Richard Sokolsky is a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program. His work focuses on U.S. policy toward Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.
Prior to joining Carnegie, Sokolsky was a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Office from 2005 to 2015. In this role, he prepared analyses and policy recommendations for the secretary of state on a broad range of foreign policy issues including U.S. policy on the Middle East and South Asia, nuclear weapons and nonproliferation, conflict prevention and post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, and foreign assistance.
Sokolsky is a 36-year veteran of the State Department and became a member of the career Senior Executive Service in 1991. He served at State in several positions including director of the offices of Strategic Policy and Negotiations, Policy Analysis, and Defense Relations and Security Assistance in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. He has been a visiting senior fellow at the RAND Corporation and at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.
The war in Ukraine has cemented the Russian-Chinese partnership for the foreseeable future. While focusing all of its efforts to the West, the last thing Russia needs is a confrontation with China.
Putin’s changing correlation of forces in Europe means NATO needs options to adapt, too.
China and Russia, which Biden has also singled out for criticism, are not the main causes of the weakening of democracies around the world. Most of the backsliding, according to a recent study, has been caused by erosion within the world’s democracies, including the United States and many of its allies.
Biden has signaled that he’s open to dialogue with America’s rivals, and that he doesn’t want another Cold War. But his rhetoric at times sounds like he’s gearing up for one, and that he’s formulating a Biden Doctrine that emphasizes the “alliance of democracies” vision he articulated in 2020.
Getting Russia right—assessing its capabilities and intentions, the long-term drivers of its policy and threat perceptions, as well as its accomplishments—is essential because the alternative of misreading them is a recipe for wasted resources, distorted national priorities, and increased risk of confrontation.
Biden’s rhetoric is certainly understandable given his belief in U.S. leadership and the four years his predecessor spent undermining America's values, cavorting with dictators, dissing democratic allies and dumping all over multilateral institutions.
Two superpowers in league against the United States is an alarming prospect. But military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is more about show than substance.
Russia is in the Mediterranean to stay. As long as the Kremlin remains locked in a tense standoff with NATO, it will aim to prevent the alliance from dominating the region.
The United States’ core interests in the Persian Gulf can be protected with a smaller and more rationalized military presence, supplemented as necessary by rotational U.S. force deployments.
Russia has big Arctic plans, but how they will be realized is uncertain. For the United States this will likely mean the return to a Cold War–like environment rather than a new chapter in great-power competition in the Arctic.
