Russia in Global Affairs

Online in-depth discussion based upon the ideas and results of the political simulation game "International Crisis Management: Private Initiative" was run by the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (CFDP) in cooperation with the Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow, Russia) on Wednesday, May 26, 2021.

What does international cooperation look like during the triumph of national interests? Is it possible to realize these interests without interaction? We turned to Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council, and Anatol Lieven, Professor of Georgetown University in Qatar for their insight.

The approximate design of an umbrella for the nuclear powers is not too complicated. It includes expanding the channels of communication between the military at all levels, exchanging information about their nuclear missile forces, strategic doctrines and modernisation plans, concurrent measures to reduce the level of a missile systems’ combat readiness, the beginning of meaningful consultations on the most dangerous military technologies, and joint actions against the threat of nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Catherine the Great is credited with saying that the only way to secure the borders of the Russian Empire is to expand them continuously. This logic is to some degree applicable to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which embarked on a path of geographical enlargement quite literally from the very first days of its existence.

The most serious impediment to improving US Russian relations today is not the lack of trust between our nations but rather the dark cloud of suspicion hovering over the Trump administration regarding its ties to the Kremlin

For several years, serious experts in Russia and the West have repeatedly warned the public about the threat of the collapse of the international nuclear arms control system. They spoke about the system, to be precise, because in the past half a century arms control developed as a sum-total of supplementary elements rather than an eclectic set of separate unrelated bilateral or multilateral agreements.

The world of the future will be more complex and volatile than it looked just 20-30 years ago. There will be enough room for a variety of combinations by different world policy actors cooperating with each other in different formats. The concept of multilaterality might become one of the guidelines to follow in this process.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the United States, the term “war against terrorism” was introduced to our political vocabulary. For nearly twenty years, we have been waging this sort of war together, and at times accusing each other of pacifism, sabotage, or even of cooperation with the enemy. But a real war is a serious matter that requires a lot of sacrifice.

Despite eight years of horrific conflict, and over 500,000 thousand deaths, a stable peace in Syria remains elusive.