Prof. Jonathan Haslam:How the incredible hubris that emerged after the Cold War contributed to excluding Russia from the European security architecture&dismissing legitimate Russian security concerns.

Professor Jonathan Haslam from Princeton University and Cambridge University is the author of “Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine”. Professor Haslam outlines how the incredible hubris that emerged after the Cold War contributed to excluding Russia from the European security architecture and dismissing legitimate Russian security concerns. Both advocates and opponents of NATO expansionism recognised it would predictably result in conflict with Russia. Yet the prevailing sentiment within the Clinton administration was that it did not matter what Russia thought. After hubris comes nemesis.

NATO’s uncompromising promise to admit Ukraine to the alliance was the casus belli that the Russian Federation has maintained in justification of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. How important was the NATO factor in sparking the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War? In his latest book, Jonathan Haslam, one of the world’s greatest experts on Russian foreign policy and espionage, traces the origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War through a sequence of events to the early 1990s that lead us not to Russia or Ukraine, but to the other side of the Atlantic.

Transcript

For over 25,000 interviews visit our new and improved website (https://newbooksnetwork.com) Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, but its origins are visible as far back as the aftermath of the Cold War, when newly independent Ukraine moved to the center of tense negotiations between Russia and the West. The United States was a leading player in this drama. In fact, Jonathan Haslam argues, it was decades of US foreign policy missteps and miscalculations, unchecked and often reinforced by European allies, that laid the groundwork for the current war. Isolated, impoverished, and relegated to a second-order power on the world stage, Russia grew increasingly resentful of Western triumphalism in the wake of the Cold War. The United States further provoked Russian ire with a campaign to expand NATO into Eastern Europe--especially Ukraine, the most geopolitically important of the former Soviet republics. 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 Western sphere of influence, Putin prepared to shift the European balance of power in Russia's favor. Timely and incisive, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine (https://bookshop.org/a/12343/97806742...)  (Harvard UP, 2025) reveals the assumptions, equivocations, and grievances that have defined the West's relations with Russia since the twilight of the Soviet Union--and ensured that collision was only a matter of time.