Global domination was indeed Moscow’s declared aim. The issue, however, was whether this goal was at all practicable.

The Red Scare blended neatly with popular hostility to mass immigration in America, particularly against a surge of Jews fleeing the anti-Semitic heartlands of Eastern Europe. Responding to hostility, many Jews embraced the inclusive internationalist ideals of Communism rather than the outlandish idea of building a Jewish state in the deserts of British-controlled Arab Palestine. But they were a minority, drawn in by radical idealism and anti-fascism. And the American opposition to wider Jewish immigration from these areas was clearly colored by racism, especially the anti-Semitism of the time.

Although there was little justification for the scare-mongering, the hysteria was enough to spur the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which put a halt to the inflow of immigrants without visas. Fears began to dissipate. The 1927 execution of Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchist immigrants accused of murder on doubtful evidence, marked the high tide of the irrational anti-red (and mostly anti-foreigner) hysteria in American life.

Ironically, it was around this time that real dangers actually began to emerge. But, having cried wolf once too often, doomsayers then faced an uphill task through the ‘30s trying to convince the government and the American public that Communist threats of any kind actually existed.

Fear of Communism and fear of Soviet espionage were closely entangled because a few members of the miniscule American Communist Party were, in fact, involved in spying for Moscow. Most adherents had no idea this kind of thing was going on—the practice was confined to the shadows, restricted to a few specially chosen for what they had to offer. But, as was the case with Communist Parties elsewhere in the world, those recruited saw it as their duty to serve. And recent archival revelations from Moscow show just how persistent the Kremlin was in its attempts to penetrate the American system.

Initially the civilian branch of Soviet intelligence—OGPU, then NKVD—had little luck recruiting American spies. Yuri Markin (codename Oskar), the illegal “rezident”—as the Russians called their station chiefs—from from 1932-1934, was murdered by persons unknown, the victim of a violent encounter in a New York bar. His replacement, Boris Bazarov (codenames, Kin, Da Vinci, Nord), worked in tandem with the ‘legal’ rezident (who was under diplomatic cover), Pyotr Guttseit (codename Nikolai). He had much better luck, including recruiting sources with direct access to the State Department and one connected to President Franklin Roosevelt’s inner circle. But the successful spy was recalled to Moscow in 1937, where he became a victim of Stalin’s paranoid purge of those seen as connected to foreigners (mass executions that included even George Kennan’s dentist at the American embassy). His successor, Ishak Akhmerov (codename Yung), took over and married a distant relative of Communist Party chief Earl Browder. Browder himself ensured that ties to Soviet intelligence became indistinguishable from Party work; his wife, Kitty (‘Gipsy’) Harris, worked for the Soviets and assisted (and slept with) their British spy Donald Maclean in London and then Paris in the late ‘30s.

The most successful operation at that time, however, came from a group of covert operatives organized by the American agriculturalist Harold Ware. The ring included Alger Hiss, Donald, and other federal officials who were convinced that the need to confront the threat from fascism eclipsed all other loyalties. They believed that the road to socialism was inevitable, and that the socialist-leaning policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal were merely the taste of things to come. This operation came under Soviet military intelligence, known as the Fourth Directorate, the NKVD’s main rival. Although their infiltration went deep, none of it added up to much—it was simply ‘music of the future’.

The stakes were raised, however, when the U.S. entered WWII in December 1941—and the Americans joined the British to develop the atomic bomb. Soviet focus on scientific and industrial intelligence (NTR), which had its own section within the NKVD, switched abruptly from London to Washington. Though intelligence boss Lavrenty Beria dragged his feet on the issue, the NTR foresaw the significant role the bomb would play and pushed it to the forefront of their priorities. Once the directive was set by Stalin in 1942, Soviet efforts knew no limits. Operation Enormoz, directed at uncovering the secret of atomic bomb construction, took high priority. The Kremlin was looking ahead to the aftermath of war. The balance of power could ultimately depend who had the bomb. And those who volunteered for the cause were putting their lives at risk, as they were soon to find out.

The American authorities had absolutely no idea what the Russians were up to until very late in the game. Good liberals scoffed at the idea that Moscow could be spying on a wartime ally, even as some of their best friends were actually secret members of the Communist Party and spies for Russia. The Roosevelt administration declined to follow up on tips about suspected infiltration. It wasn’t until the very public defection of a Soviet Embassy cipher clerk, who snuck out documentation showing the magnitude of Soviet atomic espionage that had been going on, that the issue finally came to a head. Soviet spy networks were quickly rooted out. The consequences proved cataclysmic for Americans caught serving the Communist cause. Among those swept up were Julius Rosenberg, an engineer who handed Moscow classified information about the U.S. atomic program, and his wife Ethel (against whom there was little solid evidence).

By the early 1950s, when the Rosenbergs were executed, Washington was again gripped with widespread hysteria about Communist penetration of American society and government.

The Russians, meanwhile, had been closing down all operations in the late 1940s in order to save their agents; and only well after the death of Stalin in 1953 were they able to begin seriously rebuilding their networks in America. But these networks never acquired the significance they had once had. Atomic espionage in the United States, carried out by misguided idealists who saw in the Soviets a progressive force, proved the high point of Russian intelligence operations targeting America.

Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, followed by the Soviet intervention in Hungary, destroyed any remaining allure Moscow may have held for young idealists in the West. Thus, although President Lyndon Johnson dearly hoped to uncover Moscow’s clammy hand at work behind the protest movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, no amount of effort by the FBI and CIA could uncover anything of significance. International communism, whatever challenges it still posed overseas, no longer posed the threat of creating a fifth column at home.

Though the Russians did have dramatic success in penetrating both the FBI and CIA in the 1980s, it didn’t impact the American psyche as they would have two decades earlier. Yes, they were serious security lapses, but they involved lone, disaffected or greedy double agents like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. There was nothing idealistic, nothing connected to a larger Soviet appeal, in their betrayal.

By the 1980s, the issue of socialism in American political life had become completely divorced from the issue of relations with the Soviet Union. And as the USSR dissolved from within and came to an end in 1992, the long dark shadow it cast over America finally passed forever.

Even when revelations of post-Soviet Russian spying reemerged in more recent years; most Americans just shrugged their shoulders, or met the news with a nostalgic chuckle and a mention of the good old Cold War days. Other challenges, most prominently 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, had reconnected domestic internal security concerns with international relations in an even more dramatic manner. And as the generations move on, distant memories grossly exaggerated fears recede from our shared consciousness.

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Washington’s foreign policy establishment is an imperial court of a particularly Byzantine kind, and when it comes to Russia and certain other areas of policy, the court’s insular, conformist, and bipartisan consensus has so crushed free discussion, essential critiques have been banished to the fringes. No Washington analyst or commentator who values his or her career, and wants to be recognized as residing within the narrow confines of mainstream American “nationalism,” is likely to have the guts to challenge settled wisdom when it comes to U.S.-Russia relations.

Enter Trump. The candidate may be a professional TV clown, with buffoonish and dangerous opinions on a wide array of issues, but when it comes to Russia, his views merit serious consideration.

The U.S. media obsesses over Trump’s rather grotesque personal admiration for Vladimir Putin, and the authoritarian, macho, tough guy image that both seek to portray. But this focus allows the media and foreign policy analysts to avoid addressing the actual content of Trump’s broader Russia policy.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, given how the U.S. media and commentariat have long conflated Russia with Putin. Russia’s behavior is often portrayed as springing from the personal whims of a brutal dictator, rather than reflecting an overwhelming consensus among Russian policy elites and society—a consensus with deep roots in Russian nationalism, strategy, and Russian history. Of course, that does not make Russian external policies correct. It does, however, make them enduring, coherent, and largely predictable. They are unlikely to change significantly even after Putin retires from the scene.

Russian actions found objectionable in Washington are most often supported by all significant factions of the Russian opposition, who can be more nationalist than Putin. But challenging “Putin” may seem an agreeable and cost-free occupation for Washington’s policy elites; challenging Russia has a rather more challenging ring to it, for anyone who knows history.

These days, Washington policy elites rarely articulate reasons why continued confrontation with Russia is in the interest of ordinary Americans. This goes back to a collective failure to answer a question set by the realist thinker Owen Harries, former editor of The National Interest: that if the Cold War with Soviet Communism was indeed an essential and epochal struggle requiring the transformation of U.S. institutions and the massive mobilisation of U.S. resources, then why did the end of the Cold War and the Communist threat not naturally also lead to a transformation of institutions and a demobilisation of resources?

For Trump, the failure to adjust the U.S.-Russia relationship to a new reality serves the entrenched policy establishment, not the American people. The pillars of Trump’s retrenched nationalism (which he shares with far-right European political factions like Marine Le Pen’s French National Front) rest on what he claims are the real interests of ordinary U.S. citizens: restrictions on immigration; protection against terrorism, which threatens the lives of Western citizens in a way that the Russian government has not the slightest desire to do; and the management of trade relations so as to protect the jobs and living standards of ordinary people. On these issues Russia is either irrelevant or an ally.

Foreign policy and national security elites, meanwhile, have become so bound up with a continuation of Cold War institutions that abandoning them would amount to a mortal threat to their personal and institutional interests, and so the necessary structures of hostility and confrontation have to be continued. By this I don’t mean to impute conscious individual cynicism and opportunism to most U.S. foreign policy experts. Rather, the policy elites’ attitudes towards Russia reflect beliefs deeply entrenched in American culture. These collective beliefs have a grip so powerful that they can lead people to act against their interests, and even (as in war) against their survival.

In the case of the U.S. policy elites, what followed the end of the Cold War can be summed up in the curious trajectory of Paul Wolfowitz and his beliefs. In 1992, Wolfowitz, then serving as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George H.W. Bush administration (under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney), together with his assistant “Scooter” Libby, wrote an advisory calling for the U.S. to prevent the emergence of any potential rival, not only on the world stage but in any one region of the world, and be prepared to use force unilaterally to this end. In other words, the USA should be the sole and permanent hegemon in every part of the world.

Leaked to The New York Times, this document alarmed much of the U.S. policy establishment and commentariat, who wasted no time in pointing out that no country in history had achieved this sort of hegemony, that it would impose a massive burden on U.S. resources, that it would conjure up enemies who otherwise would have no reason to be hostile to the USA, and that the fading of the global Communist threat made such hegemony less necessary than ever. In effect, the plan amounted to U.S. global primacy for the sake of U.S. global primacy and was promptly disowned by the Bush administration itself.

Remarkably, in subsequent years the basic principles of the Wolfowitz/Libby paper were gradually and quietly adopted as strategy without serious debate by both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. After the overwhelming U.S. victories in the first Gulf War and in NATO’s Balkans campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, by the late 1990s both Republican and Democratic foreign policy elites were lulled into thinking that the American “hyperpower” could have its way in a newly “unipolar” world with relatively little effort. And America’s civic nationalism has always believed passionately that U.S. power in the world is a force for good, morally justified, and welcomed by all people of good will in the world.

If Hillary Clinton wins in November, these principles look to be the guiding light of U.S. foreign policy in the next administration as well. Barack Obama, by his own confession a cautious realist at heart, was only able to slightly moderate this approach to the world, with its deep roots in the old nationalist (“exceptionalist” if you like) belief in America’s role, duty, and right to lead the world towards freedom and progress.

This approach led to the bipartisan U.S. strategy of extending NATO, first into Eastern Europe and then into the former USSR itself, contrary to promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev in return for Soviet agreement to German reunification. This was accompanied by the creation of GUUAM—a bloc of Georgia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova that was supposed to erode Russian influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus and replace it with U.S. leadership. (It should be noted, by the way, that Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan are open dictatorships, with Uzbekistan widely understood as an exceptionally repressive one.)

At no stage was there any serious attempt to address the obvious question of why Washington, after two centuries of completely ignoring these former Soviet regions, had suddenly developed a vital national interest in them; or whether there was anything that ordinary Americans could conceivably gain from the inevitable confrontations with Russia that would result from acting on this new interest. Instead of seeking to answer these questions, let alone raise them, Washington’s establishment has engaged in intellectual and moral sleight of hand: the Russian reaction to U.S. encroachment into Russia’s centuries-old influence in its near-abroad has been exploited to create an image of Russian expansionism and revisionism. Washington’s own expansionist policies have thus been sold to the U.S. public as necessary to defend the USA against Russian aggression—even though since the end of the Cold War there has been no recorded Russian threat against the U.S. homeland or its citizens.

Russian actions may have been correct or incorrect in particular cases (thus incorrect on the annexation of Crimea but obviously correct in opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya), but they have been overwhelmingly reactive to those of the USA.

None of this should be read as a plea to vote for Donald Trump. Quite apart from his odious personal character, in the area of climate change alone— by far the greatest real challenge facing America, along with the rest of humanity—Trump’s stance, like that of most Republicans, should disqualify him from any high office. But international co-operation on climate change and any other important international issue (such as the fight against ISIS) depends on some measure of international harmony. And if the bipartisan Washington strategic consensus under a second President Clinton continues to counteract international co-operation by provoking serious crises with Russia (and China, for that matter), then Trump the clown will have had the last laugh.

The post Don’t Laugh, But Trump May Be Right on Russia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Noel Field was such a man–and for that reason his story is relevant for our troubled times. The mystery at the core of Field’s life is how an apparently good man, one who started out with noble intentions, could sacrifice his own and his family’s freedom, a promising career, and his country, for a fatal myth. His is the story of the sometimes-terrible consequence of blind faith.

The power of an Idea—be it a Holy Crusade, Fascism, Communism, or Radical Islam that promises a final correction of all personal, social, and political injustices can be compulsive. Some movements add the lure of “immortality.” They prey on questing, restless, dissatisfied youth who are gradually persuaded to surrender their freedom to a “higher” cause, an all-knowing Master. In this submission, there is relief from soul searching. At last there is an answer to every question. Once he surrenders, the convert feels a rush of relief—his existence now has meaning beyond himself. With the conversion he gains a fraternal comradeship, a family of the like minded. For this rapture, he yields moral responsibility, the duty to think for himself. The global crusade—and its master in the person in the Commissar or the Caliph—knows best.

Communism was one such messianic global crusade able to recruit the likes of Field and many others. Its seductive lure is one reason the Soviet Union proved such an unnerving Cold War adversary during the second half of the 20th Century. Great powers have always faced the danger of having traitors in their midst—citizens or officials who offer their services to rival powers, for money or petty personal grievances. But the Soviets, as the self-professed vanguard of an international revolution that would render nationalism and injustice a thing of the past, could count on a ready-made Fifth Column, especially among the intelligentsia, almost everywhere.

This was especially true in the 1930s, when Field, a young Harvard-educated State Department employee, was first approached by the Soviets. Field’s betrayal of his country and his family for the promise of Communism was not merely motivated by his deep longing for a life of significance. As was true for so many children of the Depression, disillusionment with democracy, capitalism, and the West’s appeasement of Hitler were strong motivations in signing up with Moscow. For these discontents, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat seemed to offer the only alternative to the West’s breadlines and mass unemployment, as well as opposition to the Nazis’ aggression and racism. That Stalin would later make his own deal with Hitler, that there were breadlines in Russia, that reality deviated from the Communist Manifesto—these were all facts. But what concerned Field and his compatriots were not the facts but the Cause.

Field, a sensitive, self-absorbed idealist-dreamer, was both an unlikely revolutionary and an ideal target for conversion to a powerful faith. In the 1930s, he joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement. It was a time of national collapse: 10 million unemployed, rampant racism and, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Washington parched of ideas. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs. To Field, World Revolution and the violent overthrow of his own government seemed a necessary price to pay for the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Strict discipline and sacrifice for a cause beyond his person were expected of Field and his fellow recruits. Noel Field may never have hoisted an AK 47, nor strapped on a suicide vest, because he was never asked to. But his commitment and his submission to his cause were total and ultimately as destructive as those of today’s ISIS recruits.

But Field’s conversion wasn’t entirely political—his was a convergence of personal needs and political rationalization. What he and thousands of others like him had no way of knowing is that their recruitment was managed and manipulated by hardboiled cynics, skilled at spotting society’s vulnerable and promising youth. Nor did they suspect how far the reality of the Workers’ State would be from the promised Utopia.

Field was tapped as a potential spy in his time at the State Department—offering reports on colleagues and stealing documents from the West European Division—and continued when he took up a position in Switzerland for the League of Nations in 1936. He was lured to Prague in 1949, where he was arrested. He was then interrogated and tortured, his “confessions” manipulated and manufactured by Stalin to usher in the show trials that brought about the eventual murders of party members across the Eastern Bloc.

Field was not one of Stalin’s master spies. He lacked both the steel and the polished performance skills of a Kim Philby or an Alger Hiss. Field’s betrayals nonetheless cost lives. Above all, however, Noel Field’s story reveals his master’s boundless cruelty and sinister disregard for human life—including the life of his own faithful. Like thousands of others, Field was used—then, having served his purpose, he was discarded.

Communism tempted many of Field’s generation. Most, having observed the chasm between its promise and brutal reality, eventually moderated or abandoned their early zeal. Not Field. Though the dream of a triumphant working class soured and turned murderous, he stayed locked to his faith. He did not die a martyr in battle, but eventually he embraced a form of the martyrdom of innocents—his own among them—because that is what his master, Stalin, ordained.

Field never publicly spoke nor wrote candidly about his terrible choices. As Hungarian journalists working for American wire services in Budapest in the 1950s, my parents covered Field’s arrest by Soviet authorities, as well as the show trial that followed. Then, my parents were themselves arrested, and my father shared Field’s interrogator before his own fake trial for espionage. Moreover, my father was held in the same cell the American had previously occupied, both had been “Prisoner No. 410” for a period. Then, during the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, my parents located Field and his wife, and conducted the only known interview with them. Those are the circumstances that led me to write a book about him.

The post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin is a craven, sly player on the international stage—a ruthlessly self-interested authoritarian, nationalistic project. Any pretense or sense of romance or idealism about Moscow’s role in global affairs is long gone, and so it is sometimes hard to remember now the power Russia once wielded in subverting some of our best and brightest through its appropriation of the socialist ideal.

But history—and a certain human vulnerability toward messiahs of all stripes—makes clear that there will be other waves of fanaticism in the future. They may be as dangerous and hard to control as the movement that now captures fighters for militant Islam, or the one that once held Noel Field. And Americans must always ensure that their own ideals are maintained and renewed, to withstand these external threats and misguided betrayals from within.

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This was not Adams’ first trip to a country most Americans viewed more in the light of legend than history. Almost 30 years earlier, John Adams had sent his son, 14-year-old John Quincy, to serve as the secretary to Francis Dana, who was being dispatched to Russia to seek aid for the revolutionary cause. Catherine the Great refused to receive the American emissary, and neither diplomat nor secretary had much to do. But this remarkably perspicacious boy paid close attention to the world into which he had been cast. “The Sovereign,” he wrote to his mother Abigail, “is Absolute, in all the extent of the word … And the nobility have the same power over the people, that the Sovereign has over them. The Nation is wholly composed of Nobles and Serfs, or in other words, of Masters and Slaves.” The system, he wrote, is disadvantageous even to the ruler, for the nobles continually rebel against absolute power. Young though he was, Adams was very much a republican in the land of absolutism.

The Adams of 1809, the future president and son of a former president, was a man of wide experience. He had served as minister in The Hague and Berlin, and had represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. Adams knew Europe well, but Russia was not Europe. Adams thought about Russia much as many Europeans thought about America—as a vast, dynamic, semi-civilized, and almost dream-like place.

Even among the aristocrats who represented the nations of Europe in the Russian court, Adams cut a commanding, and quite forbidding, figure. “He sat in the frivolous assemblies of St. Petersburg like a bull-dog among spaniels,” as a British visitor put it, “and many were the times that I drew monosyllable and grim smiles from him and tried in vain to mitigate his venom.” Adams was not nearly so venomous towards other nations as he was towards America’s former colonial master, but he was a stubborn and single-minded advocate. We know from Adams’ own journal entries that he continually pressed Count Rumiantsev, Russia’s foreign minister, to break with Napoleon’s so-called Continental System, a series of embargos that kept English goods, whether carried by English ships or neutrals like the U.S., out of the ports of Europe. Russia had been compelled to enforce the system after suffering humiliating defeats by Napoleon’s army in 1806. Dozens of American ships had been bottled up in the Gulf of Cronstadt, outside of St. Petersburg.

Adams had an unexpected advantage over the much older men of the court, who had left their families at home: he had his young wife Louisa, their two-year-old son Charles Francis, and a pretty sister-in-law. While the 31-year-old Tsar Alexander trained his wandering eye on Louisa’s sister, he and his wife Elizabeth were also much taken with Charles Francis. They had lost two children before the age of two, the last one only 18 months before the Adamses arrived, and they practiced their English with Charles Francis, though the boy was more comfortable in French and German.

Whether because of Adams’ relentless prosecution of his country’s cause, or the Tsar’s fondness for his family, or perhaps even Alexander’s partiality to the United States, it had become clear by late 1809 that Russian policy was tilting away from France and towards the U.S. and other neutrals. On December 31, 1810, the Emperor issued a ukase lifting all restrictions on exports from Russia and on imports coming by sea, while at the same time imposing a heavy tariff on goods arriving overland, most of which came from France. Alexander thus broke decisively with the Continental System. This was a tremendous diplomatic triumph for the U.S., since most cargo carried to Russia by ship came in American vessels, whether the cargo was American or English. Napoleon concluded that he could not subdue Europe unless he invaded Russia, which he would do, suicidally, 18 months later.

In the early 19th century, when correspondence traveled no faster than a horse and carriage or a sailing ship could go, diplomats had a great deal of time on their hands. Adams engaged in learned banter—always in French—with his fellow ministers, several of whom were as erudite as he. (One of Adams’ colleagues whiled away his time translating Horace’s Latin Odes into Greek.) He went on long walks even in the blinding white winters, often meeting no one save the Tsar himself, out with his carriage.

The most painful rituals were social. Adams and Louisa were invited to lavish dancing parties, balls, masquerades, luncheons, and winter carnivals where ladies shot down ice hills on sleds. Everyone gambled, at cards and dice. Louisa was even more shocked at the debauchery than was her husband, who by now felt that he had seen everything. However, Adams barely survived on a modest American salary, and could reciprocate nothing, a source of great embarrassment.

Adams was deeply impressed by Russian piety, noting that even the gentry fasted for the 40 days of Lent—and then gorged themselves on the stupendous feats of Easter. Everything was strange and outsized. Men wagered on which day the ice on the Neva would break; and when, in mid-May, it finally did so, the governor of St. Petersburg brought the Tsar an ice-cold glass of river water, and the Tsar rewarded him with a hundred ducats. The Russian palaces were vast, the furnishings dazzling. At Catherine’s palace in Tsarskoye Selo—the Winter Palace—the magnificent decorations were decaying from wanton neglect. But Adams found the gravestones of three imperial greyhounds—”Sir Tom Anderson, Duchesse, and Zemire”—with inscriptions written in impeccable French verse.

Adams never lost his fascination with Russia; nor did Tsar Alexander’s fondness for the United States flag. But the bond between the two nations, the one the defender of autocratic orthodoxy, the other of republican liberty, was not a natural one. After Russia defeated Napoleon and humbled France, the Tsar placed himself at the head of the Holy Alliance, a league of princes dedicated to stamping out all traces of republican thought in Europe. In 1817, Adams became Secretary of State in the administration of President James Monroe. He was the chief intellectual force behind the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which stipulated that since “the political system of the allied powers”—the Holy Alliance—was “essentially different” from that of the United States, the U.S. would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” The New World, that is, would be republican, and the U.S. would be its guarantor. The ideological struggle that would come to define U.S. relations with the Soviet Union in the 20th century was thus prefigured by the friction between republican America and autocratic Russia.

Adams himself delivered a version of Monroe’s speech—in the form of a note verbale—to Baron de Tuyll, Russia’s minister to the U.S. He wanted Russia to understand that the United States would not tolerate any attempt to transplant authoritarian rule to North or South America.

The Adams of 1823, like the Adams of 1781, was a zealous patriot and a passionate republican. He would never permit his partiality towards Russia to supersede his defense of liberty.

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