For much of the period after the Cold War, Russia seemed like a problem we had already solved.
The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Soviet Union had disappeared. The United States had “won.” Russia remained enormous, nuclear armed, and occasionally troublesome, but it no longer seemed to occupy the center of American strategic thinking. The new threats were elsewhere.
Then came 9/11.
For the next decade, American foreign policy was dominated by jihadist terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the broader Middle East. Russia seemed almost like an adversary from another age.
Not everyone saw it that way.
In 2012, Mitt Romney famously called Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” Barack Obama mocked him during their presidential debate: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
I thought Obama had the better line.
Romney seemed trapped in the Cold War, worrying about yesterday’s adversary while the rest of us had moved on to the problems of the twenty-first century.
There was, however, an inconvenient fact already sitting in front of us.
Russia had invaded Georgia four years earlier.
Then came Crimea in 2014.
Then the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
And finally, in 2022, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Suddenly it was no longer possible to dismiss Russia as a problem from another era.
Which raises an uncomfortable question.
Did some conservatives understand Russia better than many of us did? Or did decades of Cold War suspicion simply leave them more attentive to a danger the some of us had decided was obsolete?
My default position in politics has long been fairly simple: if Republicans are for it, I’m probably against it.
That is not an especially sophisticated method of analysis, but honesty requires admitting that it has occasionally been mine.
And Russia may be one of those occasions.
Perhaps Rommey understood something important about the persistence of Russian power and ambition. Perhaps he was less inclined to believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union had fundamentally changed the strategic interests of the country that remained. Or perhaps habitual suspicion of Moscow happened to become useful again as Russia itself became more aggressive.
Probably there is some truth in all of it.
There is an additional irony in reconsidering this now: some of the voices most suspicious of Russia then are no longer necessarily the voices most suspicious of Russia today. Political coalitions change. So do their villains.
But the larger lesson has less to do with Russia than with how we process arguments.
We rarely encounter ideas without encountering the people who hold them. If someone we distrust makes an argument, we begin by looking for the flaw. If someone from our own side makes the same argument, we may begin by looking for the wisdom.
Sometimes that instinct saves time. Political movements really do develop patterns, assumptions, and recurring mistakes.
But sometimes the messenger interferes with the message.
Romney did not predict the invasion of Ukraine. By 2012, Russia had already demonstrated its willingness to use military force in Georgia. He was looking at evidence that was available to everyone.
Many of us simply interpreted it differently.
Perhaps conservatives saw something in Russia that many of us did not. Perhaps their Cold War instincts simply made them more attentive to dangers we considered obsolete.
Either way, there is an uncomfortable lesson in it.
Sometimes the people we have learned not to listen to are right.
And sometimes, by the time we discover it, the tanks are already moving.