Carnegie Moscow Center
The Kremlin’s new foreign policy agenda reflects Russia’s increasing need to channel resources towards modernization, a project which requires improved relations with the West.
Despite its decrease in transparency and limited reductions, the new START Treaty is nonetheless a major achievement. Above all, it is an important political accomplishment, and a significant result of the reset in Russian-U.S. cooperation.
Civil society development in Russia faces a great number of problems. Civil society exists, but it is fragmentary and divided and existing spaces for dialogue with the state have notable limits.
European and Russian experts discuss the key issues affecting Russia-Europe relations.
Following consultations which began in September 2009, the NATO-appointed Group of Experts chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, presented its findings on the Alliance’s future to NATO Secretary General Rasmussen and members of the North Atlantic Council on May 17th.
Russia’s foreign policy should stop covering up the country’s diminishing status with aggressive rhetoric against the West and, instead, focus on attracting external resources for modernization.
Despite its importance, Russia’s perspective on the war in Afghanistan has typically been missing from previous analyses of coalition policy. Moscow views Afghanistan largely through the prism of security threats to itself and its Central Asian neighborhood.
The rivalry between the two parties in the U.S. Congress today has become so acute that it is effectively freezing productive relations at all levels of power, causing inevitable damage to the country’s security and foreign policy.
The reset represents a substantive change in U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-Russian relations, not just a rhetorical shift. It is an effort to move ahead in search of solutions to vital security concerns.
Neither the expansion of NATO—even if Russia is added—nor the European security pact proposed by Medvedev alone are capable of uniting Europe. What is needed is the creation of a common security zone encompassing all of these states in which war and the use of armed forces would be abolished.