The Roots of the U.S.-Russia Rivalry

Yves here. While this John Ruehl article gives a useful long historical view of US-Russia relations, I find its extreme underplaying of the impact of what we Americans like to call the Communist Revolution on the US posture towards Russia to be bizarre. The US had long been crassly mercenary, as recounted long form by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.

In keeping a big factor that depending on your view of FDR, either enabled or propelled him to make reforms that benefitted ordinary worker was the rise of the Communist-sympathetic CIO, as in if FDR did not make concessions to force capitalists to share more, they might see even more privileges stripped from them. Similarly, the reason that Stalin approved the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was that Russia had cast about to find any possibly ally so as to hold off a predictable German attack. Russia was universally rebuffed.

By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Follow him on X @john_ruehl. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute

Washington’s relationship with Russia appears likely to continue its decades-long decline, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying on May 22 that formal diplomatic talks over the Ukraine war are effectively frozen. U.S. President Donald Trump’s last meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin took place in August 2025 in Alaska. While the meeting was free from overt hostility, the restrained press conference that followed reflected the cold and distant relationship between the countries, with little meaningful engagement since. No American president has visited Russia since Barack Obama in 2013.

Russia is the only great power with which Washington has an openly adversarial relationship, as Trump’s visit to China in May 2026 and emphasis on his friendship with President Xi Jinping reflect a desire for amicable relations with Beijing, even if it masks greater tensions.

The decaying relationship between Russia and the U.S. has all but erased the international affairs model they built over the second half of the 20th century. Cold War confrontations forced Washington and Moscow to de-escalate through agreements on arms control and maritime encounters, stabilizing relations and setting global standards. Many of those agreements, along with post-Cold War arrangements and treaties, have since collapsed, and America’s advantage over a weakened post-Soviet Russia has left the balance uneven, reducing once well-defined spheres of influence.

Russia’s struggle to control Ukraine and the uncertainty surrounding Washington’s role in global leadership have been reinforced by each side complicating the other’s position. Yet much of the talk about their antagonism ignores their deeper history of failing to gain traction. U.S. perceptions of Russia rarely go back before 1945 and the beginning of Cold War tensions, while Russians increasingly refer to the U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil War roughly two decades prior as the starting point of souring relations between them.

However, both countries need to understand that distrust and cooperation have been ebbing and flowing for more than two and a half centuries and require stabilization for their own interests and global well-being.

Early Contact

The first official Russian expedition to sight the Alaskan mainland came in 1741, led by Danish navigator Vitus Bering, in search of animals for the lucrative fur trade. After years of incursions, the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska was established on Kodiak Island in 1784, and dozens of Russian merchants, explorers, and missionaries began to settle in the region.

American merchants had already established a transatlantic trade relationship with Russia before the U.S. War of Independence, in violation of Britain’s Navigation Act. The Russian Empire’s neutral stance during the war helped build trust that would fuel commerce after, with American traders beginning Arctic trade by the 1790s. Russia established the Russian-American Company (RAC) as a state-sponsored colonial trading monopoly in 1799 to consolidate Russian commercial interests in North America, basing political administration in Novo-Arkhangelsk (now Sitka, Alaska).

Fort Ross, established in northern California in 1812, became the company’s southernmost outpost. Spain and later independent Mexico both claimed the area, but neither had sufficient presence to deter Russian development, which also unsettled Washington. In 1821, Russia officially laid claim to much of the Pacific west coast down to the modern U.S.-Canadian border, before American and British objections pushed its claim back to the present southern border of Alaska.

The overlap between expanding Russian and U.S. activity was also felt in Hawaii. The RAC briefly established a foothold at Waimea Bay after a shipwreck in 1815 and had limited success in trade and building relations with different native Hawaiian groups. However, the Russians were forced to withdraw in 1817 after pressure from native groups and Americans.

Still, ongoing Russian development in the Pacific Northwest kept concerns elevated in Washington. In 1823, then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams told the Russian envoy that the U.S. would “contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on… [American continents].” The Monroe Doctrine, revealed later that year and strongly shaped by Adams, explicitly warned Russia and several other European powers against further expansion in the Americas.

Russia nonetheless continued its efforts to expand its American holdings, and the signing of the Russo-American Treaty for Oregon in 1824 established boundaries between the two powers on the West Coast. By the late 1830s, the Russian population (which included Russians and other ethnic groups within the empire) peaked at just 823 documented colonists in its American territories. Contemporary estimates suggest that the Indigenous population was a little more than 10,000, with a further 12,500 known through contract but not formally registered, and approximately 17,000 more living beyond Russian administrative reach.

Continental Powers in Contrast and the End of Russian America

In Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840, French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville refers to Russia and the U.S. as emerging continental powers shaped by Europe but expanding across different frontier regions and following sharply contrasting political trajectories.

The U.S. appeared centered on freedom for settlers, with Russian society based on general servitude. American expansion was often through individual initiatives within a loose democratic system, while Russia advanced under centralized autocracy. Yet both appeared destined to “sway the destinies of half the globe,” stated Tocqueville.

Within decades, they were increasingly crossing paths in the Pacific, and Russia’s decision to abandon its American holdings was a practical one. The 7,500 miles from Alaska across barren Siberia to the centralized leadership in St. Petersburg complicated administration. “On March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian envoy Baron Edouard de Stoeckl signed the Treaty of Cession. With a stroke of a pen, Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his country’s last remaining foothold in North America, to the United States for… $7.2 million,” according to an article in The Conversation.

Combined with bankruptcy after wars in Europe, Russia viewed its American territories as increasingly peripheral and under threat from the British, and accepted transferring those regions to Washington. Russia sold Fort Ross in 1841 and Alaska in 1867, ending more than a century of Russian America, as it eyed Central Asia for expansion.

Even before the sale of Russia’s American territories, Moscow and the U.S. had entered a more cooperative phase. Russia offered strong support to the Union during the Civil War, including sending its Baltic and Pacific fleets to winter in New York and San Francisco in 1863. Tsar Alexander II and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln tied the latter’s emancipation proclamation to the Tsar’s emancipation of Russia’s serfs two years earlier. After the war, parts of the American and Russian elite also explored the idea of longer-term alignment.

But they never found a solid footing. Russia’s push into Manchuria in 1900 conflicted with America’s Open Door Policy in China, and the termination of the Russian-U.S. trade agreement in 1911 pointed further to how fragile their relationship remained.

Russian Revolution and U.S. Intervention in the Civil War

The two countries briefly aligned on the same side in World War I. Russia exited the war after the 1917 Revolution, and while the November 1918 armistice ended fighting with Germany, the U.S. forces were still deployed on wartime operations. “Russia had begun World War I as an ally of England and France. But the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, installed a communist government in Moscow and St. Petersburg that pulled Russia out of the conflict and into peace with Germany,” stated the Smithsonian magazine.

The U.S. public saw the war in Europe draw to a close while troops remained in Russia, still engaged in a mission that had begun under the wider conflict and now continued into the country’s civil war.

The U.S. first sent about 5,000 troops to Arkhangelsk in northern Russia in September 1918 under British command as part of a larger allied intervention. This action was originally intended to prevent any German advances and attempts to access Western weapons stockpiled in Russia, but soon expanded into Western efforts to defeat the Bolsheviks.

In Siberia, U.S. forces led by General William S. Graves arrived in 1918, also part of a larger international deployment. Their instructions were to similarly protect Western munitions stockpiles and control the Trans-Siberian railway to help evacuate the Czechoslovak legion. There was vague support in Washington for Russians experimenting with self-government in the region, but this support was less ambitious than British, French, and Japanese efforts against the Bolsheviks.

Graves kept his distance from allying with White Russian units, unsettled by reports of atrocities and unwilling to be drawn fully into the civil war. As Bolshevik forces advanced in early 1919, rising American casualties gave the Wilson administration an exit from a campaign few in the country supported, and American forces left by August 1919 from Northern Russia and in April the next year from Siberia.

The U.S. intervention did not, however, end relations with the Soviet state. The Siberian expedition was also about reining in Japanese expansion in the region, which unsettled both Moscow and Washington. Though Japanese military activity surged after American departure, they left in 1922following discussions with the consolidated Soviet government and after facing sustained U.S. pressure.

The relationship between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was also aided by the reluctance of Washington to explicitly support either side in the civil war. Notable U.S. figures and politicians from the Progressive movement even expressed favoritism for the Bolsheviks as more democratic than the Tsar.

That’s not to say there wasn’t fear on both sides; the first Red Scare intensified concerns in the U.S. about communism’s impact on culture, politics, and commerce, while the U.S. featured heavily in Soviet political rhetoric. But while the U.S. didn’t recognize the Soviet state until 1933, the decision opened the way for another brief alliance during World War II.

Modern Relations

Much of the rest of U.S.-Russian history is well-known. The Cold War that began after the end of World War II saw Washington and Moscow engaged in a global competition for ideological and military supremacy for almost 50 years, before the Soviet collapse and the emergence of the U.S.-led order.

The short-lived post-Cold War stability didn’t take long to break down. Even amid some earnest instances of cooperation, proxy conflicts in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Georgia in 2008, Ukraine and Syria in the 2010s, and the full-fledged Russian war in Ukraine since 2022 mark a steady deterioration in relations. Rising friction in the Caucasus, Libya, Central Asia, and the Arctic further signifies a steady bilateral breakdown that rivals the worst days of the Cold War.

But Russian-American history has shown periods of cooperation and balance that required restraint and concessions from both sides at sensitive moments. Russia and the U.S. remain neighbors, and relations have recovered from lows comparable to the present day. Stabilizing a great power rivalry that never found its footing would require both countries to reconsider their global and regional roles, rather than continuing to aggravate each other and leading to international tensions alike. Without building a more stable foundation, the rivalry between the two countries will continue to reassemble itself in new, destructive forms.