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Dr. Andrew Pace
Welcome to the New Books Network. Winston Churchill once said that forecasting Russia's behavior was a riddle Russian wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. That saying seems to be as true now as ever. However, a new book offers an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft and provides suggestions for how the United States can get Russia right. Hello and welcome back to New Books in Diplomatic History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Dr. Andrew Pace, the host of the channel. Our guest today is Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. And today we're talking about his new book, Getting Russia Right, which was published in 2023 by Polity Press. Tom, welcome to the show.
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Thomas Graham
Glad to be with you today.
- [02:03]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Tom, you've had a lifetime of professional experience working on U.S. russian relations. You've worked in the State and Defense Departments as a political officer at the American Embassy in Moscow for seven years, both before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. You've served as the Senior Director for Russia, I understand, on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. What sparked your lifelong fascination with Russia and what motivated you to write this book?
- [02:37]
Thomas Graham
Well, look, in many ways I'm a child of the Cold War. What sparked my interest in Russia was Sputnik 1957, you know, the first artificial earth satellite launched by the Soviet Union at that point. That created a lot of concern in the United States about our ability to compete effectively against what was seen as an ideological rival and geopolitical rival to the United States at that point. Now, I was only about six or seven years old at that time, so all this was new to me. But you could still sense from the conversations that the adults were having, my parents with others, that there was. There were certain concern about the trajectory of our country and this competition with the Soviet Union. So that's what sparked my interest, and I began reading about the Soviet Union at that point. It was a fortuitous time. The first exchange programs between the United States and the Soviet Union were opening up at that point. So people were writing their firsthand impressions of the. The. Of their travels to the Soviet Union. So I read a lot of that, and then I had the good fortune of going to the. One of the first high schools in the United States in Princeton, New Jersey, that offered Russian as a foreign language. So I started learning the Russian language when I was 13 years old, and then it took off after that. So I continued through college, got a degree in Russian studies, graduate school, and then moved into the professional world, largely with the State Department initially. So the interest has been lifelong. I've been doing this since I've been six or seven years old. It's been a great experience because, in fact, my work has been my avocation. So it never really felt like real work.
- [04:37]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Well, and there's certainly renewed public interest in Russia today with the current war going on in Ukraine. And you have noted that Russia's invasion In February of 2022 was a day of reckoning, obviously, for Russia and Ukraine and the west, but also for Russia experts like yourself, who perhaps saw many of these events unfolding, but believed that Vladimir Putin might take a less fateful route.
- [05:14]
Thomas Graham
Well, you're being kind. I mean, you know, we got it wrong, many of us, because we didn't anticipate the massive invasion. You know, for my part, I saw the growing tension. I assumed that President Putin would be more cautious in his approach. So I thought he would use military force, but he would pursue it more through salami tactics. Let me see. I'll send some troops in, we'll occupy some territory, see what reaction we get out of the west. And if we don't get real pushback, then we'll proceed a little bit further. And instead, what we got is a massive invasion. Now, that turned out to be the wrong choice on the part of President Putin, as we saw in the first months of that conflict. He expected this to be a blitzkrieg. We're now three and a half years into a war of attrition. We may be seeing the outlines of an end game, but certainly this has lasted much longer than Putin had anticipated, with consequences that are going to be much more dire for Russia in the years ahead. Now, you asked before why I decided to write the book. Well, to some extent, this invasion was a spur to do that, but this really was, I think, driven by my own conclusion that we had gotten a lot wrong about Russia. You know, I remember because I was actively engaged in the government at that point. Sort of the hopes and aspirations we had with the end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the possibilities for partnership between the United States and Russia. And clearly it didn't turn out that way. So, you know, what went wrong? Why didn't we achieve the goals that we had set out for ourselves? That was coupled with my firm conviction that Russia is going to remain a major power on the global stage. So we can't ignore it. So the question is, what are the lessons that we can draw from the past 30 years that will help us build not a strategic partnership with Russia, but a relationship, one that I call sort of competitive coexistence, that allows us to deal with with the challenges Russia presents us in a constructive fashion, allows us to take advantage of the opportunities for cooperation that might emerge, and do this in a way that advances American national interest with the least risk of a direct military confrontation between two nuclear armed powers, which would be catastrophic for us, catastrophic for Russia, and catastrophic for the rest of the world.
- [08:11]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Can you briefly just tell us where Russia, where relations currently stand with Russia? There's. There's a lot of anxiety or supposition, I guess, that we are in the midst of Cold War 2.0.
- [08:28]
Thomas Graham
What.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
What do you think about that?
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Thomas Graham
Well, you know, I've never liked the idea of Cold War 2.0, in part because the world has changed dramatically over the past, over the past 30 years. Remember, I mean, the original Cold War was an existential struggle, a strategic struggle and ideological struggle between two countries that did not share the basic fundamental views about how the world should operate, fundamental views about the relationship between the individual and the state and society. For example, the Cold War was a time when the Soviet Union was the great other superpower in the world. That's not where we are today. Our major strategic challenge, as I think President Trump has said, as President Biden said before, as President Obama suggested well over a decade ago, is China. And China poses a challenge to us across the full range of power, whether it be military, strategic, economic, diplomatic, and so forth. And Russia is an important player, but not the central focus of American foreign policy. I also think if you think in terms of Cold War 2.0, then your policy framework goes back to containment, which was the guiding principle of the Cold War. The. And one of the arguments that I make in the book is that given the nature of the global environment that we are facing now that we're going to face in the year ahead, where there are going to be multiple centers of power, the goal is not simply to contain Russia. The goal is to try to figure out how you construct a relationship with Russia that advances American interest across a wide range of interest. Russia, on some scenarios, could be an important element of our strategy for dealing with China. If we're going to think, if we're going to deal with the issues of climate change, for example, you can't do that without some form of cooperation with Russia, given its role as a large emitter of greenhouse gases. And so containment really is inadequate to the challenges we're going to face in the year ahead. And therefore, I like to think more of this as a great power competition, something that the world has seen for centuries. And the question becomes, how do you manage a great power rivalry in ways that, that protect your vital interest, allow you to advance certain goals on the global stage? And particularly when you're dealing in a global environment where there are multiple major powers, how do you fashion that equilibrium that we need in order to stabilize global affairs and provide a foundation for American security and prosperity going forward?
- [11:44]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And one of the key sort of questions here is, how did we get to this point? How did American Russian relations deteriorate to this level? And you have gone back almost 35 years now to the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the United States tried to integrate Russia into the west, into the Euro Atlantic community. There was this question for American policymakers when the Cold War ended about what do we do with Russia now? What are our relations with this state now that the geopolitical and ideological dimensions of the Cold War have disappeared? But why did U.S. officials try to integrate Russia? Why did they believe that a country, as you say, with a long autocratic tradition could successfully transition to a free market democracy?
- [12:44]
Thomas Graham
Well, you know, it's difficult to sort of put yourself in the intellectual atmosphere, political atmosphere of the Last days of the Cold War, the first years of the post Cold War period. But, you know, certainly there was a widely held view within the American, not only political establishment, I think largely across an American society, who. That the 20th century had been this great titanic struggle among competing fascism, communism, liberal Western democracy. And what the end of the Cold War demonstrated, coming about half a century after the crushing defeat of fascism in the Second World War, was that Western liberal democracy had come out on top, that this was the political model, the economic model that laid the foundation for prosperity in the years ahead. And that any country that wanted to succeed would have to adopt the basic set of parameters or principles of liberal Western democracy. Add on to that that there had been what one academician called the third wave of democratization occurring at that time. The liberation of the Portuguese colonies in Africa in particular, spread through Latin America, was moving into the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War. And then you add on that globalization, which was just gaining speed at that time, and this was. Globalization was really a projection of the American political model, the American economic model across the globe. For all those reasons, you know, the assumption was that Russia would move in this direction. There were certain Russian leaders that were articulating views that were consistent with that. So we tended to latch on to them and ignore sort of a vast part of the Russian society, including parts of the elite that wanted to move in a different direction. So intellectually we want to. We thought that this was the way the world was going to develop then. There's an interesting psychological element to this, and that is, how do you actually win a war? How do you win a Cold War? Go back and look at the Second World War and the end of the Second World War. Our victory wasn't so much in crushing the armies of Japan and Germany at that time. We won when the Japanese and the Germans adopted our political system, right. Our model, that was the real vindication, acknowledging that ours was a superior system. And so psychologically, we wanted the Russians to do the same thing, adopt our model, our model. This is the real vindication. This is the real validation of the worth of the American system on the global stage. The. So you put together sort of this intellectual exercise, the psychological need. And so the policy is focused on how do we integrate Russia into the Euro Atlantic community and the.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Well, I guess before I jump to that, you have said that you think integration was doomed from the start. Why do you think that?
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Thomas Graham
Well, because Russia had a different idea of itself, right? And what if. And its role on the global stage, You Know, you know, we were very much focused on changing Russia. You know, here's a country that had an autocratic system, goes back centuries, really didn't, if you looked at this objectively, didn't have the building blocks of a democratic, a Western style democratic system. And we thought through our engagement with Russia, we would change it, move it away, create this radical break with its history. The Russian political elites, by and large, despite a very small segment that were sort of mouthing this rhetoric about democratic transition, really thought of the country as a great power. They recognized that they had been weakened by the Cold War, but what they were focused on was restoring their power, being accepted once again as a great power on the global stage. Add to that also the psychological element is the Russians, contrary to many people in the west, thought that they had played a major role in bringing about the end of the Cold War. This wasn't really a defeat. This was Russian people rising up against Marxism, Leninism and ideology that had eroded their power, diminished their living standards. And they thought they should have been accepted as one of the victors of the Cold War and, and that the west should have expressed gratitude for that and then treated them not as a, as a student that had to learn the ways of a democratic system, but as a country with which the United States should be willing to partner in order to, in their sense, manage, manage global affairs across the full range of issues that were at the, on the, on the international agenda at the end of the Cold War. So we wanted to change Russia. Russia wanted to restore its power. That's the fundamental, I think, contradiction. And you see that play itself out in the, certainly in the 1990s. That accelerates in the 2000s after Putin becomes the top Russian leader.
- [18:57]
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- [19:54]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Yeah, and since the breakup of the ussr, you've pointed out that US Officials have had very little respect for Russian power. They've treated Russia like a power in decline. In fact, one of the labels that was thrown around was Americans sometimes referred to Russia as upper volta with nukes. Why, why were U. S. Officials so dismissive of Russian power?
- [20:21]
Thomas Graham
Well, look, I mean, Certainly in the 1990s, there was a factual basis for that. You know, the Russian economy did for all practical purposes, collapse in the 1990s. If you look at the decline in GDP, probably 60% from 1991 to 1998, this Red army that had struck fear in the hearts of many people throughout the cold war largely disintegrated. You know, I remember traveling to Moscow in the, in the early 1990s, and you would see soldiers begging on the streets, officers moonlighting as taxi drivers because they couldn't, they couldn't survive elsewhere. And so, you know, in many ways, in the 1990s, Russia suffered a socioeconomic crisis, political crisis that was unprecedented for a great power not defeated in a great shooting war. And so there was some objective foundation for this, for this view on the part of the American leadership. When we get to the 2000s, however, you begin to see revival of the Russian economy. Part of this is because of Putin's efforts to restore some order in the system, to rebuild the sinews of the Russian state. And Russia does become more active on the global stage there. I think it was, in many ways it was a reflection of American hubris. You know, we had still, you know, our 1990s actually were quite different. A very long period of economic expansion, growing influence around the world. And so even as Russia began to revolution, revive, it was this, I think, overweening confidence in the ability of the United States to dominate Russia, to push it in ways that were, from our standpoint, advantageous to the United States. So I think a tendency to downplay or disrespect Russia's power and potential power. And that clearly didn't sit well with Vladimir Putin, but also with a lot of other members of the Russian political class.
- [23:02]
Dr. Andrew Pace
So what that means is that Russia today is both stronger than we think, but also in some ways weaker than we think. Kind of occupies this paradoxical status, I guess. But what do you see as the advantages or disadvantages, you know, the strengths and weaknesses of Russian power?
- [23:25]
Thomas Graham
Well, look, I mean, it is quite clear that Russia faces formal economic problems going forward that have been exacerbated by its war against Ukraine. Russia is not investing what it should in cutting it, cutting edge technology. If the goal is to remain competitive well into the 21st century. It has, I think, create an environment which is hard to innovate, and that is also going to be a problem for Russia going forward. So there are serious economic challenges. You know, all that said, this is still a country that has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It is still a country that maybe it's not on the cutting edge of technology, but it does have a sufficiently talented scientific community that they can take the emerging technologies and at least develop the military applications for. Think about cyberspace and the way the Russians have exploited that over the past several years. It's also located in a place where it touches on all the important strategic regions of the world. It has a large coastline in the Arctic. The Arctic is going to be growing in importance. And I guess the final point is that throughout history, even when Russia has appeared weak, it has this sort of unnatural ability to mobilize its resources for state purposes. So, again, it's not going to disappear. It's still going to be a player. The United States is going to have to engage Russia in some serious way out of concern for the advancement of our own national interest. So that's sort of where I come down on this. Weaker than it needs to be because of some policies that it's pursuing, but nevertheless, a country that will be able to exert some influence on the global stage for years to come.
- [25:46]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And you make a pretty compelling case, I think, that for the United States to deal effectively with Russia, US Officials need to understand Russia on its own terms. And that means having clear eyes about what Russia's national interests are and.
- [26:08]
Thomas Graham
What.
- [26:09]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Russia wants to pursue as its grand strategy in order to achieve those interests. Can you talk about that and explain what you think are Russia's national interests?
- [26:21]
Thomas Graham
Yeah. No, no, absolutely. This is perhaps an issue that it's difficult for us to get our minds around because, you know, one of the dominant features of Russian politics and Russian political thinking is a sense of vulnerability. And that's not, you know, when we look at Russia, what Russia is doing to that. The last thing we would think is that this is a country that thinks its security is at risk. But you know, how to explain that? A couple of things. First, we need to remember that for Russia, from the very beginning, survival of the state has been critical. As I think I noted in the book, if you were going to build a great power, you wouldn't have started from where Russia started, in a frozen area up north, isolated from the rest of the world, where survival really was the primary concern. And, you know, Russia saw its survival and one eliminating, to the greatest extent possible, internal tensions within the state and then also expanding its borders outward in order to create the strategic depth it needed to protect itself from rivals. So expansion. We have always seen Russian expansion as sort of aggressive, imperialistic. And obviously, if you're a Pole or a bolt, it's easy to understand why you would see it that way. But the Russians themselves had largely thought of their expansion throughout history as defensive, strategically defensive. We're pushing the borders out, away, creating that strategic space that we need in order to protect ourselves from, from rivals. You know, Napoleon invades Russia in 1812. A strategic depth that saves Russia. At that point, Hitler invades in 1940, 1941, again, a strategic depth that saves Russia. So this idea of strategic death is also important for Russia. Final point is, if you're sitting in Moscow and looking at the world around you, everywhere you look there are unstable borders. You have an unstable border with Europe, but you're also looking at a Europe that consolidates itself geopolitically, has much greater power potential than Russia does. An economy 5, 6, 7 times the size of the Russian economy, a well entrenched scientific community that can develop the technologies of the 21st century. So certainly in terms of raw power potential, a consolidated Europe is a threat. If you look to the south, you've got this turbulent region, the Middle east, and you may want to fish in muddy waters, but you're always worried about how instability in the Middle east may spill over and impact on your, on your southern borders. And then if you look out at the east, you've got China, right? And you could talk all you want about Russia, Chinese alignment at this point, about relations being at the highest level in history. Yet the Chinese economy is eight to nine times the size of the Russian economy. A gap is only growing. The Chinese are on the cutting edge of technological advance at this point where the Russians aren't. Chinese population is 1.3 billion, the Russian population about 150 million. And you see this great asymmetry in power and fortune. And so you have to worry about where China might be 10, 15 years down the road. And in the back of your mind is you realize that there's still territorial grievances that grow out of unequal treaties in the 19th century. China and Russia are both highly nationalistic countries at this point. There's a racist element, so you have to worry about China. And then to add on to that, because of climate change and global warming in particular, the north is opening up. And so for the first time in, I would argue, in history, you have to worry about defending that northern border not against, you know, American ballistic missiles or planes coming across the North Pole, but for potential land invasions, as strange as that might seem at the moment. So there's this tremendous sense of vulnerability, instability. And the question is, how do you position yourself in order to deal with these problems as effectively as possible?
- [31:45]
Dr. Andrew Pace
So how has Russia dealt with those problems? How have they dealt with Europe and China and with the United States?
- [31:53]
Thomas Graham
Well, one things we've already talked about, strategic depth, right. To a certain extent, the conflict in Ukraine is about strategic depth. Ukraine, the territory of present day Ukraine, throughout the past 3, 400 years has been seen as a buffer zone against the west by Russian rulers. You know, you do that by preventing the formation of powerful coalitions across your border. So you've seen throughout history this effort to drive wedges among between European states, prevent the consolidation of Europe as a geopolitical entity, that over shadow Russia you've tried to create strategic balances. One of the things that Russia did at the end of the Cold war in the 1990s and the 2000s is begin to rebuild the relationship with China as a way of creating commercial counterbalance to excessive reliance on Europe, way of creating a strategic balance against the United States. Again, not that that Russia was seeking to have a bad relationship with the United States, but you wanted to demonstrate that you had a different option, but the United States wouldn't be able to dictate to you now. Now Russia finds itself sort of in the reverse position. And this is one of the sort of interesting elements of the current period is that Russia really needs to normalize the relationship with the United States because that's the only country that will provide a strategic counterbalance against a robustly growing China, which you have to have concerned about over the long term, no matter what the state of relations might be today. So it's a combination of strategic depth, prevention of hostile coalitions from forming, developing multiple relationships that allow you to balance against other major powers. All those, I think, lie at the core of Russia's strategic thinking and the way they conduct themselves on the global stage.
- [34:10]
Dr. Andrew Pace
From the American side, it also seems to me there seems to be.
- [34:17]
Thomas Graham
A.
- [34:17]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Perception of what I might call the good Russian, that the United States could have an effective relationship and a strategic partnership with Russia if we didn't have to deal with this communist ideology and these communist leaders. And today that seems. And well, and then after the Cold War, there seemed to be this idea that now that Russia is no longer communist. We can improve relations. We can strengthen our partnership with Russia economically, strategically, politically. And now there seems to be be in many ways a renewed sense that we could have great relations with Russia if we didn't, if they weren't led by Vladimir Putin. So my question, and you suggest, I think, in your book, that the challenge of Russian relations has something to do historically with Russia and its perennial insecurity and its history and the way that it does statecraft. But there also is this Putin factor. So my question is how. How can we properly assess Putin's role in Russia? There seems to be a danger in overestimating his character and his mindset, but also a risk in underestimating his importance.
- [35:41]
Thomas Graham
Let me back up and sort of underscore some of what you have just said. First, the United States and Russia have been rivals from the moment the United States emerged as a major power at the very end of the 19th century. This period in the 1990s when we were talking about strategic partnership, really is the historical aberration. And we've been rivals in many ways because we are expansionary powers. And as I've already suggested, Russia, its mind expanded for reasons of security. The United States expanded largely because of a surfeit of optimism, tremendous economic capabilities that took us across a continent and then into the world at large. And eventually our expansionism ran up against Russian expansionism. We began, because of our desire to spread our system, to spread our prosperity, and I think in the minds of most American leaders, to also bring the benefits of our system to the rest of the world. We began to encroach on Russia's security sphere. And so there's a. This, this tension is always going to be there. And I think that's something that we need to recognize going forward. We can manage it, but it's never going to go away. There are always going to be geopolitical differences between our two countries. Now, where Putin comes in to this is, I mean, particularly now in the way he. He thought about Ukraine and his willingness to use military force. Any Russian ruler would have been concerned about what was happening in Ukraine. But the decision to use military force, I think, is something that most Russian leaders would have hesitated to do, particularly in 2022. Why does Putin go down this route to some extent? Because he has moved beyond sort of the typical framework for Russian strategic thinking. Russian rulers throughout history have largely been pragmatic practitioners of realpolitik, people who could calculate well, sort of the balance of power, never took undue risk, who exploited opportunities where they saw weakness abroad, but also would pull back when they saw strength. In the past decade, I would argue that Putin has begun to develop, you know, what I call the messianic view of himself and Russia's role in the world, which has exaggerated his own role and exaggerated Russia's influence. He talks of Russia as this leader of an anti colonial movement at this point. His great relations with the global south. We saw in the past couple of days this tremendous sort of compoundulation of leaders in, in China. Right. And the Russian media would have you believe that, that many of those countries were there because of Russia, whereas most observers looking at the sick, they're there because of China. But, you know, for Putin's mind, he wants to present himself as sort of a co leader with Xi Jinping in this campaign against Western hegemony. In his mind, that I think is unrealistic reason to take risks that are unwarranted, but also keeps him engaged in a conflict like Ukraine, despite the fact that Russia is suffering tremendous losses at this point, that it is eroding the foundations of its economic power going forward, its technological capabilities, and in fact creating a situation in which Russia is going to lose ground vis a vis the other major powers in the years ahead, certainly China and the United States, which could also make an argument that it'll lose ground vis a vis a country like India or the European Union. Another Russian leader, more pragmatic, would realize that now's the time for retrenchment. I need to bring this conflict to an end. I need to focus on internal reconstruction. That doesn't appear to be where Putin is at this point. And that's sort of one of the challenges we face now as we try to open up a dialogue with Russia, to apply whatever leverage we can to push them towards a, a resolution of this conflict, which I would argue is clearly bad for Russia strategically, but is obviously bad for the Ukrainians and for European security.
- [40:51]
Dr. Andrew Pace
You say, though, Tom, that Ukraine is Putin's war more than Russia's. Is that because you don't see this war driven? You see this war driven more by Putin's messianism, messianic view, rather than sort of historic Russian rail politic?
- [41:09]
Thomas Graham
That is the fundamental reason, although I would qualify that statement now. Certainly when the war began, it was Putin's war. I've already argued. Another Russian leader almost certainly would have tried to resolve Russia's concerns diplomatically, and there was a diplomatic option at that point. But we're three and a half years into a war, right? Much of the, the Russian political lead is now complicit. They have taken steps to maintain Russia's ability to get to engage in this war. They haven't pushed sufficiently to sort of rein in whatever Putin's ambitions are. And so they have become sort of cogs in this war machine. And you see much less public dissent than you did in the early weeks against the conflict. Now, the Russian population as a whole, I don't think, you know, polling will show largely supportive, but it's passive support. It's not sort of the active type of support that you would want if you're sitting in the Kremlin. And that, I would argue is in comes for two reasons. One is that because of the money that has been poured into the war machine and war industries, in fact, standards of living have risen over the past couple of years, and so the population is satisfied with that. And second, they really haven't been asked, by and large, to participate in this conflict. The army is volunteer. We're not sending conscripts into Ukraine. The Russian state has done what it can to try to sort of put this conflict off to the side again. It doesn't call it a war. It's a special military operation. And for all that reasons, you get the sort of passive support for, for the conflict. That said, I don't think that there are a lot of Russians, certainly not a majority, that eager to join the military so they could press Russia's advantage against a hostile West. At this point, as long as they're left alone, they're not going to make trouble. So it's still largely Putin's war, but the elites are more complicit now than they would have been three and a half years ago.
- [43:43]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And I think there's a tendency, you know, in looking at U.S. russian relations, to put all the blame on Russia, to blame Putin and to, as in the Cold War, to see Russia's actions as aggressive, imperialistic, offensive. But you have highlighted what you call Washington's blind spots and missteps. Tom, what do you see as some of our national blind spots and what missteps do you think have been most critical in getting our relations with Russia to this point?
- [44:27]
Thomas Graham
Yeah. Okay, let me just underscore the point is that a bad relationship occurs because of both sides to a relationship. Right. So we don't want to absolve the Russian side of any responsibility for the deterioration in relations. We may have undertaken policies that they thought ran counter to their, their national interest, but you can respond to those policies in different ways. And certainly over the past Decade. You know, I would argue Russia has responded in ways that actually caused the relationship to deteriorate further as opposed to trying to halt the deterioration and find a plateau that was acceptable from the standpoint of Russian national interest. But if you think about the missteps we had, one we've already talked about, I think, this erroneous view as to what was possible in the early post Cold War years, this sense that Russia was going to move in a democratic direction when there were very few real building blocks for that. You know, I think we in the administration, I worked for George W. Bush, you know, we didn't exploit, to the extent we could have, Russia's desire to cooperate with us on the war on terrorism. And we, again, we were dismissive of the Russians, their capabilities, and sort of, when they reached out, tried to be helpful, we weren't prepared to accept that help. And that, I think, soured their views of the United States at that point. So, you know, I think, you know, the fundamental failure has been to respect Russia, to respect its interest, to respect its potential power. And that has led us to the policies that have unnecessarily antagonized the Russians. And again, underscoring the point that I, that we shouldn't forget, this would have been a competitive relationship under any circumstances. The challenge for American policy is to manage that competition in ways that are advantageous or most advantageous for the progress of American national interest. That's where I see the flaws. Russia is a difficult country to deal with. They got a prickly sense of nationalism, pride. So it takes a lot of, a lot of patience in order to build this relationship in a way that is, as I said, advances our interest. So that that's the sort of the way I would frame it.
- [47:34]
Dr. Andrew Pace
So, so you recommend that the United States needs to treat Russia like a great power without necessarily accepting all of the legitimacy of Russia's called sphere of influence.
- [47:50]
Thomas Graham
So you, you need to respect Russia as a great power. We need to develop what I call strategic empathy, which is understand how the Russians look at the world, what they see as the challenges, how they define their national interest, and not be so quick to say they're legitimate or illegitimate. We need to understand where Russia's red lines are. But the next point that I make is simply because you understand where Russia's red lines are doesn't mean that you don't violate those red lines if you think it is in your national interest to do so. You just need to be prepared to deal with the response that you're going to get from the Russians. So, to take an example, there were certain things that we did in 2013 and 2014 with Ukraine as they were trying to move closer to Europe, as the tension grew between Ukrainian civil society and a Ukrainian president who, in quotes, was sort of pro Russian at that point. And we were very supportive of the opposition against that president, but we didn't see Crimea coming. Now, were the Russians right to seize crimea? Absolutely not. It's a violation of international law. It's an aggressive act, but we weren't prepared to deal with it. So a better understanding of Russia, what Russia's interest were, where the red lines were, what the capabilities were, would have suggested a different sort of geopolitical environment in which that Ukrainian domestic political process was unfolding. And I could see different ways of dealing with that that still would have been supportive of democratic processes in Ukraine, but less likely to draw the type of response from Russia that we got. So that's what I'm talking about. Okay, so it's not to justify what the Russians are doing as much as it is to understand how they think about the world, what their capabilities are, what they might do, and make sure, as you develop your own policy, that you're prepared to push back against those things if necessary, but also that you can see the opportunities that you can exploit in building a more constructive relationship with Russia.
- [50:35]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Tom, we're, we're running short on time, but I, I do have a couple of final questions that I, I think are. Are useful. Um, the first is, are you optimistic about U. S. Russian relations? If the United States treated Russia as a great power, would Russia still be paranoid and insecure? And if so much of US Russian relations is founded on the expansive, exceptional views of each nation state, is there hope for optimism and a more peaceful and prosperous relationship in the future? Or is this always going to be a great power rivalry to lament, I guess?
- [51:27]
Thomas Graham
Well, it'll be a rivalry, It'll be competitive, but you don't necessarily need to lament it. So what I talk about is a competitive coexistence. We need to recognize that Russia is a great power. It has a different or a set of national interests that at times went contrary to ours. What we want to do is push that competition away from the military realm into the economic realm, the cultural, the diplomatic, and so forth. But we also need to recognize that there are a number of global issues where we have to cooperate with the Russians. Right? Think about nuclear weapons, strategic stability, think about the consequences of climate change, but also think about the fact that we do have multiple centers of power emerging in the globe today, and we have to create a balance. And part of that one of those elements of that balance is going to be Russia. So how do you structure that relationship with Russia so that China doesn't become a larger challenge to the United States going forward? How do you structure that relationship with the Europeans so that you create stability? So again, it's a different way of thinking about the relationship and how you manage a power relationship in what is increasingly a, I would argue a multipolar global environment. There we need a constructive relationship with Russia, but we always need to recognize that there will be a foundation of competition. We shouldn't exaggerate that. We shouldn't ignore it. We just need to deal with it effectively.
- [53:26]
Dr. Andrew Pace
A final question here, and I mean this kindly, as I did at the beginning, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you mentioned, was a kind of day of reckoning. And it seems that you have mentioned some of the many ways in which Russian experts, what we used to call Kremlin ologists, the things that the Russian experts got wrong about Russia. And so I guess my question is if our Russian experts have gotten it wrong, how do we trust their council? I guess if the people who know Russia and its people and their history and its language the best, if they can still get it wrong, how do we move forward?
- [54:29]
Thomas Graham
Well, look, I mean the short and.
- [54:30]
Dr. Andrew Pace
I have my own answer to that question, but I want to hear your answer.
- [54:33]
Thomas Graham
Well, look, I mean, the first question is one that they didn't always get it wrong, right? If you go back and look at the history of the past, I would argue 35, 40, 50, 60 years, there's a lot that can expert community got right about Russia, about its capabilities, about the challenges that it posed to the United States. And after all, at the end of the day, the Cold War turned out in a way that was advantageous to the United States. And that is a certain extent is based on the expertise that we developed about the Soviet Union during that period. The second is, you know, what I look or is not a perfect sort of scorecard as much as experts were willing to admit that they were wrong and then go back and sort of re examine the assumptions to see why they were misled and use that as a way of sort of refining their judgments going forward. You know, Russia's a complex problem. You know, you're not going to get everything right. You're going to be wrong at times. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to understand you shouldn't try to develop your expertise. So that would sort of be my answer to the question. A certain amount of humility is always important in dealing with a problem. Russia. You shouldn't, I think, exaggerate the confidence you have in certain judgments. You should be willing to acknowledge when you've been wrong. But then you need be willing also to go back to try to understand what it is that you missed and factor that into your judgments going forward. We still need to try to understand Russia. The extent that we do that, I think the better off, the better our policy is going to be over the longer term. But obviously from time to time we're going to misjudge what's going to happen. And I said we need to recognize that and then reassess.
- [56:53]
Dr. Andrew Pace
I appreciate that answer. I think it's a really mature perspective. I also wanted to add that I.
- [57:01]
Thomas Graham
Think.
- [57:03]
Dr. Andrew Pace
As you said, the expert community hasn't gotten everything wrong. And I certainly have seen moments in US History when the reason why we got it wrong is because we didn't take the expert advice that was offered and we had policymakers, whether driven by hubris or opportunism, decided not to except the expertise and the knowledge that we had and that was available. But Tom, I appreciate so much you being on the show and talking about your book. It's been a great conversation and wish you the best of luck with your current projects.
- [57:51]
Thomas Graham
Thank you very much. Glad to be with you today.