The West’s War on Russia
The Architecture of Enmity: The Imperial Crusade Against the East
In the quiet aftermath of the Cold War, the world was offered a fleeting glimpse of what the Prince of Peace might have intended for us, a moment to beat swords into plowshares and to dismantle the machinery of global destruction. Yet, as we survey the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that the “citizens of the empire” did not choose the way of peace. Instead, the power elite—those who benefit from the debt-fueled engine of the Imperial Economy shifted their sights toward a new project, the systematic encirclement and destabilization of Russia.
To understand why the West has persisted in trying to destroy the Russian state, we must look past the headlines of “democracy promotion” and see the spiritual and economic rot at the heart of the modern warfare state.
The Idol of Expansion
Since 1991, the Western apparatus, primarily through the expansion of NATO, has behaved not as a defensive alliance, but as an evangelical force for Mammon. Despite assurances given at the end of the Cold War, the empire has marched steadily eastward. This is not merely a matter of geography; it is a matter of control. By absorbing the former Soviet bloc into the Western financial and military orbit, the power elite sought to ensure that no alternative pole of power, especially one rooted in a different cultural or spiritual tradition, could challenge the hegemony of the dollar.
The Economic Bludgeon
A key pillar of my perspective is the understanding of the “Imperial Economy”, a system built on inflation, debt, and the weaponization of finance. Since the end of the Cold War, the West has used this system as a bludgeon against Russia. When Russia attempted to assert its own sovereignty over its resources and monetary policy, the response was not diplomacy, but “sanctions”, a sanitized word for economic warfare that primarily hurts the innocent.
From a Christian perspective, this is a violation of the command to love our neighbor. When we use the intricacies of the financial world to starve a nation or collapse its currency, we are not seeking peace; we are practicing a form of slow-motion violence. The West’s obsession with “breaking” the Russian economy is an attempt to force the East to bow before the altar of the global debt merchants. Let’s turn to the specific case of what the West did to Russia.
Looting Russia
Not all of Russia’s economic problems stem from Western malevolence. The Russian’s did plenty of damage to themselves. Although the West sent plenty of well-intentioned yet deeply misguided “economists” to assist this process.
I would argue that the “Shock Therapy” approach (rapid privatization without legal foundations) led to “political capitalism” or kleptocracy rather than a genuine market.
The core economic critique is that property rights are not just a legal label, they are a social institution that requires a stable rule of law, an independent judiciary, and cultural acceptance (not necessarily via the state). The error was that Western advisors and Russian reformers (the “Young Reformers”) believed that simply transferring title from the state to private hands would automatically create a market. The correct view is that without a pre-existing legal framework to protect owners from expropriation and to enforce contracts, these “rights” were meaningless. Instead of investing in productivity, the new owners spent their resources on “rent-seeking” (lobbying the state) and “protection” (hiring the mafia).
It started with voucher privatization. In 1992, Russia issued vouchers to nearly every citizen to buy shares in state enterprises. This failed because there was no functioning capital market, nobody knew what these enterprises were actually worth. The result was that ordinary citizens, facing hyperinflation and poverty, sold their “worthless” vouchers for bread or vodka. “Red Directors” (former Soviet managers) and well-connected insiders used their positions to buy these vouchers in bulk for pennies, consolidating massive industrial monopolies.
By 1995, the Russian government was broke. In a scheme called “Loans-for-Shares,” the state borrowed money from a few private banks owned by nascent oligarchs. The government used shares in Russia’s crown jewels (oil, gas, and nickel giants) as collateral. The government “defaulted” on purpose, allowing the oligarchs to seize these massive industries at a fraction of their global market value. This was not a market transaction; it was a state-granted privilege. It created a system of “crony capitalism” where wealth depended on proximity to the Kremlin rather than serving consumers.
Russia attempted to build a “market” without the market’s soul, the rule of law and the price process. By keeping the state involved as the “allocator” of property, they simply replaced a state monopoly with a private oligarchy.
The inevitable blowback occurred politically as the tool Boris Yeltsin was replaced with the ardent nationalist Vladimir Putin.
Expanding NATO
At the end of the Cold War, assurances were given that the alliance would not move “one inch eastward.” Yet, the Empire’s appetite for expansion is insatiable. By absorbing former Soviet states and pushing military infrastructure to Russia’s very doorstep, the West ignored the “red lines” of a nuclear-armed power. In the logic of the state, this is called “security”; in reality it is simply imperial hegemonic expansion.
Why did the U.S. expand NATO and increase its influence in Eastern Europe? Because it could. It is as simple as that. Russia was not in a position to stop this expansion. In so doing the U.S. blew past all the warnings from senior policy officials in its own government. Foremost among them was George Kennan the architect of U.S policy at the start of the Cold War. Also opposed was William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense. Then there is William Burn’s (then a State Department official, later Biden’s head of CIA) famous “Nyet Means Nyet” cable that explained the red line of NATO expansion into Ukraine. None of this stopped the imperial juggernaut because that is what all great powers do if they can.
Seeking Ukraine
In 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest an official invitation was extended to Ukraine, prompting the previously referenced Burn’s memo. Putin was at this summit and clearly expressed his opposition to this idea. This is not to justify anything Russia did, as all international relations are criminal in nature. Yet, it was a lead pipe lock that any nation that could stop such an expansion of an adversarial military alliance encircling it would do so. No nation can enhance its security at the expense of another. To attempt this was to invite a potential conflict between two nuclear armed powers. Yet, this is exactly what the aggressive U.S. empire did.
We must also look at the 2014 Maidan coup. While the West draped this event in the language of “democracy,” it was, in truth, an exercise in Imperial meddling. By actively supporting the overthrow of a neutral government to install one aligned with Western financial and military interests, the United States signaled that it viewed Ukraine not as a sovereign nation to be respected, but as a “forward operating base” for the Empire. When the U.S. treats nations as pawns on a geopolitical chessboard, they treat the people within them as collateral damage.
As an uprising, backed by Russia, grew in eastern Ukraine by those not wanting to live under an anti-Russian regime, the West and Russia came to an agreement to stop this bloodshed, known as the Mink II Accords. The U.S. and the West broke their word, because it suited imperial policy. We know this because German Chancellor Merkel admitted the accords were only a way to buy time to arm Ukraine. An overview of the all this is here.
Arm Ukraine the West did. During the first Trump Administration the so-called Putin puppet approved approximately $677 million in arms financing and another $1 billion through the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative. Included in this was modern Javelin anti-tank missiles that even Obama was too afraid to send for fear of escalation.
Additionally, Trump signed into law the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), enacting new sanctions on Russia (as well as Iran, and North Korea). Trump added even more sanctions on Russia after that.
Then there is the clear drive by Trump to fulfill a long standing U.S. policy goal of separating Russian energy production from their west European customers. This was finally achieved by Biden in the wake of the Russian invasion in February 2022. All these are direct attacks on core Russian interests and economic security. It has been a fairly open goal, at least among neoconservatives, to break up the Russian Federation. There is little in the record to give Russia any assurance that NATO expansion is not an existential threat. In short, the West has been waging war on Russia for over 30 years.
The tragedy for Ukraine is that by 2022 Putin had brought Russia back from the dead and once again into the ranks of the Great Powers. While not a peer competitor to the U.S. as China is, they nonetheless have the wherewithal to stop the U.S. The bleeding of Ukraine is the all too predictable result. Additionally, the creeping escalation of U.S. participation in this war has dramatically elevated the possibility of a direct conflict between two nuclear armed great powers. Human civilization, if not the species hangs, in the balance.
The Failure of War and the Call to Peace
We are told that the West’s interventionist posture is necessary for “security.” Yet, as the history of the last thirty years shows, the pursuit of war has been a catastrophic failure. By pushing Russia into a corner through proxy conflicts and tactical encirclement, the West has brought us back to the “constant threat of nuclear destruction.” This is the fruit of a policy that rejects the New Commandment to love one another as God loves us.
The West’s attempt to destroy Russia is, at its core, an attempt to maintain a world where the “state” remains the ultimate authority, funded by an endless supply of printed money and justified by an endless supply of enemies. But as followers of the Risen Lord, we must recognize that the “only battle worth waging is the battle for peace.”
Toward True Peace
If we wish to change the world, we must start by looking in the mirror and demanding that our own empire cease its crusade. True stewardship requires us to stop funding the warfare state. True faith requires us to reject the narrative of “eternal enemies.”
Russia, like any nation, is comprised of children of God. To seek their destruction is to seek the destruction of our own humanity. It is time to dismantle the Imperial Economy, stop the eastward march of the war machine, and embrace the practical, radical peace that Jesus offered, a peace that does not depend on the subjugation of others, but on the humble recognition that we are all children of the same Father.
May we seek not the will of the empire, but His.
Praise be to God.
