Hubris: The Belknap Press Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War Against Ukraine Paperback

Jonathan Haslam reveals how US foreign policy from Bush Sr. to Biden helped set the course for the Russo-Ukrainian War. After the Cold War, Ukraine moved to the center of fraught negotiations between Russia and the West—especially the US, eager to extend its global hegemony and neglectful of Russian ire over the shifting balance of power in Europe.

A leading expert on US-Russian relations reveals how the United States and its European allies set the course for the war in Ukraine—and offers a sobering indictment of American foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine should not have been a surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 with Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, but its origins lie in the aftermath of the Cold War, when newly independent Ukraine moved to the center of tense negotiations between Russia and the West. In fact, Jonathan Haslam argues, it was decades of US foreign policy missteps—unchecked and often reinforced by European allies—that laid the groundwork for the current war.

Isolated, impoverished, and diminished on the world stage, Russia grew increasingly resentful of Western triumphalism after the Cold War. The US-led campaign to expand NATO into Eastern Europe—especially Ukraine, the most geopolitically important of the former Soviet republics—further provoked Russian ire. Determined to extend its global dominance, the United States repeatedly ignored signs that antagonizing Russia would bring consequences. Meanwhile, convinced that Ukraine was passing into the European sphere of influence, Vladimir Putin prepared to shift the balance of power in Russia’s favor.

Timely and incisive, Hubris reveals the assumptions, equivocations, and grievances that have defined the West’s relations with Russia since the twilight of the Soviet Union.