A leading expert on US-Russian relations reveals how the United States and its European allies set the course for the war in Ukraine--and offers a sobering indictment of American foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union.

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 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.

A uniquely comprehensive and rich account of the Soviet intelligence services, Jonathan Haslam's Near and Distant Neighbors charts the labyrinthine story of Soviet intelligence from the October Revolution to the end of the Cold War.

Previous histories have focused on the KGB, leaving military intelligence and the special service--which specialized in codes and ciphers--lurking in the shadows. Drawing on previously neglected Russian sources, Haslam reveals how both were in fact crucial to the survival of the Soviet state. This was especially true after Stalin's death in 1953, as the Cold War heated up and dedicated Communist agents the regime had relied upon--Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Donald Maclean--were betrayed. In the wake of these failures, Khrushchev and his successors discarded ideological recruitment in favor of blackmail and bribery. The tactical turn was so successful that we can draw only one conclusion: the West ultimately triumphed despite, not because of, the espionage war.

In bringing to light the obscure inhabitants of an undercover intelligence world, Haslam offers a surprising and unprecedented portrayal of Soviet success that is not only fascinating but also essential to understanding Vladimir Putin's power today.

This wide-ranging book is the first comprehensive history of the development of realist ideas in international relations throughout the last five hundred years. Jonathan Haslam focuses on the emergence and relevance of realist (or statist) thought, showing how it has shaped political thinking and international events since Machiavelli's time. Haslam draws on an array of original texts in various European languages to illustrate the views of rulers and thinkers, to reveal how wars and other crises affected the thinking of those who experienced them, and to locate realist thinking squarely within the history of political and economic thought.

The author explores four themes relating to modern era international relations: reasons of state, the balance of power, the balance of trade, and geopolitics. He contrasts realist ideas with universalist alternatives, both religious and secular, which were based on a more optimistic view of the nature of man or the nature of society. Realist thought never attained consistent predominance, Haslam demonstrates, and the struggle with universalist thought has remained an unresolved tension that can be traced throughout the evolution of international relations theory in the twentieth century.

The first history of the Cold War focusing on the Soviet dimension, based on previously inaccessible archives

The phrase Cold War was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors. But as a leading historian of Soviet foreign policy, Jonathan Haslam, makes clear in this groundbreaking book, the epoch was anything but stable, with constant wars, near-wars, and political upheavals on both sides.

Whereas the Western perspective on the Cold War has been well documented by journalists and historians, the Soviet side has remained for the most part shrouded in secrecy--until now. Drawing on a vast range of recently released archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe, Russia's Cold War offers a thorough and fascinating analysis of East-West relations from 1917 to 1989.

Far more than merely a straightforward history of the Cold War, this book presents the first account of politics and decision making at the highest levels of Soviet power: how Soviet leaders saw political and military events, what they were trying to accomplish, their miscalculations, and the ways they took advantage of Western ignorance. Russia's Cold War fills a significant gap in our understanding of the most important geopolitical rivalry of the twentieth century.

The history of secret intelligence, like secret intelligence itself, is fraught with difficulties surrounding both the reliability and completeness of the sources, and the motivations behind their release--which can be the product of ongoing propaganda efforts as well as competition among agencies. Indeed, these difficulties lead to the Scylla and Charybdis of overestimating the importance of secret intelligence for foreign policy and statecraft and also underestimating its importance in these same areas--problems that generally beset the actual use of secret intelligence in modern states. But in recent decades, traditional perspectives have given ground and judgments have been revised in light of new evidence.

This volume brings together a collection of essays avoiding the traditional pitfalls while carrying out the essential task of analyzing the recent evidence concerning the history of the European state system of the last century. The essays offer an array of insight across countries and across time. Together they highlight the critical importance of the prevailing domestic circumstances--technological, governmental, ideological, cultural, financial--in which intelligence operates. A keen interdisciplinary eye focused on these developments leaves us with a far more complete understanding of secret intelligence in Europe than we've had before.

This is the third in a series of volumes detailing the history of Soviet foreign policy from the Great Depression to the Great Patriotic War. It covers Soviet policy in the Far East from the Japanese rejection of a non-aggression pact in January 1933 to the conclusion of a neutrality pact in April 1941. During the course of that period the Soviet Union moved from being the vulnerable and isolated suitor to a position of negotiation from strength.