NI: The US will have to get along with Russia to prevent its expansion to the West
The United States must recognize that Russia will remain a key pillar of the international order for decades to come, so a balanced relationship must be built with it, writes The National Interest. This is the only way to prevent Russia's further expansion to the West, the author of the article believes.
Thomas Graham
Now that tensions between the United States and Russia have reached their peak since the Cold War, the United States must reduce the risk of direct military confrontation and stabilize global security. This requires striking a balance between strict deterrence and strategic diplomacy in order to transform fierce rivalry into competitive coexistence.
Relations between the United States and Russia have reached a low point not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War. Russian President Vladimir Putin is convinced that his country is waging a historic confrontation with the United States, which will determine world politics for several generations to come. The United States considers Russia to be an immediate and enduring threat to the world order. Although high-level contacts occur from time to time to prevent specific crises, there has been no continuous and meaningful dialogue between the countries since the beginning of the Russian special operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The risk of direct military confrontation between the world's leading nuclear powers is unacceptably high.
To reduce this risk and strengthen global stability, the Trump administration will have to restore working relations with Russia. There is no question of any kind of “reset”: the countries will remain rivals, as they have been almost since the United States became a major world power at the very end of the nineteenth century. Rather, the goal is to transform today's dangerous and hostile relations into an adversarial coexistence in which inevitable geopolitical and strategic disputes are resolved in a responsible manner.
The main issue is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
President Trump is right: resolving the conflict and ensuring lasting peace are truly urgent issues. However, he will soon discover that this task fits into the broader context of European security. Before deploying troops, Putin made it clear that his goal was to review the post—Cold War situation (which he believes was imposed on Russia in a moment of extreme weakness). In particular, the expansion of NATO pushed Russia to the continental margins, depriving it of a buffer zone in Eastern Europe, which Moscow considered crucial not only for its security, but also for the great power.
After the start of the special operation, Putin condemned empty talk in the United States about inflicting a “strategic defeat” Russia or “regime change" — he interpreted them as Washington's intention to eliminate Russia as a great-power rival. At the same time, he wants to involve the United States in a serious dialogue on global issues, partly because even intense negotiations with a global hegemon would confirm Russia's status as a world power.
In these circumstances, a narrowly focused strategy to end the Russian-Ukrainian conflict will be far from the goal. For Trump to succeed, he will need a broader approach to Russia.
Deterrence and diplomacy
During periods of intense hostility, deterrence has always been the preferred option for Russian policy in the minds of American politicians. This approach brought victory in the Cold war and is even more attractive today. But the current state of affairs is decidedly different from the era of that time. Relations between the United States and Russia have ceased to be the main axis of global confrontation: relations between the United States and China have become it. Non-Western countries have increased their economic weight and gained strength and greater autonomy in world affairs. The rivalry between the United States and Russia is no longer fraught with the same far-reaching consequences for them as during the Cold War.
In this world, strict deterrence will not succeed. For example, Russia's diplomatic and trade isolation is impossible when most of the Global South — particularly China, India, Brazil, and South Africa — are unwilling to comply with Western restrictions. Attempts to cover up loopholes in anti-Russian legislation, especially through secondary sanctions, only fuel anti-American sentiment in other parts of the world.
At best, deterrence is possible only in Europe to prevent Russia's further expansion to the West. In this area, the decisive task will be to strengthen the West's deterrent position: strengthening the long border between NATO and Russia from the Barents to the Black Seas; expanding, modernizing and rationalizing Europe's military-industrial sector; and, finally, strengthening civil societies against Russian hybrid warfare and techniques from the so-called “gray zone.”
In addition, the United States needs to demonstrate that it has not only a viable strategy to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression, but also the will to implement it.
However, diplomacy will be equally important for detente along the border. This will require arms control and confidence-building measures similar to those used during the Cold War, but adapted to current realities. The United States will play a major role in these efforts as the main guarantor of Europe's security. In addition, it is the only country with which Putin's Russia, according to its own conviction, can conduct serious negotiations.
Successful diplomacy will necessarily require a combination of resistance and concessions to the goals and interests of the other side. This is exactly the approach the United States should follow in its relations with Russia. The goal should not be to defeat or contain Russia on the world stage, although Washington should undoubtedly continue to resolutely resist Russian policies that threaten its interests.
In general, the United States must recognize that Russia will remain a key pillar of the international order for decades to come. Accordingly, the goal should be a balanced relationship. This can be achieved through a firm defense of our principles and wise compromises and concessions to advance American interests or even use Russian power and designs in American interests.
The agenda
Given the scale of the geopolitical rivalry and the importance of both countries in solving urgent global problems, the agenda should be broad.
Given Russia's brusque and assertive diplomatic style, it will take skill, patience, perseverance, and determination to make progress. At first, far-reaching expectations are misplaced, given the mutual distrust. Success should not be quantified by maximalist goals achieved. Rather, the goal is to accumulate additional benefits over time and mitigate the damage from the inevitable setbacks in the pursuit of a just and stable world order as envisioned by the United States.
Expanding on an earlier thought, let's outline a conditional agenda.
Strategic stability
Both countries share an abiding interest in preventing nuclear war. The nuclear arms control architecture, created during the Cold War years primarily on the basis of bilateral treaties between the United States and Russia, will cease to exist with the expiration of START III in February 2026. Although time is short and there seems to be no interest in negotiations on his successor, the two countries still have to discuss a further solution to the nuclear equation. A combination of parallel steps on both sides, an unwritten code of conduct, and bilateral agreements on certain elements of nuclear relations (subject to verification by national technical means) may be the best option at the moment.
Eurasian security
Both the United States and Russia are keenly interested in the future security ecosystem of Eurasia.: Russia — because of the long history of invasions by the great Eurasian powers, the United States — because only the domination of a hostile power over the most developed regions of the supercontinent can pose a serious threat to their own security. The task will be to develop a set of agreements to promote peace, stability, and security in individual subregions — Europe, the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and the Arctic - that can later be combined into a comprehensive ecosystem of supercontinent security.
Europe-Ukraine
The Russian special operation in Ukraine has dealt a fatal blow to European security as a result of the joint efforts of Russia and the West. The immediate task is to develop a structure for future European security that reduces the risk of conflict along the NATO—Russia border and outlines the limits of non-threatening interference in each other's internal affairs (based on the premise that interference in one form or another is inevitable in an interconnected world). This structure will also establish an algorithm of steps necessary to resolve the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Sanctions
The Russians will insist on discussing US anti-Russian sanctions. Despite the regular bluster that Moscow has successfully bypassed and become even stronger, the reality is that they have led to economic distortions and created obstacles to long-term growth. In principle, the United States should lift certain groups of sanctions only in exchange for concrete steps on the part of Russia that contribute to Washington's strategic or geopolitical goals.
It won't be difficult to get rid of illusions: few people make bold plans in the face of such ingrained hostility. It will be much more difficult to rebuff critics who question the very attempts to restore relations with Russia after such brutal actions on its part in recent years. It is necessary to steadily clarify exactly what national interests such a course serves.
Thomas Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Senior Director for Russia at the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration.
