Allen C. LynCh University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States
The Logic of Geopolitics in American-Russian Relations
Introduction One of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s first requests as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor in 1977 was to ask the Pentagon for its plans – including targets – for nuclear war against “Russia”. Brzezinski was outraged when he was presented with the plan for nuclear war against the Soviet Union. He could not believe that the U.S. military had no plans to specifically weaken the Russian core of the Soviet empire. For the Pentagon planners, Russia and the Soviet Union were one and the same.1 I begin with this anecdote because it reflects well an enduring geopolitical logic to American-Russian relations: American policy toward Russia, whether it be in the Tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet period, has not been based on opposing a strong Russian state per se. (That state married to communist ideology was something else altogether.) In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, for instance, the United States delayed recognition of Baltic independence until 1922, two years after Soviet Russia had recognized the independence of Estonia in the Treaty of Tartu, on the grounds that Polish and Finnish independence apart nothing should be done to call into question the territorial continuity of the Russian Empire.2 Indeed, American officials seldom viewed the Soviet Union as an empire, as the Pentagon war plans just cited illustrate. Historically, the logic of geopolitics i.e., the influence of organization in space on international political relationships has often tended to frame American-Russian relations in terms of complementarities of interest. Of course, geopoli1
Allen C. Lynch, The Cold War is Over—Again (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 140, 157. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), 870–874; see also Albert N. Tarulis, American-Baltic Relations, 1918–1922: The Struggle Over Recognition (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965). 2
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