This first part examines the American half of the riddle: how a power from across the ocean became Europe’s permanent houseguest, and where Russia was standing each time the furniture was rearranged. Part 2 asks why Moscow now says it never rented a room at all.
Part 1: The Child Who Never Left Home
Now rewind two months. The December 2025 National Security Strategy warned that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” and committed Washington to “cultivating resistance” to the continent’s trajectory from within European nations themselves. Sweden’s former prime minister Carl Bildt observed that the document sat “to the right of the extreme right in Europe.”
So, the dutiful child will always belong to the family, while drafting a policy to cultivate resistance inside the family home. Meanwhile, the Russian state, which spent three centuries insisting it was European, has quietly moved out of the neighbourhood. Hence, the title. This first part examines the American half of the riddle: how a power from across the ocean became Europe’s permanent houseguest, and where Russia was standing each time the furniture was rearranged. Part 2 asks why Moscow now says it never rented a room at all.
Polar Bears and Fourteen Points: 1917–1945
America entered the First World War in April 1917 preaching self-determination. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points promised Russia an “unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity” to choose its own course. By the summer of 1918 he had sent about 13,000 American troops onto Russian soil, roughly 5,000 to Archangelsk in the Arctic north and some 8,000 to Vladivostok, against the advice of his own War Department. The stated mission was guarding Allied supply depots.
The practical result was American soldiers skirmishing with the Red Army, and the last of them left Siberia only in April 1920. Most historians call the adventure a failure. Moscow took away its first lesson in how Washington’s principles and Washington’s troop movements can part ways.
The Second World War made the two powers allies, then left their armies facing each other across the middle of Europe. The coalition that broke Hitler promptly fell into an argument over who owned the peace, on several levels.
Marshall, Molotov and the Black Bags: 1947–1966
In June 1947, George Marshall offered money to all war-torn European countries, including the Soviet Union. Stalin sent Molotov to Paris with a delegation of about a hundred experts, and on July 2 Molotov walked out. His objections were pragmatic ones. The plan made the German recovery the engine of European revival, and it needed co-ordination beyond Soviet control. Prague accepted the follow-up invitation, then withdrew after Stalin told its leaders that attending would help isolate Moscow.
Soviet commentary called the plan “a plan for interference in the domestic affairs of other countries.” Moscow’s counter-measure was the Cominform in September 1947, with Comecon later: a pale mirror of what Washington was offering. Roughly $13 billion went to sixteen Western European states. Germany sat at the centre of the quarrel: for Washington its recovery was the point, for Moscow, which had just buried millions of its citizens, it was the provocation.
Money was half the toolkit. Fearing that a communist-led front might win Italy’s 1948 election, Washington ran what became its first major covert political operation. Estimates of the spending run from $10 million to $20 million, spent on leaflets, forged letters aimed at communist leaders, and campaigns urging Italian-Americans to write home, in a highly organized psychological warfare strategy that weaponized personal family connections to sway Italian voters. The American ambassador in Rome was reportedly not even told about the cash.
The Christian Democrats won, and similar support reportedly continued for decades. In fairness, Moscow was bankrolling the other side.
NATO’s first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, is credited with summing up the alliance’s purpose: to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. The wording is attributed rather than documented, so you better treat it as folklore.
The historian Geir Lundestad called the arrangement “empire by invitation,” and a scholarly reading of George Kennan’s abandoned 1948–49 plan for a neutralised Germany concludes that Europe issued the invitation, but America carried the responsibility for accepting it.
Two exceptions prove the pattern. In April 1955 Austria signed the Moscow Memorandum, promising permanent Swiss-style neutrality; the State Treaty followed in May, and around 40,000 Soviet soldiers were gone by late September. Scholars note it was the only time Moscow ever surrendered control over a country in its orbit. Secretary of State Dulles defended the treaty before the Senate.
The lesson Russians drew is obvious: a neutral buffer in Europe was once obtainable. And in March 1966 Charles de Gaulle informed Lyndon Johnson that France would leave NATO’s integrated command to recover “the full exercise of her sovereignty,” diminished by allied forces on French soil. France stayed in the alliance, as an ally with an exit door. Which means that France remained a political member of NATO but retained the unique independence to choose when, how, and if it would participate in its military operations.
The Winner’s Peace: 1990–1999
On 9 February 1990 James Baker floated the formula that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” if Germany unified inside the alliance. Declassified American, German, British, French and Soviet records published by the National Security Archive show a cascade of such reassurances from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Mitterrand, Thatcher and Major, and as late as July 1991 NATO’s secretary-general Manfred Wörner told Moscow that he and the Council opposed expansion. Whether any of it amounted to a binding promise is contested; Mark Kramer calls the pledge a myth, and Mary Sarotte concludes that Moscow’s claim, though “wrong in substance,” carried “psychological weight”. Psychological weight is, as it happens, what wars are made of.
George Kennan, the architect of containment, called enlargement “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era,” and in 1998 told Thomas Friedman, “I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War.” He also griped that the Senate approved it with scant interest in foreign affairs. Bipartisan indifference, in other words, is an American tradition older than any party label.
The politics ran in both directions. In 1996 Time revealed that four American consultants had secretly guided Boris Yeltsin’s re-election campaign for four months, in an operation so sensitive that Yeltsin’s aides feared communists would “attack Yeltsin as an American tool.” Washington also pushed a $10.2 billion IMF loan to Moscow that February.
Three years later, NATO bombed Yugoslavia without Security Council resolution. Russia’s Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov turned his plane around over the Atlantic on the way to Washington, later calling the bombing an “enormous historic mistake.” Face to face against NATO’s starting ground invasion in Serbia, some 200 Russian troops raced from Bosnia to seize Pristina airport ahead of NATO and the stand-off ended with Russia’s soldiers still in Kosovo under a negotiated arrangement.
Moscow had learned to mix its protests with its own improvisation. The formal counter-measures were just as telling: Russia recalled its representative from NATO headquarters, halted its Partnership for Peace participation, and warned of “adequate measures,” while Kommersant headlined that Primakov’s aeronautical gesture had cost Russia $15 billion, since the trip he abandoned was meant to restore IMF financing.
Four Pillars of the Atlantic House
Energy: The US has consumed more energy than it has produced every year since 1958. It has been a net energy exporter since 2019 and in 2025 will become the first country in the world to export over 100 million tonnes of LNG in a single year. Europe is the destination. The US supplied 57% of Europe’s LNG in 2025 and 63% in Q1 2026 (IEEFA), with the EU having spent some €117 bn on US LNG between early 2022 and mid-2025.
From 36% of EU gas supply in 2020 to 8% in 2025. The $750 billion deal made in July 2025 for US energy supply is considered by analysts to be the cap beyond which the EU is not expected to cross. Pipeline gas from Russia to the EU has reduced from about 157 billion cubic meters before 2022 to about 18 in 2025. Moscow’s response has been the pivot east, with the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline as a prospect.
However, Russian LNG deliveries to the EU actually rose 16% in early 2026, ahead of bans on short-term contracts and then long-term ones from January 2027.
Finance: The very term “eurodollar” is a Soviet fingerprint. Scholars including Catherine Schenk trace the market to the 1950s, when Soviet-owned banks in London and Paris, wary of American freezes, held their dollars outside the United States. Moscow’s cautious bankers built the offshore dollar system that Washington now polices, mainly through Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord (a.k.a. Eurobank) in Paris, and the Moscow Narodny Bank in London. The irony deepened in 2022, when the West froze Russia’s central bank reserves.
About €210 billion sits immobilised in the EU, mostly at Euroclear, and in December 2025, the EU froze it indefinitely. The wider relationship dwarfs everything else: AmCham EU, an interested party who describes its mission as an entity who “speaks for American companies invested in Europe – promoting a strong Single Market, open trade and a thriving transatlantic partnership”, prices the transatlantic economy at $9.8 trillion. Russia’s counter-measure is settling nearly all trade with China in rubles and yuan, which Finance Minister Siluanov puts at 99.1%.
Arms: Europe took 33% of the world’s arms imports in 2021–25, SIPRI reports, and for the first time in two decades it absorbed the largest share of American arms exports, 38%. The US accounted for 58% of European NATO members’ major arms imports. Russia’s share of global arms exports fell to 6.8%, about a third of its previous level. This is the pillar where Russia’s counter-measure is a setback rather than a measure, and an honest account should say so.
Politics: In February 2025 Vice President Vance told Munich that Europe’s gravest danger was “the threat from within,” met the AfD’s Alice Weidel, and drew a rebuke from Germany’s defence minister. The December 2025 strategy then added “cultivating resistance.” Democrats and Republicans differ in tone: Clinton expanded NATO and rescued Yeltsin, while the Trump strategy now speaks of ending the perception of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance. Kennan, one assumes, is smiling somewhere.
Yet, the constant is: that Washington decides what Europe’s problem is, and then sells Europe the cure. However, if the last 4 years are a proof, the US can not help Europe, neither perpetually, nor wholly, if you know what I mean, and I guess you do.
A Fair Ledger
Honesty requires a paragraph for the other side. Europeans did invite the Americans, and Central European governments queued up for NATO membership. Sarotte considers enlargement a justifiable response to those entreaties. The Ukraine War pushed the EU to ban Russian gas. And Vladimir Putin, speaking at Valdai in 2013, complained that a unipolar world “requires vassals.” He was right about the requirement. The harder question is why so many of the vassals keep signing up.
That answer lies partly in Brussels and Warsaw, and partly in Moscow’s own record, which Part 2 will examine through the question Russians have asked themselves since the 1830s: are we Europe, or something else?
And I think it’s fair to say, that no blame should fall on Russia for asking that question, as the Russians did not once ask it without incessant Western efforts of provocation or exclusion, did they?
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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