The Great Fear

This book explores a full history of United States relations with both the Soviet Union and Russia, beginning with U.S. efforts to invade Russia during the Woodrow Wilson years. That relationship has been presented, from the American side, in terms of a perpetual Soviet/Russian threat, from the Leninist period through Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and, more recently, the tenure of Vladimir Putin. The argument here is that the Soviet Union and Russia have never posed a serious threat to the U.S. The only "threat" has been in the form of independent Soviet or Russian geopolitical power across Eurasia, as it prevents the U.S. from achieving economic and political supremacy in that region. The Great Fear has long been sustained by the ideological force of Russophobia, a form of political demonology that justifies high levels of military spending, military interventions, regime-change operations, and proxy wars orchestrated by the military-industrial complex. The main narrative here is that the real threat works in reverse -- it is precisely the military power of NATO and other Western powers that poses and existential threat to the Russians, who occupy the biggest landmass in the world with unprecedented levels of natural resources.