Competition and rivalry is not all there is to the West’s relationship with Russia. There are compelling reasons for cooperation in a few selected areas. As already mentioned, in the field of WMD non-proliferation, Moscow has continued to interact productively with Washington and others on Iran and North Korea, despite the general atmosphere of US–Russian confrontation. In Syria, Russia is key to the future political and military developments.
Over time, Russia may have to become more involved in Afghanistan and Central Asia in order to oppose armed radicals there. Up to a point, its interests will be aligned with those of the West. With Islamist extremism a rising threat to Russia itself, Moscow will continue to fight terrorism both within its own borders and internationally. The transnational nature of contemporary terrorism makes Moscow a valuable partner to Western governments, whatever they think about Putin or his regime.
Thus, Russia in the foreseeable future will be primarily a competitor but may also occasionally – and within the general environment of competition – be a partner of the West. Under the present politico-economic system, it is likely to continue on a declining trajectory, but its military power will grow for the time being. This unequal mix of competition and cooperation, economic decline and military expansion, will make crafting a Western policy toward Russia a particularly difficult task. This task can be divided into elements, each with its own time horizon.
In the short term, the focus has to be on ensuring that the West’s relations with Russia do not get out of control and lead to a dangerous collision that no one wants. The conflict in Ukraine’s east is now undergoing a lull, but it may be reignited and expand beyond the present battlefield. The number one priority is to make sure that it is safely controlled. It is too much to expect the West to pressure Ukraine into implementing Minsk II, which Kiev hates and Moscow likes. The least bad way under the circumstances would be to build a firewall around the zone of conflict to make sure that it does not spread.
It is also highly important to agree with Russia in avoiding any provocation involving Russian and US/NATO military assets and forces, in Europe and elsewhere. Accidents involving military aircraft and naval ships are particularly dangerous. It is also necessary to avoid provocative military exercises along the new line of the military stand-off on Russia’s north-western borders in Europe. As such exercises will continue in the absence of conventional arms control in Europe, some transparency would help. The purpose of the exercises can only be conventional deterrence, as actual war-fighting between Russia and NATO would almost certainly lead to a nuclear catastrophe.
A related issue is military deployments. So far, NATO has abided by the terms of the Founding Act on relations with Russia, which rules out large-scale military deployments and massive military infrastructure development in the eastern member countries. With Russia–NATO cooperation over, and relations downgraded virtually to Cold War levels, there is pressure building up to terminate the constraints and deploy substantial foreign (preferably US) forces and bases in the Baltic States and Poland. If this happens, the relationship between the West and Russia will become even more militarized, with Moscow probably seeking to counter Western conventional troop presence on its borders with a nuclear threat to the United States and its European allies.
This may also be Russia’s reaction to the deployment of US ballistic missile defenses in Eastern Europe and East Asia, ostensibly to counter missile threats from Iran and North Korea. Even though the Russian nuclear deterrent will not lose its effectiveness in the foreseeable future, these US deployments will not be ignored. In the asymmetrical situation of the lack of military balance between Russia and NATO, Moscow will have to rely more heavily on its strategic offensive systems. With traditional nuclear arms control between Washington and Moscow now history, it will be important for both sides at least to engage in a dialogue to help avoid erroneous assessment and resultant miscalculation.
This would require, at a minimum, keeping lines of communication open. Multilateral fora such as the UN Security Council, the NATO–Russia Council, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will need to have a bigger role to play. The institutions which functioned during the Cold War should assume some of the familiar functions; the bodies built in the hope of cooperation would need to be transformed into platforms for managing conflict. It is important that dialogue in all these organizations is not stopped as punishment for Russian behavior or in protest at Western actions; rather, it is in the crisis periods that such bodies will be particularly, maybe critically, useful.
In an environment where top-level communications have virtually broken down and only transactional foreign policy is able to operate, it is highly desirable for small groups of trusted individuals from both sides, who enjoy the confidence of their national leaders as well as each other, to carry on with more broad-ranging dialogue on managing the adversarial relationship and organizing cooperative projects where the parties’ interests approximate or coincide. These projects might range from the fight against extremism, to stemming radicalism, to the diplomatic process on crises such as Syria, to efforts to prevent WMD proliferation, and to less controversial issues such as dealing with infectious diseases and climate change.
In the medium and long term, it is necessary to work toward a new security arrangement in Europe and Greater Eurasia. The well-worn concept of European security needs to be rethought. By tradition, it was based on balances: initially among European states themselves, and later between the two blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. In the post-Cold War era an attempt was made to organize it around NATO, which was to expand to include virtually all of Europe except for Russia, which would be linked to the system by a special partnership arrangement. This attempt has failed, but there is no going back to the old blocbased equilibrium. Russia has no real bloc to lead. Russia alone cannot balance NATO. However, the geopolitical framework has expanded beyond Europe.
Just as in the twentieth century European security expanded across the Atlantic, its twenty-first-century version also needs to expand, this time in the opposite direction to embrace all of Greater Eurasia. With China moving west toward Europe along its “One Belt, One Road” route, Russia looking toward Asia and the Middle East, and the United States repositioning itself with regard to both Asia and Europe, the security interests of the great powers across the entire continent of Eurasia are becoming more closely intertwined. Thus, twenty-first-century security arrangements will have to include China, as in the last century they came to include America. This expansion, however, is nothing like the Cold War situation when the United States came to the rescue of Western Europe. China is not coming to the rescue of a weakened Russia, and Eurasia is not becoming an area of intense Sino-American rivalry. The picture is more complex.
The transcontinental, transoceanic system which is emerging not just in Eurasia but in the northern hemisphere includes three great powers: the United States, China and Russia. It also includes a number of US allies that generally follow its lead but are powerful economically: the countries of the European Union, plus Japan, Turkey and South Korea. There is also a potential fourth great power, India, whose might and ambitions will significantly expand over time, and there are a number of important regional players, such as Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.