Carnegie Moscow Center
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power, Russia has substantial leverage in the post-Soviet space and is the EU's most important neighbor. However, in the coming decades Russia will face serious internal and international challenges.
While Russia will not help push Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out, it must be careful about the consequences of a dispute with multiple countries over Syria. However, the West, too, needs to be careful not to antagonize Russia on this issue.
If Russia continues to support Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, it does not bode well for cooperation between Russia and the West on missile defense or any other security matter of a strategic nature.
Moscow’s position on Syria is primarily shaped by the recent experience of Libya, strong doubts concerning the Syrian opposition, and suspicions about U.S. motives.
The core issue in the NATO-Russia relationship is the mutual deficit of trust. The Euro-Atlantic area needs a “security community,” where no member expects any other state to use force or threaten to use force against it.
Enhanced energy security is particularly important for a more cohesive security collaboration among the states of the Euro-Atlantic region.
Today, unprecedented challenges from without and within threaten to reverse the progress toward the safe, secure, undivided Euro-Atlantic world hoped for in the wake of the Cold War. To overcome that future, a twenty-first-century problem demands a twenty-first-century solution.
No issue in the area of European military security is more important or more vexed than that of nonstrategic nuclear weapons.
One of the fundamental impediments to molding the Euro-Atlantic nations into a more unified and workable security community is the lingering distrust that poisons too many of the region’s key relationships.
No issue is more urgent or central to achieving progress toward the goal of creating an inclusive Euro-Atlantic Security Community than making European missile defense a joint project of the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Russia.