A New Strategy for Containing Russia
01:05:04 Share

Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, director of the Stuart Center and Europe-Russia-Eurasia program at CSIS. And I'm Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia. And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the Center for Strategic International Studies. What does a long-term European strategy toward Russia look like?

That's the topic that we're going to be discussing today with our excellent panel here. I'm Max Bergman. I'm the director of the Europe-Russia-Eurasia Program in the Stortz Center here at CSIS. And I'm joined today by, first, my colleague Maria Snegevaya, a senior fellow here with the Europe-Russia-Eurasia Program.

Then Jeffrey Mankoff. Jeff is a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University and also is a senior associate non-resident fellow with the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program here at CSIS. And I should say that he's here and speaking in his individual capacity and his views do not represent

that of the federal government, in particular, the Department of Defense. And Jeff, if I screwed that up, you can correct it. And then also directly to my left is Michael Kimmage. Michael is now the new director of the Ken Institute at the Wilson Institute at the Wilson Center.

Michael formerly was associated with our program is now arch rival at the Wilson Center. So Michael, Jeff, Maria, thanks so much for joining us today. And we're here in part to discuss a paper that we've been working on and contributing to as well with our colleague, Hannah Notte. And really to think about what does a

a future strategy for Europe and in particular its largest country, Germany, what should their strategy be toward Russia going forward over the long term? There's been a lot of focus on Ukraine and how to approach Ukraine. That's obviously going to be pivotal. But then how to approach Russia in the years and decades ahead. And in thinking about that, we sort of turn to the strategy that the US adopted during the Cold War period, the strategy of containing Russia, of containment.

And so I want to sort of maybe jump in to what does containment actually mean? What sort of lessons from the Cold War period, when we think about containment, should we be pulling out for a strategy for both Europe and for the United States today? Michael, maybe start with you, and maybe you could articulate why containment is sort of a useful framework for thinking about today's challenges. Sure. Sure.

So, one thing about containment, if you look at it historically, is that it's somewhat flexible. And during the Cold War, there were lots of debates and discussions about what exactly containment means. George Kennan, the architect of the concept, was not always happy with the way that it was understood and applied. You could look at it as a bad thing, but I think in some ways that's also a good thing. So, it's a strategic approach, but it's not a dogma, and there's a degree of flexibility.

Secondly, I would say about containment and one of the reasons that I think it's attractive and appealing at the present moment is that it does not rest on unconditional surrender. That was Kennan's insight that this was not going to be the Second World War Redux when he thought about the Cold War. It was a long indeterminate struggle without actually a clear endpoint, which is difficult for strategists, but that's how it was in the Cold War. And containment was a strategy for the long haul. So patience was important.

chipping away at problems but not expecting that the Soviet Union would just vanish or give up or that as a nuclear power it was defeatable. We do face something quite similar with Putin's Russia and perhaps with a post-Putin Russia as well. And then finally containment was in Kennan's eyes, and I think it's one of his great contributions, a way of bridging foreign policy and domestic politics. So it was a way of doing something that was necessary to do about the Soviet threat in the 1940s

but it was not 50% of GDP on defense and fighting battles everywhere. There was a degree of prioritization in it. So in the debates that we currently have, of course, we have a new administration in DC and there are debates about restraint and

liberal internationalism, how far to go and should we go far enough, containment has the potential to be a very productive and useful middle ground where you could enlist different political constituencies domestically behind it and therefore give it that kind of endurance that it needs to be a long-term patient strategy. It also strikes me that part of

the attractiveness of containment is that you're recognizing that Russia is an adversary, is that this is a problematic relationship. Jeff, maybe we bring you in. You're a fellow historian, student of history.

Is containment, you know, one of the things that we've heard in this project is that a lot of people sort of flinch at the term and containment sort of implying everything that was done during the Cold War. How do you think about containment as a strategy? And what are some of the lessons perhaps not that we shouldn't follow during the Cold War where maybe containment wasn't really the right approach?

Yeah, so it's useful to keep in mind that during the Cold War there was always a debate about what containment meant and what it implied as far as policy choices. George Kennan, whom Michael referenced, thought about containment as a long-term, patient, primarily non-military strategy of shoring up vulnerable countries, particularly in Europe, but not only, particularly democracies, but not only, against the threat of Soviet subversion.

There were others, including Kennan's successor on the policy planning staff, Paul Nitze, who saw containment as being a much more active, hard-edged, and sometimes military approach.

And I think that some of the instances of overstretch or failure that the United States encountered in applying containment during the Cold War came from this overly militarized way of looking at it. And you can certainly point to the war in Vietnam as perhaps the most salient example of that.

And so I think if you're trying to conceptualize the strategy of containment in the modern era, you have to walk that same divide. Now, the war in Ukraine is obviously in a category by itself. It's an ongoing war. It threatens the core infrastructure of European security.

But beyond that, I think it's important to realize that the goal of the containment strategy is to not have to fight wars. It's not to get into a direct confrontation with Russia. And so I think for people who are concerned about the idea that containment is too aggressive, that what we're calling for is going to lead to a

a redux of the Cold War and all of the things that happened during it. You know, it's important to emphasize that it's not only, in fact, it's not primarily about military action, and it's in fact designed to avoid finding yourself in the position where you have to fight a hot war against a country like Russia. And Maria, maybe over to you. I mean,

Every American administration, maybe we'll see this again, has sought to kind of reset relations with Russia. Already in Germany, you will hear talk, especially from the business community, of maybe if there's peace, we can reopen our gas pipelines and that can be used to sort of build ties again.

It strikes me that containment sort of recognizes that maybe a reset isn't the right approach and that you have to sort of accept Russia for what it is and potentially an adversary.

And I guess, or how do you see this from, you know, how Russia would sort of approach the West going forward? It sort of is, in some ways, a pessimistic outlook on the future of U.S.-Russia relations, but it also assumes a degree of limitation on the part of the West that we're not going to be able to kind of do the regime change or bring about a real change in Russia. So in some ways, it's taking the Kremlin for who they are and what they've done. Do you think that that is sort of

the right posture when thinking about Russia? - Precisely. So any long-term strategy presumes certain future vision of the world. And one particular question with which we engage in this paper is we actually look at the assumptions, premises about what Russia represents today, what Russian regime is, and what sort of policies towards the West

It will continue which war misguided and that got us unfortunately in this horrible place with Russia engaged in the largest war in Europe after Second World War.

So what are those wrong premises? Well, the first claim that many in the West have made consistently over this time of attempted reset with Russia is that it was actually a declining power, not so much of a problem in the long term. We just have to wait it out, and then accumulated natural weaknesses demographically, economically, will just eliminate the Russian problem altogether. And we've seen that over the last 25 years as we've been waiting for this problem to go away,

it actually kept growing bigger and bigger. And as we plug in the paper, the case for Russian decline has been overstated, while the case for its resilience has been consistently understated. And it's this particular issue of the Russian resilience, both economically, demographically even, despite the fact that it's a declining population, the Russian regime does not necessarily need as many people in order to sustain itself.

Then, of course, the premise of Russia becoming a so-called normal power, so abandoning its geopolitical ambitions, not being a revisionist power, but actually integrating into this unilateral West-led order. That clearly did not happen.

The reason is, we probably misconstructed originally how deep the change, the pro-Western liberal change actually was in the 1990s. And much of the emerging analysis now demonstrate that actually the change was not as deep, and unfortunately, the Russian political leadership and a significant share of the Russian society did maintain this great power and aspirations that unfortunately premise this

negative trends and in fact what we witnessed in the 1990s was an abnormality rather than the current dynamic. Russia is reverting back to what seems to be an unfortunate historical normal, hence we are going back strategically to the historical normal of containment. Last but not the least, of course, the economic factor.

Right. There was the premise that the economic ties, the energy dependence with Russia will constrain Russia's international assertiveness because it wouldn't want to lose the money that would follow the disruption of the economic ties with the West. The irony of this is that Putin thought the same and he thought he'd constrain the West.

And the reality is this might be indeed the fact, given that it seems that some of us European policymakers are desperate to go back to cheap Russian gas, despite everything that Putin has done in the last years. That, of course, is also a mistake. In fact, Putin and the Kremlin, the current regime,

sees the Western economic dependence on Russia as a weakness that it can manipulate. And clearly containment strategy will presume a degree of energy independence of the West of Russia, something that we also discuss in the paper. So altogether, I think we should review our previous assumptions, which led us here, rather than trying to hold on to them. It's clear, unfortunately, that

The regime on top of Russia is highly revisionist, aggressive against the West, and regardless of the outcomes of the war in Ukraine – another point that we're making in the paper – it will continuously represent a threat, a challenge to the Western-led order. Hence, we need to come up with a long-term strategy designed to limit its ability to damage us.

I think that's a really important point, in particular that containment does not mean ignoring Russia. And I think there can sort of be a sense of, okay, we want to focus on something else. But your point, Maria, is that

We can't really assume that Russian weakness means that they can't do harmful things to the United States or to Europe and that there needs to be a continued focus on Russia. Precisely. In fact, they're notoriously good at exploiting their weaker position, which if anything allows them a degree of flexibility actually in selecting the tools at their disposal.

For example, Putin has used the conventional weakness vis-à-vis the West to, for example, double down on the hybrid challenge, which is really significant, and the West is still – is yet to find a real adequate response to it. Similarly, yes, Russia is –

highly dependent on their energy revenues. But again, as we have discussed, the Kremlin used it as a fact as a leash to keep the Europe on and limit what Europe can do against Russia. So in that sense, there are a lot of weaknesses, but in fact,

they do not necessarily limit the damage that Russia can constitute, the challenge that Russia can constitute to the West. Now, Michael, you know, it strikes me as one of the major differences between kind of any sort of containment strategy toward Russia from Europe and the United States today is that there is this

big power called China that is the pacing threat if you use the Pentagon parlance, especially for the United States. China is the major focus. And so the major theater of competition is not really Europe, but is...

perhaps the Indo-Pacific. How does that impact your thinking on a containment strategy? How does that impact how Europe should approach Russia when NATO may be back to its original Cold War focus of deterring the Soviet Union, deterring Russia?

but the United States may not be. Well, China was there, of course, during the Cold War, and I guess, although Kennan didn't write as much about China to be sure as about the Soviet Union, China was also there to be contained, but it's paradoxical because on the one hand, China is much more economically formidable than the Soviet Union ever was. It's much more innovative. It's a much more dynamic economy. That was something that Kennan and policymakers down to Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. just didn't have to face such a

dynamic and in a number of ways adversarial countries such as China. But China is also in territorial terms not as revisionist as the Soviet Union was. So it's both more dynamic and perhaps less immediately threatening. So it may demand a different toolkit. I'm sure it does demand a different toolkit and perhaps a different conceptual framework, although I think containment could in some ways apply there as well. But I think to get to the heart of your question, Max,

The point is that when it comes to containing Russia, contemporary China, so the relationship between Putin and Xi Jinping,

is just really problematic. So the Soviet Union in economic terms was easier to contain by the West when the West was so dominant in the international financial world. That's just not the case at the present moment. And so if it wouldn't be for China, Russia wouldn't have the access to markets and access to capital that it does and probably would not be able to sustain the war effort. And of course you have dual use goods and other things that are flowing in from China to Russia to

to prosecute the war. So that just makes the task containment that much more difficult. And it probably requires that one doesn't have just the binary thinking that was at times typical of Cold War thinking. Now we need to be more global in focus. We need to factor in other countries and have something of a broader purview. But simply because something is more difficult to do doesn't mean that it isn't important to do or that it's undoable. So the containment of Russia is exactly as your question suggests,

Russia problem, a China problem, and when my dad in differing degrees a Brazil problem, a South Africa problem, an India problem, and so on and so forth. Yeah it strikes me that the containment

during the Cold War period became a very black and white notion at times. And then oftentimes led us down perhaps the primrose path in terms of how we engaged what was then called the third world. And Jeff, maybe I'm curious how you think about the kind of perhaps new map of containment. Does it require a particular focus on...

any particular regions? How do you think of this when we think about how Russia is going to interact with Europe, with the United States, and is going to compete and try to challenge the U.S. and Europe globally? How do you look at the map and how does it maybe differ than the Cold War period?

I think in some ways the map is more favorable to the West than it was during the Cold War, but in other ways it's more challenging. It's more favorable in the sense that the line of contact, if you will, is further east. We're fighting a war now over Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union and obviously part of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. So the prospect of Russia now stealing a march on Berlin or some of the scenarios that we feared during the Cold War is a lot less

concerning than it was at that time, also because Russia's military is smaller and its economy is struggling and it doesn't have the global power projection capability that it had during the Cold War. On the other hand, I think the map is more challenging though because it really is a global struggle. Now the Cold War had a global element to it, but and as I mentioned before, when

the U.S. sought to implement containment in the so-called, then so-called third world. It often did so in an overly militarized way that ended up backfiring. But the strategic significance of places like sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia during the Cold War was a lot less than it is today. And I think now you have a much more global environment

dynamic where you have a series of out-and-out revisionist powers, countries like Iran, more or less revisionist powers like China, but then you have a whole range of countries that are unhappy in various ways with the status quo and are willing to work with Russia or see Russia's adventurism in its own neighborhood as advancing their own interests in some ways in terms of shifting the global order towards one that's more multipolar, that's more open to different voices.

There's a particular area that is going to be very much on the front lines of the struggle in the year to come, and that's Eurasia or the parts of the former Soviet Union that border Russia. You can think particularly about the South Caucasus, Central Asia, Moldova, countries like this. And here I think it's going to be challenging for the United States because these are areas that are very close to Russia. Russia has the ability to escalate

in these regions beyond the capacity of the United States to do so. It considers them to be more strategically significant than the United States does. And so the U.S. is going to have to rely on a series of kind of indirect strategies in order to deal with Russian pressure in some of these areas.

Mainly, you know, there's not going to be the kind of institutionalization. I think the idea of, you know, anchoring countries like Georgia to NATO, the European Union is not in the cards for at least the near term. You know, in the medium term, we might be in a different place. But

Given that that's not really possible, I think we're going to be in a position where we have to work more with like-minded powers in the region and sometimes beyond. So, you know, looking to the role that countries like Turkey can play in the South Caucasus, you know, potentially India and others in Central Asia, and really trying to, you know, develop a more multipolar, multilateral geopolitical balance in some of these threatened regions where they don't fall under exclusive Russian control.

Max, so I wanted to jump in since you're one of the honorable contributors to this report. So given your European expertise in view of this changing geopolitical landscape, what do you think the European role is in it in terms specifically of defense, energy dependence, and other issues that we've discussed? MR. Well, I think this is where a containment strategy that Europe adopts would require major changes.

within Europe. And I think in particular on the defense side, what we see, I think, especially from a new Trump administration,

is a desire to really shift responsibility for European security to Europeans. That is something that hasn't really happened since before World War II. And that will require real shifts in European defense spending, which everyone talks about, but will also require dramatic changes in how Europe actually integrates and cooperates when it comes to defense. I know European militaries are very much structured to dock into the United States,

and aren't really structured to fight together as Europeans. And so that, I think, may require a major transformation inside of Europe. And we'll see the pace and degree that Trump sort of fosters on Europe. But there is, I think, real concern about Russia's military modernization, as there should be. There's also a real concern, I think, about the hybrid threat activities, which we can talk more about.

But I think it will also require Europe to begin to act more cohesively internationally. So when we think about Europe engaging with the global south in Africa, oftentimes that was sort of the French would lead efforts in Africa. Most of Europe would ignore that.

But what we see is Russia continuing to play a role in sub-Saharan Africa in a way that's inimical to European security interests. Europe has a real interest in stability in the Middle East and stability in Yemen and other places, in Iran not going nuclear. And this is where I think there's going to be real incentives for Europe to begin to act more together. But this also then, when we think about Eurasia,

The role of ideology, and Marie, I'll turn the question back to you, is that during the Cold War, we think of ideology as being sort of central to the fight, right? It's communism versus the democratic capitalist free world.

And I think in this sort of potentially new era of containment, there's still a role for ideology, I would think, particularly democracy, human rights, free markets. And we see that, I think, playing out in Ukraine and whether Ukraine has a European future or not. But I'm curious how you potentially see the role of ideology in a kind of new strategy of containment.

Given that the regime, Putin's regime, has created this self-made, I'd say, long-term challenge, the contestation, opposition to the West, I think in order to explain to the Russian society the nature of this challenge and the reasons why they have to endure all these big changes, the regime has to come up with ideology and full disclosure together with Mike Kimmage and Jade McGlynn. We did publish a big report about

the ideology building in which the Putin regime has engaged. Arguably, even in pre-war period, we just didn't pay enough attention to this topic before. And conventional approaches claim, hey, there's no communism anymore. That means that Putin's regime doesn't have an ideology anymore.

First of all, this concept of ideology, I'd say, is a little bit too premised on some ideal notion of ideology that allegedly communist systems had, which was never true, honestly. Even communist notions actually evolved a lot during the communist period. Stalin himself has really rewritten what he meant by Marxism, how he interpreted Marxism a number of times. So that is one point. Second, clearly, if you look at the educational system, at the media, at

With the narratives that the regime spreads consistently over more than a decade, I would say we actually argue that you can talk of all these ideologisms getting together into one more or less coherent whole about mid-2010s in Russia.

They are all sort of very nicely logically, internally coherent, and they are being spread within the regime, promoted very actively at different layers within the society. And you can also argue that they're very nicely matching some preexisting elements of the mass consciousness in Russia that are left over leaning from the Soviet times.

All of that certainly presumes Russia has been great power. The West constituted a consistent existential threat to Russia, which is very important in terms of the containment, right? That's what they've been told, that Russia really has reached its historical greatness while fighting wars, hence militarism, and this will be consistent.

And Russia being its own civilization, meaning that it's internally hostile in the position to anything that the West can represent. And all of that, we argue, can be used by the regime as a foundation of this longer term contestation with the West. At the same time, it's somewhat more flexible than the Marxist doctrines used to be, which allow actually

Putin had flexibility, right? He can really play on this narrative depending on where the political geopolitical situation leads him. So this is definitely an angle that is one of the long-term resilience of Russia potentially, and clearly something that needs to be paid attention to by the analysts who want to understood the sources of this resilience of Russia that we tend to underestimate.

Michael, you know, one of the things that also strikes me as interesting about the flexibility of containment is that on the one hand, by treating it views Russia as an adversary. Yet there was a lot of flexibility during the Cold War period. I mean, there was, you know,

intense confrontation during the Reagan period, but then also there was a period of detente and engagement, arms control treaties. And we're about to enter potentially negotiations between Ukraine and Russia with a role there for the United States. So how do you see kind of the potential for engagement with Russia in a strategy of containment? Well, to continue a thread of our conversation, containment simply is not appeasement.

And if we go back to George Kennan's biography, yes, he was a realist and he believed in certain limits to American foreign policy. He was not a Wilsonian, but he also lived through the era of appeasement as an American diplomat and certainly did not want to replicate that phenomenon or that experience. And that's relevant to containment in the present tense. So it's not a matter of making...

concessions to Russia necessarily and certainly not a matter of giving ground the whole point of containment is to hold your ground but what is I think a valuable lesson of the Cold War that we can perhaps bring back at the present moment is that containment was compatible with compartmentalization

So it was possible in the case of the US and the USSR, in fact not only possible, it happened all the time during the Cold War, to have intense proxy wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and to engage in all kinds of hybrid activities, right? Active measures, espionage, etc. But also to do arms control, to have summits, to have diplomacy, which really from the death of Stalin until the collapse of the Soviet Union is pretty much continuous.

in the story of the Cold War. So I do think that that's pertinent and perhaps even desirable at the present moment. So let's imagine that President Trump and President Putin can't make a great deal of progress on Ukraine because the visions are just too different. And of course, because Ukraine is going to play a role in diplomacy and it's not just a matter of Washington and Moscow calling the shots.

But that could be a very frustrating problem set, but at the same time they might choose to revive conversations about strategic stability, about cyber, about arms control, about nuclear warfare, and that might be in the interest of the US and that might be in the interest of Russia. It's certainly not incompatible with containment. As long as you understand that there is a line of contact, as long as you understand that there is a degree of adversity, and that is I think built into Putin's Russia,

as long as you understand that there are foolish compromises and there might be some wise compromises, I think you can pursue that kind of compartmentalization. That really has stopped between Russia and the US for reasons I don't fully understand, but it's stopped in quite a radical way in the last couple of years. It's sort of been a process from 2014 to 2022 is the first phase. 2022 to the present is the second phase.

And I would wish the Trump administration success in compartmentalization if it's practical and if it's doable. And there is one of the ways, maybe surprising ways, in which containment could also be revived. So we're half an hour in. We've had a very good, I think, stimulating intellectual conversation about containment and its historical legacy and how it applies. Maybe let's get a little bit more specific and break down some of the policy areas that

A new Trump administration, a new German government that comes in, the European Union and others will have to face. And so maybe we'll start with Ukraine. So what does kind of a containment strategy look like vis-a-vis Ukraine?

On the one hand, I could see the current situation looking quite positive from just a pure containment perspective. Essentially, it's the reverse Vietnam. It's what Afghanistan was for Russia, where they are fighting a war, spending a lot, losing a lot of men, and yet for us, it's not all that costly. What do you all think about a containment strategy for Ukraine? Jeff, maybe I'll pick on you. Okay.

I think Ukraine is really instrumental in working out what a containment strategy is going to look like because it's going to be, in a lot of ways, the defining issue in the future architecture of the U.S.-Russia relationship. And so how long the war in Ukraine lasts, on what terms it settles, is really going to set the tone for what the future nature of the relationship between the United States and Russia looks like.

which we're going to assume is adversarial and is going to require containment not just in Ukraine but in other parts of the world as well. So I think the challenge is now, as it has been since the war began, you know, giving Ukraine the capacity to end the war on terms as advantageous to its own interests as possible. With the expected flurry of diplomacy that we're going to see here in the coming months, I think that argues for, you know,

doing what it takes to help Ukraine reverse some of the momentum that Russia has achieved on the battlefield since last fall. Because in order to have a successful negotiation, in order to make Russia think or make Putin really think that a true negotiation is necessary rather than just coming to the table and demanding capitulation,

You have to demonstrate that the assumption that the Kremlin's been operating under, that time is on its side, is not really the case, and that Russia has more to gain from engaging in diplomacy over the future of Ukraine and the war in Ukraine now rather than waiting for another six months, waiting another year.

So I think those two pieces are intimately connected, the piece about strengthening Ukraine and allowing it to reverse Russia's battlefield momentum, and then engaging in a process of diplomacy to bring at least some kind of cessation of hostilities. Any other thoughts? I mean, longer term, it strikes me that this is going to be the kind of

you know, essentially what Berlin was during the Cold War period, the site of conflict, of real potential tension, where escalation could happen. I mean, how do you all see that kind of... Michael? I think what containment does at the present moment vis-à-vis Ukraine is it qualifies the notion of absolute success and absolute failure, and there are political connotations to both of those that will matter for the diplomacy.

going forward and I'm skeptical that diplomacy can yield a success. I just think that the US, Ukraine on one side and Russia on the other are too far apart for that to be possible. Maybe I'm wrong, could be disproven on that point, but I think that that's

unlikely and I have concerns that if too much is invested in that there could be a kind of disappointment or a kind of backlash from that that could put us actually into an escalatory cycle with Russia that might be very difficult to manage and we'll say a word about containment in a moment but I think containment can be helpful to avoid that scenario but I think containment is also helpful to avoid the scenario where there are

day-to-day or month-to-month military setbacks for Ukraine that we interpret as somehow Ukraine's inevitable defeat. The containment going back to the literal notion of the term in the Cold War, which I think applies directly to Ukraine, in the Cold War it would have been Soviet, but in the case of Ukraine it's the containment of the spread of Russian military power. Now that's the project.

Does that mean that that line of contact is going to be to the south of Mariupol or to the north of Mariupol? That's hard to say. But the project is to contain the spread of Russian military power. So if we have contained the spread of Russian military power at the present moment to only 18% of Ukraine's territory, to a degree that's a success, although journalistically that often looks like

failure and that may be the more viable long-term strategic success even in the absence of a big diplomatic settlement. So there's I think one of the ways in which if you really understand containment and if you apply it to the situation that is about the prevention of the spread of Russian military power, you know, a kind of black and white, not black and white, sort of checkered situation on the ground can still be viable and you can still have the patience to stick to your guns with this. So

I think that's one of the key ways that containment applies to diplomacy. Again, the big kind of like Yalta-like, not that that would be desirable, but Potsdam-Yalta Treaty of Versailles settlement to the conflict, I would be so surprised if that's how this ends. I think it's a murky, muddy, long-term thing in which containment is the linchpin, the foundation.

I had a friend ask a number of AI chats as to how this war will end and all of them, there's different similar chats, they all agree it's going to be a protracted conflict.

you don't need us also definitely echo everything that my colleagues have said uh two quick points first of all Max as you said the geopolitical line the fault line has now shifted uh from Germany now into Ukraine reflecting Russia's long-term decline and weakness that however is we have made

the point before, should not eliminate the concern. It should not make us think that the war has been won.

And the second point, the containment strategy will remain viable regardless of how the war in Ukraine ends. Hopefully it ends with Ukraine victory, but regardless of the situation, whether it's a frozen conflict or Russia advances further, if anything, in that sense, the containment will become even more viable given that certainly it will reinforce Russia's relative and objective

uh standing in the world so from that perspective uh regardless of the war uh we should still like look at this problem within this uh framework but of course if anything uh the fact that this wars is almost like opened an opportunity for the west to first of all awaken to the changing uh situation to what russia really represents to the long-term threat and second

a relatively easy solution to the problem by just arming Ukraine without literally having to fight the war directly with its own resources. Unfortunately, it seems that many of the Western countries are yet to open up to this actual opportunity that's been created for them. MR ZELTAKALNS: Jeff, did you want to have -- Yeah, I just wanted to touch on something Michael said about the Germany analogy at the end of the Second World War leading into the Cold War and the elaboration of the containment policy.

Yalta notwithstanding, the emergence of containment around Berlin and Germany didn't rest on a full settlement of the problem. In fact, quite the opposite. The U.S. and its allies moved to a containment posture when it became clear that the alternative was that they were going to

probably end up in a war over Berlin and Germany. And I think that you're in a similar situation now with Ukraine. I'm also skeptical that there's going to be a long-term settlement of the conflict anytime soon, irrespective of whether there's a ceasefire in the short-term term. And I think that if there is a ceasefire, or even if there's not, there's going to be some kind of interim arrangement that prevails in Ukraine. And containment is, in a lot of ways, a strategy that tries to prevent

put off the final settlement of that problem. You know, the West left open the question of Germany's reunification. It left open the status of Berlin, you know, not sort of recognizing that these were under Soviet domination. And it just, you know, it took 40 years before that problem resolved itself. And I think we're going to find ourselves in a situation around Ukraine that may be similar with about a fifth of Ukraine's territory under Russian occupation, even if the fighting stopped.

But that doesn't mean that now we put a bow on this and walk away and focus on containing Russian power elsewhere. This is going to continue to be the focal point for a lot of this containment policy going forward.

I want to maybe pivot to the threat that Russia poses, particularly to the West and to Europe. We've seen a real uptick in hybrid or active measures, whatever you want to call them, gray zone activities where cables being cut in the Baltic, assassinations done by allegedly Russian actors, a particularly notable incident in Spain, potential threats to Russia

major European officials or European leaders, such as the head of a major European defense company being under threat of assassination by Russians. How do you see the kind of hybrid challenge in the present moment? It does strike me that our ability to, as the West, as Europe, to deter Russia is rather limited, having sanctioned Russia extensively.

having evicted lots of Russian diplomats, many Russian intelligence officers. So many of the normal tools that you have to sort of express displeasure, we've used, we're providing more, you know, tons of aid to Ukraine, maybe we should do more, but it's sort of, we're already, we probably should be doing everything we can to support Ukraine. How do you kind of see the hybrid challenge that Russia poses? Michael, maybe I'll start with you.

Well, I think maybe this is an odd framing of it, but it's almost a function of the success of a containment strategy. In a sense, this is what Russia is left with doing when it comes to the West. And it's not that I want these hybrid measures to continue, but I hope that this situation kind of stays because

The alternative would be territorial aggression against the Baltic states or Poland. I don't think the alternative for Putin is a state of peace and cooperation with the West. So hybrid war to me is almost too fancy a notion when it comes to the situation. What it is is that Russia is infuriated, Putin's Russia is infuriated by the fact that the West is supporting Ukraine. You know, 700,000 is the estimate, I think, of Russian losses.

in the war that says something about Western support and it may waver in the future but it's formidable at the present moment and I suspect will stay that way. So what can Russia do? I mean it can't really change that situation, it can't get the weapons, the flow of weapons to stop by Russian volition so it can exact costs which is a very normal technique and procedure in foreign policy. You want to exact costs when you don't like

a certain state of affairs so i think we need to be very intelligent in synthesizing police action and intelligence and it's it's a military problem uh as well certainly in no sense as marie is saying to rest on your laurels or to be complacent about this kind of threat because russia has lots of things that it can do and that it will do uh it's it's certainly formidable uh

in this regard, but strategically to recognize that this is probably a symptom of weakness more than it is of strength. If Russia had real influence in the West, it would use it, real political influence, it would use it. If it had real military leverage to get the war to stop on its terms, it would certainly do that. It doesn't, and so active measures, hybrid threats are kind of the next best thing for Russia, but there's a kind of pathos to this on the Russian side. It's not that we shouldn't take it seriously, but I think if we're a little bit sarcastic about it, we probably do ourselves a service.

Yeah, it does strike me that, you know, the support for perhaps, you know, anti-establishment parties is an effort that we will likely see increase inside of Russia. On the other hand, if they do something so overt, so that causes the deaths of lots of European civilians...

then that could cause a real backlash against hardened policies towards Russia, support for Ukraine and other things. So this is no golden age of Russian soft power in Europe. Outside of Europe, that's a different story, but it's no golden age in Europe. It strikes me, maybe to shift gears, unless either one of you want to come in on the hybrid element, that diplomatically that Russia's had some successes in sort of breaking out of the containment shackles that were put around it during...

the early days of February 2022. It's expanded its relations with Iran, with North Korea. It's made some headway with some countries in Africa as well as with the BRICS.

Maria, how do you see Russia diplomatically right now and this axis of upheaval of Russia building these new relationships, particularly with North Korea or building new relationships with North Korea and Iran? In some ways echoing Michael, the fact that we are increasingly seeing this shaping relationship axis.

a term that's debatable among the analysts because it's not really clear to the extent to which this is a new emerging political alliance. The nature of most relationships is bilateral between all of them. But nonetheless, something new and something that often analysts did not anticipate, like for example, the deployment of North Korean soldiers in Kursk region to fight against Ukraine. So in that sense, in some ways, it's

it's a function of Russia's weaker position. Russia has to do it, right, and to essentially collaborate with prior states like Russia itself at the moment. But at the same time, it's also very creative, innovative about the way it goes around. And hence, accordingly, we should treat it, again, as not probably Russia's preferred position to be in, but not the same-- at the same time, the weaker card that is able to play well.

And primarily over the last, obviously, years, we've seen really concerning signs of deepening collaboration between the countries, primarily militarily, Iran and North Korea. Just to give you some stats, according to Ukrainian intel, up to 60% of the shells that Russia deploys in Ukraine come from North Korea. Only 30% of the shells are Russian-made.

Then, of course, there are all these ballistic missiles and drones coming from Iran, etc., etc. There is also deepening economic collaboration with trade between Russia and North Korea, although it turns out there are things to trade with North Korea.

And of course, Russia-Iran are also deepening, as well as diplomatic collaboration. There are very concerning questions as to what are these countries getting in return. It's clear that Russia is getting a lot of military aid, for example, but how about – is it offering – especially in Iran and North Korea, some technologies that are potentially nuclear in nature, something that can be converted into nuclear? This is a big question.

Given that Putin at this point seems to be committed to be a spoiler and to create as much problems to the West as possible, that is not off the table. So that's a problem. At the same time, given the questionable nature of this alliance, yes, they are up to destroying the West, but there is also a big question of China. China is a beneficiary of the actual existing world order. It may not be as interesting.

in going full-scale, full-blown nuclear on the Western-led order. And then, of course, there are questions pertaining to the long-term vision that this alliance offers. Yes, it's clear what they don't like. It's very unclear what they actually get to offer. Some analysts are suggesting that maybe this new alternative

is precisely what the West is not, the opposite of what the West is offering, right? The rule-based order, that is going to be the order based on circumvention of those rules, which, as we have seen, is a lucrative opportunity to many third countries, like the so-called countries of the global south, who are certainly beneficiaries of Russia's sanctions or convention schemes.

So that is interesting, but it's questionable that these countries are able to pull this off in the long term. After all, these lucrative opportunities that Russia, for example, is willing to pay sometimes triple to get a particular type of technology, a particular military component, is a function of Russian resources, which, as we have discussed, actually constitute Russia's long-term weakness. So potentially for the West, it's an opportunity.

to go after these schemes, to go after Russia's oil revenues, and also to exploit the fact that North Korea, Russia, and Iran don't really have a lot to trade with other than the weapons. Iran and Russia cannot just sell oil to each other. So that is where their natural competitors, and if we are careful in crafting the policies that target those weaknesses, it potentially is possible to disrupt the alliance.

A word of caution, it is also true that the degree of the alliance, the collaboration is far stronger than anything we could have envisioned in 2022. So we should be on alert and should be sort of analytically humble about this dynamic.

Yeah. Yeah, let me just expand the aperture a little bit because I think while there's a lot of focus on the Iran and North Korea elements of the war in Ukraine, in some ways what I see as the bigger challenge is the way that other pivotal states, middle powers are approaching the war, engaging with Russia. And this really is one of the reasons that the approach of emphasizing sanctions has not maybe produced the results that we'd hoped for.

China, of course, is a big purchaser of Russian energy. So is India, a country that is a close strategic partner of the United States. And the U.S. has not been able to convince India to wean itself from Russian oil. In fact, India is paying less for Russian oil now because of the sanctions and sees it as being very advantageous to do so.

And this gets back to what I was saying earlier about how the map now is in some ways more challenging than it was during the Cold War. You know, India is a rising power, potentially important cornerstone of U.S. efforts to push back against Chinese expansion in the Indo-Pacific.

Therefore, the US has a lot invested in having a productive relationship with India. And that means that there are limits to how much pressure Washington can put on New Delhi over things like the nature of its economic relationships with Russia. A similar pattern prevails with Turkey, a country, Max, where you and I were just having a lot of interesting conversations about this.

Turkey is an important member of NATO, second largest military in the NATO alliance. But it, I think, is very skeptical of this idea of a long-term containment strategy towards Russia. It has economic equities with Russia. It shares a neighborhood with Russia around the Black Sea and in the Caucasus and doesn't want to find itself facing the risk of an expansion of the conflict.

And so on the one hand, the United States needs to cooperate with Turkey on a whole range of issues in the Middle East and elsewhere. But at the same time, the visions for how do you engage, how do you deal with the Russia threat in Washington and in Ankara are very different. And the same is true for important countries elsewhere in the world, the Saudi Arabias, the UAEs, the Brazils.

And all of these countries in various ways are important to the United States, including for dealing with this pacing challenge of China. And so there's going to be a real difficulty for the U.S. going forward in figuring out how to balance its need to have productive relations with these countries, to cooperate with them on what Washington may see as a higher priority than dealing with Russia, and the fact that these countries all have their own equities in dealing with Moscow that we may not necessarily approve of.

Michael, one of the seminal moments during the Cold War, the major success of US foreign policy was Nixon going to China, wedging China and the Soviet Union. And that's oftentimes been pointed to as maybe you could get Russia, you could park Russia to the side as the Biden administration sought and then focus on China.

It strikes me that there may be a little bit of a... First, that's probably overstated. Sergei Rodchenko's excellent new book points out that the Sino-Russia relationship had basically totally collapsed and we sort of came in after the split had already emerged. We didn't sort of cause a split. But then when we think about...

relations between Washington and Beijing, Brussels and Beijing. We have a situation where Washington was really focused on China, but Europe may be really focused on Russia and wants China to sort of turn down the dial in how much it's supporting Russia, particularly with its defense industry. How do you think of the kind of Sino-Russia relations going forward and how durable do you think this relationship is?

Yeah, I'll just answer the question vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine, which I think is the primary concern here, but obviously the relationship between China and Russia is bigger than that. I think it's self-evident that China does not want Russia to lose. It's self-evident that Xi Jinping in particular wants Putin to stay in power in Russia to the...

you know, for the duration as long as he can, the two of them being not just partners but friends. And China has stuck its neck out up to a point to support Russia diplomatically, to repeat its narrative of the war, to assist Russia in various diplomatic fora in BRICS and in the UN and elsewhere, and as already mentioned in this conversation, to be an economic outlet and economic foundation for

Russia's political and military activity. So that's a lot. That's not a little. And that's certainly meaningful for the war. But it's also equally self-evident that this is not a great war for China. It cuts right into the middle of a leg of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, sort of from China to the southeast of Europe.

now have the ukraine war in the middle of that it introduces all kinds of uncertainty including the potential for a nuclear conflict that china definitely doesn't uh doesn't want uh and you know i can see ways that for china if they could find a method of wrapping up the war it would be to china's advantage it would be to china's economic advantage because a key reconstruction

country in Ukraine, not great news in this city, I think is going to be China, right? It was the biggest trading partner of Ukraine before the war. It has a lot of the infrastructure it can use for Ukrainian reconstruction. So that's one incentive that China has to bring the war to a conclusion. But I think it has other incentives. Now, it may not be the kind of chessboard, Nixon to China, Henry Kissinger mapping everything out kind of deal. But I suspect that the second point, China's impatience with the war and desire to see it over,

might be useful. It was interesting that President Trump suggested including China in negotiations over war termination. Maybe that is a kind of pressure point to be used on Russia. And if Washington can be imaginative about this, there are probably possibilities that arise. But I don't think it's this kind of geometry where it's a seesaw and you have one and the other and you can kind of drive a huge wedge between the two from Washington. It's more subtle and more limited than that, but still something to think about and to explore. And I think it's pretty clear that

While Moscow and Russia have become much more dependent on China economically, and China has sort of prevented many of the harsh, immiserating effects of the sanctions from really impacting the population, people are instead of buying Russian cars, they're buying Chinese cars. But that Moscow is still very much focused on being a big geopolitical actor, which then sort of brings in, Marie, I'll come to you.

brings sort of the economic and energy side of this equation in the few minutes that we have left, that that strikes me as a key sort of potential vulnerability for Russia as we sort of project out. Right.

First of all, just a quick point to the possible sorts of tensions between China and Russia. Just today's news that since the end of October, allegedly Russia has been detaining a lot of cargo that goes from China to Europe, which potentially is an indication of some emerging tensions between the two.

Maybe it's because Russia doesn't want some of the cargo end up in Ukraine, because we know that China is also very instrumental for Ukraine side of the war. But then also it's possible that Moscow is hinting that Beijing has been too maybe complacent with the sanctions, the threat of the Western sanctions. Maybe that's the signal. But something is going on, and I think we should be watching this more carefully. Right. MS.

Absolutely. I think every single element of our conversation leads us to conclude that as long as Moscow has the money, the resources that it primarily at this point is getting from oil energy sales, it is more likely to stay a danger problem. It is able to buy off

by the loyalty or neutrality of the global South countries. It is able to fund the war domestically by convincing more people to fight, creating more stakeholders of the regime of the war. And in fact, just beyond just the pure sort of objectively economic side of the story, there's also other more sort of ideational part of the story

If you read the great book by Sergei Rachinko and other scholars of the Cold War, you can see that the moments of the Soviet Union slash Russia's international assertiveness, aggressiveness against the West are very strongly tied to it having a lot of

resources at its disposal. Literally, there are works that show that the Politburo discussion of the possibility of the intervention in Afghanistan before and after oil prices spiked was like literally the complete opposite of each other. At first, the leadership was like, you know, we should wait it out, you know, never know, it's too risky, what others are going to think about us. And after the oil prices spiked, they were like 100%.

Let's just do it. And clearly you have the same dynamic in the Russian relationship with the West. You can also trace the Munich – the notorious Munich speech of Putin precisely to this moment when Russia had enough energy – MR PRICE: That was at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. -- 2007, and was able to pay off its debts to the West, which then was followed by a series of –

wars on the Russian side. So clearly this is where we should be hidden, we should be hidden more effectively. It's Russia's heel-less heel also just because its export is so non-diversified and it's relatively straightforward what should be done. Hopefully this administration that's less constrained by the climate change considerations has a little bit more of the leeway to target Russian oil. Of course it's not as straightforward. Russia is a big, about 10% of the

well, exports, so it is not an easy way to do it, but certainly something that we should be thinking of. Yeah, it's one of those when we project out a containment strategy and we think about also the clean energy transition that

Russia is a very low cost producer of oil. Yet, if we have a clean energy transition in which the world is consuming much less oil, potentially, hopefully, then the ability to kind of try to take Russian oil off the market, which is something that the Biden administration was really hesitant to do, becomes a much more operable activity. And this is where it's sort of interesting that China, Russia,

economic questions where China is now going to be this massive producer of clean energy technology. It's essentially going to be a clean energy superpower and then has a real interest in the developing world not using oil, switching to the clean technology that China manufactures. So I think

And then we think about from a European perspective and how it approaches Russia, I could see much stronger approaches as it implements the carbon border adjustment mechanism and other efforts to accelerate the clean transition will really serve to potentially weaken Russia's economic position in the long run. We're basically at time, but I want to sort of go around for sort of any kind of closing thoughts people have in particular.

as you think about what sort of this strategy of implementing a containment strategy should look like, particularly from a European perspective, and how to go about thinking about Russia and approaching this from a policy perspective. So maybe, Michael, I'll start with you and we'll go around.

Maybe skirt your question a little bit and just conclude on a point that's maybe more rhetorical than substantive. One of my pet peeves about the current conversation about the war is a refrain that nobody has a strategy. Europe doesn't have a strategy, the United States doesn't have a strategy, there's no end state, it's throwing spaghetti at the wall. At times it feels like that, but it's not true. I think in many ways Europe and the United States have pursued a containment strategy

with the war and the war is heartbreaking each day that it continues and the devastation that it wreaks on the civilians of Ukraine is unconscionable and it's terrible to behold. But, you know, there has been a quite considerable strategic success with this strategy when you compare it to what the alternatives might have been, which would be the partition of the country, the colonization of the country.

the defeat, the spread of the war to neighboring countries, etc., all of which is very, very possible or has been escalation with U.S. forces. Correct. Yeah. Or nuclear confrontation, etc. All of those are very real possibilities and I suppose remain real possibilities. And they have been since February 2022. And so

Yes, it's been improvising, there have been successes, there have been failures, sometimes too slow, all of that. But there has been a kind of strategic progress in the last two and a half years. And again, thinking of domestic politics, we should emphasize that point as we try to make even more strategic progress in the next couple of years. If you convince yourself that what you're doing is ridiculous and failing, there's a good chance that the end result will be ridiculous and a failure. So let's remember, in a sense, the...

the validity of containment as something that's already been pursued and already been practiced. Excellent. Maria.

Obviously, echo everything Michael has said. I think that we find ourselves in a very interesting moment from the policy-making perspective. There are a lot of, as you mentioned, Max, creativity opportunities, new toolkits emerging that can be used. At the same time, it's pretty clear that the world that existed after the end of the Cold War is over. It's the end of the end of history, if you will. And of

Accordingly, the West and Europe in particular has to rethink many of the assumptions on which the previous order has been based. And as we see, while certainly the direction is towards the realization of what indeed is happening, unfortunately it's also difficult, it's legitimately difficult from these societies to make all these tough choices.

And what has been lacking consistently over the last few years, it seems to me, is the political will. Putin, in this sense, is able to play his weak hand well because he has the political will that we often lack.

Hopefully this report will help the Western European leaders come to the realization that the previous order is over. Unfortunately, it was a really nice world to live in. Too bad it didn't last. Hopefully we'll get back at some point, but in order to get back there, we right now need to make some of the tough political choices that will hopefully get us back to a better world order.

Okay, let me look both forward and backwards. Looking forward, I agree with what Michael said that we have been implementing a containment strategy in Ukraine for the last three years. But I think, and this is probably true more so in Europe than it is in the United States,

They haven't quite come to grips with the fact that this is going to be a long-term problem and the containment is not going to end when the war in Ukraine – when the guns stop in Ukraine. And I think part of the challenge that we have to confront and part of what we're trying to do with this report is to remind people on both sides of the Atlantic that the Russia problem that requires a containment strategy is not going to go away even if there's a ceasefire.

and that we need to be prepared both at the leadership level and the level of societies to remain focused on that idea of containment as long as it takes. During the Cold War, it took 40-something years. Hopefully it won't take as long this time, but we have to be prepared for this to be a kind of generational struggle if we want to live in the kind of world that Maria was describing having existed in the recent past. And then let me just look backwards a little bit too because I think...

You know, containment was sustainable domestically during the Cold War, in part because it represented a bet on the superiority of the Western model. It was a vote of confidence that the U.S. and its allies could outlast the Soviet Union, that we had a stronger economy, that we had better institutions, that we had a more legitimate political order.

And I think that we need to make that case again today as well if we're going to pursue this kind of strategy. You know, President Trump has talked about the idea of peace through strength. And I think ultimately that's what containment comes down to. It comes down to making sure that the decision makers in the Kremlin, the decision makers in Beijing and elsewhere understand that the United States and its allies have

legitimate, viable, durable political systems and a viable long-term commitment to maintaining this posture of strength such that in making their calculations about how to behave, neither Russia nor China nor other revisionist powers decide that it's in their interest to pursue the kind of aggression that a containment strategy is designed to avoid.

I think that's a great place to close. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Michael, Maria, and Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today. And another shout out to our colleague, Hana Notte, for her tremendous contribution to our work on this project.

Lastly, another big thanks to all our viewers for tuning in. If you like this conversation, you should subscribe to our two podcasts, Russian Roulette and The Europhile. We talked about Sergey Rodchenko's book quite a lot. We're actually having Sergey on Russian Roulette, so tune in for that. And I want to thank you so much for joining us, all our guests, and please tune in next time to another CSIS event. Thank you. Until next time.

You've been listening to Russian Roulette. We hope you enjoyed this episode and tune in again soon. Russian Roulette releases new episodes every two weeks on Thursdays and is available wherever you get your podcasts. So please subscribe and share our episodes online. And be sure to check out all the latest analysis by the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at csis.org.