U.S.-Russian Relations in a New Era

Thomas Graham Jr.

Security, Eurasia

Washington and Moscow are on the verge of a confrontation that has not been seen since the early 1980s.

The post–Cold War period in U.S.-Russian relations ended abruptly in March 2014 with the eruption of the Ukraine crisis. The United States finally abandoned the waning aspiration to slowly integrate Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community that had driven its Russia policy since the end of the Cold War.  Russia demonstrated its willingness to flout the norms that had governed European security since the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 to protect its vital national interests. Talk of partnership vanished; channels of communication were severed. Each country now clearly viewed the other as a strategic competitor. That point was made explicit in the U.S. National Security Strategy released in December 2017. Russian President Vladimir Putin had repeatedly made it with increasing vehemence since his remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007.

This does not mean, as many commentators argue, that a new cold war has broken out, even if relations are at their lowest ebb since the early 1980s, one of the darkest periods of the original Cold War. The international context and the nature of relations are radically different. The distribution of power in the world is no longer bipolar as it was during the Cold War. Rather, the contours of an inchoate multipolar system are emerging. The two countries are no longer engaged in a global existential struggle of two diametrically opposed philosophies of man and the state. Rather, both countries oversee variations of a capitalist economic system and profess adherence to democracy. U.S.-Russian relations no longer structure the international system or dominate the global agenda. Rather, they are among many other bilateral and multilateral relationships that shape the system and agenda, and not necessarily the most consequential. And Russia no longer lies at the center of American foreign policy, even if the United States remains a top priority for Russia. Rather, the United States is focused on other matters, including China and international terrorism. The new National Security Strategy does not change the picture, even if it identifies Russia as a revisionist power and strategic competitor, for the strategy also identifies China in the same terms and names Iran, North Korea, and international terrorism as major threats.