A Brief History of the US-Russian Cold War Turned Warm Embrace

“Ever notice how Russia’s always the bad guy?” Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on March 1, 2025, pointing the finger at Hollywood for casting Russia as the villain. Not only is calling out Hollywood an anti-Semitic dog whistle, but it is defiantly ignorant, especially for someone who grew up during the Cold War. The U.S. government, civil society, and the press saw the Soviet Union as a global threat, and for good reason. People lost their careers in the 1950s for being communists or “fellow travelers” (anybody who was too closely linked to a communist group). In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles being stationed in Cuba: had either side escalated, it would have meant the end of civilization as we know it.  Decades of foreign policy was centered around the fear of war with Russia, and figuring out how to constrain and limit its influence. Republicans consistently were at the vanguard of Russophobia, accusing the Democrats of being soft on communism and being too close to Russia. The fear of Russia was suffocating.

And then, starting in 2016, things started to change.

Donald Trump has never been secretive of his admiration for Vladimir Putin. Even before Election 2016, rumors swirled that Trump was a Russian asset. In a sense, whether it’s true is irrelevant because he rapidly won acceptance for this view within the GOP. Sen. John McCain, who had been the party’s candidate for president in 2008 and was vehemently anti-Putin, was marginalized within his own party by the time he died. Trump helped to force a new consensus within the GOP that Putin was not an enemy of the United States and was even a potential ally. Within just a few years a massive political shift unfolded: Republicans abandoned decades of policy and embraced Russia, leaving Democrats to hold the bag opposing Russia just as Putin was gearing up for a war of conquest in Ukraine.

To really understand what unfolded, you have to look at the long history of U.S.-Russian relations. The seeds for the conservative embrace of Vladimir Putin were sown during the Cold War. The steps the United States took to win ironically have created a backlash that is now undermining a whole world order. Putin’s Russia offers a mirror into what conservatives want for themselves in this country: a socially conservative government, one that only has the trappings of democracy, where extreme income inequality is just taken for granted, and where the government can throw its weight around on the world stage. That Russia is exceptionally dysfunctional, with an underdeveloped economy and authoritarian government doesn’t seem to register as a problem. The remainder of Republican lawmakers have fallen into line for fear of being driven out of the party and ostracized.

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U.S.-Russian relations in the 19th and early 20th century were quiet and basically cordial. Russia had its outposts in Alaska, but they were a tiny dot in the huge Russian Empire and sold off in 1867 with a minimum of fuss. Many immigrants from Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere fled to the United States from Russia, often because of anti-Jewish pogroms led by the Czar’s government, but this did not affect the U.S. government’s position toward Russia. 

It was the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that changed the U.S. position toward Russia. Americans reacted with immediate alarm to the November Revolution that ignited the Russian Civil War and ultimately brought Vladimir Lenin to power. American troops landed in Russia along with the French and British, ostensibly to protect military aid that had been sent, but in practice to offer support to the anti-Bolshevik White Russians. Limited combat between the two sides led to long-simmering distrust between the two governments. In the U.S., what followed was the first Red Scare that led to hundreds of deportations of suspected radicals, a backlash against elected socialists, and a deep fear of Soviet subversion.

A temporary alliance during World War II was just that: Josef Stalin was so deeply paranoid that he saw the worst intentions in everybody. Stalin’s vision for a postwar world was spheres of influence, and he wanted to expand Soviet influence wherever he could. Americans meanwhile were focused on a postwar world order with low trade barriers and international cooperation that would in their view guarantee global prosperity and forestall future wars. In a context of mutual suspicion and fear, these competing priorities made the Cold War inevitable.

Anti-Russian paranoia and fear during the Cold War was suffocating. In the 1950s, Americans were taught to be terrified of spies: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of passing information on the atomic bomb to the Soviets were ultimately executed for spying. Being accused of being a communist could get you blacklisted from your job. While this Second Red Scare ended by the 1960s, the fear of war with Russia never went away. Movies in the 1980s like The Day After (1983) made very clear what nuclear war would be so catastrophic that you would not want to survive it, while others like Red Dawn (1984) played to the fear that the Russians were always on the verge of attack.

In order to win the Cold War, the United States embraced Atlanticism—the closely cooperation between North America and Western Europe. Some of this was based around national security with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Other dimensions were economic: The U.S. supported European reconstruction through the Marshall Plan. The IMF and World Bank were both created to help maintain economic stability. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the precursor to the WTO, was supposed to keep trade moving smoothly by lowering tariffs. Why? Atlanticists lowered trade barriers and tariffs because many of them believed that barriers to trade had in fact helped to cause the Second World War. U.S. officials also encouraged European postwar economic and political integration. All of these were meant to build up Western Europe as a bulwark against Soviet expansion.

And yet, this was never entirely popular among conservatives. In fact, many rabid anti-communists hated these institutions even at the height of the Cold War. Robert Taft felt that NATO was too much of an open-ended commitment for the United States and felt that Europeans needed to pay more for their own defense. Others rejected the idea that the U.S. should be bound by too many global commitments: Ohio Senator John Bricker) proposed a series of amendments called the Bricker Amendments that would make it far more difficult for the United States to sign international treaties. William F. Buckley, who served as a delegate to the UN courtesy of Richard Nixon said, “The United Nations is the most concentrated assault on moral reality in the history of free institutions.” Barry Goldwater, a conservative icon and presidential candidate in 1964 suggested that the United States leave the United Nations. Why? He felt the United States had no business being dictated to by other countries, or changing its foreign policy to suit their views.

While many Republicans still loved free trade (Ronald Reagan among them), there was always a subset who were distrustful of it. Pat Buchanan became one of the most famous among them, starting with a place in the Nixon administration, then Reagan, and ending with presidential campaigns in the 1990s. Buchanan’s refrains might sound familiar: “Great nations do not have trade partners. They have trade competitors and rivals. Trade surpluses are superior to trade deficits. Tariffs on foreign goods are preferable to taxes on U.S. producers. Manufacturing, not finance, is the muscle of the nation.” 

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russia took its place, there was an enormous open question of what would happen next. Breakaway republics, most famously Ukraine declared their independence and became new countries. For a brief moment, it was even suggested that NATO membership be extended to Russia, but this moment passed. Meanwhile, within Russia oligarchs came to power as state-run industries were privatized, granting a few people enormous wealth and creating an extremely unequal society. 

And then, in 2000, Vladimir Putin came to power. Putin reshaped nascent Russian democracy by centralizing power under himself and eroding independent institutions throughout the country. Putin’s social politics were deeply conservative, opposing LGBTQ rights, abortion, and trying to co-opt religion as a tool for political unity. Dismantling the brief liberalization of the 1990s was simple. Meanwhile, his foreign policy was based on restoring what Russia had lost when the Soviet Union dissolved: influence or control over its breakaway republics and in Eastern Europe.

 

Putin thus found admirers in the United States: Social conservatives who had loathed the Soviet Union for its communism loved that Putin positioned himself as a defender of tradition and order. Putin’s anti-gay law in 2012 marked a moment when conservatives shifted to Russia more openly. In 2014, Franklin Graham applauded Putin for his work fighting “homosexual propaganda.” Pat Buchanan was another early admirer of Putin who suggested that he was really just a “paleoconservative” fighting the same culture war that Americans were. Conservative media vanguards like Drudge Report were quick to embrace Putin. Trump’s interest in Russia was much more venal: It was an easy way to solicit money when the Trump brand was basically running out of gas everywhere else in the world. 

Trump helped to make the embrace of Russia more mainstream—it went from being a niche opinion among politicians to an unchallenged view among GOP officials. But Trump couldn’t have done it by himself. He had Evangelicals and the NRA and conservative media carrying Putin’s water for years prior to that. The entire conservative information ecosystem, primed by a generation of culture wars, was exceptionally easy to manipulate by Russian intelligence systems. It’s opportunistic and ham-fisted at times, but it merely needs to undermine and fray consensus. It dovetailed with a growing hatred of those same institutions the United States had built up or supported to contain the Soviet Union and keep the peace in Europe, and whose demise Putin actively hopes for. 

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Atlanticism was never perfect. Its earliest supporters were people who thought Europe and North America were the political and economic center of the world: the ambitions and hopes of people in Africa, Latin America, and Asia often barely registered as a concern. Free trade came with significant costs, and as the dominant position of the U.S. was eroded it came home for American workers. Institutions like the IMF became tools of neoliberalism that gutted state services in exchange for debt relief: Russia experienced this in the 1990s, when it was described as “shock doctrine.” And of course, the United States continued to treat Latin America like its own backyard and playground. 

But the basic premise, international cooperation and coordination, was a good one. It built decades of stability in Europe. Moreover, the general principle of disavowing wars of territorial expansion, of respecting human rights, and not treating nearby countries as puppets and colonies was a good one. Now we’re confronting its possible demise, unlearning some of the dearly bought lessons of World War II by Trump and Putin who want to return the world to 19th century Great Power politics and all the violence that they can unleash.