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32. The Russia File
- Author:
- Robert Legvold
- Publication Date:
- 07-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- Reversing the collapse of U.S.-Russian relations is one of the great tests facing the Obama administration. Among the major powers, Russia is the hard case. And the stakes involved in getting U.S.-Russian relations right are high -- much higher than the leadership of either country has acknowledged or perhaps even realized so far. If the Obama administration can guide the relationship onto a more productive path, as it is trying to do, it will not only open the way for progress on the day's critical issues -- from nuclear security and energy security to climate change and peaceful change in the post-Soviet area -- but also be taking on a truly historic task. One of the blessings of the post-Cold War era has been the absence of strategic rivalry among great powers, a core dynamic of the previous 300 years in the history of international relations. Should it return, some combination of tensions between the United States, Russia, and China would likely be at its core. Ensuring that this does not happen constitutes the less noticed but more fateful foreign policy challenge facing this U.S. president and the next.
- Political Geography:
- Russia, United States, China, and Soviet Union
33. An Agenda for NATO
- Author:
- Zbigniew Brzezinski
- Publication Date:
- 09-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- NATO's 60th anniversary, celebrated in April with pomp and circumstance by the leaders of nearly 30 allied states, generated little public interest. NATO's historical role was treated as a bore. In the opinion-shaping media, there were frequent derisive dismissals and even calls for the termination of the alliance as a dysfunctional geostrategic irrelevance. Russian spokespeople mocked it as a Cold War relic. Even France's decision to return to full participation in NATO's integrated military structures -- after more than 40 years of abstention -- aroused relatively little positive commentary. Yet France's actions spoke louder than words. A state with a proud sense of its universal vocation sensed something about NATO -- not the NATO of the Cold War but the NATO of the twenty-first century -- that made it rejoin the world's most important military alliance at a time of far-reaching changes in the world's security dynamics. France's action underlined NATO's vital political role as a regional alliance with growing global potential. In assessing NATO's evolving role, one has to take into account the historical fact that in the course of its 60 years the alliance has institutionalized three truly monumental transformations in world affairs: first, the end of the centuries-long "civil war" within the West for transoceanic and European supremacy; second, the United States' post-World War II commitment to the defense of Europe against Soviet domination (resulting from either a political upheaval or even World War III); and third, the peaceful termination of the Cold War, which ended the geopolitical division of Europe and created the preconditions for a larger democratic European Union. Even France's decision to return to full participation in NATO's integrated military structures -- after more than 40 years of abstention -- aroused relatively little positive commentary. Yet France's actions spoke louder than words. A state with a proud sense of its universal vocation sensed something about NATO -- not the NATO of the Cold War but the NATO of the twenty-first century -- that made it rejoin the world's most important military alliance at a time of far-reaching changes in the world's security dynamics. France's action underlined NATO's vital political role as a regional alliance with growing global potential. In assessing NATO's evolving role, one has to take into account the historical fact that in the course of its 60 years the alliance has institutionalized three truly monumental transformations in world affairs: first, the end of the centuries-long "civil war" within the West for transoceanic and European supremacy; second, the United States' post-World War II commitment to the defense of Europe against Soviet domination (resulting from either a political upheaval or even World War III); and third, the peaceful termination of the Cold War, which ended the geopolitical division of Europe and created the preconditions for a larger democratic European Union.
- Topic:
- NATO and Cold War
- Political Geography:
- Russia and France
34. The Unbalanced Triangle
- Author:
- Stephen Kotkin
- Publication Date:
- 09-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- The Chinese-Russian relationship is more opportunistic than strategic, Bobo Lo argues. The United States is stuck watching from the sidelines and may be pushing Moscow further into Beijing's pocket.
- Political Geography:
- Russia, United States, China, Beijing, and Moscow
35. Russia Reborn
- Author:
- Dmitri V. Trenin
- Publication Date:
- 11-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- Two decades after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and nearly 20 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has shed communism and lost its historical empire. But it has not yet found a new role. Instead, it sits uncomfortably on the periphery of both Europe and Asia while apprehensively rubbing shoulders with the Muslim world. Throughout the 1990s, Moscow attempted to integrate into, and then with, the West. These efforts failed, both because the West lacked the will to adopt Russia as one of its own and because Russian elites chose to embrace a corporatist and conservative policy agenda at home and abroad. As a result, in the second presidential term of Vladimir Putin, Russia abandoned its goal of joining the West and returned to its default option of behaving as an independent great power. It redefined its objectives: soft dominance in its immediate neighborhood; equality with the world's principal power centers, China, the European Union, and the United States; and membership in a global multipolar order. Half a decade later, this policy course has revealed its failures and flaws. Most are rooted in the Russian government's inability and unwillingness to reform the country's energy-dependent economy, the noncompetitive nature of Russian politics, and a trend toward nationalism and isolationism. In terms of foreign policy, Russia's leaders have failed to close the book on the lost Soviet empire. It is as if they exited the twentieth century through two doors at the same time: one leading to the globalized market of the twenty-first century and the other opening onto the Great Game of the nineteenth century. As the current global economic crisis has demonstrated, the model that Russia's contemporary leaders have chosen -- growth without development, capitalism without democracy, and great-power policies without international appeal -- cannot hold forever. Not only will Russia fail to achieve its principal foreign policy objectives, it will fall further behind in a world increasingly defined by instant communication and open borders, leading to dangers not merely to its status but also to its existence. Russia's foreign policy needs more than a reset: it requires a new strategy and new policy instruments and mechanisms to implement it.
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan, Russia, United States, and Soviet Union
36. Eurasian Energy Security
- Author:
- Jeffrey Mankoff
- Publication Date:
- 02-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- For two weeks in the freezing January of 2009, homes and businesses across Europe were left without heat, the result of a murky dispute over gas prices between Russia and Ukraine. When Moscow and Kiev failed to agree on a formula for calculating price and transit fees for the coming year, the gas simply stopped flowing. Europe, which gets a significant proportion of its gas through pipelines that transit both Russia and Ukraine, bore the brunt of this confrontation between the two feuding post-Soviet neighbors.
- Topic:
- Security, Energy Policy, Markets, and Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Europe, Ukraine, and Asia
37. Averting Crisis in Ukraine
- Author:
- Steven Pifer
- Publication Date:
- 01-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- Ukraine faces a year of challenge in 2009. In the aftermath of the August 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict, Kiev must cope with an increasingly assertive Russian foreign policy. The Kremlin regards Ukraine as part of its sphere of privileged interests, has made clear its unhappiness with Kiev's desire to integrate into the European and Euro-Atlantic communities, and will attempt to disrupt that course. The possibility exists, more real following the August conflict, of a serious confrontation between Kiev and Moscow over issues such as Ukraine's geopolitical orientation and the Black Sea Fleet.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy and NATO
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Europe, and Ukraine
38. Putin's Russia
- Author:
- Padma Desai
- Publication Date:
- 05-2008
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- To the Editor: Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss ("The Myth of the Authoritarian Model," January/February 2008) make several erroneous judgments regarding the current Russian scene. The Russian economy has grown in the last seven years at an annual rate of 6.5 percent. The ongoing debate among economists and other informed observers of Russia is over whether this is a result of exceptionally high (and rising) oil prices, and hence a reversible phenomenon if the price of oil collapses, or the result of substantive changes in the last decade that made high growth rates sustainable. At a major World Leaders Forum and a scientific conference attended by distinguished Russia scholars at Columbia University last April, participants shared the view that Russia's economic performance was not a flash in the pan caused by oil; rather, the consensus was that important policy changes had taken place. Still, no responsible Western scholar of Russia (nor even a supporter of former Russian President Vladimir Putin) has suggested that the high growth rates in Russia are a product of Putin's authoritarian ways. The claim by McFaul and Stoner-Weiss that this argument is made is simply creating a straw man.
- Political Geography:
- Russia
39. The Road to the Arctic
- Author:
- Coalter G. Lathrop and Scott Borgerson
- Publication Date:
- 05-2008
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- To the Editor: Scott Borgerson's article "Arctic Meltdown" (March/April 2008) is an addition to the recent wave of Arctic journalism rife with Wild West imagery of chaos and lawlessness -- a reporting trend spurred by Russia's August 2007 flag-planting stunt on the North Pole. Arctic frontier jargon that included "land grab" and "ungainly scramble" is now augmented by Borgerson's "gold rush" and "legal no man's land." While Borgerson correctly identifies the many sources of tension in the region, he is wrong when he writes that "the Arctic region is not currently governed by any comprehensive multilateral norms." The Arctic is not the "legal vacuum" invoked in his piece; it is a region governed by international law and, for the maritime issues that are the main subject of the article, specifically by the international law of the sea. With one exception ("growing talk of Greenland petitioning Denmark for political independence"), all of the Arctic problems that Borgerson raises -- offshore hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation, overlapping maritime claims, wide-margin continental shelves, the dumping of nuclear reactors, indigenous whaling, and a variety of shipping issues, including contested shipping routes, the use of flags of convenience, vessel-source pollution, and ship-based tourism -- are quintessential law-of-the-sea problems, around which a robust and widely adopted body of international law has grown.
- Political Geography:
- Russia
40. American Oligarchs
- Author:
- Katrina vanden Heuvel
- Publication Date:
- 09-2008
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- Replying to Padma Desai's letter ("Putin's Russia," May/June 2008), Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss assert that, like the Yeltsin-era media bosses, the United States' "oligarchs . . . own" many media outlets, including The Nation. In reality, The Nation -- the United States' oldest continuously published weekly -- has operated at a loss during all but a few of its 143 years and has been kept alive by its subscribers, advertisers, and many loyal supporters. Moreover, The Nation's equally long-standing antioligarchic positions are known to virtually everyone familiar with the American press.
- Political Geography:
- Russia, United States, and America