For citation, please use:
Portansky, A.P., 2025. The U.S. and Russia Are Friends More Than Enemies. Russia in Global Affairs, 23(2), pp. 50–56. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-2-50-56
In November 2024, retired U.S. general and former Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane described Russia, China, and Iran as “the enemy at the gate.” But America and Russia are not condemned to be enemies.
2025 marks the 120th anniversary of the Peace of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War. President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the negotiations. Now, establishing peace with Kiev has become a key issue for the whole world. President Donald Trump has raised great expectations with his repeated promises to quickly resolve the conflict. Will he be able to repeat Roosevelt’s feat?
In 1775, King George III of England appealed to Russian Empress Catherine II for military aid to suppress the American rebellion. The Empress twice refused, realizing that the war in North America was seriously weakening Britain, Russia’s adversary. Gratitude from across the ocean was prompt. “We are much gratified to learn from a reliable source that Britain’s requests and proposals to Russian Empress were rejected with contempt,” George Washington wrote in a letter to the Marquis of Lafayette in the spring of 1779. Thus, Russia, at least, did not remain indifferent to the U.S. struggle for independence.
Russian Emperor Alexander I inherited much of his grandmother Catherine II’s prudence, and was initially interested in liberal reforms, constitutionalism, and the U.S.’s system of federalism. In personal correspondence (1802-1806), President Thomas Jefferson recommended to Alexander I several books, including a collection of The Federalist articles. Jefferson himself sought rapprochement with Russia because of the deterioration of U.S. relations with Britain and France following the introduction of Napoleon’s “continental blockade.” Russia, forced to join the blockade after the humiliating Peace of Tilsit in 1807, was also interested in rapprochement. It was under Jefferson and Alexander I that formal diplomatic relations were established between the U.S. and Russia.
On 25 June 1863, by decree of Russian Emperor Alexander II, two squadrons were sent to America’s shores. By then, Russia and the United States had developed an agreeable, trusting relationship. St. Petersburg highly appreciated Washington’s neutral and favorable position taken during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Russian Foreign Minister and later Chancellor Prince Gorchakov wrote: “The sympathy of the American nation to us did not weaken during the entire war. America provided to us … more services than could be expected from a power adhering to strict neutrality.”
Historians do not agree on the reasons that prompted St. Petersburg to send two squadrons of Russian warships to America in June 1863. Many researchers see this step primarily as a preventive measure against a possible war with Great Britain and France. In this case, the Russian squadrons could have become an effective tool for blocking the enemy’s maritime communications off the coast of America.
In the early 1860s, the threat to President Lincoln’s government came not only from the rebellious South and Britain, but also from France, which had plans for the American South’s neighboring Mexico. Seeking to secure the Confederates’ loyalty, Paris unofficially supplied them with arms.
In these conditions, only Russia entirely supported the North in the Civil War. Gorchakov wrote: “Russia’s policy towards the United States … will not change depending on the course of any other state. … Offers have been made to Russia to join in the plans of intervention. Russia will reject any proposals of this kind.”
In 1891-1892, a terrible famine broke out in central Russia due to poor harvests. Americans began collecting donations in December 1891, and the Russian Historical Archive records humanitarian deliveries by six steamships in 1892. The American people’s humanitarian impulse inspired famous Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky to create his Relief Ship and Food Distribution.
Three decades later, under the Bolsheviks, famine recurred, striking about 25 million people. Soviet writer Maxim Gorky appealed to all “honest people of Europe and America” for bread and medicine.
Two days later, U.S. Secretary of Commerce and future President Herbert Hoover informed Gorky that he could feed up to a million children in Russia. The U.S. did not recognize Soviet Russia, and there was opposition to helping the Reds, but Hoover wrote: “Millions of people are starving. Regardless of politics, they need to eat.” Gorky later responded: “Your aid will go down in history as a unique gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians … whom you saved from death.”
Things began to go differently later in the 20th century. Russia’s continued involvement in World War I became the key issue in relations between Entente nations, including the United States, and the Bolshevik regime in late 1917 and early 1918. President Woodrow Wilson opposed the recognition of the Bolshevik regime that sought to pull Russia out of WWI. He pinned hopes on the victory of counterrevolutionary forces that would form an anti-Bolshevik government and continue the war. By 1920, Wilson had become disillusioned with the possibility of a regime change in Russia, and America set out on a firm course of non-recognition of the Soviet state and its isolation. This policy continued under successive Republican administrations.
From the late 1920s, U.S. investments help build Soviet steel, tractor, automobile, chemical, and aircraft factories, oil refineries, and more, assistance that was praised by Stalin. In May 1929, the automobile king of America, Henry Ford, signed a technical assistance agreement with the USSR.
In November 1933, Franklin Roosevelt diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union, as isolation was doing nothing to overthrow the Bolsheviks, and relations could be useful in case of German or Japanese aggression. A boom in American investment and exports followed, and Joseph Stalin promised to clamp down on the tiny Communist Party in the U.S.
Moscow-Washington relations reached their highest point during World War II. In 1943, at the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt promised an interest-free loan of $6 billion to help rebuild the Soviet economy. Stalin responded with a promise to go to war with Japan. Having learned from intelligence in the spring of 1944 that the U.S. was ready to increase the size of the package to $10 billion, the Soviet leadership decided to participate in the upcoming Bretton Woods Conference.
Many historians believe that Roosevelt attached great importance to these agreements, and counted on long-term postwar cooperation with the USSR. Everything changed, however, after his death. Harry Truman did not feel bound by his predecessor’s promises to Stalin. Washington replaced the Bretton Woods plan for postwar aid with the unilateral Marshall Plan, which demoted the USSR from a great power to a regional power. Stalin refused to ratify the Bretton Woods documents, signed in July 1944. Truman cut the USSR’s loan to $3 billion and gave it to Britain instead.
In early 1946, Washington asked its embassy in Moscow to explain why the USSR did not support the new Bretton Woods institutions. In response it received the famous “long telegram” of Embassy Counselor George Kennan. It argued for the impossibility of partnership between the U.S. and the USSR, as the Soviet leadership perceived the West as its main enemy and sought to sow distrust between and within Western countries. The proposed strategy of containment came to define the U.S. for decades to come. When Kennan’s July 1947 article in Foreign Affairs was translated for Stalin, Kremlin officials replaced “containment” with “strangulation, which largely provoked mutually hostile rhetoric that lasted 40 years.
The ensuing Cold War occasionally thawed, such as in the early 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev. Then came the rapprochement with the West under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. In the U.S., there continued to be outbursts of Russophilia. Kennan, the author of the “long telegram,” and Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State and participant in many Russia-U.S. summits, were known as Russophiles and lovers of Russian literature. President Ronald Reagan was impressed by conversations with a Swiss Slavist about Russian culture, and to understand the Russian soul, he watched the movie Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears seven times before meeting with Gorbachev. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush and other Western leaders supported Gorbachev’s efforts to preserve the USSR through a new Union Treaty. In a speech in Kiev on 1 August 1991, Bush was very clear on this point, urging Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to endorse the Treaty and warning of the dangers of suicidal nationalism.
Another episode of Russia-U.S. fruitful interaction was Operation Provide Hope. The operation, aimed at ensuring the safety of nuclear weapons of the defunct Soviet Union, was discussed during U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s visit to Moscow on 6 December 1991. In appreciation of Yeltsin’s assurances that the 27,000 Soviet nuclear warheads would be under “strict export control” and Russia would not let them “fall into the wrong hands,” Baker offered to provide humanitarian aid to Russia and other newly independent republics. Shortly after Baker’s visit, on 21 December, the Agreement on Joint Measures Regarding Nuclear Weapons was signed in Alma-Ata, calling for all tactical nuclear weapons to be moved to Russia. Soon after, on 10 February 1992, twelve U.S. Air Force transport airplanes carrying an estimated 500 tons of bulk-food rations and medicines headed for Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Minsk. The operation concluded in September 1994. Secretary Baker said on the occasion that the shipments should be seen not as charity but as an investment in the security of the West and the world and stability for decades to come.
The Clinton administration’s decision in 1994, to begin expanding NATO into Eastern Europe, sparked a heated debate in Washington that upset 90-year-old Kennan, who retained his Russophilia. Many in Russia and abroad still consider the West’s post-Cold-War triumphalism and dismissal of Russia, which Margaret Thatcher strongly opposed, to be a tragic mistake.
Two days before the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin called his U.S. counterpart George W. Bush to warn him of the threat. The next conversation between the presidents took place immediately after al-Qaida’s terrorist attack on the Twin Towers—Putin called Bush to express his support. He also sent a telegram of condolences and solidarity to the U.S. president on the same day and made a televised address on the terrorist attacks.
After the reincorporation of Crimea in 2014, American elites across the political spectrum seem to have permanently labeled Russia as the main geopolitical enemy of the United States.
What follows from this ultra-brief historical excursion?
The U.S. is the only major power with which Russia had neither armed conflict nor significant confrontation between the late 18th century and the mid-20th century. Relations in 1776-1945 were mostly quite friendly, marked by important acts of mutual support, and it was only in 1946-1985 and the 21st century that they deteriorated.
The bottom line: 170 positive years versus approximately 60 negative ones. Friendship and cooperation between the U.S. and Russia is their more natural state, and in the long run their relations are likely to return to this historical norm.
