| The Century Foundation has undertaken a program initiative on Russia through commissioned papers and seminars to identify a new framework for U.S.-Russian relations and policy alternatives that a new administration and the Congress might pursue to right the troubled relationship at a crucial juncture.
The Century Foundation has convened a high-level working group to provide direction to the project and guidance on the work it produces. A broad range of policy papers were commissioned to inform the working group, which has given primary focus to the lead policy paper, on the reasons why Russia matters for American foreign policy and on alternative approaches to U.S. relations with Russia, bilateral and multilateral, in the future.
Former U.S. Senator Gary Hart and Jack F. Matlock, Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., have co-chaired the working group, supported by TCF program officer Michael Wahid Hanna.
Download the Russia Working Group Prospectus.
Key Publications
Policy Recommendations of the Working Group
Published 4/1/09
The Working Group offers recommendations for rebuilding a mutually beneficial relationship between the United States and Russia, mindful that there is no simple path to repairing relations. Challenges and Opportunities for Russia-U.S. Nuclear Arms Control
Frank von Hippel and Anatoli Diakov, The Century Foundation, 11/17/09
Containment of a costly and risky nuclear arms race was a central theme of the U.S.-Soviet relationship for a third of a century, and even two decades after the end of the cold war, the vast arsenals, weapons complexes, and military budgets spawned by the conflict linger. As weapons threats to security diversify, can a new U.S. administration find common ground with a post-Putin presidency in Russia to reduce or eliminate such dangers? Given Russian caution about U.N. sanctions, what initiatives can the two countries take to ensure firm responses to nuclear weapons proliferation among other states? Do the two countries have convergent, competing, or opposed interests in prospective nuclear technology transfers to non-NPT countries, such as India? Despite Moscow’s longtime formal commitment to nuclear disarmament, has the post-Soviet degradation of its conventional military capabilities intensified its attachment to nuclear arsenals, and in any event what ability do they have to press other nuclear-armed states into a global rollback or abolition schedule? How crucial to American security—and how destabilizing to international order--are such signature Bush-era initiatives as antimissile weapons and antisatellite military capabilities or other space weaponry, and to what degree can a new administration put them on the table for negotiation? Can conventional force pacts be resuscitated, and other arms abolition pacts, such as on biological weapons, be reliably monitored and enforced? Download the report (PDF).
The China-Russia Relationship: What It Involves, Where It Is Headed, How It Matters for the United States
Rajan Menon, The Century Foundation, 6/15/09
Issue to be addressed: Since the Communist takeover of China in 1949, relations between Moscow and Beijing have alternated between a close partnership against a hostile or threatening United States and bitter estrangement that could allow Washington to play one against the other. Russia and China in recent years have drawn back together against perceived American overreaching, yet the rapidly rising economic strength and political influence of China also occasions disquiet in Russia. Its vast resource-rich but population-scarce territory of Siberia shares a long and still disputed border with an overpopulated China, providing an undercurrent of instability to the relationship between these giant neighbors. What are the strategic challenges that Russians see in China's breakneck rise, and what do they see as their opportunities? What shared interests do Moscow and Beijing see in Central Asia, in China’s western “autonomous” regions, and in offshore East Asia, and what opportunities and challenges do regional groupings like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization present to them—and to Washington? What are the two countries’ convergent (and at times divergent) concerns on vexing international issues in which the United States is engaged, both in the United Nations Security Council and outside? How can U.S. policymakers most successfully address the complex web of Russian interests vis-à-vis China to achieve greatest success on their own concerns, and how can progress on these issues strengthen U.S.-Russian cooperative relations in other areas?
U.S.-Russian Relations and the Islamist Challenge
Gordon M. Hahn, The Century Foundation, 5/7/09
Issue to be addressed: Political Islam under the sway of fundamentalist radicals long posed a regional and a domestic security concern for Russia, of which the eagerness with which Russians embraced the Bush administration's counterterrorism agenda following September 11th was a testament. How widespread, and well-founded, is the Russian fear of increased Islamic radicalization in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia becoming a frontline Russian challenge when NATO forces exit Afghanistan? To what extent do American and Russian concerns about political Islamism still coincide, and how much do they diverge based on differing threat perceptions from various conflicts and regimes in the Middle East? How can Russians and Americans most effectively address security concerns regarding political Islam, and how might the United States bring Russia into closer collaboration in dealing with secular Syria, Islamic Iran, and fiercely anti-Israeli factions in Lebanon and Palestine? What connection do Russians see between international efforts to defuse or confront radicalized Islamist political movements abroad and Russia’s episodic domestic problems with Islamic fundamentalism? How can U.S.-Russian cooperation on these issues facilitate a durable relationship in other areas? Download the paper here.
Resurgent Russia and U.S. Purposes
Thomas Graham, The Century Foundation, 4/20/09
Today the Russian-American relationship has become the most testy and confrontational in the two decades since Moscow withdrew its military support for Eastern Europe’s communist regimes, with nationalist alarmists on each side suspecting the worst intentions by the other. On a growing number of policy fronts, the two countries have struggled to find common ground or else been directly at odds: antimissile weapons and their deployment in Central Europe, expansion of NATO and U.S. military bases into former Soviet republics, Russian pressures on weak or divided states on its periphery, Kosovo’s status, “democratic” development in Russia and other ex-Soviet states, pricing and restraints on energy exports, as well as nuclear proliferation policy toward Iran and prospective space weaponry. Humiliated in the 1990s by a view of Russia as a spent empire and second-rate regional power—assuaged in part by the formal respect acknowledged in initiatives like the Gore-Chernomyrdin dialogue--many Russians have welcomed Putin’s steps towards a more traditional, muscular foreign policy defined by Russia’s willingness to stand alone, if need be, against U.S. temptations to hegemony. With so much of the rancor linked to a Bush-era reach for U.S. global dominance, a new American administration might seek to recalibrate U.S. policy and approaches. But need it bother? Does Russia matter? With so many in the American foreign policy debate convinced that Russia had become a ghost superpower, why should American politicians, policy elites, and press pundits take it seriously as a significant actor on the global stage again? What are core U.S. interests in human rights and democracy, economic policy, and alliance-building in the former Soviet space? What are the pressing international issues on which U.S. policymakers might need, or want, Russian collaboration? What are core Russian concerns in those areas, and in specific regions like the Balkans and the Middle East, and how might the United States seek to accommodate them? What use can a new government in Washington and a refurbished one in Moscow make of international institutional and legal regimes to consolidate and implement broader areas of agreement? And perhaps the overarching question: What is the basis for improved relations between the two in the years ahead? Download the paper here.
U.S.-Russian Relations and the Democracy and Rule of Law Deficit
Sarah Mendelson, The Century Foundation, 6/19/09
Issue to be addressed: As their political choices narrow, liberal-minded Russians and Westerners alike have been dismayed by the upsurge of nationalist revisionism pervading both old and new media, school books, and political debate that, critics say, resuscitates the most notorious canards of Communist-era “history” and helps legitimize the Russian state’s steady erosion of hard-won civil liberties and political activism. Are there countervailing pressures within Russian society that are pushing back against the revived nationalist narrative and creeping authoritarianism? How important to Russia’s future, and to its interaction with the rest of the world, is the enhanced vibrancy of an audible and critical center-left political community for reining in authoritarian nationalism? How may Russians’ experience of market economics and the privatization of property affect their perceptions of democratic governance, with which those were often linked? To what extent have internationally recognized human rights been compromised as political space contracts? As authorities seek to discredit and de-fund Russians who question the nationalist narrative, what support can these find from the outside world, from international organizations, and particularly from Americans? How important to Russian influentials is the closer relationship with the West that a more open political system was supposed to foster, and how important is the openness of Russia’s domestic politics and society to Western interests in dealing with Moscow?
The United States and Russia in International Institutions
Edward Luck, The Century Foundation, 1/4/2010
Even through four decades of cold war, the United States and Soviet Russia never renounced the global institutions in which they had inscribed for themselves a privileged role at the close of World War II, including in particular the United Nations and its Security Council. After two subsequent decades' experience with trying to make those institutions work, do Washington and Moscow still see the system and its rules as workable frameworks for managing troublesome security crises, social and economic problems, and international order? Amid complaints that the distribution of formal power in these institutions has not kept pace with changing power relationships in the real world, in terms of both has-been and want-to-be powers, do the United States and Russia have any interests in common in terms of restructuring or reforming the formal, legally based institutions? What might the United States gain by working around a recalcitrant Russia intent on impeding U.S. objectives in U.N. bodies, perhaps through reliance on alternative multilateral arrangements, such as NATO (e.g., on Kosovo) or new groupings defined by their members' relative degree of domestic democracy—and what would Washington lose? What role do the two countries foresee for each other in the international economic institutions—in particular those of Bretton Woods as well as the World Trade Organization? Might an energy-enriched Russia see a larger role for itself in international economic policymaking, and especially on global strategic purposes like the Millennium Development Goals and control of climate change?
Russia's Policy in the Middle East: Prospects for Consensus and Conflict in the Middle East
Dmitri Trenin, The Century Foundation, 3/2/10
Issue to be addressed: For much of the past half-century, Moscow has been a “player” in sundry Middle East conflicts, during Soviet times primarily as patron of secular Arab nationalist regimes opposed both to Israel and to lingering vestiges of Western colonialism. With the relaxation of Soviet controls it also became one of the largest sources of Jewish immigration into Israel, and while seeking in recent years to maintain cordial relations with Israel as part of the international “Quartet,” it has also been the one Quartet partner to open up channels to anti-Israeli factions like Hamas in defiance of Washington. Russian opposition to U.S. policies favoring regime change in both Iraq and Iran antagonized more than just conservatives in Washington, though its weakened position left some voices in the region regretful at the loss of any significant counterweight to the United States. In the absence of a cold war, what are Russia’s overriding interests in the Middle East, what influence can it muster with Israelis and Arabs to complement—or possibly undercut—U.S. policies, and what might it seek to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability among the countries that ring the Persian Gulf?
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Taking Note
