demands, even when local and defensive, should be treated as inherently expansionist and therefore unacceptable.
That shift is captured with extraordinary clarity in a document highlighted by Orlando Figes in The Crimean War: A History (2010) as being written at the hinge point between diplomacy and war: Mikhail Pogodin's memorandum to Tsar Nicholas I in 1853. Pogodin lists episodes of Western coercion and imperial violence-far-flung conquests and wars of choice-and contrasts them with Europe's outrage at Russian actions in adjacent regions:
France takes Algeria from Turkey, and almost every year England annexes another Indian principality: none of this disturbs the balance of power; but when Russia occupies Moldavia and Wallachia, albeit only temporarily, that disturbs the balance of power. France occupies Rome and stays there several years during peacetime: that is nothing; but Russia only thinks of occupying Constantinople, and the peace of Europe is threatened. The English declare war on the Chinese, who have, it seems, offended them: no one has the right to intervene; but Russia is obliged to ask Europe for permission if it quarrels with its neighbour. England threatens Greece to support the false claims of a miserable Jew and burns its fleet: that is a lawful action; but Russia demands a treaty to protect millions of Christians, and that is deemed to strengthen its position in the East at the expense of the balance of power.
Pogodin concludes: "We can expect nothing from the West but blind hatred and malice," to which Nicholas famously wrote in the margin: "This is the whole point."
The Pogodin-Nicholas exchange matters because it frames the recurring pathology that returns in every major episode that follows. Europe would repeatedly insist on the universal legitimacy of its own security claims while treating Russia's security claims as phony or suspect. This stance creates a particular kind of instability: it makes compromise politically illegitimate in Western capitals, causing diplomacy to collapse not because a bargain is impossible, but because acknowledging Russia's interests is treated as a moral error.
The Crimean War is the first decisive manifestation of this dynamic. While the proximate crisis involved the Ottoman Empire's decline and disputes over religious sites, the deeper issue was whether Russia would be allowed to secure a recognized position in the Black Sea-Balkan sphere without being treated as a predator. Modern diplomatic reconstructions emphasize that the Crimean crisis differed from earlier "Eastern crises" because the Concert's cooperative habits were already eroding, and British opinion had swung toward an extreme anti-Russian posture that narrowed the room for settlement.
What makes the episode so telling is that a negotiated outcome was available. The Vienna Note was intended to reconcile Russian concerns with Ottoman sovereignty and preserve peace. However, it collapsed amid distrust and political incentives for escalation. The Crimean War followed. It was not "necessary" in any strict strategic sense; it was made likely because British and French compromise with Russia had become politically toxic. The consequences were self-defeating for Europe: massive casualties, no durable security architecture, and the entrenchment of an ideological reflex that treated Russia as the exception to normal great-power bargaining. In other words, Europe did not achieve security by rejecting Russia's security concerns. Rather, it created a longer cycle of hostility that made later crises harder to manage
The West's Military Campaign Against Bolshevism
This cycle carried forward into the revolutionary rupture of 1917. When Russia's regime type changed, the West did not shift from rivalry to neutrality; instead, it moved toward active intervention, treating the existence of a sovereign Russian state outside Western tutelage as intolerable.
The Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War produced a complex conflict involving Reds, Whites, nationalist movements, and foreign armies. Crucially, the Western powers did not simply "watch" the outcome. They intervened militarily in Russia across vast spaces-North Russia, the Baltic approaches, the Black Sea, Siberia, and the Far East-under justifications that rapidly shifted from wartime logistics to regime change.
One can acknowledge the standard "official" rationale for initial intervention: the fear that war supplies would fall into German hands after Russia's exit from World War I, and the desire to re-open an Eastern Front. Yet, once Germany surrendered in November 1918, the intervention did not cease; it mutated. This transformation explains why the episode matters so profoundly: it reveals a willingness, even amidst the devastation of World War I, to use force to shape Russia's internal political future.
David Foglesong's America's Secret War against Bolshevism (1995)-published by UNC Press and still the standard scholarly reference for U.S. policy-captures this precisely. Foglesong frames the U.S. intervention not as a confused side-show, but as a sustained effort aimed at preventing Bolshevism from consolidating power. Recent high-quality narrative history has further brought this episode back into public view; notably, Anna Reid's A Nasty Little War (2024) describes the Western intervention as a poorly executed yet deliberate effort to overturn the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The geographic scope itself is instructive, for it undermines later Western claims that Russia's fears were mere paranoia. Allied forces landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk to operate in North Russia; in Siberia, they entered through Vladivostok and along the rail corridors; Japanese forces deployed on a massive scale in the Far East; and in the south, landings and operations around Odessa and Sevastopol. Even a basic overview of the intervention's dates and theaters-from November 1917 through the early 1920s-demonstrates the persistence of the foreign presence and the vastness of its range.
Nor was this merely "advice" or a symbolic presence. Western forces supplied, armed, and in some instances effectively supervised White formations. The intervening powers became enmeshed in the moral and political ugliness of White politics, including reactionary programs and violent atrocities. This reality renders the episode particularly corrosive to Western moral narratives: the West did not merely oppose Bolshevism; it often did so by aligning with forces whose brutality and war aims sat uneasily with later Western claims to liberal legitimacy.
From Moscow's perspective, this intervention confirmed the warning issued by Pogodin decades earlier: Europe and the United States were prepared to use force to determine whether Russia would be allowed to exist as an autonomous power. This episode became foundational to Soviet memory, reinforcing the conviction that Western powers had attempted to strangle the revolution in its cradle. It demonstrated that Western moral rhetoric concerning peace and order could seamlessly coexist with coercive campaigns when Russian sovereignty was at stake.
The intervention also produced a decisive second-order consequence. By entering Russia's civil war, the West inadvertently strengthened Bolshevik legitimacy domestically. The presence of foreign armies and foreign-backed White forces allowed the Bolsheviks to claim they were defending Russian independence against imperial encirclement. Historical accounts consistently note how effectively the Bolsheviks exploited the Allied presence for propaganda and legitimacy. In other words, the attempt to "break" Bolshevism helped consolidate the very regime it sought to destroy
This dynamic reveals the precise cycle of history: Russophobia proves strategically counterproductive for Europe. It drives Western powers toward coercive policies that do not resolve the challenge but exacerbate it. It generates Russian grievances and security fears that later Western leaders will dismiss as irrational paranoia. Furthermore, it narrows future diplomatic space by teaching Russia-regardless of its regime-that Western promises of settlement may be insincere.
By the early 1920s, as foreign forces withdrew and the Soviet state consolidated, Europe had already made two fateful choices that would resonate for the next century. First, it had helped foster a political culture that transformed manageable disputes-like the Crimean crisis-into major wars by refusing to treat Russian interests as legitimate. Second, it demonstrated through military intervention a willingness to use force not merely to counter Russian expansion, but to shape Russian sovereignty and regime outcomes. These choices did not stabilize Europe; rather, they sowed the seeds for subsequent catastrophes: the interwar breakdown of collective security, the Cold War's permanent militarization, and the post-Cold War order's return to frontier escalation.
Collective Security and the Choice Against Russia
By the mid-1920s, Europe confronted a Russia that had survived every attempt-revolution, civil war, famine, and direct foreign military intervention-to destroy it. The Soviet state that emerged was poor, traumatized, and deeply suspicious-but also unmistakably sovereign. At precisely this moment, Europe faced a choice that would recur repeatedly: whether to treat this Russia as a legitimate security actor whose interests had to be incorporated into European order, or as a permanent outsider whose concerns could be ignored, deferred, or overridden. Europe chose the latter, and the costs proved enormous.
The legacy of the Allied interventions during the Russian Civil War cast a long shadow over all subsequent diplomacy. From Moscow's perspective, Europe had not merely disagreed with Bolshevik ideology; it had attempted to decide Russia's internal political future by force. This experience mattered profoundly. It shaped Soviet assumptions about Western intentions and created a deep skepticism toward Western assurances. Rather than recognizing this history and seeking reconciliation, European diplomacy often behaved as if Soviet mistrust were irrational-a pattern that would persist into the Cold War and beyond.
Throughout the 1920s, Europe oscillated between tactical engagement and strategic exclusion. Treaties such as Rapallo (1922) demonstrated that Germany, itself a pariah after Versailles, could pragmatically engage with Soviet Russia. Yet for Britain and France, engagement with Moscow remained provisional and instrumental. The USSR was tolerated when it served British and French interests and sidelined when it did not. No serious effort was made to integrate Russia into a durable European security architecture as an equal.
This ambivalence hardened into something far more dangerous and self-destructive in the 1930s. While the rise of Hitler posed an existential threat to Europe, the continent's leading powers repeatedly treated Bolshevism as the greater danger. This was not merely rhetorical; it shaped concrete policy choices-alliances foregone, guarantees delayed, and deterrence undermined.
It is essential to underscore that this was not merely an Anglo-American failure, nor a story in which Europe was passively swept along by ideological currents. European governments exercised agency, and they did so decisively-and disastrously. France, Britain, and Poland repeatedly made strategic choices that excluded the Soviet Union from European security arrangements, even when Soviet participation would have strengthened deterrence against Hitler's Germany. French leaders preferred a system of bilateral guarantees in Eastern Europe that preserved French influence but avoided security integration with Moscow. Poland, with the tacit backing of London and Paris, refused transit rights to Soviet forces even to defend Czechoslovakia, prioritizing its fear of Soviet presence over the imminent danger of German aggression. These were not small decisions. They reflected a European preference for managing Hitlerian revisionism over incorporating Soviet power, and for risking Nazi expansion rather than legitimizing Russia as a security partner. In this sense, Europe did not merely fail to build collective security with Russia; it actively chose an alternative security logic that excluded Russia and ultimately collapsed under its own contradictions.
Here, Michael Jabara Carley's archival work is decisive. His scholarship demonstrates that the Soviet Union, particularly under Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, made sustained, explicit, and well-documented efforts to build a system of collective security against Nazi Germany. These were not vague gestures. They included proposals for mutual assistance treaties, military coordination, and explicit guarantees for states such as Czechoslovakia. Carley shows that Soviet entry into the League of Nations in 1934 was accompanied by genuine Russian attempts to operationalize collective deterrence, not simply to seek legitimacy.
However, these efforts collided with a Western ideological hierarchy in which anti-communism trumped anti-fascism. In London and Paris, political elites feared that an alliance with Moscow would legitimize Bolshevism domestically and internationally. As Carley documents, British and French policymakers repeatedly worried less about Hitler's threats than about the political consequences of cooperation with the USSR. The Soviet Union was treated not as a necessary partner against a common threat, but as a liability whose inclusion would "contaminate" European politics.
This hierarchy had profound strategic consequences. The policy of appeasement toward Germany was not merely a misreading of Hitler; it was the product of a worldview that treated Nazi revisionism as potentially manageable, while treating Soviet power as inherently subversive. Poland's refusal to allow Soviet troops transit rights to defend Czechoslovakia-maintained with tacit Western support-is emblematic. European states preferred the risk of German aggression to the certainty of Soviet involvement, even when Soviet involvement was explicitly defensive.
The culmination of this failure came in 1939. The Anglo-French negotiations with the Soviet Union in Moscow were not sabotaged by Soviet duplicity, contrary to later mythology. They failed because Britain and France were unwilling to make binding commitments or to recognize the USSR as an equal military partner. Carley's reconstruction shows that the Western delegations to Moscow arrived without negotiating authority, without urgency, and without political backing to conclude a real alliance. When the Soviets repeatedly asked the essential question of any alliance-Are you prepared to act?-the answer, in practice, was no.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that followed has been used ever since as retroactive justification for Western distrust. Carley's work reverses that logic. The pact was not the cause of Europe's failure; it was the consequence. It emerged after years of the West's refusal to build collective security with Russia. It was a brutal, cynical, and tragic decision-but one taken in a context where Britain, France, and Poland had already rejected peace with Russia in the only form that might have stopped Hitler.
The result was catastrophic. Europe paid the price not only in blood and destruction but in the loss of agency. The war that Europe failed to prevent destroyed its power, exhausted its societies, and reduced the continent to the primary battlefield of superpower rivalry. Once again, rejecting peace with Russia did not produce security; it produced a far worse war under far worse conditions.
One might have expected that the sheer scale of this disaster would have forced a rethinking of Europe's approach to Russia after 1945. It did not.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.