Jonathan Haslam advances a deliberately provocative, though not sensational, argument: he addresses western—above all American—elites and urges them to accept a share of the responsibility for Russia’s war against Ukraine and the broader breakdown in Russia-west relations.

Politicians rarely acknowledge mistakes, their own or their nation’s. In wartime, the question of responsibility is especially acute, and responsibility of course lies first with the side that started the war. But should that responsibility be projected backward, so that the aggressor now is also blamed for the failure to find formulas for peace over the preceding three decades?

The official positions of both the US and Russian governments tend to polarize, placing all blame on the other; the harder task for unbiased analysis lies between these poles—acknowledging each side’s errors. There is no neat formula for apportioning responsibility, but analyzing the missteps of all actors in Russia’s failed post-Soviet integration remains essential. A persistent obstacle has been Washington’s limited grasp of how its choices were perceived in Russia—what hopes they raised or dashed and with what long-term effects. Recent scholarship has begun to address this, notably William H. Hill’s No Place for Russia (2018) and Mary Elise Sarotte’s Not One Inch (2021), which feed into the perennial western question, “Who lost Russia?”

At first glance, Hubris appears to continue this line of inquiry by tracing Washington decisions that led to confrontation, seemingly a book about US policy. Read more closely, however, it is above all a study that persuasively reconstructs the mindset of Russia’s political elite in its reactions to American policies: its frustrations with US actions, its disillusionment about integration, and the ensuing consolidation around Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime. In places, Haslam articulates this evolution more clearly than members of the elite themselves. Having lived in Russia for much of the period under discussion and having followed US-Russian relations both as a scholar and as a Russian liberal, I sympathize with the sense of misreadings and missed opportunities and appreciate Haslam’s forceful presentation of western mistakes as they appear from Russia.

That said, this is not a book to rely on as the sole account of Russia’s estrangement from the west; taken alone, it yields a tilted picture. Some claims also invite verification. For example, Aleksei Venediktov—editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy—was never the station’s owner, contrary to the author’s statement (159). Likewise, the assertion that Nicholas II “chose war to save the autocracy” (270) is, to say the least, highly idiosyncratic. On NATO enlargement in particular, M. E. Sarotte has identified factual inaccuracies in a field she knows intimately (“Why They Fight,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2025). I set that debate aside here. Even so, such slips echo widely held Russian understandings of the process, which is part of the book’s value for readers seeking to grasp the Moscow view.

The larger limitation is analytical balance. Hubris underweights Russia’s internal evolution: developments not reducible to US choices. To frame Russian foreign policy chiefly as reaction risks a mirror-image American centrism. Russia’s ruling circles, and especially the Putin coalition, pursued their own agenda; “integration” or “confrontation” with the west served as tools for domestic priorities, not least, the perpetuation of political power.

A related issue is periodization. The Russia of the early 1990s—immediately after the Soviet collapse—differed profoundly from the Russia of the 2000s and the 2020s. In the early 1990s, identity anxieties combined with economic hardship to produce widespread hopes for integration with the west. If we are to speak of missed American opportunities, the focus should be that brief window. By the time Putin took office, mass hopes for integration had largely evaporated; significant segments of the elite had already turned away from the west, and Putin’s later overtures were more tactical than strategic. Letting slip the chance to integrate a fragile, would-be democracy differs fundamentally from failing to pacify an entrenched autocracy.

There is, finally, an unintended and uncomfortable consequence: the narrative’s alignment with official Kremlin talking points may discourage some readers. Yet despite these reservations, I consider Hubris a useful and at times illuminating book, especially for American policymakers who will have to engage with Russia in the future. Its core contribution is to insist on a sober reckoning with western choices and their unintended effects. The next step is to embed that reckoning within a fuller account of Russia’s domestic transformations and the autonomous logic of Putin-era decision-making.