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Seen through a 21st and late 20th-century prism, President Trump’s engagement with President Putin looks odd, to say the least. The Cold War dominates our thinking still: here is the de facto leader of Nato treating with the leader of the very polity whose deterrence and possible defeat is Nato’s rationale.
Taking the long view of history, however, Russo-American hostility is not the norm. For at least the first century-and-a-half of US independence, Russian-American relations were characterised by cooperation and even warmth. While most European countries were fighting wars with Russia, the US often as not played the role of conciliator.
Even in the late 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s purges, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E Davies (encouraged, by President Roosevelt), remained an apologist for the regime. His memoir, Mission to Moscow, was made into a film in 1943 for propaganda purposes: “…an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation”, said its producer, Robert Buckner. “I knew that FDR had brainwashed him [Davies]…”
It all changed in 1945, when Stalin’s designs on post-war Europe became clear to everyone with eyes to see, and with the succession to the presidency, on Roosevelt’s death, of Harry S Truman. Truman came to Potsdam (Berlin) in July ready for a fight. After their first meeting in Washington, FDR’s secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, had written in his diary: “He [Truman] gave me the impression that he thought we had been too easy with them [the Russians].”
But geography is important. Truman was travelling east to Europe for the last of the great allied conferences, as successive presidents have done to meet Soviet leaders, and this affects perspectives. In Britain it is easy to think of America as being across the Atlantic, and Russia as being in the opposite direction. Washington, however, has an historical perspective west towards Russia, in the Asian Pacific. America and Russia used indeed to have – literally – common ground:from the early 1740s to 1867 (just two years after the end of the Civil War) there was Russkaya Amerika, Russia’s colonial possessions in North America.
The capital was Novo-Archangelsk, now Sitka, Alaska. Under the auspices of the Tsar’s Russian-American Company,there were settlements as far south as present-day California, and Hawaii. Russian Orthodox churches abounded. The Pacific Northwest was infinitely more accessible to Russia by sea than it was to the infant United States overland, whose locus still was east of the Missouri. Or indeed to British Canada, which in the first half of the 19th century did not yet span the continent (British Columbia was not colonized until the 1850s, and Yukon later still).
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