By Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry
Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 6, December 2009–January 2010, pp. 39–62
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Twenty years ago, as the Cold War was being ushered to a close, American and Russian leaders together articulated a vision of an emerging world order. They also crafted a settlement with principles and arrangements intended to constitute a great-power peace as well as to extend the liberal international order. Unlike any previous settlement, the Cold War settlement’s arms-control centrepiece was based not on the strength of the victor and weakness of the defeated but rather the mutual vulnerability both parties faced from a new type of weapon. Coming after five decades of intense antagonism and rivalry, this diplomatic realignment of Russia and the West seemed to mark an epochal shift in world politics. Today, the promise these arrangements once held now seems distant. Over the last decade, the relationship between Russia and the West has become increasingly acrimonious and conflictual. For both sides, relations are now marked by a sense of grievance, disappointment and dashed expectations. Many expect a future based not on a cooperative partnership but rather renewed rivalry and geopolitical conflict, in effect a return to the nineteenth century.
The new administration of President Barack Obama sees the repair of the relationship with Russia as a major foreign-policy objective, and is ambitiously attempting to reset it and place it on a more positive footing. These efforts began with conversations during Obama’s July 2009 trip to Moscow and have already produced a major foreign-policy shift with the decision to replace the deployment of silo-based ballistic-missile interceptors and radars in Eastern Europe with a more flexible sea- and land-based system. Already this new policy has provoked a chorus of condemnation that the United States is appeasing Russia and sacrificing both its national interests and the interests of democratic allies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet region. In reality, the Obama policy is a move toward recovering some of America’s most successful foreign-policy approaches that reached a zenith at the end of the Cold War under the later Reagan administration and the George H.W. Bush administration.
The premise of the new Obama policy is that the stakes in the relationship with Russia are very large – even larger than is widely appreciated. Its proponents recognise that achieving the goals of an American interest-based foreign policy in many areas – nuclear weapons and non-proliferation, terrorism, energy supply and climate change, and peaceful change in the former Soviet sphere – requires a cooperative relationship with Russia.3 A further deterioration of relations will not only undermine these goals, but also holds the unappealing prospect of a return to the type of full-blown great-power rivalry that the Cold War seemed to end. Russia is not powerful enough to dominate the international system or to even be a full peer competitor, but it is capable of playing the role of spoiler. The reigniting of a nuclear arms race and a full-spectrum competitive relationship with Russia would be a major setback for fundamental American security interests. US stakes in the relationship with Russia are not as great...
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Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton University Press, 2007). G. John Ikenberry is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Korea.
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