'Understanding the other side’s perspective is not the same as accepting it .. those enduring factors shaping Russian national security policy and threat perceptions—strategic depth, a history of invasions from the west, and inherently difficult relations with other major European powers. Had these factors been taken into account, the discussion would have considered the much greater hard-security requirements associated with the commitment to defend the new members from external threats, including from Russia..
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Historically, dealing with the rest of Europe from a position of strength has been Russia’s overriding geopolitical priority. This remains the case and is likely be true for the indefinite future.
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Formulating an effective and sustainable response to Russia’s global posture will be challenging if virtually every action taken by the Kremlin is viewed as being zero-sum. Thus, a judicious approach to the task should rely on several key questions:
- How do Russian activities affect U.S. interests, foreign policy goals, and priorities? Do they compromise core or secondary U.S. interests?
- How successful has Russia been in advancing its objectives, interests, and priorities, and can these gains be sustained?
- How have different countries reacted to Russian activities? Have these fostered a greater desire for Russian engagement or stirred resentment and pushback?
- What tools and options does the United States have to confront Russia’s behavior in different regions when it is judged to be unacceptable?
- What are the costs, benefits, and potential risks and consequences of U.S. responses to Russia’s activism?
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..The United States can afford to view the manifestations of Russia’s renewed global activism on a case-by-case basis and respond judiciously and selectively, weighing the costs, benefits, and consequences of alternative responses.''A critical examination of U.S. policy misfires in dealing with Russia and its intentions and capabilities over the past several decades is long overdue. Three factors largely account for this problem. All of them continue to affect contemporary policymakers’ approach to a deeply troubled relationship with Moscow. By unpacking the analytical assumptions that underlie these misconceptions, President Joe Biden’s administration and other important policy players will be better equipped to ensure that U.S. policy going forward is grounded in the most realistic understanding of the challenge that Russia poses and the right kinds of tools that the United States should use to contend with it.
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Getting Russia right—assessing its capabilities and intentions, the long-term drivers of its policy and threat perceptions, as well as its accomplishments—is essential because the alternative of misreading them is a recipe for wasted resources, distorted national priorities, and increased risk of confrontation.
In responding to this challenge, it is important to set priorities and differentiate between primary and secondary interests. Europe is the principal theater of the East-West confrontation where Russian actions threaten Western security. Beyond Europe, Russia’s gains have been considerably less than often portrayed and pose a less serious challenge to U.S. interests.
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At the same time, the scope and scale of the threat that Russia’s global activism poses to U.S. interests will depend largely on how Washington defines those interests in regions where Russia has expanded its footprint over the past decade. Absent a sober assessment of Russia’s gains and tools for power projection, the United States will position itself to needlessly chase after the specter of Russian expansionism in distant corners of the world where major U.S. interests are not at stake.
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A more nuanced understanding of Russia’s geopolitical intentions and capabilities is needed. Exaggerating its military might and economic potential—and the Kremlin’s will to use these tools for coercive purposes—can lead to a waste of resources at best and a dangerous arms race and confrontation at worst. Conversely, underestimating Russia’s capabilities and its will to use them when, in the Kremlin’s view, this is warranted by what is at stake can lead to miscalculation and an escalation of tensions that also increases the risk of military conflict. It is equally important to understand those drivers of Russia’s policy that determine its resolve to use military force, especially in a crisis. Effective crisis management and de-escalation, risk reduction, and conflict prevention—which should be among the paramount goals of U.S. policy toward Russia—require a firm grasp of the sources of Russian conduct and the factors shaping it. These considerations can play a far more important role in determining the outcome of crises than simply counting the military hardware that Russia has at its disposal. In other words, understanding Moscow’s vantage point and how it defines Russian vital interests is just as important as calculating the military balance accurately. Understanding the other side’s perspective is not the same as accepting it.
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The paper builds on our recent study, in which we argue that Russian strategic culture is a product of the country’s long history of adversarial relations with other major European powers and its geography that lacks an effective barrier to check its expansionist impulses or shield it from external threats, and therefore underscores the value of strategic depth as a measure of its security..
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The United States misreading the Soviet/Russian threat has a long history dating back to the outset of the Cold War. The history of that confrontation is rich in episodes when the two superpowers stepped closer to the brink due to their misreading and misunderstanding of the other side. The misreading of the Soviet threat was made worse by the closed and secretive nature of the Soviet state.
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Over time, and especially after the Cold War ended, declassified documents provided ample evidence that reports of Soviet strength had often been exaggerated.
Exaggeration in assessing adversary strength is a common phenomenon, especially when one confronts a country that is not easily accessible to outsiders, intent on concealing its capabilities, belligerent, and guided by a seemingly powerful and all-encompassing ideology. It was not unreasonable to conclude that a country that allocated far more resources to guns at the expense of butter was indeed committed to nefarious goals. Planning on the basis of worst-case scenarios was prudent when dealing with such a potent and apparently ideologically driven and hostile adversary. But Soviet military capabilities and posture needed to be considered in the context of factors that have long shaped and guided Soviet and Russian defense policy and threat perceptions. Key among these are the quest for strategic depth coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of the homeland and an adversarial relationship with and sense of inferiority vis-à-vis Europe.
While the history of the Cold War is punctuated by many crises in which U.S. misperceptions of Soviet intentions and capabilities threatened to result in a military clash, two major ones stand out because they brought the superpowers and the rest of the world to the brink of nuclear war. The first was the relatively brief but dramatic Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the second was the much more protracted Euromissile crisis of the early 1980s..
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It is easy to overlook the lessons of those crises since they ended peacefully and, in the case of the Euromissile crisis, contributed to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was a victory for NATO, won without firing a single shot. In retrospect, however, their lessons should have been given much greater weight when the alliance began its post–Cold War chapter and took on the challenge of transforming the security of the whole of Europe. Unfortunately, those two lessons—namely, enduring Russian perceptions of an existential threat from the West, driven by history and geography, and the lengths to which Russia’s leaders were prepared to go to defend the homeland, including eliminating a whole class of weapons..
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..Spurred into action by the tragedy of the September 11 terror attacks, Washington articulated ambitious plans for a web of bases around the world to prosecute the war on terror, including some in the former Soviet states. Again, an unhappy Russia was unable to do anything to stop those plans.
The perception of Russian weakness, however, proved to be misguided. It fed the erroneous view among U.S. policymakers that Russia’s power was not a force to be reckoned with and that the long-standing security concerns of generations of its leaders and drivers of its security policy— including those that shaped its posture in the Cuban missile crisis and the Euromissile crisis—would no longer apply .. those enduring factors shaping Russian national security policy and threat perceptions—strategic depth, a history of invasions from the west, and inherently difficult relations with other major European powers. Had these factors been taken into account, the discussion would have considered the much greater hard-security requirements associated with the commitment to defend the new members from external threats, including from Russia. Taking Russia’s weakness as the “new normal” would prove to have far-reaching consequences for European security.
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..the sudden collapse of Russia as a military power in the 1990s had blinded the U.S. national security community to the real possibility that Russia would be able to reconstitute its military capabilities and return to policies guided by long-standing security requirements and threat perceptions.
Had the possibility of Russia’s military comeback been treated as a more realistic prospect, NATO enlargement would have been undertaken with much greater attention paid to the mission of territorial defense considered by some in the early 1990s a “strategic luxury,” without exposing its newest members in the Baltic region to the threat from the east .. Russia’s hybrid arsenal—backed up by its conventional and formidable nuclear capabilities—will remain its principal tool deployed against the United States and its NATO allies, and thus a major threat to their security.
The ills and failings of Russia’s economy are well known .. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the country as an economic basket case and underestimate its resilience .. Thanks to fiscal austerity, Russia has not only avoided major downturns and generated over $500 billion in total reserves, but also paid for the military to continue to upgrade its arsenal and operate in a handful of conflict zones. After seven years of mounting pressure, the unexpected resiliency of the economy has enabled the leadership to stay the course and even escalate its confrontation with the West.
The disappearance of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union does not mean that the ideas that animated their expansionist policies for centuries vanished with them. The history of the Russian state is one of geographic expansion driven by a mix of considerations—economic growth, defense of the homeland from encroachment by other major powers, protection against threats to the regime, religion, and the ambitions of the country’s rulers.
The leaders of post-Soviet Russia inherited a powerful legacy of difficult relations with every neighboring country. Unlike the United States, which has long enjoyed peaceful borders if not always harmonious relations with its immediate and weaker neighbors to the north and south, Russia does not have a relationship with a single neighbor that can be described as harmonious. Some relationships are better than others, but all of them—from that with Norway in the Far North to that with China in the Far East—are marred by histories of imperial conquests, territorial disputes, and ideological or religious tensions.
The end of the Soviet Union was so swift and so complete that it allowed Russia little time for reflection about the right historical and ideological foundations upon which to build its new foreign policy. There was no precedent in its history for anything other than the pursuit of an empire in one form or another. It was the only foundation that Russian foreign policy could easily fall back on, especially as the transition to democracy and markets at home proved exceedingly painful and disruptive. Moreover, in geographic terms the transition entailed the country’s rollback to frontiers that it had not been confined to not just in decades, but in centuries.
As a result, the post-Soviet transition did little to change some of the most powerful and enduring drivers of Russian foreign policy. Key among them is the geography of the western frontier, which offers neither a meaningful barrier to its expansionist impulses nor a reliable defense against threats to the homeland. The principal feature of foreign policy since the days of Peter the Great, when Russia became an integral part of European geopolitics, has been the struggle for control of the flat and open terrain between Moscow and Berlin. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had achieved the greatest geographic security the state had ever enjoyed in its history. The loss of that strategic depth at the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union resulted in the rekindling of Russia’s long-standing insecurities.
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For the current generation of Russians in charge of foreign policy the dissolution of the Soviet Union was indeed the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century, as Putin famously stated. They are the children of the Soviet Union’s “greatest generation” that through incredible sacrifice had won the Great Patriotic War, as the Second World War is known in the country. They grew up in a country that was recovering from the trauma of war yet managed to conquer space, to build a military that was second to none, and to maintain a great empire. The system was good to them; they had promising careers in the security services—the elite institutions of the old regime—and the prospect of promising careers. The ideas that the old system was built on had delivered for them. Then, after that system suddenly collapsed, ideas imposed by countries that throughout their careers had been their adversaries failed miserably as Russia struggled to survive the 1990s. The alternative—authoritarian politics, limited personal freedoms, and state capitalism—was obvious to them.
Having seen the benefits of a market economy, Russia’s leaders had little incentive to go back to socialism and central planning. But they had little incentive to allow such elements of the new ideology as free elections and the rule of law to stand in the way of their ability to extract rents from the economy. The result is a hybrid system that combines elements of the free market with authoritarian politics and hostility to the West, fears of encirclement, Soviet nostalgia, and above all a sense of entitlement to its security rooted in the suffering and sacrifice of another generation.
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Over the past decade, Russia’s foreign policy has become increasingly assertive and adversarial, constituting a multidimensional effort to expand its global influence at the expense of the United States and other Western countries. This has been animated by several objectives. The most important are: undermining democracy in the United States and Europe; delivering further blows to the U.S.-led liberal international order and creating a multipolar one; fracturing Western political and security institutions; demonstrating Russia’s return as a global superpower; bolstering Putin’s domestic legitimacy; defending Russia’s sphere of privileged interests in its “near abroad”; and promoting Russian commercial, military, and energy interests.
It would be an exaggeration, however, to say that Russia’s foreign activities follow a well-conceived and systematic strategy; to the contrary, its actions have been frequently opportunistic. It has taken advantage of U.S. and Western missteps and growing antiestablishment, populist, and nationalist sentiments in Europe and North America. Over the past four years, it has also capitalized on U.S. retrenchment and the power vacuums caused by former president Donald Trump’s “America first” foreign policy. Russia’s global activities are not the root cause of the political, economic, and social problems confronting other countries, but it is determined to capitalize on them to the detriment of U.S. interests.
For several reasons, Russia’s assertiveness will remain an enduring challenge for the United States. First, it has employed relatively inexpensive diplomatic, military, intelligence, cyber, trade, energy, and financial tools to wield influence and expand its global footprint. Second, the Kremlin has been generally successful in managing the economic costs (for example, Western sanctions) of its foreign transgressions while garnering some benefits. Third, Putin’s nationalist agenda and the anti-Western orientation enjoy widespread support among Russian elites and a large swath of the Russian public. Finally, the Kremlin is likely, largely for domestic political reasons, to up the ante in response to efforts by the administration of President Joe Biden to push back against Russian expansionism, subversion, disinformation, and human rights abuses.
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..Russia and the regional institutions it has created—such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and the EAEU—are not set up to tackle the major problems afflicting all countries in both regions—including poor governance, corruption, lack of accountability, transparency and the rule of law, and poverty and economic underdevelopment. What is more, Moscow has shown little interest in helping them.
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Historically, dealing with the rest of Europe from a position of strength has been Russia’s overriding geopolitical priority. This remains the case and is likely be true for the indefinite future..
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Russia’s poor relationship with Europe is not a surprise. The EU’s expansion posed a major ideological challenge to it. The union was founded on democratic ideals and shared European values—alien ideas to a country where those values have never taken hold either in its politics or society. In fact, for most of its history, Russia’s relationship with the rest of Europe has been one of ideological differences and rejection of each other’s values..
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Formulating an effective and sustainable response to Russia’s global posture will be challenging if virtually every action taken by the Kremlin is viewed as being zero-sum. Thus, a judicious approach to the task should rely on several key questions:
- How do Russian activities affect U.S. interests, foreign policy goals, and priorities? Do they compromise core or secondary U.S. interests?
- How successful has Russia been in advancing its objectives, interests, and priorities, and can these gains be sustained?
- How have different countries reacted to Russian activities? Have these fostered a greater desire for Russian engagement or stirred resentment and pushback?
- What tools and options does the United States have to confront Russia’s behavior in different regions when it is judged to be unacceptable?
- What are the costs, benefits, and potential risks and consequences of U.S. responses to Russia’s activism?
Russia will continue to occupy a prominent place on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Its vast size and position on the Eurasian continent, energy resources, proximity to U.S. allies in Europe and Asia conventional and nuclear capabilities, geopolitical ambitions, and relatively low-cost tools for projecting influence ensure that it will retain the capacity to sustain a position on the world stage that the United States cannot afford to ignore. But in responding to this challenge, it is important to avoid acting on the impulse to push back against every instance of Russian activism and instead to proceed in pursuit of priorities based on a sober assessment of Russian motivations and capabilities. Europe is the most important theater where Russia’s actions pose the most significant threats to the United States and its allies. Its ambitions in many other parts of the world—the Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Western Hemisphere, the Arctic, and even the states of the former Soviet Union—pose less serious concerns because they have little impact on core U.S. interests of security or economic prosperity, and in many cases could lead to Russia’s overextension.
The adversarial character of the U.S.-Russian relationship will persist for many years, driven by conflicting interests, values, and conceptions of global order. Because both countries engage in global pursuits, they are bound to cross paths in various parts of the world. It is critical that they manage their competition to mitigate the risk of conflict. As two noted experts have observed, the two powers are not locked into a zero-sum existential contest for global geopolitical and ideological dominance. The United States can afford to view the manifestations of Russia’s renewed global activism on a case-by-case basis and respond judiciously and selectively, weighing the costs, benefits, and consequences of alternative responses.'
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Grand Illusions: The Impact of Misperceptions About Russia on U.S. Policy, June 30, 2021
Context'Russia is a problem to be managed pragmatically and with coolheaded realism.''..Russia would continue its centuries-long attractive-repulsive relationship with the West..''..Putin’s Russia .. feudalism..' - '..The Byzantine choice was fundamental in the evolution of Russian society and state compared to Western Europe..''..Archduke Otto .. warned .. Russian imperialism .. conquering Ukraine, folding it into Russia and using it as a platform for further major operations in Europe..' - Prince Michael of Liechtenstein(Ukraine) - 'We needed 40 years to overcome East Germany .. be prepared for the long haul..' - Angela MerkelUkraine - '..Insofar as we wish for peace and democracy, we are going to have to begin by getting the story right.''I have said it so often: if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West.' - Václav HavelTo Nikolai Patrushev: '[Gaidar] warns Russia..'(Russia) - 'The new National Security Concept .. the most primitive Soviet ideological vocabulary..', 2021
(2021-2030) - EU Action Plan: “Towards Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil”Holacracy – ‘..to fully harness the power of every human sensor..’Estimate: October, 2025 – Safire Plasma (fusion) Reactors commercially available – Abundance