speeches or confrontational policy actions turns what appeared at the time to be an isolated example of anti-Americanism into a noticeable trend.
It is further hypothesized that Putin’s and his nation’s anti-Americanism has become self-perpetuating. Putin’s anti-Americanism can be seen as in-line with the antiAmerican popular consensus which his machine has manipulated. This thereby garners significant domestic political benefit for Putin within his hybrid-authoritarian system. Putin’s anti-Americanism drives public anti-Americanism which further feeds Putin’s anti-Americanism; a feedback loop has developed. The thesis, thereby, also hypothesizes that though easy to discount as the whims of a paranoid man, Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric and policy stances toward the United States remains pragmatic in light of the domestic political situation that he created for himself. Regardless of the number of “resets” in Russian-American relations, Putinist Russia will continue to breathe a degree of surliness toward the United States and West.
1 Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, Anti-Americanism in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 12.
2 Ivan Krastev, “The Anti-American Century,” Journal of Democracy 15, no 2 (April 2004): 7.
3 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 239.
D. BACKGROUND
Anti-Americanism in Russia, whether emanating from the Kremlin or other segments of the populace, has influenced Russian-American relations during the ongoing era of Vladimir Putin. Anti-Americanism, however, was not new to Russia with Putin’s ascension to power on December 31, 1999. It has existed around the globe and among the world populace as well as within Russian politicians, elites, and the public for some time. Global anti-Americanism in the 1990s, according to Fouad Ajami, was much more rampant than many casually observed, and that post 9/11 sympathies for the United States were barely skin-deep and completely temporary. Historical hatred of America, thereby, cannot be supplanted but only temporarily hidden.1 A lingering product of Soviet times, Russian anti-Americanism in the 1990s under then President Yeltsin, therefore, simply laid dormant, waiting to resurface, which it did during the Balkan crises of the later 1990s, followed by resurgent global anti-Americanism after the 2003 Iraq invasion.2
Much of the recent global anti-Americanism has been attributed to recent U.S. actions and policy, like those within the Global War on Terror, Iraq, and economic globalization. Russian anti-Americanism can also be attributed to the Soviet past and the history of the anti-Imperialist/Western class struggle. Such an “old” form of anti-Americanism still underlies the “new” form anchored in hatred of current U.S. policies, global influence, and lifestyle.3
According to the Levada Center, one of the pre-eminent organizations that has been gauging Russian public opinion since the late 1980s, vast majorities of people polled from 2003 through 2011 consider the United States to be an aggressor state seeking influence or outright control of other countries. During that same timeframe, large pluralities or even small majorities consistently rate relations between the United States and Russia positively with less than a majority, and often as low as 25%, believing the United States is inherently unfriendly or hostile toward the Russian Federation.4 Within such polling data, however, when observed over the course of several years, marked fluctuations underlying the overall summarizing numbers can be seen. Russian public opinion toward the United States, therefore, often oscillates as much as relations between the two states varies from “allies” to “friends” to “partners” to “colleagues” to “enemies” and back again.
1 Fouad Ajami, “The Falseness of Anti-Americanism,” Foreign Policy, no. 138 (September — October 2003): 58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3183656.
2 Ole R. Holsti, To See Ourselves as Others See Us: How Publics Abroad View the United States after 9/11 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 46.
3 Eric Shiraev and Vladislav Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia from Stalin to Putin (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 2.
4 “Russian Public Opinion 2010 — 2011” (Moscow: Levada Analytical Center, 2012), 276, 292, 293.
1. Putin’s Evolving Anti-Americanism
Vladimir Putin himself has been the subject of much scholarly interpretation. Examples of Putin-era anti-Americanism are abounding, as are analyses about the underlying facets thereof. The roots of Putin’s personal antipathy toward the United States, according to some in the literature, merely represents a present day continuation of hostilities from the Cold War. Anti-Americanism was drilled into him as a former Soviet KGB agent, and such an underlying mentality did not change with the USSR’s collapse. Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber attribute much of Putin’s positions and paranoia to Soviet-era thinking about Russia, the United States, and government.1 Others assign equal importance to current events in tracing modern Putinist anti-Americanism. Fyodor Lukyanov believes that Putin retains a grudge toward the United States for President George W. Bush’s alleged slighting of the Russian President during their first terms on issues from Iraq to NATO enlargement to unsuccessful repeal of the Jackson-Vanik trade restrictions. This pattern of slighting, therefore, is equally important to explaining the ongoing animosity.2
Perhaps “it’s the foreign policy, stupid!” Anti-Americanism around the world is as much fueled by U.S. foreign policy actions as by any intrinsic or psychological cause, according to some scholars, eloquently summarized by Juan Cole.3 Putin’s anti-Americanism, therefore, could represent a common product of modern relations between two unequally powerful nations operating within the confines of the contemporary global environment.
1 Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber, “Us and Them: Anti-American Views of the Putin Generation,” The Washington Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2008), 132.
2 Fyodor Lukyanov, “Why is Russia anti-American?” RT, February 24, 2012, http://lolo.rt.com/politics/columns/unpredictable-world-foreign-lukyanov/russia-usa-america-putin/.
3 Juan Cole, “Anti-Americanism: It’s the
