By Angela Stent, Brookings Institute
The United States’ relationship with Russia is today the worst that it has been since 1985.
Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and what appears to be its continuing attempts to affect the 2020 election campaign have made Russia a toxic domestic issue in a way that it has not been since the 1950s. Its annexation of Crimea and launch of an ongoing war in southeastern Ukraine, plus its support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in his brutal civil war, and for Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro have raised tensions with the United States. President Trump came into office determined to improve ties with Russia. But the rest of the executive branch and the U.S. Congress have pursued tough policies toward Russia, imposing rafts of sanctions and expelling diplomats. The U.S. National Security Strategy declares Russia and China the two top threats to U.S. national security. At the best of times, U.S.-Russia ties are a mixture of cooperation and competition, but today they are largely adversarial.
Yet, as the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States bear a unique responsibility to keep the peace and discourage the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons around the globe. Moreover, there are global challenges such as terrorism, climate change, governing the Arctic, and dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic that necessitate working together. The challenge is to find an acceptable balance between cooperation and competition and to compartmentalize the relationship in a more effective way than at present.
