Resisting Russia.

• Author: Herbst, John E.

As surely as geese fly south every autumn, the arrival of a new American president resounds with calls for a new policy toward Moscow. To be sure, there have been mistakes in the policies of our past two presidents toward the Kremlin. President Barack Obama thought that he could diminish the national security dangers emanating from Moscow by declaring Russia a mere regional power and naively suggesting that its aggression in Ukraine was a European problem. President Donald Trump seemed to think that burrowing his head in the sand would somehow protect the United States from Kremlin cyberattacks or election interference. There is a certain logic to taking a fresh look at our policy towards the Kremlin as the new administration's foreign policy team takes up its duties.

Our relationship with Moscow is a tense one. One school argues that difficult U.S.-Russian relations are dangerous because Russia, as our only nuclear peer, has the unique capability to annihilate the United States. Therefore, they argue that we must take a new approach based on dialogue and a new effort to "understand" Russia.

This position was argued by a distinguished group of former senior officials and experts in Politico last August.

It is always important, whether dealing with friend or foe, to understand major powers. The right policy towards Russia begins with a true understanding of the country--its capabilities and its intentions. As for its capabilities, besides being one of two nuclear superpowers, Russia has by far the strongest conventional military in Europe and vies with China for having the second most powerful conventional military in the world. Russia also boasts a significant military cyber capacity. But Russia's economy, while ranking eleventh in GNP, has been sputtering for the last decade, and its relatively large GNP is based principally on natural resources. Massive corruption from the top and substantial capital flight explain this. Russia is a power in decline, but with great military capability.

But the importance of this decline should neither be exaggerated nor minimized, which brings us to the matter of the Kremlin's intentions. Since his truculent speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, President Vladimir Putin has not hidden his objectives. He believes that the Kremlin got a raw deal in the new security system that emerged at the end of the Cold War, even though Moscow signed the international agreements that defined it. The...