America and Russia: Permanent confrontation? A symposium on U.S.-Russia relations in the age of Trump.

• Author: Allison, Graham T.

Graham T. Allison

President Trump can improve relations with Russia in ways that advance American national interests by going back to Cold War fundamentals. American presidents' first responsibility is to protect and defend the United States of America. In a world in which Russia's leader commands a nuclear arsenal that can erase the United States from the map, sufficient (and often politically painful) cooperation to avoid that outcome is indispensable. Just as in the Cold War, Americans and Russians today share a vital national interest in averting a nuclear war.

To many twenty-first-century readers, this will sound decidedly "last century." Conceptually, when the Cold War ended in 1991, most Americans consigned nuclear weapons, along with the Soviet Union, to the dustbin of history. But that was a dangerous delusion. While the Soviet Union disappeared, its superpower arsenal certainly did not. Indeed, the half-life of plutonium is twenty-four thousand years, so nuclear weapons are likely to be with us for some time.

Current discussions of "punishing" Russia for interference in the 2016 presidential election, or "sanctioning" Russia for destabilizing eastern Ukraine, or "countering" Russian military deployments by stationing additional U.S. and NATO troops in the Baltics, fail to ask an elementary question from strategy 101: and then what? What will Russia do in response? And at the end of the sequence of actions and reactions, will Americans be safer than before? Bismarck warned against playing chess one move at a time.

In the high Cold War, Ronald Reagan knew that the Soviet Union was the "Evil Empire" and was determined to defeat it. At the same time, he recognized, as he frequently reminded fellow cold warriors, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

What that meant for U.S. strategy was profound. If, for whatever reason, America found itself in a general nuclear war with the Soviet Union, America would have completely destroyed the enemy and vice versa. This meant an overriding categorical imperative to ensure that a nuclear war would "never be fought."

If, for example, there were an accidental launch of nuclear weapons by either state, or either side should so severely misperceive or miscalculate the actions of the other that it stumbled into war, or there were a conventional war between the two that escalated to nuclear Armageddon, America would lose. If Russian leaders were to behave recklessly, as Khrushchev did in attempting to install nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, and that led to nuclear war, then moralists might seek consolation in blaming them, but the result for Washington would be a devastating loss.

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Technology, in effect, made Russia America's insufferable but inescapable Siamese twin. The strategic reality is even more horrific. However demonic, however destructive, however devious, however deserving of being strangled Russia is, the brute fact is that we cannot kill this bastard without committing suicide.

Cold War strategists learned that survival under these conditions necessitated shaping the competition around five Cs: caution, communication, constraints, compromise and cooperation. Recognition that even accidents could trigger a doomsday machine engendered caution. Communication in a deadly rivalry that magnifies misperceptions and misunderstandings is also a no-brainer. To paraphrase Paul Selva, the current vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the surest way to promote misunderstanding, whether in relations between individuals or in international affairs, is to cut off communication. Constraints on initiatives that one would otherwise take, especially in exercises of military force, were reflected both in tacit "rules of the status quo" and explicit arms-control agreements that emerged from bargaining, in which each party gave in order to get. Compromise--not only to achieve negotiated agreements, but in accepting (for an extended period) otherwise unacceptable facts (like Soviet domination of the captive nations of Eastern Europe)--was judged necessary to avoid direct conflict between large-scale military units that could escalate to the war that absolutely had to be avoided. And finally, this meant both tacit and explicit cooperation where each party could achieve more of what it wanted by working together than going it alone--including, for example, joint efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

President Obama came to office with grand ambitions to "reset" relations with Russia and diminish the role of nuclear weapons in international affairs. When he stepped down eight years later, U.S.-Russia relations were at their lowest ebb since the nadir of the Cold War, and the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in Europe had again become a topic of debate. While there can be no doubt that Putin deserves most of the blame for this outcome, the bottom line for Americans is whether they are safer now than eight years ago. Did Obama's policy of "demonizing Putin" induce better or, alternatively, worse behavior? By punishing Russia for its unacceptable aggression against Ukraine by cutting off all communication and cooperation with Russia--including joint actions to secure nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and other countries, and communication between commanders in Europe and the Middle East whose military forces were operating in close proximity--did Washington decrease or increase the level of risk?

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President Trump has an opportunity to make Americans safer by reversing these Obama initiatives and regrounding relations with Russia on the foundation of Cold War fundamentals.

Conrad Black

President Trump came to office believing that there are no great strategic issues that divide Russia and the United States, that there is no longer a great rivalry between them: Russia is not the superpower the Soviet Union was, having lost most of its population, all of its satellites and what was left of the mystique of Communism. He came to office believing that some rapprochement should be possible. The only serious problems were in Ukraine, which Russia fails to accept as entirely independent, and in Syria, where all agreed on the unacceptability of Islamist extremist movements, particularly ISIS, but the Russians and Iranians supported the Bashar al-Assad regime and the United States and its tepid European allies supported secular opponents of Assad and ISIS. The American response to Russia became entangled in its relations with China and with the Western alliance that had been largely allowed to crumble under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Trump's initial conception was to put pressure on NATO to become an alliance again, rather than a bunch of free riders in search of an American military guarantee, and to persuade the allies to pay their way; then to roll back the excessive concessions that had been made to Russia by Obama, especially the deferral of antimissile defenses for western Europe. The next stage in the sequence was effectively to trade Russian acceptance of the complete independence of Ukraine, and the Baltic and Caucasian former Soviet republics, in exchange for an end to sanctions and the Russian retention of Crimea and the sections of Georgia that Moscow seized in 2008--Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Trump would not attempt to incite democratic protests in Russia, and Russia would refrain from attempting to influence U.S. elections.

This seemed a reasonable and possibly attainable framework, but it quickly became mired in the spurious fabrication, spread by the Clinton and Obama Democrats and the Trump-hating media, that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin to rig the U.S. election. This must rank as the most inane charge ever to have been leveled at an American administration for over six months without being supported by a scintilla of evidence, but it has made it more difficult for the Trump administration to make real progress with Russia. That process was further complicated by Russia's tolerance of Assad's use of poison gas on Syrian civilians, in emulation of his late father. This led to President Obama's infamous "red line" fiasco. Trump sent a different message when he retaliated to a recurrence with fifty-nine cruise missiles against a Syrian air base.

The United States has also been working with Russia to replace Iran with Turkey as the local player in Syria and Iraq. The antics of the Recep Tayyip Erdogan regime have been almost as bumptious as Putin's, and such progress does not come quickly. The United States has no problem with a Russian naval base on the Mediterranean in Syria (and Russia is not a serious threat to the U.S. Navy), and whatever its irritation with Erdogan, the United States would like to get the thousands of Iran-backed militiamen out of Iraq and Syria, stop the Iranian pipeline of advanced war supplies to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and reduce Iranian influence in Iraq (the emergence of which was not the purpose for the immensely costly American occupation effort there).

The Western alliance--despite grumblings from defense-light, climate-change-frightened and Ukraine-averse Germans and others--is shaping up. Excellent relations seem to exist between Trump and the relatively new British, French and Canadian leaders. Putin has ceased trying to muscle Americans out of Syrian airspace, as he routinely did with Obama. U.S. goodwill is worth more to the Russians than any degree of friendliness with Iran, and Washington can extract a useful price for that goodwill. The gigantic canard about collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin cannot possibly preoccupy the American political arena much longer.

The greater complication is with China, which has sired the greatest problem: North Korea. The Democratic fantasy that China can easily be induced to defuse North Korea is of a piece with the delusional appeasement of Pyongyang...