Carnegie Moscow Center
The apparently long-term rupture of Russia’s relations with the West offers an opportunity to China to enhance its already close relationship with the Kremlin and thus turn the global geopolitical balance in its favor.
According to this year’s Transatlantic Trends survey, Russians have an increasingly unfavorable view of the United States and the EU. Americans and Europeans also had more negative outlooks toward Russia in 2014 than previous years.
Western sanctions against Russia are driving the Kremlin toward closer economic, political, and potentially military alignment with China.
With tensions running high and diplomacy struggling to find a way out of the Ukraine crisis, inflammatory rhetoric violates the first rule of foreign policy: do no harm.
Europe’s and the United States’ principal challenge for the coming years is to develop a new strategy for dealing with Russia. This strategy will have to be built on a realistic understanding of Russia as it is, rather than on what the West would like it to be and hopes it will one day become.
Berlin is critical to any future settlement of the Ukraine crisis. It is too difficult to reach a deal on the settlement, but the absence of any deal deemed minimally acceptable to all sides would steer Europe toward an abyss.
John Mroz, who died earlier this month, was the founder of the EastWest Institute, a novel concept of a “think and do tank” which sought to organize Track 2 and Track 1.5 discussions across the Cold War divide. Mroz has departed precisely at the moment when the need for his services has peaked again.
Russia’s efforts to find an acceptable place for itself in the U.S.-led Western system have ended in a bitter disappointment. The changing trading patterns point to a new era in Moscow’s foreign relations, in which Sino-Russian relations will be taking center stage.
Two decades after the debate about NATO enlargement pitted “NATO-firsters” against “Russia-firsters,” both sides have had reasons to say, “I told you so.” And they did.
Fundamental disagreements over Ukraine must not jeopardize U.S.-Russian cooperation on important issues of mutual interest, such as counterterrorism and nonproliferation.