By MATTHEW MENDES*

Between 2004 and 2005, Moscow suffered four NATO advances: three former Soviet republics were the scene of color revolutions and NATO included seven countries, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

1.

The best way to misunderstand the Ukrainian War is to start reading from February 24, 2022. That is why the oligopolistic media and their favorite analysts do so. When they do not, with exceptions that only serve to confirm the rule, they extend the analysis up to, at most, the recapture of Crimea in 2014.

However, without wanting to get into a discussion about Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or any point in the Middle Ages, it would be prudent to broaden the focus. Mid-1990s, when NATO expanded into the former socialist states? End of the Cold War? Cold War? Revolution of 1917? I dare say that, from the perspective of long-term cycles, it would be interesting to go back to the beginning of the XNUMXth century. After all, in these little more than two hundred years, the only two moments in which the West (or its prototype) stopped having Russia as its main enemy were the two times in which an alliance against Germany was necessary.

In 1815, when the Treaty of Vienna ended the Napoleonic Wars, there was a huge simplification of the European interstate system. For understandable reasons, Brazilian schools teach that Portugal and Spain were further demoted. However, little is said about what happened in Eastern Europe. There, Austria, Prussia and Russia divided up the spoils of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The once powerful state, which stretched from the Baltic to within a few kilometers of Crimea, had been destroyed by Napoleon in 1795.

What would come to be called the West began to take shape at that time. Not without some changes. (Not to mention the entry of the United States, whose imperial pretensions in the Monroe Doctrine would have been nothing more than empty words had it not been for European consent…). France was too powerful to be lumped together with the Iberians, and was soon rehabilitated. Austria would fall into insignificance a century later, but not before losing part of its territory to Piedmont-Sardinia in the unification of Italy. Prussia also took territory from it, as it did with Denmark and France, in order to promote German unification.

The United Kingdom was already above the continental powers and had Russia as its main enemy. The Great Game was beginning, a set of geopolitical moves by London to prevent the expansion of Saint Petersburg in Central Asia. It was in this context that the British invasion of Afghanistan took place in 1838, and a whole series of events throughout Eurasia.

The high point of the Anglo-Russian rivalry, however, came in 1853. Led by the United Kingdom, this prototype of the West would ally itself with the Turks against Russia in the Crimea. The British, French and Italian crusaders must have turned in their graves over this heresy of their great-great-grandchildren.

2.

But the Earth is round, and Asia is very large. In the Far East, the prodigal boy of the Europeans was inflicting his first humiliation on the Japanese. Faced with the threat, Tokyo concluded that it would be better to copy European development than to succumb like India and China. Thus was established the Japanese-British partnership that made the Meiji Era possible. On Japan's side, the aim was to take advantage of the rivalries between the European powers and promote accelerated development through a catch up. For the UK, it not only created a safe haven for investment, but also a possible new front against Russia.

Forty years after the start of the Meiji Era, in 1905, Japan began its expansionism in continental Asia and reached the borders of Russia. The Japanese victory over the Russians was announced with the first defeat of a European country by a non-European country, something that is only true up to page two. Although not a European country, the Japan that defeated Russia had imitated the industrial-military project of the most powerful of the European countries, and had done so through strategic concessions from the United Kingdom.

The defeat by the Japanese was the requiem for Russian absolutism. Some of the pillars of the two revolutions of 1917 were laid in the Revolution of 1905. In the February Revolution, the Western project – representative government, bourgeois civil law and an enlightened government – ​​seemed to announce the great and final Franco-British political and ideological victory. However, the wheel of history did not stop at the point that the European bourgeoisies had hoped for, and took another step. This extra turn attracted, more than attention, the anger of the Western bourgeoisies: not only were the Russian territories taken by the Germans during the war not returned, but the Westerners sent soldiers to join the White Army in the Civil War (1918-1921).

After the civil war – which, given the degree of involvement of foreign powers, one must question whether the term “civil” is really applicable – came the founding of the Soviet Union, the NEP and the five-year plans. In addition to not experiencing the crisis of 1929, the Soviet Union promoted an astonishing industrial development, with an average growth rate of 1930% in the 16,5s.

The Soviet Union was characterized by a centrally planned economy marked by a scarcity of capital and state ownership of the means of production, including agricultural collectivization. Production was guided by use value rather than exchange value, i.e. its function was to meet social needs rather than seek profit. In its early years of existence, the development strategy adopted by the Soviet state, which controlled all foreign trade, was to sell raw materials and buy the machinery that would be the foundation of its industry.

Now, to the geopolitical variable were added the political, economic and ideological variables. The awareness that the Soviet Union was persona non grata in the concert of nations, the military-industrial complex assumed centrality in economic planning.

History would soon demonstrate the correctness of these choices. The capitulation of France and the United Kingdom in Munich (1938) made it clear that there were sectors in Paris and London that did not find it problematic to see Nazi Germany expanding eastwards, after all, that was where the Soviet Union was located.

Even when Washington and London allied with Moscow to defeat Berlin, they did so with reservations. Proof of this is that Franklin D. Roosevelt held back the entry of the Americans and British into Eastern Europe as long as possible in order to increase the military and human costs that the Soviets would pay.

Later, with Roosevelt's death, relations with Truman worsened considerably. From the start, the new president pretended not to understand and turned his predecessor's promise to help rebuild the Soviet Union into empty words. In 1947, he launched the containment policy. In 1949, he created NATO. In addition to "keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down", NATO structured the informal protectorate of the United States over Europe and served as an instrument for its geostrategic ambitions.

In the 1970s, Washington's moves showed that the ideological question could be relativized and that the encirclement of Russia continued to be one of the main geopolitical guidelines. In 1972, the United States moved closer to communist China, squeezing out its Taiwanese allies. Between 1977 and 1981, Jimmy Carter and Brzezinski revived Mackinder and his Heartland theory and fueled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism on the fringes of the Soviet Union, which became bogged down in defending its secular allies in Afghanistan.

3.

With the Western victory in the Cold War, Russia, now a capitalist state, hoped that since there had been no military defeat in stricto sensu, would be respected in its condition as a geopolitical power. The first decade after the Cold War showed that this expectation was nothing more than an illusion.

The liberalization of the economy destroyed the country economically and socially: privatizations ruined the welfare state and the speculative attack of international capital brought the country to its knees.

In the geopolitical dimension, the humiliation was even greater. Belgrade, a historic ally of Moscow, saw its territory not only carved up but also bombed and occupied by NATO twice. It was also in this decade that an international commitment by a US president turned out to be nothing more than empty words: NATO began its expansion into the countries in Moscow's strategic surroundings.

The proof that such an offensive was not a whim of this or that occupant of the White House but rather a strategic decision is that, except for Bush Sr. and once the expansion of the Soviet spoils had begun, all US presidents promoted some expansion of NATO.

Between 2004 and 2005, Moscow had to endure four more setbacks. During this period, three former Soviet republics were the scene of color revolutions (Georgia, 2003; Ukraine, 2004/05; and Kyrgyzstan, 2005) and saw governments aligned with Russia replaced by pro-Western governments. In 2004, NATO's largest expansion took place – seven countries were included – with the added bonus that for the first time this expansion included countries that were part of the Soviet Union – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – and border Russia.

In April 2008, NATO invited Georgia and Ukraine to join the military alliance. In August, with the backing of the West, Georgia invaded Ossetia, an autonomous Georgian region with an ethnic Russian majority. But this time, Russia would not let it go.

Under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, there has been a reorganization of both the country’s political and economic elites and the Russian state itself, which has been prepared to demand that its status as a geopolitical power be respected. Thus, since 2000, Moscow has abandoned its liberal policies and restructured its military-industrial complex: it has reestablished state control over the energy sector and initiated a program of research, development and innovation that would make it the vanguard in combat aircraft, missiles and anti-aircraft systems. Thus, Russia was ready to react to the provocation, and it did so, forcing Tbilisi to capitulate within five days.

The next provocation by the West would result in the inevitability of a conflict that has now been going on for three years and whose consequences are well known. Dissatisfied with the pro-Russian government, the West encouraged yet another color revolution in Ukraine, relying on openly fascist groups such as Pravy Sektor and the Azov Battalion. Immediately following Eutomaidan (November 2013-February 2014), Russia annexed Crimea (March 2014) – where the bulk of its fleet is anchored – and equipped the separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk.

Until February 2022, Russia signaled several times that it would not allow Ukraine to join NATO and demanded that Kiev refrain from attacking the ethnic Russian minorities of Donbass. Faced with the West's intransigence in maintaining the siege of Russia and Ukraine's consent to be an instrument in the maneuver, Russia had little room for maneuver: either it would start the war, or it would see NATO establish a huge border just a few meters from Moscow.

4.

Now, there is no point in demonizing Russia or saying that Vladimir Putin is to blame. Anyone who thinks that Vladimir Putin is a megalomaniac and delusional autocrat has missed the point: he is the person who has managed to channel the discontent of the Russian elite through more than two centuries of sieges and offensives. Nor can it be fruitful to gloss over and sugarcoat neo-Nazis like Navalny or to say that Vladimir Putin and the Russian elites are not attached to the liberal agendas that seduce the left in the West and in part of Latin America.

Another simplistic analysis is to lump Vladimir Putin in with Donald Trump and the European far right. NATO is the greatest threat to Russian security, and the European institutional left has never considered dismantling it or halting its expansion. Furthermore, if the far right destabilizes Europe and the United States, and if it was the stability of center-right governments that promoted NATO expansion, it is plausible to believe that with the far right in these countries, Russia, at least in the short term, has a greater chance of preserving its security. In other words, with internal difficulties, the West poses less of a threat to Russia.

Finally, Donald Trump has indeed promoted a shift in the US position. The decision to ditch Ukraine and side with Russia in the conflict is unparalleled. However, it is still too early to say whether this shift will be an exceptional moment or a new paradigm in US foreign policy.

What is safe to say is that, whether it ends in the next few weeks or the next few years, the conflict that is now three years old is part of a war that has already lasted two centuries.

*Matthew Mendes is a PhD candidate in international political economy at UFRJ. Author, among other books by Hybrid war and neo-coup: geopolitics and class struggle in Brazil (2013-2018) (popular expression).

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