Contents Historical Precedents ..8 Committing to a New Status Quo: A Proposal .........13 Why This Approach Can Work ..........21 Conclusion ....32 Appendix A: Survey Results .34 Appendix B: Survey Methodology .....37 Notes .39 References ....43 Abbreviations 47 About the Authors .....47 The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughoutthe world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonproft, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.Cover image: Getty Images/E+/emrah_oztas Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercialuse only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it isunaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of our research documents for commercial use.For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit /pubs/permissions.html. RAND’s publications do not necessarily refect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. R is a registered trademark. For more information on this publication, visit /t/PE297.Copyright 2018 RAND Corporation R ussia and the West agree on very little thesedays. But they seem to have found one solidpoint of accord: Teir current relations arethe worst that they have been since the end ofthe Cold War. U.S. President Donald Trumpsays that they are at a dangerous low.1 Russian PresidentVladimir Putin agrees that relations have gotten worse inthe last year.2 German Chancellor Angela Merkel believesPutin is already fghting a new cold war and is trying toreconstitute the Soviet Union.3 Te 2017 U.S. NationalSecurity Strategy asserts that Russia seeks to reduce U.S.infuence in the world globally, create a rif between theUnited States and its allies and partners, and interferein the domestic political afairs of countries around theworld.4 Both sides also agree that this new cold war is poten- tially extremely damaging, given each side’s nuclear arsenaland well-established capabilities for international action. Teoriginal Cold War, which some today look back on with nos- talgia, was a time of deep strategic uncertainty, costly proxywars, and extraordinary peril. Te ending of the Cold Warwithout a nuclear exchange did, to a degree, refect efectivestatesmanship and well-crafed policy. But as numerousnear misses—from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the AbleArcher episode—demonstrate, this success was a result ofluck as well as of strategy. Given the extraordinary potentialconsequences if things were to go wrong—namely, nuclearArmageddon—a protracted period of high tensions withMoscow is not an experiment we should seek to repeat.Te Cold War was also extremely destabilizing world- wide. Bipolar confrontation was the lens through which theUnited States and the Soviet Union viewed every aspect oftheir respective foreign policies. Tey ultimately importedthat rivalry into nearly every region of the world, fuel- ing seemingly endless proxy wars in such diverse localesas Guatemala, Angola, and Vietnam. AsTe Economist reported,[B]y the end of [the Cold War], civil war aficted18percent of the world’s nations . . . When the [ColdWar] ended, the two enemies stopped most of theirsponsorship of foreign proxies, and without it, thecombatants folded. More conficts ended in the 15years afer the fall of the Berlin Wall than in thepreceding half-century.5 1 2 Indeed, as relations between Russia and the West havedeteriorated over the past several years, new proxy confictshave broken out in Georgia; Ukraine; and, arguably, in Syria. More broadly, this new cold war undermines the pos- sibility of joint action to address shared global challenges.Te functioning of multilateral diplomacy depends to asignifcant extent on a basic level of comity among the per- manent members of the United Nations Security Council.Tat level of comity between Russia and the West is gone.Constructive interaction within the United Nations andelsewhere will thus depend on the ability of governments tocompartmentalize—i.e., not allowing confrontation on onefront to prevent cooperation on another. Tis is difcult forbureaucracies at the best of times.While Russian and Western diplomats did worktogether on the 2015 deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear pro- gram, tensions have led to a lack of cooperation on a rangeof matters that have nothing to do with the dispute over theregional order. Tese breakdowns in cooperation includeMoscow’s boycott of the U.S.-led Nuclear Security Summitof March–April 2016, its renunciation of the PlutoniumManagement and Disposition Agreement in October 2016,and the suspension of joint counterterrorism eforts inAfghanistan. As time goes on, both sides—and the rest ofthe world—will continue to lose out due to missed oppor- tunities for cooperation.6 Both the West and Russia are ill-equipped to fght anew cold war. Russia is economically weak and susceptibleto social unrest. It can ill aford even its current level ofmilitary spending, much less the spending needed for anew arms race. Te West is divided on whether to confrontRussia in part due to the rise of pro-Russian political forceswithin mainstream parties.7 Te one certain victor in sucha confrontation is China, which should give both sidespause before putting their energies into another globalcompetition with each other. Despite these clear drawbacks, however, there is littlenew thinking about how to change course to avoid such asuboptimal outcome. Trump began his presidency, as didthe previous two U.S. Presidents, with a stated commitmentto improving U.S.-Russia relations. All three Presidentsacknowledged that confrontation between Russia and theWest would be dangerousfor both sides and would be aserious impediment to achieving other U.S. objectives. Atthe start of their terms, each man believed that, for all thedistrust and historic enmity, Russia and the West had fewconficting core interests and multiple reasons to worktogether on issues such as terrorism, arms control, and sta- bility in the Middle East. Te Trump administration cameinto ofce afer the Ukraine crisis, Moscow’s intervention inSyria, and the interference in the 2016 elections, which hadalready raised tensions higher than at the start of any previ- ous administration. However, there was a strong argumentthat this new period of confict needed at least to be bettermanaged to avoid a spiral of escalation. Te Trump administration seems to have abandonedthe efort to improve relations with Russia even morequickly than its predecessors did. In 2017, the United Statesimposed new sanctions against Russia for meddling in theU.S. election, approved the sale of weapons to Ukraine, andcontinued the tit-for-tat struggle over expelling diplomatsand closing diplomatic compounds that began under then– President Barack Obama. By the end of Trump’s frst yearin ofce, then–National Security Adviser H.R. McMasterwas referring to Russia as a rival power that was “engagedin a very sophisticated campaign of subversion to afect3 our confdence in democratic institutions, in democraticprocesses—including elections.”8 In part, the continued deterioration of U.S.-Russiarelations refects the constraints posed by the investiga- tions into Russia’s role in the elections. But more broadly,it refects a deep-seated consensus in U.S. foreign policycircles that Russia seeks to undermine the liberal inter- national order, stymies U.S. eforts at stability in Syriaand Eastern Europe, and refuses to allow its neighbors tojoin Western institutions. Moscow’s eforts to interfere inthe elections hardened a bipartisan hawkish position onRussia that now extends far beyond the national securityestablishment. Likewise, the Russians blame virtually every domesticproblem on Western subversion. Tey have invaded two oftheir neighbors that got too close (in their view) to the Westand meddled in elections in the United States and Europe.Tey also have returned to the Cold War playbooks byengaging in provocative and dangerous incursions intoWestern airspace, increasing submarine patrols in sensitiveareas, and overtly mapping Western infrastructure. Overall, both sides distrust each other fundamentally,view each other as attempting to interfere in each other’sdomestic politics, and think the other is inherently aggres- sive and expansionary. In short, the West and Russia areafraid of each other. Each side’s fear of the other’s aggres- sive intent has proven stronger overall than hope that com- mon interests can provide a basis for cooperative relations.Te result is a cycle of increasing tensions that seems to beinexorably leading to a new cold war. Tis political environment means that breaking thecycle will require a new intellectual framework that canconfront what really divides Russia and the West: thestatus of what we call the “in-between states”—Ukraine,Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan— and the broader regional order as it relates to them (seeFigure1).Russia has longinsisted that it had a special role toplay in its immediate environs. An early articulation ofthis came in a 1995 presidential decree,9 but a more-recentinfammatory formulation was made in 2008 by then– Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, when he referred tothe region as one “in which it has privileged interests.”10Te West’s refusal to grant Russia a negotiation on thisbasis, and particularly its decisions tointegrate severalof Russia’s neighbors into the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization (NATO) and the European Union (EU),Both sides distrusteach otherfundamentally,view each other asattempting to interferein each other’sdomestic politics,and think the other isinherently aggressive.。。。。。。