Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Calling for renewed broad engagement and for rebuilding the relationship on a more realistic basis, this work sets key points in the agenda for U.S. and Russian policy makers.
Improving security measures alone will not solve the problems in the Caspian region and the role of the US in this process is a limited one. The countries of the region must add to the number of stakeholders in their countries to begin this reform.
In all democracies around the world, national elections generate important data about the condition of the political system and the concerns, hopes, and beliefs of society.
Presentations by Michael McFaul, Thomas Graham, Anatol Lieven, and Lilia Shevtsova.
The "revolutionary stage" of the post-Soviet era is over. Russia is now facing a second conversion: from the post-Soviet era of transition into a consolidated Russian nation-state. The priority for the Yeltsin regime was to minimize the harm of the fragmentation of the Soviet Union. For Putin, the priority will be to create a new unified national identity.
The present danger is that the United States will shrink from its responsibilities as the world's dominant power and--in a fit of absentmindedness, or parsimony or indifference--will allow the international order that it sustains to collapse. The present danger is one of declining strength, flagging will and confusion about our role in the world.
These are not happy days for global arms-control advocates. As far back as the early 1960s, policymakers warned that the true threat to the United States was not only that third-world despots might acquire the bomb but that advanced industrial countries might do so.
