Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center since its inception, is a leading analyst of Russian-U.S. relations, and previously served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993. His evaluation of what the week of meetings that ended on Jan. 20 between Russia and the U.S. “revealed” appeared on the Carnegie Moscow website. (https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/86222)
Trenin asserts in his Jan. 20 feature: “Moscow’s demands of the United States and NATO are in fact the strategic goals of Russian policy in Europe. If Russia cannot achieve them by diplomatic means, it will resort to other methods….
“The lack of a diplomatic solution will logically lead to a further escalation of the crisis, and increase the chances that the only way out of it will be through the use of what Russian officials call `military technical means.’”
The crisis arises from the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. and its allies established an order dominated by the U.S. and NATO. “Russia, which had failed to become part of the West on its own terms and refused to accept the inferior role offered to it, found itself on the outside of that order, and was forced to accept the new state of affairs,” Trenin writes. If a large, defeated power has not been offered a place in a security order which it finds acceptable, over time it will take action to remedy that. In Russia, he says, these conditions formed in the first half of the 2010s, in reaction to the crisis in Ukraine. After Putin became President, he spent time trying to establish that America and Russia should work together on security, terrorist threats, and global challenges.
