INTRODUCTION

      The Russians Are Coming, Again

      The 1966 Academy Award–winning film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, directed by Norman Jewison, parodies the Cold War paranoia pervading the United States as the war in Vietnam was heating up, depicting chaos that seizes a small coastal New England town after a Soviet submarine runs aground.

      Half a century later, U.S. citizens are again being warned daily of the Russian menace, with persistent accusations of Russian aggression, lies, violations of international law, and cyber-attacks on U.S. elections, as reported in leading outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

      The charges are many and relentless: the Russians invaded neighboring Georgia; the Russians attempted to subvert and overthrow the Ukrainian government; the Russians shot down Malaysian Flight MH17 in July 2014 over eastern Ukraine or supported rebel forces that did so; the Russians annexed Crimea in 2014 in an aggressive move reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s postwar actions in Eastern Europe; the Russians have threatened smaller NATO nations in that region; and, most recently, the Russians engaged in cyber warfare by attempting to interfere in the U.S. presidential election and then tried to manipulate the president through connection to key figures in his inner circle.

      A prime example of the new Russian hysteria comes from a 2016 report in the New York Times by national security correspondents David Sanger, Eric Schmitt, and Michael R. Gordon:

      For his part, Mr. Putin is counting the days until Mr. Trump is in the Oval Office. Despite a failing economy, the Russian president has been pursuing for the past four years what most Western analysts see as a plan to reassert Russian power throughout the region. First came the annexation of Crimea and the shadow war in eastern Ukraine. Then came the deployment of nuclear-capable forces to the border of NATO countries, as Moscow, working to fracture the power structures in Germany and France and promote right-wing parties, sent a reinvigorated military force on patrol off the coasts of the Baltics and Western European nations.¹

      Possessing some unproven assertions masquerading as fact, such as that Putin was working to fracture the power structures in France and Germany and promote right-wing parties, the article fails to acknowledge that a verbal agreement was made in late 1990 between Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. According to the Russians, whose version is corroborated by hundreds of memos and transcripts at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, Baker made a pledge to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east toward their border, in return for Russian support for German reunification.² Since then, of course, the United States has armed and funded NATO’s eastward advance to include states that share common borders with Russia.

      The United States also provocatively increased its naval presence in the Black Sea, carried out military exercises in former Warsaw Pact countries, forged ties with former Soviet republics like Azerbaijan, built oil pipelines to bypass Russia with the involvement of major Western oil companies, and covertly supported Putin’s opponents through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) along with Islamic terrorists in Chechnya as the British had done a century and a half earlier.³

      In 2014, the State Department fanned protests that led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s semi-autocratic but democratically elected pro-Russian government, prompting the Russian annexation of Crimea, which was voted on by a 95 percent majority of Crimeans. The United States then provided over a billion dollars in security assistance to a newly installed Western-friendly right-wing regime that suppressed a pro-Russian uprising in the eastern Donbass region.⁴

      By omitting these aggressive U.S. actions, the New York Times and other media sources failed to provide proper context for many of Putin’s policies, hence furthering the impression that he alone is a major danger to world peace.

      In summer 2016, the Obama administration announced the construction of a future U.S. missile defense site in Poland and the