Britain, Russia and the Roots of Russophobia: Crimea to NATO

Why did the British come to hate the Russians? Why?

And I would tell you, because I just published a book yesterday

about Russophobia

in Europe, and I

recount in the

first chapter of this book a wonderful study by

a historian named Gleason, written in nineteen fifty.

And he asked a poignant

question, completely

relevant for us

today. He said, "Britain

and Russia

were allies in

eighteen fifteen at Waterloo.

Twenty-five

years later,

they're enemies.

What happened?"

And so he studied the Hansard,

he studied

every published

record. He read everything.

He read whatever was said in the House of Commons. He read every speech.

And his conclusion in this

wonderful book is that

Russia's biggest crime is that it has seventeen

million square kilometers. That's its biggest crime.

Why do I say that? Because with seventeen million square

kilometers, Britain got into its head that Russia was so

big that it was a threat to the

British Empire in

India, something

that never crossed the tsar's mind, by the way.

But Britain talked itself into quite a froth, and by

eighteen forty, Russia was the enemy.

And in eighteen

fifty-three,

Palmerston, the

quintessential imperialist, went to war in

Crimea. Why? Long story, but basically just

to crush Russia, because

Russia in eighteen

fifty-two said,

"We can solve all the grievances. There's no reason for any conflict."

And Palmerston said,

"We move on to

Sevastopol." And the

reason is that he wanted to make Russia a

non-entity so it couldn't invade the British Empire.

And there was a

three-year bloody war,

the Crimean War.

That's how revolutionarily peaceful we were.

And you know, days after

Germany's surrender in

nineteen forty-five, everyone

knows that Churchill asked his own

war command, "Why don't we invade the Soviet Union

now?" Operation

Unthinkable. And it became an enemy of the United

States of

America when it took over the British Empire in nineteen

forty-five. And when

the Soviet Union would dissolve,

we had peace

in our hands for a century to come if we wanted it,

because the Russians were rather exhausted of seventy-five

years

of Bolshevism. They wanted peace, they wanted cooperation,

they wanted friendship.

And all the American strategists could

think

about was, "Russia's big. We just have to make sure it remains a

third-rate power."

And what was decided

is we're gonna surround

Russia with NATO, and if

you behave that

way long enough, you

end up with the Ukraine

war. This is not Putin's war.

This is our war, for exactly the same reason

that Palmerston and

Napoleon III launched the first Crimean War.

Because Russia doesn't have the slightest interest in marching

into Europe, and it never did, except when Napoleon

bothered them and when Hitler bothered them