What We Get Wrong About Russia
President Donald Trump greets Russian president Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, Friday, August 15, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Every US President since the collapse of the Soviet Union has come into office believing he can fix the US-Russia relationship and all have failed. There is a simple reason for this: the US-Russia relationship is driven far less by the identities of the two presidents, and far more by longer-term, historical-structural factors, than most US leaders understand. Put simply, the US and Russia have fundamentally different models of how the world works. If this remains to be the case, Russia will continue to be a problem for the US – if not an outright threat – and the US will be the same for Russia.
Previous Stages of US-Russian Relations
Bill Clinton, the first US president to deal with Russia exclusively in its post-Soviet incarnation, staked the relationship on the “Bill and Boris show”. Clinton and his foreign policy team believed that the personal relationship with Russian President Boris Yeltsin – along with significant US aid to Russia – would cement enduring ties between the two countries. But by the end of Clinton’s presidency the relationship was in tatters. The US became frustrated with Russia’s economic transition, which turned its Soviet-style command economy into a kleptocratic oligarchy marked by massive theft and routine violence, instead of a functioning market economy. The Clinton Administration also began to have serious doubts about Yeltsin’s commitment to democracy and fitness for office, fueled by his use of force against his political opponents and almost routine episodes of public drunkenness. For their part, Russian leaders blamed the US for the social and economic dislocation of the 1990s and took umbrage to NATO’s 1999 airstrikes on Serbia over what the Alliance deemed ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The Kremlin’s anger over the latter was so great that Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov – on the way to Washington to appeal for more economic aid to forestall an impending economic collapse - turned his plane around in midair when he was informed of them.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were the catalyst for the first “reset” in modern US-Russian relations. Russian President Putin, in office since the spring of the previous year, was the first foreign leader to call US President George W. Bush to express his condolences. The two established a close personal relationship. So close, in fact, that Bush (in)famously said he “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul”. The ever clear-eyed John McCain quipped in response, “I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.” Like its 1990s predecessor, the post-9/11 reset had a short shelf life. Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya – where it rehearsed the use of war crimes as an instrument of military strategy the world is witnessing today in Ukraine – shocked many Western leaders. The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq angered the Kremlin (and some US allies), which also began to see the US military presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia as problematic despite having initially supported it. Putin’s 2007 Munich Security conference speech made clear that US-Russian relations were in bad shape. In the speech, Putin accused the US of engaging in “uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.” He went on to claim that the US had “overstepped its borders in every way.” The speech sent shock waves through Western capitals, and those shock waves only intensified eighteen months later when Russia invaded its neighbor Georgia, marking the definitive end of the post-9/11 reset.
Enter the Obama Administration. Convinced that Bush had mishandled the relationship with Russia, and that pragmatic, limited, US-Russian cooperation was possible, Obama’s team embarked on its own reset. Unlike its predecessors, it publicly used that term to describe the objective of its outreach to the Kremlin. In an ironic harbinger of the fate of this reset, the big red button that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at their first meeting, meant to represent a reset button, had the wrong Russian word written on it: the word Obama’s team chose for the button meant “overcharge” in Russian, not reset.
Obama’s attempt to establish productive, resilient US-Russian relations fared no better than those of his predecessors. The first storm clouds began gathering in September 2011, when Putin announced he was returning to the helm of the United Russia party, replacing his hand-picked successor Dmitri Medvedev. The sense among many Russians that Medvedev had simply been keeping Putin’s seat warm and that they were being deprived of a real choice in the presidential election upcoming the next spring sent tens of thousands to the streets in angry protests. When parliamentary elections of that year cemented United Russia’s hold on the Duma and paved the way for Putin’s return to the presidency, popular anger only grew, and the protests intensified. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized the elections as unfair, saying “Russian voters deserve a full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation." This enraged Putin, who accused Clinton directly of interfering in Russian politics and supporting his political opponents. According to Putin, “She set the tone for certain actors inside the country; she gave the signal. They heard this signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, started actively doing their work.”
That same fall events outside Russia only accelerated the deterioration of the US-Russia relationship. In October, former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi was captured and executed in the street, sparking rage from Putin, who accused the US of masterminding the execution. In Putin’s mind, Gadhafi’s execution was the natural outcome of the NATO-led intervention in the Libyan civil war, an intervention he had vociferously opposed. But the decision was not his to make. Dmitri Medvedev, then Russian President, decided not to veto the UN Security Council Resolution that paved the way for NATO military action in Libya. If the Obama reset was dead by the end of 2011, it was buried for good by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and fomenting of war in eastern Ukraine in early 2014. For the rest of Obama’s presidency, relations were icy and neither side made any effort to bring about a thaw.
Donald Trump’s surprise election in 2016 seemed to offer room for yet another attempt to set the relationship on more steady ground. And this was Trump’s inclination, but he was stymied by Democrats and more than a few Republicans, who did not trust his instincts via-a-vis Russia and Putin. In fact, Congress was so suspicious of Trump’s inclinations that – in a rare instance of bipartisanship – it codified the Obama-era sanctions on Russia into law, limiting Trump’s ability to lift them without Congressional approval. Faced with an even rarer veto-proof majority in Congress, Trump signed the bill but complained that it amounted to Congressional encroachment on his constitutional power to conduct foreign relations. Mistrust of Trump’s ability to manage the relationship only grew after his infamous 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki, when Trump sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, which had issued a joint assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election that brought Trump to power. When asked directly whether he thought Russia had interfered, Trump said, "President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be.” For the rest of Trump’s term, US-Russia relations were essentially frozen, with no movement toward a thaw from either side.
Joe Biden’s election in 2020 offered little hope of such a thaw. Biden had long been a critic of Russia under Putin and skeptical of the idea that the US and Russia could be productive partners. Russia’s brutal 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine confirmed Biden’s skepticism and set the US and Russia on a collision course, where they remain today. Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a case study in the limitations of personal diplomacy in setting the US-Russia relationship on a sustainable path. Despite promising to end the war in 24 hours Trump has been unable to make meaningful headway in doing so, much less repairing ties between Washington and Moscow. This is even though Trump’s administration has sent the Kremlin multiple signals of Washington’s willingness to meet Russia’s demands and has made multiple unilateral concessions to Russia. These include voting against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on its third anniversary (even China abstained rather than voting against), publicly humiliating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their February Oval Office meeting, briefly cutting off military assistance and intelligence sharing to Ukraine, and publicly announcing that Ukraine should give up on restoring its territorial integrity and joining NATO.
When the Kremlin pocketed these concessions and continued its brutal attacks on Ukraine, Trump threatened sanctions unless Russia agreed to a ceasefire. He then invited Putin to a summit in Alaska, where Trump claimed there would be serious consequences for Russia if the meeting did not produce the ceasefire Trump insisted on. In an eerie echo of the 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump came out of the meeting repeating Putin’s rhetoric, claiming a ceasefire was not needed prior to negotiating a peace deal to the war. The first seven months of the Trump administration have been a master class in the structural nature of the US-Russia relationship and the severe limitations of personal relations between US and Russian presidents in repairing it.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, US-Russian relations have moved through predictable stages, which Kier Giles of Chatham House has described as euphoria-pragmatism-disillusionment-crisis-reset. Regardless of the occupant of the White House, the US and Russia have been unable to establish and maintain productive, stable relations. And they will not be able to do so anytime soon, because the relationship is governed far more by long term, structural issues than by the identity of the two presidents.
Underestimating Russia
So, what should the US do? How can it ensure that – even if its relationship with Russia is icy and confrontational – Washington’s policy is founded on a solid set of principles and a good understanding of Russia? A key step is to stop treating Russia like a normal 21st century state. It is not – it is an unapologetically unreformed empire masquerading as a responsible global citizen. Continuing to treat Moscow as if it wants what most other states want – reasonable security for itself, a stable region around it, and a predictable global order – is a dead end because this is not what Russia wants. US policymakers routinely misunderstand or underestimate four things about Russia, leading to recurring frustration and failed attempts at reconciliation.
The first is Russia’s definition of minimally acceptable security for itself. Put simply, the Kremlin’s security demands are so extensive that if fulfilled they would fatally undermine the security of Russia’s neighbors. Smaller states bordering Russia or lying in its self-described “near abroad” have two choices in dealing with Moscow: become its vassal or its adversary. This is because the Kremlin sees independent foreign policy choices by its neighbors as a grave security threat to itself. Many of Russia’s former colonies or satellites know this well, which is why they immediately began agitating for NATO membership when the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed.
Russia’s insistence on almost perfect physical security for itself leads to the second thing Westerners dealing with Russia often underestimate: the Kremlin’s threat perceptions. Peter Zwack, the former US Defense Attache to the Russian Federation, characterizes the threats to Russia as “real, perceived, and contrived”. Like all states, Russia has threats to its security; given its size and the neighborhood it is in, it has more than most. If dealing with Russia simply meant understanding what these threats are and not exacerbating them, things would be straightforward. But Moscow also perceives things as threatening that most other states would not. To make matters even more complicated, the Kremlin also makes up or contrives threats against itself, routinely accusing other states of doing things they are simply not doing (and which the Kremlin knows they are not doing).
The danger for the US and its allies here is that they often dismiss as contrived things the Kremlin actually does perceive as threats.
The danger for the US and its allies here is that they often dismiss as contrived things the Kremlin actually does perceive as threats. Since the US wouldn’t consider a certain action threatening and since it knows that in taking that action it means no harm to Russia, US policymakers often assume the Kremlin understands this. They therefore dismiss Russian protests as typical Kremlin propaganda – in other words, they accuse Russia of contriving threats that it knows do not really exist. But in some cases Russian policymakers do perceive these actions as threatening, paving the way for miscalculation and misperception. In the words of Russia scholar Olga Oliker, this problem makes Russia “hard to reassure and easy to escalate with”.
NATO enlargement is an example here. Despite the narrative from Moscow that NATO is a hostile military bloc marching inexorably toward Russia’s borders, until Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 NATO’s enlargement in Russia’s direction was purely institutional, not military. Although the Alliance admitted new members closer to Russia, it moved no foreign military forces into those new members, meaning they posed no greater military threat to Russia than they did before they joined NATO (unless Russia attacked them, triggering NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause). And since most of these were small states with militaries far smaller than Russia’s, the latter’s threat environment did not change in any meaningful way.
But the Kremlin did not see it that way; it routinely accused NATO of making threatening moves by enlarging toward Russia’s borders. Moscow reacted by, among other things, invading Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, and justified both invasions as attempts to keep Ukraine out of NATO. In response, NATO has moved significant military forces to member states bordering Russia. NATO characterizes these moves as prudent steps to deter Russian aggression; Moscow labels them as grave threats to Russia’s security. The irony here is that NATO enlargement itself did not threaten Russia, since no NATO forces moved east until after 2014. However, Russia’s perception of NATO as a threat caused Moscow to take actions that, in turn, caused NATO to move forces in Russia’s direction, posing an actual military threat to Russia. One way to summarize the paradox here is this: if you think NATO enlargement threatens Russia, you don’t know NATO; if you think Russia is not threatened by NATO enlargement, you don’t know Russia.
One way to summarize the paradox here is this: if you think NATO enlargement threatens Russia, you don’t know NATO; if you think Russia is not threatened by NATO enlargement, you don’t know Russia.
The third thing US policymakers often underestimate about Russia is its tolerance for risk. From threatening US forces in Syria, to nuclear saber-rattling over Ukraine, Russian political and military leaders often run risks of escalation that the US would not accept. There is a simple reason for this: Russia knows it is weaker than the US and accepting risks the US would not entertain helps balance the power disparity. Political science labels this phenomenon prospect theory. Prospect theory takes some of its insights from observing the behavior of gamblers, noting that those on a winning streak become less risk tolerant, hoping to preserve their gains, while those on losing streak are prone to high-risk behavior. This is known as “gambling for resurrection” – trying to reverse the losses incurred through a single high-risk, high-reward move. Russian behavior in its interactions with the US contains many characteristics of prospect theory and often has the exact intended effect of deterring the US by threatening an escalation Washington is unwilling to risk.
The fourth and final thing US leaders often underestimate about their Russian counterparts is their cynicism. While Russian cynicism extends to the motives of all states, it is particularly pronounced toward those of Western states. When the US and its allies use appeals to international law, norms, and institutions with their Russian counterparts, the latter greet these appeals with overwhelming cynicism. The view from the Kremlin is that Western states put no more stock in laws, norms, and institutions than Russia does, the Western governments are simply more duplicitous and better about hiding their true motives. Every time the US or another Western state operates outside the law, ignores norms of behavior, or evades institutions, it strengthens this cynical Russian perception.
The view from the Kremlin is that Western states put no more stock in laws, norms, and institutions than Russia does, the Western governments are simply more duplicitous and better about hiding their true motives.
A short personal story serves to underline how deep and widespread this cynicism is in the Russian political and military establishment. In 2016, while working at the UN in Geneva on the Syria peace process, the author had twice-daily meetings with Russian military officers and diplomats. The purpose of these meetings was to monitor the status of local ceasefires that were in place, and to enable the delivery of humanitarian aid. In practice, the Russian military ignored the ceasefires, bombing opposition-held areas routinely and indiscriminately, and preventing the delivery of aid. At one meeting, after the Russian and Syrian militaries had again bombed a hospital overnight, I brought this up to my counterpart, a Russian colonel. He replied, “Look, every time we come up to a hospital, some Dutch guy in glasses comes running out and says ‘you can’t come in here, this is a hospital’. And behind him are two dozen Arab guys with beards.” The implication here was clear: international humanitarian assistance organizations were intentionally harboring opposition fighters and therefore hospitals were legitimate targets.
What Can Be Done?
Given that a sustainable reset in US-Russia relations will remain elusive, how should the US deal with Moscow? How can Washington hold the line against Russian attempts to degrade US security without risking uncontrolled escalation with its only existential threat? Understanding – and eventually discarding – the four common misconceptions discussed above would be a major step. This does not mean caving to every Russian demand or reacting to every threatening Russian statement, but it does mean being able to put these demands and threats in context by understanding their sources and their objectives.
The US and its allies will never be able to meet Russia’s excessive demands for its own security without fatally undermining their own, and they should not try. Nevertheless, American and other Western leaders should understand that their Kremlin counterparts genuinely do see the world as a largely hostile, threatening place. Yes, Russian propaganda does contrive threats where none exist, but Kremlin leaders also see things as threatening that their Western counterparts would not. Being aware of this and being able to discern perceived threats from contrived threats will help prevent US officials from inadvertently triggering Russian threat perceptions.
Next, understanding the Kremlin’s tolerance for risk will help US and other Western officials from “self-deterring” in response to threats on which the Kremlin is highly unlikely to follow through. When Russian officials make statements or policy moves that risk direct conflict with the West, their Western counterparts should see these less as examples of things the Kremlin is prepared to do and more as attempts to even the playing field by raising the risk of confrontation to levels Moscow knows its adversaries are uncomfortable with. While ignoring Russia’s risk acceptant behavior is unwise, allowing it to deter the US from pursuing its own core interests also carries a high cost.
The US and its allies must work to restore trust in international laws, norms, and institutions, first and foremost by respecting them even when inconvenient.
Finally, the US and its allies must work to restore trust in international laws, norms, and institutions, first and foremost by respecting them even when inconvenient. This will undercut cynical Russian accusations that the US has no respect for these itself, instead seeing them merely as a convenient way of criticizing Russian behavior. While imperfect and even maddening at times, international laws, norms, and institutions are a needed bulwark against the Hobbesian world that could dawn if the US walked away from them. It was, in part, the US imposition of crushing tariffs that choked off trade and exacerbated the global depression of the 1930s. That, combined with the US abandonment of the League of Nations – a body it founded and then never joined – helped set the stage for the bloodiest decade in modern history, culminating in World War II. The carnage of that war convinced a generation of American leaders that laws, norms, and institutions were critical to preserving predictability and order in the world. It would be a shame if a new generation of American leaders had to learn this lesson again through the catastrophe of another global war.
