Are Russia’s relations with America at their worst point since the Cold War?
Nations increase military spending
The Washington Post
It may still be far from the depths of the Cold War, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Thursday speech, outlining new, “invincible” weapons to overcome U.S. defenses, lowered the already chilly temperature of the relationship by several degrees.
Few experts on either side believe that the new weapons, assuming they actually exist and are ever deployed, would change the balance of power between two nations that already have the ability to destroy each other many times over.
At the same time, there is widespread agreement that the rhetorical attacks, stalled diplomacy and military escalation that increasingly characterize U.S.-Russia relations are counterproductive to global security.
“Giving half the time in the annual address to the Russian parliament to a graphic description of new weapons’ capabilities is a measure of how close the U.S. and Russia have moved toward military collision,” Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Twitter. “For the foreseeable future, it looks that the U.S.-Russia agenda willbe limited to just one item: war prevention. Good luck to usall.”
Russia and the United States have a lot to talk about, on such topics as arms control, cyber-intrusions, Ukraine, Syria and beyond. But there are no easy answers on how to break what appears to be an inexorable slide into a deeper freeze and little optimism of dialogue soon.
“The tension level is high, higher now than it was several months ago, in part because the Russians have gotten past the phase where they thought with President Donald Trump they would be able to move the relationship in a different direction,” said Thomas Graham, senior director for Russia on the George W. Bush National Security Council staff and now managing director at Kissinger Associates Inc.
“This is qualitatively worse than any post-Cold War period,” Mr. Graham said.
Mr. Trump appears to be the only senior member of his administration who still believes in a thaw. He has praised Mr. Putin’s honesty and directness after meeting with him in person and recalled his own campaign aspirations for closer ties. He has yet to take a stand against the election interference that U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed, largely because he fears it will undercut his own legitimacy, according to administration officials.
But as he has failed to move relations forward, “the Russians basically see the Trump administration as a lost cause,” said Andrew Weiss, who held senior Russia policy positions during both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and is now vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“On the one hand, [the administration] is mired in this intense political crisis,” in part over allegations of Trump campaign ties to Moscow. “On the other hand, it’s got this obvious level of dysfunction and incoherence. Trump is saying only nice things about Russia,” Mr. Weiss said, while “the national security cabinet around him has pretty mainstream views of Russia as an adversary.”
U.S. defense officials have consistently cited Russia as the most significant strategic threat to the United States, and the primary reason to build up its defense budget. Gen. John Hyten, who leads U.S. Strategic Command, said in a speech Wednesday that Russia poses “the only existential threat to the country.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said that there will be no warming of relations with Russia until it abandons its 2014 annexation of Crimea, something Russia has vowed never to do. The administration has reversed an Obama-era prohibition against providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military. In the first major implementation of that decision, it notified Congress on Thursday of plans to sell 210 antitank missiles to Ukraine.
Mr. Tillerson has also come down increasingly hard on Russia for failing to control the attacks against civilians by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad that it supports.
Russia not only is providing air cover for the regime but also is “responsible” for Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Mr. Tillerson has said on numerous occasions. “They can deny it all they want to, but facts are facts,” he told Fox News last month.
Both the United States and Russia have now outlined expansions of their nuclear arsenals, and it remains unclear whether New START, the primary arms-reduction treaty in effect between the two, will remain viable beyond its expiration date of 2021. Each has also charged the other with violations of the Intermediate-Range NuclearForces Treaty.
As both have rapidly increased their defense budgets, “this is a time when there ought to be some serious conversations about arms control,” said Steven Pifer, a Russia expert during 25 years as a Foreign Service officer and now senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.