On January 25, 2017, the Valdai Discussion Club held an expert discussion about the international challenges of 2017 together with the presentation of the report titled "International challenges-2017. Forecast of threats to international security and stability ", prepared by the Moscow-based Foreign Policy analytical agency.
The event moderator, Dmitry Suslov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club, introduced the report, discussing major shifts of 2017, including the Donald Trump presidency, which has proven to be resolute in its campaign promises, even as far as the possibility of preventive nuclear strikes.
Andrey Sushentsov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club and head of the Foreign Policy agency, began by discussing the methodology of the report, in which he compared foreign policy to driving a car on a busy highway in a snowstorm in the limitations in terms of views and unpredictability of the other actors.
Sushentsov also explained how the report was prepared, through brainstorms that limited the report to 12 major issues that Russia would face in 2017 and forecasts, one of which is the possibility of a Russian-Japanese peace treaty and resolution of the Kuril Islands issue. The authors also gave some markers for the possibility of such an event.
Andrey Bezrukov, Associate Professor at the Russian Foreign Ministry's Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), talked about the cyclical model of economic paradigms, repeating the key theses he presented at the Donald Trump report presentation. He noted that Trump is currently breaking the old US political system, which has become unable to solve key issues, shifting the conversation to identity politics instead.
He added that under a Clinton presidency, the US elite would have rotted and fallen like an overripe fruit, with a new elite taking over without the fight being seen now. Bezrukov also gave a prediction of four scenarios along a compass with axes of economic success vs failure and cooperation vs. confrontation.
Sushentsov, in turn, gave major factors for normalization of US-Russian relations, for which there are several important prerequisites, such as the United States’ strategic vision of the world in 2040, as well as the end of the proxy conflict in Syria, which is not very possible, according to the report. On the issue of sanctions, Sushentsov noted that the issue may begin to be resolved in early 2018. He noted that BRICS will continue to lose importance, Iraq will remain unstable, the migrant crisis will continue to worsen, Afghanistan will remain stable, while Saudi Arabia is expected to destabilize. In the post-Soviet space, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not expected to be settled while Ukraine will remain socio-politically stable, although Western countries will increasingly see it as a liability, rather than an asset.
Nikolai Silaev, senior fellow at the MGIMO Institute of International Studies, a co-author of the report, explained the report’s views on the post-Soviet space. He noted that Russia has been able to move confrontations farther away from its borders. He added that Russia has been able to solve many issues, such as the possibility of Ukraine or Georgia joining NATO, although the settlement cost human lives and is not enforced by international law. In Nagorno-Karabakh, where a conflict flared up in 2016, Russia has been able to prevent a war with diplomatic intervention. A similar situation took place with regards to Ukraine, which has been left out of US-Russian relations, and does not drive any current political issues outside itself.
He also noted that Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet space is more conservative than that of the US, and that the West may eventually take a similar approach. This, in turn, may cause post-Soviet republics to gain agency, which they did not have when they were simply seeking to join different unions, such as NATO or the EU.
