One month before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I published an editorial largely blaming Zelensky if anything happened. I said sitting between Russia and Europe as Ukraine does, all he had to do was promise his administration would not pursue NATO membership, and Putin would not have invaded. Because that is all that Putin wanted: respect for Russia. Now, Jonathan Haslam has written Hubris, which takes it back much farther, to the Reagan era, where betrayal after betrayal by the USA pushed and shoved Russia to this point, where this was essentially the last opportunity to keep NATO off the southern borders of Russia. Because if Ukraine joined NATO, such an invasion would mean world war. So it had to happen, right away.

Gorbachev made a mistake. He trusted the USA. He negotiated a deal to let the Soviet Republics go their own ways, if NATO agreed not to take them on as members. And just like its treaties with Native Americans, the US government immediately dropped any pretense of honoring that commitment and following through. It immediately started signing up central and eastern European countries as new NATO members. This put American nuclear arms on Russian borders, which is precisely and only what Russia wanted to avoid. Just like JFK not wanting Russian missiles in Cuba just 90 miles from the USA, so Russia didn’t want to be hemmed in by American nukes.

But there’s more. The USA suddenly started ignoring Russia completely. While Russia was publicly and openly led to believe it would have a place for itself inside NATO, the Americans then found ways to keep it out. After 9/11, when Russia negotiated deals with its former republics in central Asia for new US bases to attack Al Qaeda, and even pinpointed those strongholds and camps in Afghanistan for the Americans, the USA didn’t bother thanking them or involving them or even notifying them, and just went ahead to attack. Even when George Bush II invaded Iraq, he didn’t bother to notify Russia as a courtesy. Russia was the last to know. Stunningly, Bush later said of Putin: “We’ve lost him…I don’t know how, but we’ve lost him.”

The key is that the US treated Russia as if it had lost the Cold War. Only the US survived as a power. Nothing Russia said, did or had made any difference any more. At the same time, all Russia ever wanted was to be treated as an equal, with respect. All the efforts by Russia to help out, negotiate deals and work its own way up the capitalist system were simply ignored. This forced Russia to go it alone, creating a powerful competitor and enemy instead of an additional democratic ally. And Russia had moved heaven and earth to convert itself into a western style capitalistic democracy in the 1990s.

What was behind all this, Haslam says, is the American fear that Europe wouldn’t need it any more. If NATO, like capitalism, didn’t keep expanding, it would wither away. Without an enemy to keep it on its toes and physically present throughout Europe, NATO would shut down and the Americans would have to go home. There would be no US troops in Europe. No troops meant no influence, let alone control, and this was untenable to successive American presidents. There had to be a uniting fear to keep Americans occupying Europe.

President after president proved incompetent in understanding, let alone dealing with Russia. Russia was just put on a shelf with no intention of ever looking at it. Haslam shows clearly the Clinton administration was horrific in this respect. Clinton himself was all about the economy, and had no grasp or the slightest interest in foreign relations. And it showed. US intelligence agencies were left stranded. Their information and data were ignored. Until one day, when Europeans got to Clinton, he was suddenly leading the charge to enlarge NATO, again without reference to all his own people’s findings and concerns. The crazy mixed messages Clinton sent left no room for the hand of friendship Russia kept extending – and which kept getting slapped away.

Haslam has done an absolutely stellar job of research, pulling together speeches, conversations, reports and meetings going back forty years. The book is a whirlwind of insider events, colored by the characters who caused them or stood by as they bypassed them. The frustration of the professional diplomats and intelligence personnel is palpable. The failures, all preventable, are glaring. It is good old fashioned hubris, in which America had it all and could do no wrong. It expected everyone to follow suit, fall into line behind them, and do their bidding and abiding as demanded. The result is the stalemate we see today.

The book moves with lightning speed, and makes it easy to follow the hundreds of players involved, from the diplomatic and political communities of all the nations involved. Haslam employs a delightfully helpful tool of a single adjective before a name, which sets the scene, the tone, and outcome even and especially if readers have never come across the name before. New characters are referred to as hardline, dyspeptic, arch-realist, dithering, easily intimidated, irascible, or finely tuned, among others. Anthony Blinken, currently US Secretary of State, is introduced as Vice President Biden’s blithering national security advisor, which is, I am certain, the way most view him today, too. The emollient Colin Powell continually refuses to take a firm stand, and so on over scores of characters it would otherwise take too long to describe. This is a brilliant way to keep the pace of this page-turner account going ever faster towards oblivion. If you were to ask me if this was a narrative or a character-driven story, I would have to say yes.

There are plenty of key moments and turning points. Haslam cites Defense Secretary and CIA Director Robert Gates, who long understood Russia, writing: “The arrogance, after the collapse, of American officials, academicians, businessmen, and politicians in telling the Russian how to run their diplomatic and international affairs (not to mention the internal psychological impact of their precipitous fall from superpower status) had led to deep and long-term resentment and bitterness.” But all he could do was watch it unfold.

The Americans decided on a quiet policy of “neo-containment“ for Russia “kept in the background, only rarely articulated” that Haslam cites from 1992 as the central turning point of the Ukraine debacle. “It is at this point that the United States made a fight with Russia over the future of Ukraine inevitable. It was merely a matter of time.”

Presidents ignored the facts and the advice. In 1996, Strobe Talbott pleaded that “NATO enlargement is not urgent… When you want something, you cannot humiliate the other party.” French President Jacques Chirac felt the same way, and was not shy about saying it. But America would not be deterred. Russia itself reminded the USA that it had a “gentleman’s agreement not to expand NATO by an inch,” but America ignored it all. Jean Chrétien, Canada’s Prime Minister put it in perspective: In America, “nothing is done for reasons of state, it’s all done for short–term political reasons, to win elections.” At several points Haslam cites this attitude as kicking the can down the road for successive administrations to deal with instead. The world is paying the price today.

It gets worse. William Kourtney was the US Ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia and was an adviser to the National Security Council. He testified at a Senate committee that the US actually “filled a security vacuum in southern Eurasia and Afghanistan” and any pullout by the US would “recreate a destabilizing vacuum,” completely ignoring the role of Russia in its own sphere of influence. Not that there was such a thing, according to the US. Only the United States had a sphere of influence. No other country in the world could claim one, said Vice President Joe Biden in 2009.

Russia could not and cannot back down and have the obviously treacherous Americans surrounding it. Ukraine cannot get its precious NATO membership, because its borders are (clearly) unsecured if not undefined. The Americans have to keep pumping money into the war machine, or the Russians will succeed. And all this because the USA treated Russia like a loser instead of a new ally.

This total ignorance of how the world works is on constant display throughout the book. It is a horror story of navel-gazing incompetence. And it led straight to the invasion of Ukraine before it was too late. Seen from that angle, it is a completely different situation than the one portrayed daily in Western media, making Hubris a critically important book.

David Wineberg