Carnegie Moscow Center
Europe’s rupture with Russia has entered its third year. Trust is non-existent. As one looks into the future, one sees uncertainties. What is the way forward? Is there a way forward?
The current standoff between Moscow and Washington, should it persist longer, could have disastrous implications for nuclear nonproliferation.
President Putin’s announcement that he is pulling back from Syria should not have come as a big surprise. He believes he has met most of his goals there—many of which have nothing to do with Syria itself. Russia has found a way back to the table where the world’s board of directors sits and resolves regional conflicts together.
Speaking in Munich, Medvedev diagnosed an ongoing slide into a new Cold War and, accordingly, an increase of dangers—both from a potential direct clash between Russia and the United States/NATO and from their inability to cooperate to fight extremism.
The Western political establishment is hostile to Russia. This makes it all the more important to demonstrate that the Western religious establishment is more sympathetic. Regardless of Putin’s aims, the meeting between Pope and Patriarch has become a landmark event in the history of Christianity.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly accused the United States of upsetting the strategic nuclear balance by deploying a missile defense system in Europe, but closer examination of the facts reveals a more complex picture.
The main challenge of foreign policy expertise both in Russia and in the United States is to understand where the other country is coming from. The challenge to the U.S. is to be able to go beyond the ideological stereotypes. For the Russians, there is a clear need to do more serious research on the United States.
The goal was to return to the club where the destiny of the world is being discussed, not as an ally (because given the current economic disparity, one could only be a subordinate ally) but as a “partner”—a word that is invariably spoken in Russia with phonetic quotation marks: a disobedient, sometimes blunt neighbor with whom considerations of the world order must be shared.
A recently published report examines factors that contribute to an atmosphere in which the use of nuclear weapons in the Euro-Atlantic region becomes more probable than immediately after the end of the Cold War.
In comparison to 2014, 2015 was at least a somewhat positive year for relations between Russia and the West. However, it is unlikely that these relations will improve in the near future.