The Paradoxes of Russian-US Relations

According to Valdai Club Programme Director Andrey Sushentsov, Russian-US relations will remain tense. We are unlikely to see any breakthroughs or signals that relations are returning to their conventional norm. To a degree, all of us will be hostage to the domestic political situation in the US, which will remain tense at least until next November’s midterm congressional elections.

The current situation in Russian-US relations can be described as the most complex since the end of the Cold War. While the two countries are divided by profound differences over Ukraine and Syria, US unilateral use of force, arms limitation and ABM systems deployment in Europe, both presidents are prepared for a constructive dialogue in order to try and extricate the relationship from the deep morass it is currently in.

President Putin’s answer to a question about the character of Donald Trump and his unpredictability, asked during the Valdai meeting in Sochi, was very telling in this respect. He said that the problem was not the supposed unpredictability of Mr. Trump but the political system that surrounds him and prevents him from pursuing a constructive line in relations with Russia. In other words, Trump is essentially paralyzed by the internal political crisis currently gripping the United States. Despite the readiness at the highest level to engage in dialogue and decision-making, the US president’s hands are tied when it comes to taking initiative in relations with Russia. Any achievements at this stage will most likely be reversed and fail to produce constructive long-term effects in bilateral relations.

The US is suffering from a bad case of anti-Russian fear and paranoia linked to allegations of Russian interference in the US presidential election in 2016. It is clear that the scandal is being fomented by the Clinton camp that lost the election. The first allegation that Trump owes his victory to collusion with Russia was made by the Clinton campaign within 24 hours of the Democratic defeat.  Today it has assumed an absolutely unprecedented scale, with the media hysteria and public fears creating not just a difficult situation for normal contacts but an insurmountable obstacle to dialogue.

As the US coverage of the Putin-Trump meeting at the APEC summit in Vietnam made clear, any contact, any conversation, even an exchange of pleasantries is perceived in the US as well-nigh a betrayal of national interests. 

Of course, this scandal will subside over time. Nine months since it began in earnest, no real evidence of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russian officials or a hacker attack allegedly supported by the Russian government has been produced.

All of this is creating a situation that is very tangled and ambiguous. It includes many superficial, false, contrived and questionable elements, with many people believing that this illusory environment is the main thing and a new constant in Russia-US relations.

But along with this uncertainty, vagueness and complexity, there is a number of objective tendencies that make Russia-US relations highly complicated and form the foundation of what could be called insurmountable differences. This primarily refers to the rearmament program that the US is actively discussing and will, in all evidence, implement in the coming years. Among other things, it involves modernization of the US strategic nuclear weapons. In the worse-case scenario, this means a new arms race between the United States and Russia, which is likely to be joined by China, resulting in the collapse of the strategic arms limitation regime.

The US is discussing withdrawing from the INF Treaty. A provision in the Pentagon budget for 2018 says directly that the exit should take place within 18 months. This step may have long-term consequences that will not only affect Russia-US relations but cause a wave of rearmament in other important countries seeking to possess the most advanced cutting-edge weapons.

At the same time, the APEC summit and the brief meetings between the two presidents resulted in the coordination of a joint statement on Syria that emphasized their shared intention to fight Daesh until it is completely defeated and outlined the next steps for Syrian reconstruction and bilateral cooperation in this area. This is a real achievement, a political and diplomatic affirmation of the work done by both countries’ diplomats and military officials over the last few years. But this is still infinitesimal against the background of other issues on the Russia-US agenda.

Hopefully, the appointment of new ambassadors in Washington and in Moscow – Jon Huntsman and Anatoly Antonov – a new State Department official to oversee Eastern Europe and Russia affairs, and a special US representative for Ukraine will create some constructive dynamism in US-Russia relations, which are, in effect, frozen. But no quick fixes are in the cards and all short-term forecasts are surely negative. We are unlikely to see any breakthroughs or signals that relations are returning to their conventional norm. To a degree, all of us will be hostage to the domestic political situation in the US, which will remain tense at least until next November’s midterm congressional elections. This state of affairs may persist even after November. If the Democrats manage to regain control of both houses of Congress, they may attempt to impeach the president, further complicating US-Russia relations.          

Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.