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November 18, 2009 (LPAC)—A leading faction of American nationalists reached an agreement with Vladimir Lenin in 1920, that Americans would supply Russia with billions worth of capital goods, would develop the resources of eastern Siberia, and would move into an implicit military alliance with Russia to counter the British-Japanese alliance. The deal was scuttled by the destruction of the Presidency of Warren Harding.

Just prior to the November, 1920 election, a group of non-Wall Street industrialists supporting Harding's candidacy dispatched engineer Washington Vanderlip to Moscow to meet with Lenin, whose Communist revolution in 1917 had made Lenin the head of state. Vanderlip and Lenin agreed that the incoming Harding Administration would support this deal: the California-based industrial syndicate would sell to the Soviet Union, for $3 billion, locomotives and other tools for infrastructure progress. The syndicate would begin the large-scale production of petroleum and natural gas in the far eastern section of Russia. And the U.S. would be set up in a Pacific Ocean naval base on Kamchatka peninsula. This would in effect restore the old American-Russian alliance of the Lincoln Republicans.

British imperial strategist H.G. Wells was in Moscow at the time of these "back-channel" U.S.-Russian negotiations and tried unsuccessfully to spoil them. Wells subsequently told the New York newspapers that Lenin was being duped by the Americans into believing that Russia could be electrified. Russia is a peasant country that can never be modernized, Wells declared.

During the Harding administration, Edward Doheny and the other Harding supporters in that syndicate were scandalized in the trumped-up "Teapot Dome" scandal (which was aimed against plans by patriotic military strategists to use American petroleum to strengthen the Pacific against the Anglo-Japanese alliance). Several of these men were indicted. Harding died of mysterious causes in 1923. The U.S. then had no official ties with Russia until Franklin Roosevelt opened diplomatic relations with the Soviets.