History books tell us the Cold War ended in 1991. Yet the brutal proxy war now raging in Ukraine—which could at any moment escalate into a full-scale NATO-Russia confrontation—suggests otherwise. The conflict reveals that the West’s antagonism toward Russia did not end with the Soviet Union’s collapse, but merely entered a new phase.
The roots of the war are easily traced. After 1991, despite the disappearance of its original adversary, NATO remained intact and soon began expanding eastward—despite assurances to Moscow that it would not. Then came NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, the deployment of missile defense systems along Russia’s borders and various “color revolutions” across the post-Soviet space, all aimed at installing pro-Western governments. These efforts culminated in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which put a fiercely anti-Russian regime in power in Kyiv. The civil war that followed, and the West’s de facto integration of Ukraine into NATO, made confrontation inevitable, eventually leading to Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Why did the United States and its NATO allies persist in the strategy of containing, marginalizing and weakening Moscow after the grand ideological antagonism of the Cold War had vanished? This question is usually answered in geopolitical terms. When the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union fell, Washington quickly grasped that the disappearance of its geopolitical rival offered a unique opportunity for global expansion. The notion of a “unipolar world”—one dominated politically, militarily and culturally by the United States—soon emerged.