Through his rhetoric and actions, United States (US) President Donald Trump has created political space for a reversion of Western-Russian relations to their pre-2014 state, underpinned by the implicit assumption that strained relations since that year have resulted from flawed Western foreign policy. In this article, Simon Waring argues that Russian aggression against Ukraine since 2014 and hostility towards the West is consistent with centuries of Russian foreign policy, and that a thaw in US-Russia relations today cannot change the fundamental antagonism between Russian and the Western world.
