What Should the U. S. Policy With Respect to Russia Be?

I was very gratified to see something approximating my view of what U. S.-Russian relations should be like in Thomas Graham’s piece in Foreign Affairs:

U.S. policy across four administrations has failed because, whether conciliatory or confrontational, it has rested on a persistent illusion: that the right U.S. strategy could fundamentally change Russia’s sense of its own interests and basic worldview. It was misguided to ground U.S. policy in the assumption that Russia would join the community of liberal democratic nations, but it was also misguided to imagine that a more aggressive approach could compel Russia to abandon its vital interests.

A better approach must start from the recognition that relations between Washington and Moscow have been fundamentally competitive from the moment the United States emerged as a global power at the end of the nineteenth century, and they remain so today. The two countries espouse profoundly different concepts of world order. They pursue opposing goals in regional conflicts such as those in Syria and Ukraine. The republican, democratic tradition of the United States stands in stark contrast to Russia’s long history of autocratic rule. In both practical and ideological terms, a close partnership between the two states is unsustainable.

In the current climate, that understanding should come naturally to most U.S. policymakers. Much harder will be to recognize that ostracizing Russia will achieve little and likely prove to be counterproductive. Even if its relative power declines, Russia will remain a key player in the global arena thanks to its large nuclear arsenal, natural resources, geographic centrality in Eurasia, UN Security Council veto, and highly skilled population. Cooperating with Russia is essential to grappling with critical global challenges such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism. With the exception of China, no country affects more issues of strategic and economic importance to the United States than Russia. And no other country, it must be said, is capable of destroying the United States in 30 minutes.

I don’t quite agree that “relations between Washington and Moscow have been fundamentally competitive from the moment the United States emerged as a global power at the end of the nineteenth century”. It is, at least, an over simplification. I think that on most issues there is no conflict because our countries’ interests are too disparate. Russia not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was expansionary and millennialist; Russia is irredentist. The Soviet Union pursued objectives that Russia never had before 1918; Russia is pursuing the same objectives that Russians have for the last 300 years at least.

There are some areas, e.g. the Arctic, in which our interests conflict. There are some areas in which our interests coincide.

Our problem is that for the last 30 years individuals who are, frankly, anti-Russian have had too much influence at high levels of government. They have fostered an attitude in which ensuring that the Russians did not achieve their policy goals was a major objective of U. S. policy despite the reality that it did not actually promote our own interests.