Research for Russia

On 22-23 February 2007, The CNA Corporation’s Project Asia hosted a two-day conference exploring the state of relations between China and Russia, their future prospects, and the implications for U.S. interests.

Drs. H. H. Gaffney and Dmitry Gorenburg traveled to Moscow 2-6 November 2003 to talk to a range of Russian strategic thinkers, plus two retired Russian officers. Their mission was to understand the political, economic, and military context in which the Russian Federation Navy was functioning today. They found that the military in general seems to be low in Russian priorities, and that the Russian Federation Navy, despite some increased activity of late, is still shrinking, perhaps to a combination of coastal force and strategic nuclear forces.

Dr. Nosov provides a concise summary of the pressures that Russia has faced from the east and the south, while reaching out toward Europe-which was in large part "the West" until the post-World War II period and the Cold War. Russians agonize more about their relations with the West and about their own identity than we in "the West" do about whether Russia somehow belongs in the West. After all, Russia never had a nation-state of its own until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has now had only 12 years to sort out an economy and a political system, while being bogged down in Chechnya.

CNAC and its Russian counterpart, ISKRAN, held their 15th seminar here at CNAC on 7 December 2001. This is a report of that seminar. The report is also based on other discussions the Russian visitors had in the Washington area, including with Deputy Secretary of State Armitage and Vice Admiral Keating, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations. The CNAC program dates back to the fall of 1990, when we invited Andrey Kokoshin, among others, to the CNAC Annual Conference, to the fall of 1991, when a CNAC group took its first trip to Moscow, and the spring of 1992, when the first CNAC-ISKRAN seminar was held, here in Washington. The discussions focused on new opportunities for Russian American relations and for NATO-Russian cooperation following September 11, following President Putin's initiative to support the United States on September 24, and following the Bush-Putin summit meeting in November ("the Crawford Summit"). These discussions stood in some contrast to the discussions we held in Moscow in July 2001. Then there was an almost complete obsession among our Russian interlocutors, with the impending demise of the ABM treaty, and with it, as they said, the end of strategic stability. There was also a discussion during the seminar on whether the last decade had seen a great deal of progress in the improvement of U.S.-Russian relations or was a time of wasted opportunities during which the chances for a real Russian-American partnership, especially in matters of security, were squandered.