Description

A good topic should have a mechanism that is a term of art, topic uniqueness, quality solvency
advocates, and be a timely issue that is worthy of consideration. In constructing a topic, we need
to be sensitive to the division of ground, ensuring that there is a healthy debate in both policy and
critical literature bases surrounding the controversy area.
Given these considerations, it is time to debate Russia. Putin has been increasingly aggressive
with Russian foreign policy and the international community is calling on the United States to
use its influence to curb future, increasingly worrisome behavior. There is an evolving (but still
relatively stable) literature base to draw upon, core mechanisms that are advocated in the
literature, and a healthy balance of affirmative and negative ground on the topic.
Benefits of this controversy area:
1.) Timely
a. Russia is an evolving controversy, this area will stay fresh throughout the year.
2.) Topic Uniqueness
a. Trump isnt going to put conditions on Russia anytime soon.
3.) Deep, broad literature base
a. Terms of art for defined mechanisms
b. Solvency Evidence
c. Disadvantage/CP cards
d. K Literature
Thanks to Travis Cram, Martin Osborn, Collin Roark, James Herndon, David Cram Helwich, and
Austen Yorko for assisting in the research for this paper.
Proposed Resolutions
 Coercive Diplomacy

The United States federal government should substantially increase its coercive diplomacy
towards the Russian Federation in one or more of the following areas:
- Information warfare
- Electoral interference
- Territorial annexation
- Military deployments
- Reductions of nuclear weapons

The United States federal government should substantially increase its coercive diplomacy
towards the Russian Federation in one or more of the following areas:
- Offensive cyber operations
- Electoral interference
- Territorial enlargement
- Military deployments
- Nuclear arms control
 Constructive Engagement

The United States federal government should substantially increase its constructive engagement
with the Russian Federation in one or more of the following areas:
- Information warfare
- Electoral interference
- Territorial annexation
- Military deployments
- Reductions of nuclear weapons

The United States federal government should substantially increase its constructive engagement
with the Russian Federation in one or more of the following areas:
- Offensive cyber operations
- Electoral interference
- Territorial enlargement
- Military deployments
- Nuclear arms control
 Discussion

I prefer the term coercive diplomacy. It makes the aff be more aggressive towards Russia than
constructive engagement. As the verb stem coercive diplomacy thus would allow the
negative access to softer approaches as counterplan ground. This sets up a cleaner orientation for
both the aff and the neg, improves topic uniqueness for the neg, and preserves good solvency
evidence for the aff.
An alternative term is conditional engagement, which is somewhat of a middle ground,
requiring the aff to implement government-to-government interactions, and also the specification
of ex ante conditions (which is a likely, but debatable part of constructive engagement. It is
less aggressive (and less well-defined) than coercive diplomacy, which would afford the
affirmative with more flexibility, with a corresponding decrease in negative predictability.
Verb Coercive Diplomacy
 Term of Art
Coercive diplomacy is a term of art it must include a threat of force and may
include positive inducements
Levy, Jack S. (2008). Deterrence and coercive diplomacy: The contributions of
Alexander George. Political Psychology, 29(4), 537-552.

In Georges view, the strategy of coercive diplomacy is an age-old instrument of

statecraft that had never been systematized. His aim was to articulate a policy
relevant theory of coercive diplomacy in which threats, persuasion, positive
inducements, and accommodation were integrated into a crisis bargaining strategy that
provided political leaders with an alternative to war or to strictly coercive military
strategies.5 In contrast to either war or the quick, decisive military strategy,
which George described as a military strategy that aimed to negate adversary
capabilities to contest what is at stake, coercive diplomacy is a political-diplomatic
strategy that aims to influence an adversarys will or incentive structure.6 It is a
strategy that combines threats of force, and, if necessary, the limited and selective
use of force in discrete and controlled increments,7 in a bargaining strategy that
includes positive inducements. The aim is to induce an adversary to comply with
ones demands, or to negotiate the most favorable compromise possible, while
simultaneously managing the crisis to prevent unwanted military escalation.8 Coercive
diplomacy also differs from deterrence. Deterrence invokes threats to dissuade an
adversary from initiating an undesired action, while coercive diplomacy is a response
to an action that has already been taken.9 George distinguished coercive diplomacy
from compellence, which Schelling (1966) defined as one of two forms of coercion
(the other being deterrence), in two ways. First, George emphasized more strongly
than did Schelling that coercive diplomacy (and deterrence as well) can include
positive inducements and accommodation as well as coercive threats. This is an
important contribution, and one that led to subsequent efforts to incorporate
assurances into analyses of influence strategies (Davis, 2000; Lebow & Stein, 1987;
Stein, 1991). Second, George differentiated between defensive and offensive uses of
coercive threats. He defined coercive diplomacy as a defensive strategy that is
employed to deal with the efforts of an adversary to change a status quo situation
in his own favor, by persuading the adversary to stop what it is doing or to undo
what it has done (George & Simons, 1994, p. 8; George, 1991a, p. 6). George
specified a number of variants of coercive diplomacy, defined in terms of tactics
(George & Simons, 1994, p. 18). The starkest variant is the full- fledged ultimatum,
which includes a demand, a time limit for compliance, and potent and credible
threat of punishment for noncompliance. If the strategy involves an implicit rather
than explicit form of any of these elements, it is a tacit ultimatum. George defined
a try-and-see approach as one in which a demand is made without an explicit
threat or time limit, and a gradual turning of the screw as involving the threat of a
gradual rather than step-level increase in coercive pressure. These variants
enhance the flexibility of the strategy of coercive diplomacy.
 Negotiated Arrangement

Coercive diplomacy involves a threat of military action, coordinated with a

diplomatic approach
Art, R. J., & Cronin, P. M. (Eds.). (2003). The United States and coercive diplomacy.
US Institute of Peace Press.

Coercive diplomacy (or compellence, as some prefer to call it) employs threats of
force to persuade an opponent to call off or undo its encroachmentfor example,
to halt an invasion or give up territory that has been occupied. Coercive diplomacy
differs, therefore, from the strategy of deterrence, which involves attempts to
dissuade an adversary from undertaking an action that has not yet been initiated.
Coercive diplomacy is also different from use of military force to reverse an
encroachment. Coercive diplomacy seeks to persuade the adversary to cease its
aggression rather than bludgeon him with military force into stopping. In coercive
diplomacy, one gives the opponent the opportunity to stop or back off before
employing force against it. Threats or quite limited use of force are closely
coordinated with appropriate diplomatic communications to the opponent.
Important signaling, bargaining, and negotiating components are built into the
strategy of coercive diplomacy.
Verb Constructive Engagement
QPQ
 Crocker

CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT IS A CONDITIONAL QUID PRO QUO

ARRANGEMENT
CROCKER (Distinguished fellow at United States Institute for Peace) 1989
[Chester, South Africa Eight Years Later, Foreign Affairs, fall, p. asp //wyo-tjc]
Regarding South Africa, constructive engagement was by definition a conditional concept: in
exchange for Pretoria's cooperation on achieving Namibia's independence, we would work to
restructure the independence settlement to address our shared interest in reversing the Soviet-
Cuban adventure in Angola; in exchange for reduced rhetorical flagellation and minor
adjustments in certain bilateral fields (e.g., civilian export controls), we would hold Pretoria to its
self-proclaimed commitment to domestic reform. There would be a change of tone toward
reciprocity and even-handedness. But there would be no change in basic policy parameters on
such matters as the U.S. opposition to South African apartheid laws and institutions or bilateral
security ties -- no "rewriting of the past 20 years of U.S. diplomacy," as the 1980 article put it --
in the absence of fundamental internal change..
 Chan

CHAN 1996 [N., Burma Issues Newsletter, Vol. 3 No. 4, Gentle and Slow Persuasion, March
1996, http://www.burmalibrary.org/reg.burma/archives/199604/msg00035.html //wyo-tjc]
By definition, a policy of "constructive engagement" used by one country to relate to another
country must satisfy three conditions: 1. Rather than dealing with sensitive issues, such as
human rights abuses and/or dictatorship, in a confrontational and immediate way, a long-term
strategy to slowly encourage democratic change and respect for human rights is carried out. 2.
Important economic and political relationships between the two countries are established and
strengthened. 3. Conditions are placed on the country in question, and these conditions
must be met within a specified time-frame for the good relationship to continue. In other
words, one country tells another, "We will encourage investments and greater political
dialogue with you if, and only if, you meet these specific conditions by a specific date."
 Carrot + Stick

VODANOVICH (research fellow) 1999 [Ivanica, Constructive Engagement and Constructive

Intervention, Feb. 2, p. online //wyo-tjc]
Constructive engagement assumes involvement in the internal affairs of another state as the
middle way between confrontation and isolation. In reality the line between `constructive'
involvement and intervention can be difficult to maintain. Without a degree of pressure for
change, and inducements to do so, the policy can be seen to lead to accommodation. It can
be interpreted by the recipient regime as providing legitimacy and support for its policy. Explicit
intervention and pressure for change raises the problem of interference in the internal affairs of
an autonomous sovereign state. In practice constructive engagement has usually combined
the carrot and the stick. Inducements to change, in the form of trade concessions, loans and
other incentives have been accompanied by clearly defined and limited negative conditions.
These have included arms embargo or limiting aid funds to NGO projects rather than
government programmes.
 Ongoing

RESNICK (Assistant Professor of IR) 2001

[Evan, Defining Engagement, Journal of International Affairs, April 2001, p. online //wyo-tjc]
In contrast to many prevailing conceptions of engagement, the one proposed in this essay allows
a substantive distinction to be drawn between engagement and appeasement. The standard
definition of appeasement-which derives from the language of classical European diplomacy,
namely "a policy of attempting to reduce tension between two states by the methodical
removal of the principal causes of conflict between them"29-is venerable but nevertheless
inadequate.30 It does not provide much guidance to the contemporary policymaker or policy
analyst, because it conceives of a foreign policy approach in terms of the ends sought while
never making clear the precise means involved. The principal causes of conflict between two
states can be removed in a number of ways.31
A more refined definition of appeasement that not only remains loyal to the traditional
connotations but also establishes a firm conceptual distinction from engagement might be: the
attempt to influence the political behavior of a target state by ceding territory and/or a
geopolitical sphere of influence to that state. Indeed, the two best-known cases of appeasement,
Great Britain's appeasement of the United States at the turn of the 20th century and of Nazi
Germany in the 1930s, reveals that much of this appeasement adopted precisely these guises. The
key elements of the British appeasement of the US-acceptance of the Monroe
Doctrinepermission for the US to build and fortify a Central American canal, and acquiescence
to American claims on the border between Alaska and the Yukon-consisted of explicit
acknowledgement of American territorial authority. 32 Meanwhile, the appeasement of the Third
Reich by Great Britain was characterized by acquiescence to: Germany's military reoccupation of
the Rhineland (1936); annexation of Austria (1938); acquisition of the Sudetenland from
Czechoslovakia as decided at the Munich Conference; and absorption of the remainder of
Czechoslovakia (1939).33 A more contemporary example of appeasement is the land for peace
exchange that represents the centerpiece of the on-again off-again diplomatic negotiations
between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Thus, a rigid conceptual
distinction can be drawn between engagement and appeasement. Whereas both policies are
positive sanctions-insofar as they add to the power and prestige of the target state-engagement
does so in a less direct and less militarized fashion than appeasement. In addition, engagement
differs from appeasement by establishing an increasingly interdependent relationship
between the sender and the target state. At any juncture, the sender state can, in theory,
abrogate such a relationship at some (ideally prohibitive) cost to the target state.34
Appeasement, on the other hand, does not involve the establishment of contacts or
interdependence between the appeaser and the appeased. Territory and/or a sphere of
influence are merely transferred by one party to the other either unconditionally or in
exchange for certain concessions on the part of the target state.
Not QPQ
 Unconditional

Constructive engagement is an explicit use of incentives without defined conditions

Toler 82 (Deborah, professor of Political Science, Ohio State University, Constructive
Engagement: Reactionary Pragmatism At Its Best, Issue: A Journal Of Africanist Opinion,
Volume Xii, Numbers 3/4, Fall/Winter 1982 JSTOR, trinity//wmj)
Much of the liberal criticism of constructive engagement has centered on its explicit "carrot
approach" towards the white minority regime of South Africa. In an effort to obtain South
African cooperation for U.S. objectives in the region the Reagan Administration has toned down
U.S. criticism of apartheid, permitted visits by high level officials between the two countries,
increased bilateral diplomatic relations, and vetoed anti-South African U.N. Security Council
resolutions. Far more meaningful to the South Africans have been the administration's economic
and military "carrots" such as the facilitations of IMF and Export-Import Bank transactions, the
offer to renew U.S.-South African nuclear cooperation, and particularly the relaxation of
restrictions on the sale of U.S. exports of such items as helicopters, light aircraft, transport
planes, and computers to the South African military and police forces. This explicit "carrot
approach," for which the United States has so far received in return only a series of South
African eructions, is based upon the underlying beliefs that, in Crocker's words, the "U.S.
government has at its disposal neither the potential 'carrots' nor the 'sticks' required for a
coherent and effective policy," and that the "South African capacity to cope with destructive
actions is finite, but their ability to pervert our purposes and produce unintended and unforeseen
consequences is not."' In much of his earlier writing Crocker blames domestic political pressures,
from the left in the case of "carrots" and from the right in the case of "sticks," for the inability of
U.S. policymakers to either offer the promise of substantive rewards (e.g., resumed arms sales)
or to threaten major economic damage such as trade or investment sanctions. Far more dominant
in Crocker's more recent analyses is the view that South Africa's military and economic self-
sufficiency means that there really are no meaningful "carrots" or "sticks" for the United States
to wield. If this is the case, why then constructive engagement's cornucopia of "carrots"? The
use of "carrots," particularly those which have not been tied to specific South African
concessions, can perhaps best be understood by beginning with K.J. Holsti's admittedly crude
and overly simplistic, but nonetheless useful formula for predicting influence outcomes in a
diplomatic situation: State A's resources + State B's needs from State A + State B's
responsiveness to State A = Probability that State A will succeed. In essence, there are three
critical variables in the ability of State A to influence State B. First, the relevance of A's
resources for a specific diplomatic situation and concomittantly, the ability of State A to mobilize
those resources in support of foreign policy objectives and make them credible. Second, the
extent to which there are needs between states A and B. In order for A to succeed it is necessary
both that B is dependent on it for resources and that State A not need State B for equally
important resources. And the third critical variable is the ephemeral quality of responsiveness-
the disposition of State B to receive State A's requests with sympathy, even to the point
where State B is willing to sacrifice some of its own values and interests in order to
accommodate those requesk6 Constructive engagement's proponents believe that the United
States simply lacks many of the relevant resources necessary to influence South Africa and
that it is unable to mobilize those few resources it does have available due to domestic political
pressures. Not only does South Africa not need U.S. resources, the United States does need
South African resources-not merely the raw materials, Cape Sea routes, and trade and investment
opportunities so frequently emphasized, but also South African cooperation in regional
diplomatic negotiations and in the quest for regional diplomatic stability. If the United States
lacks the first two elements of the influence equation, then it is reasonable to emphasize the
third-increasing South African responsiveness to U.S. wishes. Clearly this is the aim of
constructive engagement's indiscriminate "carrot approach." Harsh rhetoric condemning
South Africa's apartheid policy and attempts to isolate and punish the racist regime have,
Administration officials argue, only made white South Africans more obdurate and more
internally self-sufficient. Richard E. Bissell describes the dilemma constructive engagement's
architects believe they face when he notes: For South Africa, the domestic and regional situation
matters far more than the views of the United States do, and U.S. views are rarely reflected in the
higher circles of Afrikanerdom where policies are made. This latter point is frequently missed by
U.S. commentators on South Africa who assume that the primary goal of South African foreign
policy is to "region" the Western community of nations. . . . Influence can hardly be exerted if
there is no one of significance at the other end willing to take it.'

Its all carrot and no stick

Geoffrey Wisner Transition, No. 60 (1993), pp. 174-183
The distinctive feature of constructive engagement was what has been characterized as an all
carrot and no stick approach to South Africa. The United States engaged in quiet diplomacy
with Pretoria while lifting sanctions imposed earlier and strenuously opposing the passage of
new ones by the United Nations and Congress. Critics argued that by giving South Africa more
breathing room, we allowed it to delay the independence of Namibia, repress anti-apartheid
protest, and attack its neighboring states with impunity.
 Sanction Removal

Sciolino 92 (Elaine, Staff Writer at the New York Times, The World; After a Fresh Look, U.S.
Decides to Still Steer Clear of Iran, June 7, 1992, Lexis, trinity/wmj)
So it seemed natural that Washington might reward Teheran after it stayed neutral in the Persian
Gulf war in early 1991 and used its influence -- and its money -- to persuade Iranian-backed
groups in Lebanon to free the last American hostage last December. Indeed, earlier this year,
Richard N. Haass, the chief White House aide on the Middle East, launched the first formal
review of American policy toward Iran since the first months of the Bush Administration.
He floated the idea that the Administration consider a strategy of "constructive
engagement" by lifting some economic sanctions, according to participants in the review
process.

Luciano 97 (Ernest, New England International and Comparative Law Annual, A Helms-Burton
Act Analysis: Is This Type Of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Consistent With Our
Treaty/Agreements, Customary International Law & Post-Cold War Policy?,
http://www.nesl.edu/intljournal/vol3/helmnote.htm#N_188_, trinity/wmj)
The United States has been the champion of free trade(187)and in its participation in the global
market, it has promoted free markets and free trade areas while minimizing protectionist policies.
The demise of the Soviet Union called for the removal of trade embargos and sanctions
against communist countries. This strategy of openness, was thought to have accelerated the
collapse of communist regimes. The United States previously dealt with a number of rogue
countries which fell into communists hands, but now has established foreign relations with these
countries. Countries such as China, Vietnam and North Korea are all examples of nations which
still have communist regimes, have expropriated United States investments but have opened
relations the United States. This policy is called constructive engagement .(188) Under this
policy, a larger country which disagrees with the government or policy of another country,
exposes the other country to trade and diplomatic relations , in the hope that its government
will accede to the larger country's concerns, such as improving human rights. This policy has
been looked upon more favorably than imposing economic sanctions because it is believed that
cultural, economic and diplomatic relations will lead to an informational exchange that will
promote political change more quickly, and will result in the defusion of local nationalism
against the United States.
 Economic Integration

Constructive engagement is economic integration

Forcese 02 (Craig, BA, McGill; MA, Carleton; LL.B., Ottawa; LL.M., Yale; Member of the Bars
of New York, Ontario and the District of Columbia., Globalizing Decency: Responsible
Engagement in an Era of Economic Integration, Yale Human Rights & Development Law
Journal 2002, 5 Yale H.R. & Dev. L.J. 1, Lexis, trinity//wmj)
Like many terms expressing a highly politicized concept, "constructive engagement" has a
mutable and sometimes very amorphous meaning. The expression seems to have originated in
the mid-1970s to describe U.S. policy towards apartheid-era South Africa. In that context, the
concept comprised, on the one hand, a rejection of trade and economic sanctions and, on the
other, a continued diplomatic relationship with Pretoria aimed at resolving the issues of
Rhodesia, Namibia and apartheid. 5 Notwithstanding its region-specific origin, the term is now
regularly invoked in popular discussions surrounding current U.S. relations with contemporary
repressive governments. Asked in 1997 what "constructive engagement" meant in the
context of the United States' China foreign policy, then-Secretary of State Albright spoke
rather obliquely of "a [*5] relationship with [the Chinese] where they feel a part of the
responsibility for the international community." 6 From other sources, it is clear that for the
State Department and other foreign ministries, "constructive engagement" describes a
diplomatic relationship involving dialogue rather than isolation. 7 Further, for governments
and businesses, "constructive engagement" is more than a species of diplomatic intercourse.
Instead, it is often taken to mean accelerated economic integration.

Constructive engagement is active economic interaction

Luciano 97 (Ernest, New England International and Comparative Law Annual, A Helms-Burton
Act Analysis: Is This Type Of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Consistent With Our
Treaty/Agreements, Customary International Law & Post-Cold War Policy?,
http://www.nesl.edu/intljournal/vol3/helmnote.htm#N_188_, trinity//wmj)
Constructive engagement, is a policy in which there is active trade and extensive diplomatic
relations in hope that eventually the un-democratic country will eventually have to accede
to the concerns of the international community.
 Not Military
Constructive engagement is diplomatic, not military
IVANICA VODANOVICH Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland, New Zealand 02 February . 1999
http://www.focusweb.org/constructive-engagement-and-constructive-intervention-a-useful-approach-to-security-in-asia-pa.html?Itemid=26
Constructive engagement cannot be called a theory. It is rather a method or process for implementing policy and as such can be and has been used by realist or liberal strategists. This is illustrated by
American policy between 1968 and 1985, a period ranging from the Nixon Kissinger years through the Carter epoch, which defined human rights a foreign policy concern, to the Reagan years when the model was most explicitly set

out by Crocker. Despite this versatility it begins from certain identifiable premises which mark it as a distinctive approach. The basic underlying idea is that there is a middle way for addressing foreign policy and
security concerns that lies between isolation and more direct confrontation. In this sense it is a pragmatic response to security dilemmas. It is part of a group of approaches, strategic
engagement, critical dialogue, or the Japanese concept of `quiet diplomacy' which overlap in their assumption that inclusion, dialogue and negotiation are more effective in securing foreign policy objectives than exclusion or overt
coercion. (President Clinton's televised debate with Premier Jiang Zemin, during his recent visit to China can be seen as fitting into this approach and as a response to his domestic constituency, an important element in the policy
process in a democracy). The adoption of constructive engagement in American foreign policy vis a vis South Africa was based not on the validity and strength of the argument for exclusion, and the imposition of sanctions, but rather
on an assessment that sanctions were ineffective (Coker, op.cit.). Constructive engagement offers an alternative approach to security dilemmas. It is significant that it has been developed and implemented by foreign policy institutions.

. It offers a political response to a security issue rather than a military one.

This is one of its distinctive characteristics as a security response As such it
corresponds more closely, in its approach, to contemporary understandings of the complexity and multifaceted character of modern security dilemmas in a unipolar global world. These are expressed in concepts such as comprehensive
security, cooperative security and common security. They all emphasise that security, and stability in which security is grounded, is affected by the inter-dependence between economic, social, and environmental factors as well as

. Crocker (1980), argues that constructive engagement is based on the premise that it is possible to mediate to
political and military

apply pressure that will result in constructive change. This requires that contact is maintained. The focus of the approach is on the
process, the dynamics of internal change, rather than the ultimate objective. The latter can, ultimately, be assumed to be based on self interest, however this is defined in the specific context.
The emphasis is on evolutionary rather than revolutionary or abrupt and radical change. So this approach envisages a sequence of orderly and inter-related change. It recognises that change can be destabilising and attempts through
constructive pressure, to ensure that it occurs in an orderly process. In South Africa and again in Burma and China the maintenance of order and stability, internal and regional, through sequential evolutionary change rather than

radical change was the ideal. At the same time there was recognition that the existing situation by its nature threatened internal and regional instability .
Verb Conditional Engagement
 Haas

HAAS (Brookings) 2000 [Richard, Terms of Engagement, Survival, p.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2000survival.pdf //wyo-tjc]
The term engagement was popularised in the early 1980s amid controversy about the Reagan
administrations policy of constructive engagement towards South Africa. However, the term
itself remains a source of confusion. Except in the few instances where the US has sought to
isolate a regime or country, America arguably engages states and actors all the time simply
by interacting with them. To be a meaningful subject of analysis, the term engagement must
refer to something more specific than a policy of non-isolation. As used in this article,
engagement refers to a foreign-policy strategy which depends to a significant degree on
positive incentives to achieve its objectives. Certainly, it does not preclude the simultaneous
use of other foreign-policy instruments such as sanctions or military force: in practice, there is
often considerable overlap of strategies, particularly when the termination or lifting of sanctions
is used as a positive inducement. Yet the distinguishing feature of American engagement
strategies is their reliance on the extension or provision of incentives to shape the behaviour
of countries with which the US has important disagreements. Todays rapidly globalising world,
no longer beset by Cold War competitions, creates new possibilities for engagement as a foreign-
policy option. In particular, the growing recognition of the drawbacks of punitive policies in this
new environment has spurred a search for alternative strategies. There are increasing doubts
about the wisdom of using sanctions, particularly when exerted unilaterally in a globalised world
economy, to dissuade problem regimes from their agendas. Not only has the record of sanctions
in forcing change been poor, but the costs of such policies to civilian populations and American
commercial interests has often been substantial. Just as faith in sanctions has been shaken, the
limits of military force have been exposed; despite periodic bombings, Saddam Hussein remains
in power, and events in Kosovo demonstrate how even the most carefully orchestrated military
campaign can result in serious collateral damage. Moreover, the dissolution of Cold War
alignments has both opened new opportunities for engagement strategies and created new
rationales for them. Due to the heightened economic vulnerability and strategic insecurity of
former Soviet allies, the incentives that the US can offer have new potency. At the same time,
because Americas allies are freer to shape their foreign-policy agendas subject to their own
desires, the US needs to seek out policies with appeal that extends beyond rigid American
preferences. During the 1990s, many of Americas closest allies in Europe revealed a preference
for using incentives rather than punitive actions to achieve foreign-policy goals.2 Many
different types of engagement strategies exist, depending on who is engaged, the kind of
incentives employed and the sorts of objectives pursued. Engagement may be conditional
when it entails a negotiated series of exchanges, such as where the US extends positive
inducements for changes undertaken by the target country. Or engagement may be
unconditional if it offers modifications in US policy towards a country without the explicit
expectation that a reciprocal act will follow. Generally, conditional engagement is geared
towards a government; unconditional engagement works with a countrys civil society or
private sector in the hope of promoting forces that will eventually facilitate cooperation.
Solvency Evidence
 Articles/Books

TRUMP, PUTIN, AND THE NEW COLD WAR, 3-6-17, The New Yorker, Evan Osnos, David
Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-
the-new-cold-war

A NEW DIRECTION IN U.S.-RUSSIA RELATIONS? Americas Challenges & Opportunities

in Dealing with Russia, Editor, Paul J. Saunders, February 2017, Center for the National Interest

Russias Nuclear Diplomacy: How Washington Should Respond By Sagatom Saha, 4-2-17,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2017-04-02/russia-s-nuclear-
diplomacy

REPORT: Towards a Realist American Russia Policy, by Gordon M. Hahn, 1-23-17,

https://gordonhahn.com/2017/01/23/report-towards-a-realist-american-russia-policy-revised-
final-edition-parts-1-and-2/

Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy by Todd S. Sechser, Matthew Fuhrmann Cambridge
University Press, Feb 2, 2017

Energy, Coercive Diplomacy, and Sanctions, Chapter: The Palgrave Handbook of the
International Political Economy of Energy, Part of the series Palgrave Handbooks in IPE pp 487-
504, Date: 06 August 2016, by Llewelyn Hughes, Eugene Gholz

Coercive Diplomacy, Sanctions and International Law, Natalino Ronzitti, Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, Mar 24, 2016

Power Plays: How International Institutions Reshape Coercive Diplomacy, Allison Carnegie,
Cambridge University Press, Sep 3, 2015

Chapter: Russias Foreign Policy Choices and the Application of Situational Coercive
Diplomacy,
Ryan C. Maness, Brandon Valeriano, in Russias Coercive Diplomacy, pp 21-44

The Controversial Impact of WMD Coercive Arms Control on International Peace and Security:
Lessons from the Iraqi and Iranian Cases, Coralie Pison Hindawi, J Conflict Security Law (2011)
16 (3): 417-442. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jcsl/krr017, Published: 27 January 2012

Other Recent Links:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-trump-russia-20170321-story.html
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/saving-russia-policy-from-trump/
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/03/14/putin-might-not-wait-for-trump-
to-sort-out-his-russia-policy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/why-trump-is-right-on-russia.html?_r=1
 Big Military
Dtente with Russia is essential to avert global nuclear war read this
excellent card
Jeffrey Tayler is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, The Deal Trump Should Strike with
Putin, 2-17-17, http://quillette.com/2017/02/17/the-deal-trump-should-strike-with-putin/
What, then, is to be done? Before going into specifics, we should review why we need a renewed
dtente a relaxation of tensions with Russia. A properly achieved dtente would serve
American interests and buttress American security, and should therefore not be predicated on
hoped-for improvements in Russias internal situation, or thwarted by animosity to the current
occupant of the Kremlin. The hard facts: Russia is the only country with a nuclear arsenal
that can annihilate the United States. Russia has demonstrated a growing willingness to use
its conventional forces extraterritorially in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, and now,
of course, in Syria. Moreover, in case its conventional forces dont suffice to deal with an
existential threat, Russia has adopted a military doctrine that foresees the use of tactical
nukes to de-escalate a conflict. (Russias envisioning an asymmetrical response make sense,
given that it faces, alone, a twenty-eight member alliance.) Simply put, an outbreak of
conventional hostilities between Russia and NATO could easily turn nuclear.
There are other, less obvious, but nonetheless cogent reasons we need a new dtente. Russias
cooperation is essential to ensure the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. (E.g., Russias
sway with Iran was crucial in concluding the P5+1 nuclear deal with that country.) Russias
intelligence-gathering apparatus makes it a vital partner in combatting terrorism.
(Remember, for example, that Russias main security agency, the FSB, warned the FBI about the
Boston Marathon bombers, but was ignored.) And lest we forget, Russias unique geographic
dimensions and its scientific, technological and natural resources would be valuable assets
for an ally, but afford the Kremlin the capacity to play an international spoiler role that cannot
be discounted. Finally, as President Richard Nixon and Kissinger understood, Russia is well
placed to counterbalance an ever more assertive China and mediate with Chinas
unpredictable ally, North Korea two other nuclear states that pose great problems for
American interests in the Asia-Pacific region.
To dispense with one sure-to-be-raised objection to dtente: dtente does not mean
appeasement. Nixon and Kissinger brought about the first real dtente with the Soviet Union
while its army faced off with NATO forces in Europe; the SALT I and SALT II treaties and the
Helsinki Accords resulted. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan disrupted relations, but less
than a decade later, President Ronald Reagan, a lifelong enemy of communism who had
denounced the Soviet Union as an evil empire, enacted his own dtente with Mikhail
Gorbachev and ended the Cold War.
For now, at least, Trump can count on his Russian counterparts desire to improve relations.
Trump has many options, none of which require Congressional approval (at least at this time)
and which, doubtless, would not be forthcoming. Putin, less restrained politically, has more
latitude, of course. But what exactly would a new dtente with Russia look like and how would it
begin?
To initiate the dtente, the two sides should start small to build trust. Russia could reactivate
the Future Leaders Exchange (Flex) program (which it cancelled in 2014) and also lift the ban,
which it imposed in 2012, on Americans adopting Russian children, as the speaker of Russias
Federation Council has suggested. (In play at the time were approximately a thousand adoptions,
procedures for which could be resumed.) Simultaneously, the White House could cancel the
last round of sanctions (which dont amount to much anyway) the Obama administration
levied against Russia and renounce plans to mount a cyber attack against it for alleged
Kremlin-directed hacks related to the 2016 elections. (A bipartisan commission should
investigate this matter, and further action could be taken depending upon its findings.) The
Kremlin could then reinstate the 2000 agreement, suspended in October of last year, with the
United States by which the two sides worked jointly to dispose of excess Russian weapons-
grade plutonium, and repeal the law, passed subsequently, that sets forth unrealistic
preconditions (e.g., compensation for sanctions concerning the Ukraine crisis) for its
reinstatement.
More consequentially, both countries could immediately take their nuclear arsenals off hair-
trigger alert. (Possibly, though, only the United States has its weapons set to launch on
warning.) Hair-trigger alert status originated in darkest days of the Cold War, when the two
superpowers feared they would have to use their missiles or lose them to a surprise first strike,
and formed the basis of the MAD doctrine. As things stand now, the United States could fire off
its ICBMs within ten minutes of receiving a warning, via radar and satellites, of an incoming
salvo of Russian missiles. This is not a foolproof system: accidents and errors (on both sides)
have many times (and as recently as 1995) almost resulted in this horrific eventuality. The
United States and Russia agreed to a mutual detargeting of their arsenals in 1994; taking
the missiles off hair-trigger alert would be the obvious next step.
NATO could then reactivate the NATO-Russia Council, which it suspended in April 2014. A
mechanism for consultation, consensus-building, cooperation, joint decision and joint action,
the Council was established in 2002 so that the alliance and Russia might work as equal
partners on a wide spectrum of security issues of common interest. The United States and
Russia could restore other direct military-to-military ties, also cut off in 2014. These
contacts could save the planet from an accidental holocaust.
Such would be the framework within which to resolve some of the most pressing, less complex
issues between the United States and Russia. The prospects for a broader rapprochement,
however, rest on a reassessment, by the United States and its NATO allies, of NATOs stance vis-
-vis Russia and on taking an honest, impartial look at the genesis of the present standoff,
which originated with the Ukraine crisis but which has to do with the alliances post-Cold-War
strategy as a whole dating back to the 1990s.
The NATO alliance was founded in 1949 to counter Soviet military might. In 1990, as this might
was diminishing with the pan-Soviet woes that came with Perestroika, and when the United
States needed Soviet assent to allow German reunification, the United States pledged (orally) to
the Soviet government iron-clad guarantees that NATO would not expand eastward. (This
pledge should not be a matter of dispute: hundreds of memos, meeting minutes and transcripts
from U.S. archives attest to it, as do official papers released by former Chancellor Helmut Kohl
of Germany.) NATO, of course, broke its promise. Since then, it has expanded in four main
waves, under both Republican and Democratic administrations and against the objections of
Russian leaders, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Dmitry Medvedev to Putin. (Montenegro is the next
country to join.) Its twenty-eight members now include former Soviet satellite states in Eastern
Europe, and three former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Moreover, in the
Bucharest Summit Declaration of 2008, NATO promised to induct, one day, Ukraine and
Georgia.
An understandable historical fear of Russian domination ensured an array of countries in Central
and Eastern Europe willing to join NATO, but that does not mean expanding the alliance was a
prudent move. Here we should remember the words of George F. Kennan, the master American
diplomat who authored the Cold-War-era containment policy and called the enlargement of
NATO a tragic mistake. Kennan, in 1997, predicted that the planned expansion would spark a
bad reaction from Russia, and warned of a resulting new cold war, probably ending in a hot
one and the death of democracy in Russia. More recently, the renowned historian of
international relations, Michael Mandelbaum, described the alliances growth as one of the
greatest blunders in the history of American foreign policy. I concur, and have argued
repeatedly, and as far back as 2002, that NATOs expansion would poison relations and set off a
new confrontation with Russia. Oft-heard rhetoric that NATO is a defensive alliance has meant
little to Russia, which has faced the deployment of troops, armaments, matriel, and intelligence-
gathering infrastructure right up to its border. What counts are military capabilities, which
constitute a concrete reality, whereas declarations of peaceful intent are just, well, words.
The upshot: NATOs expansion has convinced Russians that the west regards it as an enemy,
justified the Kremlins vast military buildup, turned a good number of average Russian
citizens against the United States, and bolstered Putins popularity. It has reawakened
Russian apprehensions of invasion from the west (which happened twice in the preceding
century alone).
And lest we forget, Ukraine and Georgia remain on NATOs waiting list. The mere possibility
that these two countries might join the alliance has already cost lives. There is good reason to
think that the supportive overtures of the George W. Bush administration to Georgia, backed up
by the 2008 Bucharest Declaration, prompted Russia to act preemptively and respond to
Georgias incursion into South Ossetia (then a breakaway republic within Georgia) with its brief
invasion of the country that year. By creating a frozen territorial conflict in Georgia, Russia
would thwart for a long time, at least, any further moves by NATO to bring it into the alliance.
The next theater of conflict would be Ukraine, which former National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski, as far back as 1997, identified as a new and important space on the Eurasian
[strategic] chessboard. In late 2013 President Viktor Yanukovych (not entirely an ally of Russia,
but basically compliant to Moscow) decided, at least temporarily, to defy his publics ardent
wishes and delay signing a highly popular Association Agreement (ostensibly a trade pact) with
the European Union. Moscow had opposed the Agreement, which also just happened to foresee a
gradual convergence [between the European Union and Ukraine] in the area of foreign and
security policy, including the Common Security and Defense Policy.
(See Title II, Article 7. The implication was clear: the Agreement was a stepping stone to, either,
Ukraines renunciation of its neutral status, or to eventual NATO membership. A glance at the
similar lists of member countries for the E.U. and NATO should dispel any doubts.)
Yanukovychs refusal to sign the Association Agreement ignited the Euromaidan protest
movement, which morphed into an armed revolt that overthrew him in February 2014. A pro-
American leadership took over and repealed the statute enshrining Ukraines non-bloc (neutral)
status in the constitution, and renewed calls to join NATO. Days after Yanukovychs toppling,
Russia, encountering no real resistance, seized the Crimean Peninsula, home to its Black Sea
fleet. (Russia had been leasing, long-term, the Sevastopol port from Ukraine.) War then broke out
in Ukraines mostly Russian-speaking, partly ethnic Russian eastern region, the Donbas, with
Moscow covertly supporting the rebels. As of December 2016, according to the United Nations,
almost ten thousand had perished in the conflict.
Russias decisive reaction to a clumsy Western attempt to wrest Ukraine from its orbit
should surprise no one. Ukraines land border with Russia stretches some 1,300 miles and
comes within five hundred miles of Moscow. Russia arose as a nation from ninth-century Kievan
Rus, the historic heartland of both countries. From the fourteenth century until 1917, foreign
powers, including, especially, imperial Russia, dominated Ukraine; Soviet control lasted from
shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution to 1991. About one out of three Ukrainians speak
Russian as a first language, which serves as a lingua franca almost everywhere in the country.
(Russian and Ukrainian both evolved from the same East Slavic language.) Mutually beneficial
economic ties between Russia and Ukraine, as well as familial relations (including millions
of intermarriages) also bind Russia and Ukraine. Accordingly, when fighting broke out in eastern
Ukraine, 1.5 million Donbas Ukrainians fled not to Kiev-controlled territory, but to Russia,
where they knew they would be well received.
As Putin has it and there is no reason to doubt him Yanukovychs overthrow precipitated
Russias lightning grab of Crimea (with strategically critical Black Sea port and its majority
ethnic Russian population). Russias actions violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandums on
Security Assurances that Russia (as well as the United States and the United Kingdom) had
signed with Ukraine, by which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for guarantees of
territorial integrity. Russia continues to pay dearly for this move, which has resulted in sanctions,
a slowing economy, and economic hardship for its population. Yet it shows no sign of backing
down.
How would Ukraine figure into the deal Trump should strike with Putin? Trump would
renounce NATOs promise of eventual NATO membership to Ukraine (and Georgia) in
return for Russias recognition that both countries, while remaining neutral, would be free to
join whatever political and economic blocs they choose. This is essentially what both
Kissinger and Brzezinski have already proposed. Full implementation of the stalled Minsk
Accords, reached in February 2015 and foreseeing autonomy for the Donbas, would end the
conflict in Ukraines east. This might prompt a violent reaction against the Ukrainian
government from the far-right militias fighting on Kievs side in the region. Ultimately, though,
that would be an issue for the Ukrainian government, not the United States, to deal with.
Additionally, NATO and Russia would withdraw their militaries to pre-2014 postures.
NATO would halt and reverse the deployment of approximately four thousand troops to the
Baltic states and Poland. (Stationed on a rotating basis so as not to violate the alliances
Founding Act with Russia, the troops are intended as a trip wire and could not, in any case,
halt a Russian invasion of the Baltic countries, which would take as little as sixty hours.) Russia
would redeploy forces it has moved close to the Baltic frontier, and take out the short-
range, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles it has sent to Kaliningrad, on the Polish border.
Both sides would cease conducting provocative military exercises, and Russia would stop
sending its fighter jets to violate European airspace and buzz U.S. warships.
The status of Crimea presents a significant hurdle to be overcome. The peninsula officially
became part of Russia in 2014. A great majority of both ethnic Russians and Ukrainians in
Crimea favor remaining within the Russian Federation. To settle the matter, Russia could agree
to hold another referendum, but this time under the auspices of the United Nations. If the
results show that Crimeas population wishes to stay within Russia, as is highly likely, the
United States should recognize this, and, of course, the White House should drop the Crimea-
related sanctions implemented by executive order. If Crimeans choose to return to Ukraine,
Russia should honor their wishes.
More broadly, yet critically for the future, Russia and the United States should resume
strategic arms limitation talks. Trump should reverse his position on the New START
agreement (signed by Obama in 2010 and scheduled to remain in force until 2021); contrary to
what Trump believes, it does not favor Russia.
In any such negotiations, the Russians are sure to raise the U.S. missile defense system now
operational in Romania, and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty from which the United States
decided to withdrew unilaterally in 2002. (Russia followed suit the day after.) The U.S.
government has always maintained that its European Star Wars complex is meant to shield the
continent against an Iranian attack. A good argument can be made, though, that the missile
defense system is more destabilizing than effective and should be considered an offensive
weapon. Theoretically, it could be used to shoot down the few ICBMs Russia could launch in the
wake of a successful first strike by the United States. Such a strike might seem implausible, to
say the least, but, according to the eminent nuclear theorist John Steinbruner, it represents the
only imaginable route to decisive victory in nuclear war. Hence, Russian strategists must take
the possibility of it seriously. Ideally, both sides could sign a new anti-ballistic missile treaty,
with agreed-upon exceptions (formerly these included protection for Moscow and an anti-
ballistic missile complex in North Dakota), but which could be expanded, if necessary, by mutual
agreement. A treaty would require Congressional ratification, though.
With the exception of the treaty (which would have to come later) all the above could be codified
in an accord and signed at a summit in either Moscow or Washington.
If Trump chooses not to pursue dtente with Russia and continues with the current policy,
then he would do well to recall Kissingers words: the test of policy is how it ends, not how
it begins. He might also want to reflect on what President John F. Kennedy said in 1963, after
the nearly catastrophic Cuban Missile Crisis: Above all, while defending our vital interests,
nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of
either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. The dtente outlined above would allow us to
lessen the risk of such a confrontation.
No time in recent decades has been more perilous than ours. The Trump administration, as
well as Congress, should recognize this, and act immediately to reduce the threat to us all.
Conditions
 Grand Bargain Aff

Niall Ferguson, The Russian Question, 12-23-16, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/23/the-

russian-question-putin-trump-bush-obama-kissinger/
From the mid-19th century until the mid-20th, the German Question was the biggest and
hardest question of geopolitics. The German Question, to put it simply, was whether or not a
unification of German speakers under one rule would create a dangerously powerful state at the
center of Europe. The answer to that question was decided in the end, as Otto von Bismarck had
foreseen, by blood and iron. Two vast, catastrophic wars brought violence and destruction to the
whole of Europe and finally left Germany defeated and divided. By the time of its reunification
in 1990, demographic decline and cultural change had defanged Berlin sufficiently that the threat
of a united Germany has receded. Germany still predominates over the European Union because
of its size and economic strength. But it is no menace.
The same cannot be said of Russia, which has become more aggressive even as its economic
significance has diminished. The biggest and hardest question of 21st-century geopolitics may
prove to be: What do we do about Moscow?
Like the German Question, the new Russian Question is a function of the countrys Mittellage
(central situation). Germanys location was central in European terms. At its height, the
German Reich extended from Koblenz to Knigsberg, from the banks of the Rhine to the
beaches of the Baltic. Russia today is central in global terms . It was the only one of the great
European empires that extended into Asia over land rather than sea. The Soviet Union died an
astoundingly peaceful death 25 years ago this month. Yet the Russian Federation still extends
from Kaliningrad as Knigsberg has been known since its annexation by Russia in 1945
all the way to Vladivostok, 4,500 miles and 10 time zones away.
In the 19th century, the tension between Russias westward-looking metropolises and its vast
Asian hinterland furnished novelists and playwrights with wonderfully rich material. Ivan
Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky could debate which direction Russia should take, but no one
doubted the existence of the West-East dilemma. Nor was it a purely geographical phenomenon.
The institution of serfdom meant that until the 1860s and in practice long after that a
Russian gentleman only had to take a ride through his estates to leave Europe far behind.
But Russias West-East dilemma today is fast becoming the central problem of
international politics, not literature. On one side lies a China that long ago surpassed Russia
in economic as well as demographic terms and increasingly aspires to military preeminence
in Asia. On the other side of Russia lies a Europe that, for all its prosperity, has become
politically introverted and excessively reliant on the United States for its defense.
In his most recent book, World Order, Henry Kissinger contrasted four evolving and
incompatible conceptions of international order: American, European, Chinese, and Islamic.
Russias place in this scheme of things is ambiguous. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin,
circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent, Kissinger
wrote. Russia is a uniquely Eurasian power, sprawling across two continents but never
entirely at home in either. It has learned its geopolitics from the hard school of the steppe,
where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources on an open terrain with few fixed
borders.
Russia, it might be inferred, is the power least interested in world order. President Vladimir
Putin would no doubt deny that. He would argue that the best basis for order would be for the
great powers mutually to respect their spheres of influence and domestic political differences. On
the other hand, Russia is clearly the power most ready to exploit the new tools of
cyberwarfare that Kissinger warned presciently about in 2014:
The pervasiveness of networked communications in the social, financial, industrial, and military
sectors has revolutionized vulnerabilities. Outpacing most rules and regulations (and
indeed the technical comprehension of many regulators), it has, in some respects, created the
state of nature about which philosophers have speculated and the escape from which, according
to [Thomas] Hobbes, provided the motivating force for creating a political order.
[A]symmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between cyber
powers both in diplomacy and in strategy. Absent articulation of some rules of international
conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system.
That crisis has already arrived. As I write, the burning question of American politics is how far
the Russian government was successful in its efforts to influence the outcome of Novembers
presidential election. That Russia tried to do this is no longer in serious dispute. Russian hackers
successfully accessed the emails of the Democratic National Committee. WikiLeaks acted as the
conduit. The resulting email dumps and leaks probably reinforced voters negative views of
Hillary Clinton. Given Donald Trumps narrow margin of victory in key swing states, one might
claim that this was decisive though no more or less decisive than all the other factors that
made up the minds of crucial voters in an election where everything mattered. President
Barack Obama now says that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our
electionswe need to take action and that we will.
What remains debatable is how far the Trump campaign was aware that it was receiving
assistance from Moscow. If so, was there some hidden quid pro quo? Writing in Slate back in
July, Franklin Foer argued that Putin has a plan for destroying the Westand that plan looks a
lot like Donald Trump. In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum called Trump a Manchurian
candidate. The evidence for such claims is circumstantial at best. When he hired Paul Manafort
as his campaign manager, Trump can hardly have been unaware of Manaforts work for Kremlin
crony Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt Ukrainian president between 2010 and 2014. Another
former Trump campaign advisor with questionably close ties to Moscow was Carter Page, a
vocal defender of Russias annexation of Crimea.
Proponents of the conspiracy theory also cite Trumps description of NATO as obsolete and
expensive, his desire to make a great deal with Putin if elected, and his repeated refusal to
accept that Russia was behind the cybercampaign against his opponent a campaign that he
himself incited, if only jokingly, back in July.
Yet this controversy is generating more heat than light. First, there is nothing new about Russian
attempts to influence Western elections: Such psychological operations were conducted by
intelligence agencies on both sides of the Cold War. New technology has perhaps made them
easier to conduct and more effective, but they remain (unlike, say, biological warfare) within the
pale of international law. Second, in an election characterized by a general lack of restraint,
Trump may simply have exploited an unlooked for but not unwelcome advantage. If another
foreign government had supplied a liberal website with embarrassing emails hacked from
Republican accounts, would the Clinton campaign have averted its gaze? Third, nothing Trump
has said during the election binds him to be Putins confederate, as he made clear to Bill OReilly
on Fox News in April. I think I would possibly have a good relationship [with Putin], Trump
said. I dont know. I have no idea, Bill. Maybe we will, maybe we wont.
The real question we need to ask is why the Russian government was so eager to influence the
election in Trumps favor. The answer to that question is not as obvious as might be thought. It is
that Russia urgently one might even say desperately needed a friendlier president than
Clinton would have been. Moscows meddling in American politics reflects not its strength, nor
its strategic sophistication, but its weakness and dependence on Cold War tactics such as psy-ops.

A new era , but what era?

It did not have to be this way. Twenty-five years ago, the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked
not only the end of the Cold War but also the beginning of what should have been a golden era of
friendly relations between Russia and the West. With enthusiasm, it seemed, Russians embraced
both capitalism and democracy. To an extent that was startling, Russian cities became
Westernized. Empty shelves and po-faced propaganda gave way to abundance and dazzling
advertisements.
Contrary to the fears of some, there was a new world order after 1991. The world became a
markedly more peaceful place as the flows of money and arms that had turned so many regional
disputes into proxy wars dried up. American economists rushed to advise Russian politicians.
American multinationals hurried to invest.
Go back a quarter century to 1991 and imagine three more or less equally plausible futures. First,
imagine that the coup by hard-liners in August of that year had been more competently executed
and that the Soviet Union had been preserved. Second, imagine a much more violent dissolution
of the Soviet system in which ethnic and regional tensions escalated much further, producing the
kind of super-Yugoslavia Kissinger has occasionally warned about. Finally, imagine a happily-
ever-after history, in which Russias economy thrived on the basis of capitalism and
globalization, growing at Asian rates.
Russia could have been deep-frozen. It could have disintegrated. It could have boomed. No one
in 1991 knew which of these futures we would get. In fact, we got none of them. Russia has
retained the democratic institutions that were established after 1991, but the rule of law has not
taken root, and, under Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian nationalist form of government has
established itself that is notably ruthless in its suppression of opposition and criticism. Despite
centrifugal forces, most obviously in the Caucasus, the Russian Federation has held together.
However, the economy has performed much less well than might have been hoped. Between
1992 and 2016, the real compound annual growth rate of Russian per capita GDP has been 1.5
percent. Compare that with equivalent figures for India (5.1 percent) and China (8.9 percent).
Today, the Russian economy accounts for just over 3 percent of global output, according to the
International Monetary Funds estimates based on purchasing power parity. The U.S. share is 16
percent. The Chinese share is 18 percent. Calculated on a current dollar basis, Russias GDP is
less than 7 percent of Americas. The British economy is twice the size of Russias.
Moreover, the reliance of the Russian economy on exported fossil fuels as well as other
primary products is shocking. Nearly two-thirds of Russian exports are petroleum (63
percent), according the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Russias relative economic
weakness has been compounded by the steep decline in oil, gas, and other commodity prices
since 2014 and by U.S. and EU sanctions imposed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and
annexation of Crimea that same year.
Is Putin to blame?
Who is to blame for the recent steep deterioration in relations between Russia and the
United States? When, in fact, did it begin? Four years ago, Barack Obama ridiculed Mitt
Romney for characterizing Russia as Americas No. 1 geopolitical foe. To this day, Obamas
view remains that Russia is weak, not strong. As he told the Atlantics Jeffrey Goldberg in
March, [Putin is] constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with us,
because hes not completely stupid. He understands that Russias overall position in the world is
significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up [Bashar al-]
Assad doesnt suddenly make him a player. He went even further in his end-of-year press
conference, calling Russia a smaller country a weaker country that does not produce
anything that anybody wants to buy.
Yet this is a very different tone from the one the Obama administration took back in March 2009,
when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov,
symbolically pressed a reset button. (Appropriately, as it turned out, the Russian translation on
the button was misspelled by the State Department so that it read overcharged.) Nor was the
reset a complete failure. A year later, the United States and Russia reached an agreement to
reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons (the so-called New START deal).
One answer to the question of what went wrong is simply Putin himself. Having made my own
contribution to the blame Putin literature, I am not about to exonerate the Russian president. I
vividly remember the tone he adopted in a speech I heard at the 2007 Munich Security
Conference, where he gave (as I wrote at the time) a striking impersonation of Michael
Corleone in The Godfatherthe embodiment of implicit menace.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember what exactly Putin said on that occasion. In remarks
that seemed mainly directed at the Europeans in the room, he warned that a unipolar world
meaning one dominated by the United States would prove pernicious not only for all
those within this system but also for the sovereign itself. Americas hyper use of force,
Putin said, was plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. Speaking at a time
when neither Iraq nor Afghanistan seemed especially good advertisements for U.S. military
intervention, those words had a certain force, especially in German ears.
Nearly 10 years later, even Putins most splenetic critics would be well-advised to reflect for a
moment on our own part in the deterioration of relations between Washington and Moscow. The
Russian view that the fault lies partly with Western overreach deserves to be taken more
seriously than it generally is.
Is the West to blame?
If I look back on what I thought and wrote during the administration of George W. Bush, I would
say that I underestimated the extent to which the expansion of both NATO and the
European Union was antagonizing the Russians.
Certain decisions still seem to me defensible. Given their experiences in the middle of the 20th
century, the Poles and the Czechs deserved both the security afforded by NATO membership
(from 1999, when they joined along with Hungary) and the economic opportunities offered by
EU membership (from 2004). Yet the U.S. decision in March 2007 to build an anti-ballistic
missile defense site in Poland along with a radar station in the Czech Republic seems, with
hindsight, more questionable, as does the subsequent decision to deploy 10 two-stage missile
interceptors and a battery of MIM-104 Patriot missiles in Poland. Though notionally intended to
detect and counter Iranian missiles, these installations were bound to be regarded by the Russians
as directed at them. The subsequent deployment of Iskander short-range missiles to Kaliningrad
was a predictable retaliation.
A similar act of retaliation followed in 2008 when, with encouragement from some EU states,
Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. In response, Russia recognized rebels in
South Ossetia and Abkhazia and invaded those parts of Georgia. From a Russian perspective, this
was no different from what the West had done in Kosovo.
The biggest miscalculation, however, was the willingness of the Bush administration to
consider Ukraine for NATO membership and the later backing by the Obama
administration of EU efforts to offer Ukraine an association agreement. I well remember the
giddy mood at a pro-European conference in Yalta in September 2013, when Western
representatives almost unanimously exhorted Ukraine to follow the Polish path. Not nearly
enough consideration was given to the very different way Russia regards Ukraine nor to the
obvious West-East divisions within Ukraine itself. This was despite an explicit warning from
Putins aide Sergei Glazyev, who attended the conference, that signing the EU association
agreement would lead to political and social unrest, a dramatic decline in living standards, and
chaos.
This is not in any way to legitimize the Russian actions of 2014, which were in clear violation of
international law and agreements. It is to criticize successive administrations for paying too little
heed to Russias sensitivities and likely reactions.
I dont really even need George Kennan right now, President Obama told the New Yorkers
David Remnick in early 2014. The very opposite was true. He and his predecessor badly needed
advisors who understood Russia as well as Kennan did. As Kissinger has often remarked, history
is to nations what character is to people. In recent years, American policymakers have tended to
forget that and then to wax indignant when other states act in ways that a knowledge of history
might have enabled them to anticipate. No country, it might be said, has had its character more
conditioned by its history than Russia. It was foolish to expect Russians to view with equanimity
the departure into the Western sphere of influence of the heartland of medieval Russia, the
breadbasket of the tsarist empire, the setting for Mikhail Bulgakovs The White Guard, the crime
scene of Joseph Stalins man-made famine, and the main target of Adolf Hitlers Operation
Barbarossa.
One might have thought the events of 2014 would have taught U.S. policymakers a lesson. Yet
the Obama administration has persisted in misreading Russia. It was arguably a mistake to
leave Germany and France to handle the Ukraine crisis, when more direct U.S. involvement
might have made the Minsk agreements effective. It was certainly a disastrous blunder to give
Putin an admission ticket into the Syrian conflict by leaving to him the (partial) removal of
Bashar al-Assads chemical weapons. One of Kissingers lasting achievements in the early 1970s
was to squeeze the Soviets out of the Middle East. The Obama administration has undone that,
with dire consequences. We see in Aleppo the Russian military for what it is: a master of the
mid-20th-century tactic of winning victories through the indiscriminate bombing of cities.

What price peace ?

Yet I remain to be convinced that the correct response to these errors of American policy is to
swing from underestimating Russia to overestimating it. Such an approach has the potential to be
just another variation on the theme of misunderstanding.
It is not difficult to infer what Putin would like to get in any great deal between himself and
Trump. Item No. 1 would be a lifting of sanctions. Item No. 2 would be an end to the war in
Syria on Russias terms which would include the preservation of Assad in power for at least
some decent interval. Item No. 3 would be a de facto recognition of Russias annexation of
Crimea and some constitutional change designed to render the government in Kiev impotent by
giving the countrys eastern Donbass region a permanent pro-Russian veto power.
What is hard to understand is why the United States would want give Russia even a fraction of
all this. What exactly would Russia be giving the United States in return for such concessions?
That is the question that Trumps national security team needs to ask itself before he so much as
takes a courtesy call from the Kremlin.
There is no question that the war in Syria needs to end, just as the frozen conflict in eastern
Ukraine needs resolution. But the terms of peace can and must be very different from those that
Putin has in mind. Any deal that pacified Syria by sacrificing Ukraine would be a grave mistake.
President Obama has been right in saying that Russia is a much weaker power than the United
States. His failure has been to exploit that American advantage. Far from doing so, he has
allowed his Russian counterpart to play a weak hand with great tactical skill and ruthlessness.
Trump prides himself as a dealmaker. He should be able to do much better. Here is what he
should say to Putin.

First , you cannot expect relief from sanctions until you withdraw all your armed forces
and proxies from eastern Ukraine.

Second , the political future of Ukraine is for the Ukrainians to decide, not for outside
powers.

Third , we are prepared to contemplate another plebiscite in Crimea, given the somewhat
questionable nature of its cession to Ukraine in the Nikita Khrushchev era, though credible
foreign representatives must monitor the vote.

Fourth , we are also prepared to discuss a new treaty confirming the neutral, nonaligned
status of Ukraine, similar in its design to the status of Finland in the Cold War. Ukraine would
renounce future membership of either NATO or the EU, as well as membership of any
analogous Russian-led entity such as the Eurasian Customs Union. However, such a treaty
would need to include guarantees of Ukraines sovereignty and security, comparable with
the international treaty governing the status of Belgium in 1839. And this treaty would be
upheld in a way that Obama failed to uphold the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 by use of
force if necessary.

Fifth , in return for these concessions, the United States expects Russia to participate
cooperatively in a special conference of the permanent members of the U.N. Security
Council to establish a new and peaceful order in North Africa and the Middle East. The
scope of this conference should not be confined to Syria but should extend to other countries in
the region that are afflicted by civil war and terrorism, notably Iraq and Libya. It should consider
questions that have lain dormant for a century, since the Sykes-Picot agreement drew the borders
of the modern Middle East, such as the possibility of an independent Kurdish state.
With a bold proposal such as this, the Trump administration would regain the initiative not
only in U.S.-Russian relations but also in international relations more generally. Crucially, it
would parry Putins aspiration for a bilateral relationship, as between the superpowers of old
a relationship to which Russia, for all its oil and weaponry, is no longer entitled. And it
would bring to bear on the problem of Middle Eastern stability the two European powers
that have an historic interest in the region and an Asian power China that has a
growing reliance on Middle Eastern energy.
The Russian Question itself can be settled another day. But by reframing the international order
on the basis of cooperation rather than deadlock in the Security Council, the United States at
least poses the question in a new way. Will Russia learn to cooperate with the other great
powers? Or will it continue to be the opponent of international order? Perhaps the latter is the
option it will choose. After all, an economic system that prefers an oil price closer to $100 a
barrel than $50 benefits more than most from escalating conflict in the Middle East and North
Africa preferably conflict that spills over into the oil fields of the Persian Gulf.
However, if that is the goal of Russias strategy, then it is hard to see for how much longer
Beijing and Moscow will be able to cooperate in the Security Council. Beijing needs stability in
oil production and low oil prices as much as Russia needs the opposite. Because of recent
tensions with the United States, Russia has been acquiescent as the One Belt, One Road
program extends Chinas economic influence into Central Asia, once a Russian domain. There is
potential conflict of interest there, too.
In the end, it is not for the United States to solve the Russian Question. That is Russias
challenge. But by re-establishing the Kissingerian rule that the United States should be closer
to each of Russia and China than they are to one another the Trump administration could take
an important first step toward cleaning up the geopolitical mess bequeathed it by Barack Obama.
 Grand Bargain Neg

Jakub Gygiel, The Temptation of a Grand Bargain, a senior fellow at the Center for European
Policy Analysis, Washington, DC, 12-12-16, https://www.the-american-
interest.com/2016/12/12/the-temptation-of-a-grand-bargain/
Great-power rivalries are recurrent in history, and once in place, they endure until one side
gives up the fight (e.g., the Soviet Union) or is defeated in a war (e.g., Kaisers Germany). The
risks associated with such competitions often lead to an understandable temptation: Why remain
locked in a struggle when perhaps a grand bargain may be possible? Understandable, yes, but
dangerous and to be resisted.
The temptation is to believe that the sources of the tensions perhaps can be negotiated away;
some common interests might be found; possibly, a rival can help to solve a challenge in a
distant region; and, why not, the rivalry may be simply the product of a misunderstanding caused
by the crankiness or incompetence of previous political leaders. The human mind can find plenty
of ways to fancy a rosy outcome. Thucydides was right when he wrote that it is a habit of
mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust
aside what they do not desire (Thucydides, 4.108.4).1
A great powers leaders are affected by such temptation especially when the rival is not attacking
directly and clearly. A percolating conflict, rather than a full-blown war, gives the impression that
the enemy does not have deeply held hostile desires and is merely seeking attention; a temper
tantrum of a teenager demanding less discipline more than a careful plan of an aggressive
predator.
Maybe, the seductive voice says, it is better to show comprehension of the rivals aggressiveness
and offer some sort of deal to him to stop the misbehavior.
The allure of such a grand bargain with Russia is back in Washington, and is resurgent again in
many European capitals. Nobody denies that Putin has escalated tensions with NATO and that
relations between Russia and the United States are frosty. Butand here is the temptation
maybe all this can be swept aside because of some, until now undiscovered, common interest.
For instance, improved relations with Russia may aid the United States in counterbalancing
China and fighting ISIS. In a civilizational clash, the West and Russia may join forces, erecting a
21st-century version of Christianitatis Antemurale. But any deal is likely to carry a cost, probably
some sort of acceptance of a Russian sphere of influence over Ukraine, a promise not to accept
new states into NATO and the European Union, and an end to the strengthening of NATOs
eastern frontline. The grand bargain would have to be sealed with a weakening of deterrence in
Europe.
A proper response to such a bargain is simple: nuts.
Lets take an example from the Romans. For several centuries, Rome had Parthia, as the United
States has Russia and China: a large power with which there was an enduring rivalry. The flare-
ups of violence were dangerous and Rome had licked its wounds several times. For instance, in
53 BCE, Crassus, the wealthiest Roman at the time and the victor over Spartacus, suffered a
crushing defeat. He was killed, and for good measure the Parthians poured molten gold into the
mouth of his corpse.
Some time later, in the 4th century, the Persians continued to be a nuisance on the eastern
frontier. By thieving and robbing, through small raidsper furta et latrocinia (Ammianus
Marcellinus XVI:9:1)they nibbled at Roman territories.2 Careful to avoid a direct clash and set
battles, they engaged in low-intensity conflictnew generation warfare, hybrid war, or
whatever the latest term for raiding may be.
Furta et latrocinia did not warrant a serious military response from Rome. On the contrary, the
Roman high official in the region approached the Persian authorities in search of a grand bargain
that would hopefully put an end to the annoying behavior of the Persians. Persia sensed an
opportunity. After all, Rome had other worries: the Danube and Rhine were under barbarian
assault and the Eastern frontier was a distraction. Maybe the Romans would be happy to concede
some territories in exchange for a promise of a stable limes and lowered tensions.
The Persian King Sapor, a straight-talking guy, made an offer. He wanted to get back territories
in Armenia and Mesopotamia that he considered as unjustly taken away from him. As he put it,
these lands were Persian because it was well known that the rule of [his] ancestors once
extended that far. It was simply right that [he] should demand this territory (Ammianus
Marcellinus, XVII:5).
After clearly stating his goal and his right to it, Sapor immediately followed with a not-so-veiled
threat. After all, he said, these were small, insignificant territories that Rome did not need. If
you will be guided by good advice, let go this small area, which has always been a source of
trouble and bloodshed, and reign in peace over the rest of your realm. Rome would be so much
better off without these lands, shedding them from the rest of the empire like those wise doctors
who sometimes cauterize and cut and even amputate parts of the body in order that the patient
may enjoy the healthy use of the rest (Ammianus Marcellinus, XVII:5).
Sapors arguments sound familiar. For instance, Moscow claims a right to big chunks of Ukraine
because it is part of New Russia, an old province of the Russian empire. And voices favorable
to a grand bargain with Russia are eager to emphasize the risks of the United States being
entrapped by its alliance with the Baltic states and Central Europe, the pygmies of Europe
deemed to be the cause of regional crises in the past and future. Why hold them? Maybe its
worthwhile to amputate them.
A proper response to the temptation of the grand bargain was offered by the Roman emperor,
Constantius. He replied quickly and clearly, rejecting the arguments, offers, and threats of Sapor.
Listen to the plain unvarnished truth, which is not to be shaken by empty threats. Were Rome
to be attacked, Sapor should have no doubt that Romans will defend our territory, whenever we
are attacked, with courage inspired by a clear conscience. And for good measure, Sapor should
remember that Rome was a powerful empire that has never emerged the loser from an entire
war (Ammianus Marcellinus, XVII:5).
The negotiations for the grand bargain were over. The mission was dismissed empty-handed,
since no further response was possible to the unbridled greed of the [Persian] kings. But Rome
sent another envoy, this time not to negotiate what could not be negotiated, but to do what
diplomacy ought to do in case of a deep-seated rivarly: buy time to prepare for war. Their task
was to secure by diplomacy a delay in Sapors preparations, while our northern provinces were
being fortified beyond the possibility of an attack (Ammianus Marcellinus, XVII:5:8). Sapor
had no intention of abandoning his claims to Armenia and Mesopotamia, and the Roman
proposal to sign a peace treaty on the basis of the status quo was rejected (Ammianus
Marcellinus, XVII:14:1).
The rivalry was after all enduring. The conflict of interests was deep. The grand bargain was an
alluring illusion. Constantius rejected the temptation.
We should also reject the temptation. Russia is not a misunderstood power asking for
sympathy but a predatory rival in search of gains. To anyone proposing a grand bargain, the
answer should be clear: nuts.
Military Signals
 Military Threat - Blockade

Zbigniew Brzezinski and Paul Wasserman, Why the World Needs a Trump Doctrine, 2-21-17,
https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20170221/why-the-world-needs-a-trump-doctrine/en-us/
While we did not support Mr. Trump, he is the president of the United States. He is our president,
and we want him to be a success. Right now, he does not look like that to the rest of the world, or
to us.
A vulnerable world needs an America characterized by clarity of thought and leadership
that projects optimism and progress. Make America Great Again and America First are all
very well as bumper stickers, but the foreign policy of the United States needs to be more than a
campaign slogan.
So we would advise the president to give an address that offers a bold statement of his
vision, including his determination to provide Americas leadership in the effort to shape a
more stable world. This speech should not be a detailed blueprint for American foreign policy,
but rather serve as a much-needed reminder that the president of the United States is on watch, is
actively engaged and has a sense of historical direction.
What we need to hear from our president is why America is important to the world and why the
world needs America. At the same time, he can take advantage of the opportunity to point out
what the United States expects from the world.
We may disagree with President Trump on day-to-day decisions, but we urge him to recognize
that the ideal long-term solution is one in which the three militarily dominant powers the
United States, China and Russia work together to support global stability.
Much hinges on the degree to which America and China can engage in successful dialogue. This
would open the way for a more serious, strategic Sino-American understanding. That, in turn,
could create the basis for a more lasting understanding among all three major powers, since
Russia would realize that if it were not included in a Sino-American accommodation, its interests
would be at risk.
America must also be mindful of the danger that China and Russia could form a strategic
alliance. For this reason, the United States must take care not to act toward China as though it
were a subordinate: this would almost guarantee a closer tie between China and Russia.
More immediately worrying is the problem posed by North Korea, which will require increased
cooperation among North Koreas more powerful neighbors, including China and Japan (and
potentially Russia), as well as the United States. Isolated American efforts are unlikely to move
Pyongyang in a positive direction.
If the United States is to improve its relationship with Russia, it must renew both sides
acknowledgment that a commitment to abide by law is central to the international order. A
superficial show of better relations must not be a cover for deception, maneuvering or violence
against weaker neighbors. President Trumps desire for constructive engagement with Russia
is sensible, but there has to be a framework of acceptable conduct that, unfortunately, does
not exist at present.
Russia is confronted by non-Russian former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Uzbekistan
consolidating their independence, while Chinas economic penetration of Central Asia has also
reduced Russias role in that region. The stakes for all three major powers are high, but so are the
potential rewards and they know it.
In the near term, America should aim for specific regional agreements with partners like Japan
and Britain, as these relationships will be essential for managing regional affairs. In this regard,
the administrations steps to reaffirm Americas commitment to defend Japan and South Korea
are encouraging. But as the linchpin of NATO, America must also be ready to defend Western
and Central Europe.
With his background, President Trump knows the power of business. The United States should
make clear to Russia that any military incursion into Europe, including the little green
men tactics seen at the beginning of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, would incur a punitive
blockade of Russias maritime access to the West that would affect nearly two-thirds of all
Russian seaborne trade.
Given the Trump administrations abysmal performance so far in installing a leadership capable
of strategic decision making, it is crucial that America and the world hear a vision of
leadership and commitment from our president. A Trump Doctrine, any doctrine more or less,
is sorely needed.
Harm Areas
Cyber/Information Warfare
 Information Warfare

Definition of information warfare.

Giles 5/20/2016. Keir Giles specialist on cyberwarfare tactics, prepared for and by the NATO
Strategic Communications Centre of Intelligence (a multinational organization that provides
comprehensive reports and advice for allied nations). THE NEXT PHASE OF RUSSIAN
INFORMATION WARFARE. Page 3.
The Ukraine conflict provides a clear demonstration of how Russia sees cyber activity as a
subset, and sometimes facilitator, of the much broader domain of information warfare. 11 In
fact, the techniques visible in and around Ukraine represent the culmination of an evolutionary
process in Russian information warfare theory and practice, seeking to revive well-established
Soviet techniques of subversion and destabilisation and update them for the internet
age.12 For all their innovative use of social media, current Russian approaches have deep roots
in long-standing Soviet practice.13 As pointed out by Jolanta Darcewska, in a detailed review
of coverage of information warfare in Russias new Military Doctrine, doctrinal
assumptions about information warfare demonstrate not so much a change in the theory of
its conduct... but rather a clinging to old methods ( sabotage , diversionary tactics ,
disinformation , state terror , manipulation , aggressive propaganda, exploiting the
potential for protest among the local population).14 The basic principles of the Russian
approach to information security and information threats have been consistently clear from
Russian declaratory policy,15 and the development of their implementation can be traced
through a wealth of official Russian documents laying out the approach to information
security.16 Public military discussion of the integration and utilisation of cyberspace to facilitate
compromise of adversary decision-making channels, as well as command and control networks,
has a prehistory in Russia dating back to the early 1990s if not before.17 But as with Russias
military transformation, this evolution accelerated following the war with Georgia in 2008, when
limited performance in the information domain was one of the many criticisms aimed at the
Russian Armed Forces. The proposal within Russia at that time was to establish dedicated
Information Troops , whose purpose would be the creation of an information domain
that makes international reality responsive to Russias interests.18 By the beginning of
2014, before the Russian move on Crimea, it was clear that information operations, which may
encompass broad, sociopsychological manipulation ... are comfortably in the mainstream of
Russian military thought.19

Information warfare has a growing literature base and will remain political
relevant.
Giles 5/20/2016. Keir Giles specialist on cyberwarfare tactics, prepared for and by the NATO
Strategic Communications Centre of Intelligence (a multinational organization that provides
comprehensive reports and advice for allied nations). THE NEXT PHASE OF RUSSIAN
INFORMATION WARFARE. Page 2.
In the 18 months since Russias seizure of Crimea, Western understanding of Russian
information warfare techniques has developed beyond all recognition. From the preserve of a
few isolated specialists, study of Russias use of the information tool has become mainstream. A
number of excellent investigative reports have examined in detail the ideological grounding
and conceptual basis for Russias approach to information warfare.1 And a substantial
body of research has emerged describing in detail the operational measures used by
Russia.2 The challenge of Russian information warfare is, however, not a static situation ,
but a developing process. The Russian approach evolves , develops , adapts , and just like
other Russian operational approaches, identifies success and reinforces it, and conversely
abandons failed attempts and moves on. The result is that Russia should not be expected to fight
the last war when it next decides to use an information warfare component in a new conflict. In
other words, those nations or organisations that think they understand Russian information
warfare on the basis of current studies, and are responding by preparing for currently
visible threats and capabilities, are out of date and will be surprised once again by what
happens next.

The current anti-cyberwar strategies by Western nations fail to take into

account information warfare more broadly further action is a must.
Giles 5/20/2016. Keir Giles specialist on cyberwarfare tactics, prepared for and by the NATO
Strategic Communications Centre of Intelligence (a multinational organization that provides
comprehensive reports and advice for allied nations). THE NEXT PHASE OF RUSSIAN
INFORMATION WARFARE. Pages 15-16.
For Russia, cyber activities in the broad sense are critical to offensive disinformation campaigns
which can have strategic effect even if the cyber component of these campaigns is very limited.
In other words, the problem of propaganda and disinformation - as subsets of the much broader
Russian information campaign overall - is at least as important as the traditional (if often
misguided) cyber Pearl Harbor notion of crippling cyber attacks on critical national
infrastructure. By contrast, the Western approach to cyber threats has typically focused on
technical responses to technical threats, largely disregarding the interface with information
warfare in the broad sense. This approach is entirely apt for some persistent or
background threats, but not always sufficient for a broader-based approach like the one
adopted by Russia.81 In other words, the West may be well prepared for pure cyber
challenges, but events in Ukraine show that it also needs to be prepared for information war
when these are seamlessly melded with cyber, kinetic and EW operations. Since a primary
target for Russian information and disinformation campaigns is mass consciousness, greater
public involvement is essential. This poses a strategic communications challenge for
Western governments. Despite the focus on regenerating communications strategies to
address the Russian public, it is also critical to involve domestic audiences and explain the
challenge they are facing. In some Western nations, explicit ministerial or even presidential
acknowledgement of the information warfare problem has been highly effective in raising
awareness.82 In others, there has been effectively no visible public debate: and this critically
undermines those societies resilience to information attack.

Russian information warfare represents a massive threat, with an emphasis

being placed on targeting/hampering NATO operations the problem is much
larger than target states currently assume.
BBC 2/23/2017. Russian military admits significant cyber-war effort.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39062663

Russia's military has admitted for the first time the scale of its information warfare effort,
saying it was significantly expanded post-Cold War. Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that
Russian "information troops" were involved in "intelligent, effective propaganda", but he
did not reveal details about the team or its targets. The admission follows repeated
allegations of cyberattacks against Western nations by the Russian state. NATO is
reported to be a top target. During the Cold War both the USSR and the West poured
resources into propaganda, to influence public opinion globally and sell their competing
ideologies. Speaking to Russian MPs, Mr Shoigu said "we have information troops who are
much more effective and stronger than the former 'counter-propaganda' section". Keir
Giles, an expert on the Russian military at the Chatham House think-tank, has warned that
Russian "information warfare" occupies a wider sphere than the current Western focus
on "cyber warriors" and hackers. "The aim is to control information in whatever form it
takes," he wrote in a NATO report called "The Next Phase of Russian Information Warfare".
"Unlike in Soviet times, disinformation from Moscow is primarily not selling Russia as an idea,
or the Russian model as one to emulate. "In addition, it is often not even seeking to be believed.
Instead, it has as one aim undermining the notion of objective truth and reporting being
possible at all," he wrote. Russia has been testing NATO in various ways, including
targeting individual soldiers via their social media profiles, Mr Giles told the BBC. "They
have been reaching out to individuals and targeting them as if it comes from a trusted source," he
said. There have been reports of Russian information attacks targeting NATO troops in the
Baltic states , the Polish military , and Ukrainian troops fighting pro-Russian rebels.
 Cyber-Attacks

Russian cyber-attacks are escalating in both frequency and magnitude, but

the United States remains behind in their response further pressure on
Russian is necessary.
Lipton, Sanger, & Shane 12/13/2016. Eric Lipton - Washington-based correspondent for The
New York Times; David E. Sanger NYT reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner in reporting on
national security topics; Scott Shane reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York
Times, where specializes in national security. The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower
Invaded the U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-
dnc.html?_r=0

But for years, the Russians stayed largely out of the headlines , thanks to the Chinese
who took bigger risks, and often got caught. They stole the designs for the F-35 fighter jet,
corporate secrets for rolling steel, even the blueprints for gas pipelines that supply much of the
United States. And during the 2008 presidential election cycle, Chinese intelligence hacked into
the campaigns of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, making off with internal position papers and
communications. But they didnt publish any of it. The Russians had not gone away, of course.
They were just a lot more stealthy, said Kevin Mandia, a former Air Force intelligence
officer who spent most of his days fighting off Russian cyberattacks before founding Mandiant,
a cybersecurity firm that is now a division of FireEye and the company the Clinton campaign
brought in to secure its own systems. The Russians were also quicker to turn their attacks to
political purposes. A 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, a former Soviet republic that had joined
NATO, sent a message that Russia could paralyze [shut down] the country without
invading it. The next year cyberattacks were used during Russias war with Georgia. But
American officials did not imagine that the Russians would dare try those techniques inside
the United States. They were largely focused on preventing what former Defense Secretary
Leon E. Panetta warned was an approaching cyber Pearl Harbor a shutdown of the power
grid or cellphone networks. But in 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group began
systematically targeting the State Department , the White House and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff . Each time, they eventually met with some form of success, Michael Sulmeyer, a
former cyberexpert for the secretary of defense, and Ben Buchanan, now both of the Harvard
Cyber Security Project, wrote recently in a soon-to-be published paper for the Carnegie
Endowment. The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier, tricking government computers
into sending out data while disguising the electronic command and control messages that set
off alarms for anyone looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled
[hurt] that it repeatedly closed its systems to throw out the intruders. At one point, officials
traveling to Vienna with Secretary of State John Kerry for the Iran nuclear negotiations had to set
up commercial Gmail accounts just to communicate with one another and with reporters
traveling with them. Mr. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision
that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue
sanctions . There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the
United States needed Russias cooperation in negotiations over Syria. Wed have all these
circular meetings, one senior State Department official said, in which everyone agreed
you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didnt happen. So the
Russians escalated again breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or
broadcast what they found, known as doxing in the cyberworld.
 Electoral Interference
The 2016 US election was just the tip of the iceberg Russia has engaged in
extensive efforts to interfere with foreign elections
Simmons 17 (Ann M, Russia's meddling in other nations' elections is nothing new. Just ask the
Europeans, March 30, http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-election-meddling-
20170330-story.html)//cmr
Russias suspected interference in last years U.S. presidential election may have come as a
surprise to some. But to many European nations, such an intrusion is nothing new. For
years, Russia has used a grab bag of illicit tactics, including the hacking of emails and
mobile phones, the dissemination of fake news and character assassination, to try to
undermine the political process in other countries. They have a history of doing this, Roy
Godson, professor of government emeritus at Georgetown University, told a Senate Intelligence
Committee hearing Thursday. They find this a successful use of their resources . Moscow has recently
stepped up this type of activity, targeting political processes in France, Germany and the
Netherlands, among other nations, according to experts who testified on the first day of a series of Senate hearings on
Russias propaganda and intelligence campaign aimed at undermining the 2016 vote. Russias tentacles are far-reaching in Europe Some of
the nations Russia has stung are Western foes, others former Soviet republics, or states that
fall within Moscows sphere of influence. There are ample examples, Eugene Rumer, director
of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , told
the Senate committee. Ukraine was hit during its 2004 and 2014 election campaigns, Rumer said. Malware
was used to infect the servers at Ukraines central election commission and was also believed to have been responsible for a December 2015
power outage that left thousands of Ukrainians in the dark, according to media reports. Hungary,
the Baltic States, and the
former Soviet republic of Georgia, which Russia invaded in 2008, have also been the target of political
subversion by the Kremlin, which has often sought to bolster the political ambitions of far-right and Euro-skeptic parties or foster
instability or social unrest, experts said. It is really in central and Eastern Europe that theyve really been
able to practice and hone these techniques and youre now starting to see that theyre
comfortable enough with them to start to export them to other parts of the world, Hannah
Thoburn, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, said during a conference call about Russias interference in
foreign elections hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative, a Washington-based think tank, during the U.S. election campaign. On Wednesday,
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr warned Russia was actively involved in efforts to interfere in the upcoming French and
German elections. "Were
on the brink of potentially having two European countries where Russia
is the balance disruptor of their leadership," Burr said at a news conference. "A very overt effort, as well as covert in
Germany and France, already been tried in Montenegro and the Netherlands." The first round of the French vote is set for April. If no candidate
wins a majority, a runoff election between the top two candidates will be held in May. Experts said Russias aim was to support Frances far-right
candidate Marine Le Pen, whose National Front party received an $11.7-million loan from a Russian bank in 2014, according to several
international news reports. Russia has also reportedly lent money to Greece's Golden Dawn, Italy's Northern League, Hungary's Jobbik and the
Freedom Party of Austria all far-right nationalist parties. Putin has denied meddling in Frances politics and has called accusations of
Moscows interference in the U.S. election lies. The Kremlins political favorites in other European nations typically populists have been
given favorable news coverage by Russian news outlets, such as the state-owned satellite network RT and the website Sputnik, while their
opponents are denigrated, often in fake news stories and by Internet trolls, experts said. In December, the English-language Moscow Times
newspaper reported that RT was given an additional $19 million to start a French-language channel. Germany
is also believed to
have fallen prey to Russian attempts to undermine the countrys presidential election ,
scheduled for September. The countrys domestic intelligence agency has accused Russia of cyberattacks and cyberspying, according to a report
in November by the Associated Press. Bruno Kahl, who heads Germanys Federal Intelligence Service, said material hacked from the German
parliament and published by the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks came from the same Russian group that hacked the U.S. Democratic National
Committee, the AP reported. "The
perpetrators have an interest in delegitimizing the democratic
process as such whomever that later helps," Kahl was quoted as saying.

Russias interference stabs at the heart of global democracy fuels global

authoritarianism, undermines NATO and US allies. The US presidential
election will only embolden them response now is key.
Nam 17 (Moiss, distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
where his research focuses on international economics and global politics, How Democracies
Lose in Cyberwar, 2/13, http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/02/13/how-democracies-lose-in-
cyberwar-pub-67993)//cmr
When Leon Panetta, then the U.S. secretary of defense, warned in 2012 about the possibility of a cyber-Pearl Harbor, he envisioned physical
calamity like hackers causing train derailments or contaminating the water supply. Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, involving what U.S. intelligence believes were Kremlin-directed hacks
and leaks of emails damaging to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, differed from this vision. It
represented a political cyber-Pearl Harbor . And that cyber confrontation was asymmetrical, not because America was
at a technological disadvantage (the U.S. is among the worlds leaders in the technologies needed to wage cyberwars), but because Russia
was able to exploit the weak points of America as a democracy. What made America uniquely susceptible to
the attack from an authoritarian Russia is emblematic of what makes other democracies particularly vulnerable, relative to their authoritarian
counterparts, to political cyberattack. For one thing, the
2016 election attack targeted the democratic process
itself. In the words of the intelligence communitys January 2017 report on the incident, the hacks and leaks worked to
undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and
harm her electability and potential presidency. They aimed to take advantage of the free
flow of information in a democratic society, the affect of that information on public
opinion, and the electoral mechanisms through which public opinion determines a
countrys leadership. (The assessment did not allege cyberattacks on voting machines, nor assess the actual impact Russian meddling
might have had on the final outcome.) If, on the other hand, a hacker leaked damaging information about Vladimir Putin, there are various
obstacles in the way of its having an electoral effect. Restrictions on the media in Russia could prevent the information from circulating widely.
Even if it did manage to attract publicity and sway public opinion, what then? Putin has tight control over the countrys electoral apparatus,
meaning that a voting citizenry inclined to punish him for leaked evidence of misdeeds has no real mechanism to do so. The Panama Papers leaks
of spring 2016, which resulted from the alleged hack of a law firm specializing in offshore banking, help illustrate the point. Though they
exposed shady financial dealings within Putins inner circle, the Russian media covered them in a way favorable to Putin. The leaks made
virtually no dent in his popularity. And if
democratic politicians are more vulnerable to the effects of
leaks, democracies are also more likely to produce leakers to begin with. The legal protections
individuals enjoy in the democratic states make it hard to deter this type of behaviorthough as illustrated by the case of Chelsea Manning, who
provided classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, leakers can be prosecuted and jailed. (Edward Snowden, who leaked
classified details of government surveillance programs to journalists, fled the U.S. before he could face prosecution.) But the cost of leaking in an
autocratic society like Russia, where political opponents of Putin have been known to wind up dead, could be far higher, obviously posing a
major disincentive. Democracies, too, have used cyberattacks against non-democratic states. Perhaps the best known example is the use of
StuxNet, the successful attack, most likely by the United States and Israel, involving a malicious computer worm that sabotaged an element of
Irans nuclear program. Other countries with similar capabilities could be stealthily using them against their rivals. As a member of former
President Barack Obamas council of advisers on science and technology told me: The internet is now fully weaponized. But, so far,
the
main political victims of cyberattackers have been leaders and public figures in democratic
countriesespecially the United States. And the United States is not the only democracy vulnerable to
political cyberattacks. One of the conclusions of the intelligence communitys report on the 2016 election hacks points to a much
broader implication: We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign
aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including
against U.S. allies and their election processes. With elections coming up in several
European countries, the Kremlin might turn its attention to influencing outcomes that
would benefit its national interests. From bolstering populist candidates who have vowed to
leave the EU, to encouraging skepticism of NATO by global leaders (most notable, so far, being President
Trump), to supporting candidates who would ease the economic sanctions imposed on Russia
for its actions in Crimea, there are numerous incentives for Putin to interfere, and
numerous ways in which he could do so. Indeed, Russian cyber meddling was longstanding practice in Europe before
2016, and France, Germany, and the Netherlands are facing cyberattacks ahead of their elections this year. The question is: Why havent Western
democracies made the necessary reforms to adapt to the threat? Why have they let countries like Russia get the upper hand, not in capabilities, but
in practice? One answer is that democracies, by their very nature, hinge on checks and balances that limit the concentration of power and slow
down governmental decisionmaking. While all bureaucracies, including those of authoritarian regimes, are slow-moving, Vladimir Putin or Xi
Jinping surely are less encumbered by their laws and institutional constrains than their democratic counterparts. Japans attack on Pearl Harbor in

1941 unleashed a massive American reaction. It remains to be seen what the reaction to Americas political
cyber-Pearl Harbor will beif any.
Territorial Enlargement
 Russia Expansionism Threat

Russian war-time expansion is real and happening Naval exercises and

Putins personal expansionism
Fedyszyn 4 19 17 - Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College
[Tom Fedyszyn, Russia: A Land Power Hungry for the Sea, April 19, 2017, War on the Rocks,
https://warontherocks.com/2017/04/russia-a-land-power-hungry-for-the-sea/]
Trying to understand the military behavior of nations has been a hobby of Western academics,
beginning with the great geopoliticians of former centuries, such as Nicholas Spykman, Sir Halford Mackinder, and Admiral Alfred Thayer
Mahan. Simply, the argument is that geography demanded that insular and coastal nations such as England, Japan, and the Netherlands develop
strong navies to support their national economic and political interests. Conversely, Germany, the Turkish Republic, and the Roman Empire were
required to use their formidable land armies to defend and expand their territories. Russia
stands out as a one-off. Situated
squarely on the borders of Eastern Europe and central Asia, she endured numerous land assaults, and,
accordingly built large defensive and offensive land armies. However, in fits and starts, she has
also assembled naval forces equal to or greater than most of her presumptive adversaries.
Why does Russia, a traditional land power, engage in such counterintuitive and unique behavior? Do
recent international events shed light on Russias future naval activities? When Tsar Peter the Great
embarked on building a navy 330 years ago, he did so to defend the homeland from Swedish and Turkish enemies, north and south, while at the
same time buying Russia a seat at the great power diplomatic table. Serendipitously, his navy did enable him to expand Russian boundaries and
give him access to the worlds oceans. A second noteworthy Russian foray into the sea was at the height of the Cold War when Soviet Adm.
Gorshkov planned and built a naval force that rivalled American supremacy at sea. His submarines alone (385) outnumbered those of the NATO
Alliance and they regularly patrolled off the American Atlantic and Pacific coasts until the fall of the Soviet Union. On the surface of the oceans,
it was commonplace for U.S. warships visiting exotic ports around the world to be joined by their Soviet counterparts throughout the Cold War.
All this ended abruptly with the implosion of the Soviet Union. The Soviet 5th Eskhadra ingloriously slipped out of the Mediterranean in the dark
of night once it was determined that there wasnt enough money left in the Kremlins coffers to sustain its operations in late 1989. Russian
ballistic-missile submarines gradually reduced their Atlantic Ocean patrols until they reached zero in 2001. Almost
as quickly as
the Russian Federation Navy vanished, it reappeared. A convenient benchmark for this
turnaround is 2008, since a number of factors began to congeal. First, the Russian military (including its
navy) performed deplorably while defeating hapless Georgia in a short war of annexation. This incited the Putin-Medvedev team to spur Defense
Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov to reform the defense establishment. He mimicked U.S. initiatives to become more professional and joint.
Additionally, he also addressed the training, morale, and recruit quality in the Russian navy, since it was equally unsatisfactory. Second, the price
of oil (Russias only meaningful export commodity) began to skyrocket, filling Russian pockets with vast reserves of discretionary resources.
Third, and finally, Putin and Medvedev decided to invest much of this money building a bigger
and better military, and the Russian navy got more than its fair share of the 10-year
building plan. Today, we once again are being treated to witness a land power whose sea power
switch has been reactivated. For instructive purposes, lets take a close-up look at Russias Syria interlude: The Russian
navy had awakened from its Rip Van Winkle-like 20-year sleep and in 2013 re-established a
permanent flotilla in the eastern Mediterranean, serviced by all four of its major fleets (Northern, Baltic, Black
Sea and Pacific). After the Obama administrations red line pronouncement on Bashar al-Assads chemical weapons, only
this Russian naval force was in position to escort the vessels carrying Syrian chemical
weapons to their ultimate destruction. The world acknowledged Putins diplomatic lead on this navy-enabled initiative.
Then, Russias air force required additional air defense and communications support in its operations in support of the Syrian regime. The
Russian permanent naval flotilla obliged. The Russian air campaign was then augmented by the arrival of Russias only aircraft carrier, Admiral
Kuznetsov, last fall. Finally,
in an act that surprised and impressed most of the world, the Russian
navy launched multiple long-range Kalibr cruise missiles on so-called terrorist positions in
Syria from both small Buyan-M patrol boats in the Caspian Sea as well as similarly small Kilo-class diesel submarines in the Mediterranean.
Perhaps of greatest importance, Russia provides virtually all of its logistical support for its Syrian operation with logistic ships operating from the
Black Sea and escorted and defended by the naval flotilla, enroute to its base in Tartus, Syria. Worldwide, the Russian navy
has made equally impressive gains, particularly in view of its low starting point in the
1990s. Operating jointly with the Russian Air Force, there is no point on the Russian periphery where a foreign military can now operate with
impunity. This is most obvious in Russias northern reaches where she has militarized the Arctic with a vengeance. This initiative is led by the
Russian Northern Fleet, which has once again begun deploying submarines into the North Atlantic in great numbers. Given the political focus
caused by Russias illegal annexation of Crimea and expansion of its base in Sevastopol, the Russian navy has also been rushing new frigates and
submarines to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Former head of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe, Admiral Mark Ferguson, has described this as Russias
Arc of Steel from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, vaguely reminiscent of the Churchillian Iron Curtain. What
lessons might we
learn about the future behavior of this land power with a hefty appetite for maritime
power? Does the United States have reason for concern as it, too, launches naval cruise missile strikes into Syria,
with the well-armed Russian navy observing on the sidelines? From the perspective of the United States and its allies, the current status of the
Russian navy offers both comfort and consternation. On the plus side for the West, irrespective of how much money Russia throws at its navy, no
serious analyst thinks that the Russian navy can contend for control of the worlds oceans. This is eminently logical because the Russian
fascination with the sea does not rest on economic necessity. Moscow never had, and still today does not have, an economy that is dependent on
global trade, much less one that demands control of the seas. In addition, Russias stark inability to build large ships (think, aircraft carriers) ties
its hands in any attempt at blue water sea control and power projection. Plus, it goes unsaid that the Russian economy is always at risk. Continued
stagnation in Russian GDP growth probably is the death knell of expanding its navy. Nonetheless,
Putins navy continues to
perform the missions outlined by Peter the Great, which should begin to offer a stew of
comfort mixed with consternation. First, defense of the homeland. The Russian navys principal focus is on real estate close
to the Russian border. Most of its operations and exercises are in waters adjacent to Russia. Think of it as high firepower potential but limited
range. This, however, is comforting only if you are not a NATO member in Eastern Europe near the Russian border. Russias resumed
deployment of ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic could be unnerving, but is more readily construed as defense of the homeland, since
these submarines, more than ever, will constitute Russias second strike that is, deterrent capability. Tsar Peters secondary consideration
gaining international diplomatic respect and recognition continues to be supported by Russian Navy port visits and exercises around the world.
In recent months, Russian ships have visited Namibia, the Philippines, South Africa, and the Seychelles and also conducted fleet exercises with
the Indonesian and Chinese navies. While Putin has lost no ground to Peter the Great, this activity need not keep us awake at night. Now, for
the anxiety. The Russian naval mission appears to have quietly expanded to become a
vehicle to sell sophisticated weaponry. Witness the salability of the Kalibr cruise missile and
the Improved Kilo-Class diesel submarine, highlighted by its recent combat performance in
Syria. Weapons exports follow behind the sales of petroleum products as the leading source of Russian foreign exchange. This may be of
minimal concern, but even strategically important and friendly nations can unwittingly become
client states as they realize weapons systems purchases addict the purchaser to follow-on
supply, repair, and support contracts. Think India. Of even greater concern is that Russias
navy is now conducting military operations (Syria) some distance from its borders and it can
apparently shoot straight. The U.S. Navy has learned over history that there is no alternative in
learning to fight the away game than by sending naval forces beyond their security
umbrella and forcing them to learn how to operate without an umbilical cord to fleet
headquarters. This has never been a strong point of the Russian navy in the past. Also, should Russian
national strategies be taken seriously, we might anticipate seeing the development of maritime hybrid
warfare in the eastern Mediterranean, so well-perfected by Russian ground forces in Ukraine and
Eastern Europe. Perhaps the greatest and most serious concern is Russian national security decision
making, concentrated in Vladimir Putin. He sure seems to love his navy. For unscientific proof, Google him
and note the frequency with which he dons nautical fashion (hint: somewhat less often than bare-chested bear riding). At a recent press
conference, he boasted that Admiral Kuznetsovs deployment to the Mediterranean was his personal initiative. Based
on the
frequency with which he attends naval events and dresses in its uniforms, it is not
unreasonable that he has a special affinity for his fleet. Further, he is a risk taker, known to
overplay weak hands and get away with it. And, finally, he is a judo master, fashioning
himself along the lines of a navy destroyer: sleek, lean, lethal, vicious, stealthy and a very
impressive sight to witness.
Russia is modernizing and expanding threatening Europe and Asia
Vidanage 17 - Director, at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) [Dr.
Harinda Vidanage, Russia ready to rumble, 2017-03-27 00:21:51,
http://www.dailymirror.lk/article/Russia-ready-to-rumble-126218.html]
Many outside of Russia are still struggling to understand what it wants in the 21st century, or
where Vladimir Putin wants to take the bear that has suddenly woken from its hibernation, and where
does the bear fit in the great political rivalry that is emerging between the American eagle and the Chinese dragon.
Russian foreign policy recently was dependent on three main factors. These factors included firstly, the relationship with the US; secondly,
responding to global economic crises, especially, since 2007 and, thirdly, interest in conflicts in Middle East. While Putin is projected as a
villainous anti-western autocrat, his early self was not antagonistic to the West. He tried to cooperate, clearly announced in the aftermath of 9/11
attacks, the US and Russian interests of fighting terrorism aligned and he called for pragmatic partnerships and relations with the western
nations.

Yet, the subsequent NATO

expansion and American force presence in Eastern Europe, expansion of
American missile defence systems into Poland frustrated Putin. Russians were convinced that
Americans were trying to use their signature strategy of containment on their nation. They claimed the
West was expecting more cooperation while giving less of it. When the so-called Colors revolution swept parts of Europe-North Africa merging
to create the Arab Spring. Russians
saw this as an American strategy to destabilize the region serving the
Russia and its intervention in Crimea and Syria is based
national security interests of the US at minimal cost.
on bringing back regional stability, while Americans called it Russia aggression, but
Russians called it legitimate use of force to protect the status quo. With the war in Syria, Russia is trying
to take the position of stabilizer other than aggressor. The US, at the same time, is politically imploding with massive polarizations. The current
President is struggling to get consensus from his own party for domestic policy changes. Analysts such as Peter W. Singer claim that Russian
military modernization, sophistication of using cyber attacks have even surpassed American capabilities to deter such new attacks, Russia
is
being buoyed by a radical right-wing drift in European Politics. While Western analysts argued such as in
the recently published report by the Centre for Study of Democracy (CSD) titled, Kremlins new Playbook, it argues
that European right wing groups are all backed by the Kremlin, which it argues is involved in
a strategy, of influence, not of brute force, and its primary goal is breaking the internal coherence
of the enemy system - and not about its integral annihilation. FBI Director James Comeys testifying at the US House Intelligence
Committee last week led to him admitting that the FBI was investigating the Russian governments effort to interfere with the 2016 presidential
elections, and he mentioned that it was part of an ongoing counter intelligence mission. The debates that are engulfing US Politics go beyond
Russia. Yet the latter remains one constant factor in the multitude of debates.

At the same time, Russian counter argument is that the world should look at a post western world order and as the current Russian Foreign
Minister Lavrov points out there is no way that Europe can build a security architecture by excluding Russia. Thus, Germany maybe the
indispensable nation in the EU. But when it comes to European security, Russia is becoming the
unavoidable constant. The importance of focusing on Russia emerges from an existing
reality which according to Georgetown University Professor Charles Kupchan signifies the
emergence of No Ones World, a world where there is no real centre of gravity when it comes to concentration of global
political power. Focusing on Russia and its global political outlook is becoming more and more
pertinent observing how it positions itself in multiple fronts, from being the largest oil exporter of 2016 to demonstrating the political will
to flex its military muscles across various global theatres. The US is in panic mode with Russian expansion of its
Arctic patrols, Arctic military readiness and expansion of submarines fleets that patrol the Arctic and
the Atlantic Ocean. Analysing the Russian economy is a complex endeavour, yet, if one looks at how Russia is engaging in global trade, the
numbers are astonishing, its trade has nearly quadrupled over the last 10 years. In 2003, it was worth 200 billion US Dollars, by 2014 that has
increased to 750 billion USD, while nearly half of that accounted to trade with the EU. Russias relationship with Greater Europe is a complicated
affair. The largest country on the planet is going through a period of serious domestic economic consolidations despite American and European
sanctions, its GDP has grown from 200 billion to 1.3 trillion US Dollars by 2015.
Ever since 2014 annexation of Crimea, NATO allies have been on high alert. Russia has
increased its surveillance flights that have irked countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, while Germany has managed to
maintain significant trade ties, France had been more hostile, it even suspended the ultra modern Mistral class helicopter carrier it was building
for Russian Navy at a great cost. Russia is flying its nuclear capable strategic bombers across the globe,
in a recent panel discussion on the future of Asian security organized by University of Chicago, a Japanese expert claimed that his countrys Air
Force was preoccupied with chasing Russian aircraft which were encroaching its air territory.

Russian resurgence in its strategic sphere is remarkable, Russia has undertaken a massive
accelerated military modernization scheme, it is producing new weapons platforms to
project air superiority to weapons which are more autonomous in nature. Russia is going
through the greatest experiment of military automation. While the world was fixated with the American Drone
strikes debate, Russia has increased autonomous weapons research and production . Even weapons
platforms such as Tanks have either been semi-automated which require a Spartan crew, the new Russian Battle Tank, the Armata is a classic
example. Saudi Arabia recently placed an order for 50 Russian armed drones, while Russian air assets are shopped heavily by the Chinese and
Indian militaries. China, over the years, according to research coming from Stockholm Peace Research Institute, has purchased arms and
armaments worth 30 billion US dollars from Russia.

Why is Russia developing an army of robots? The answer is simple. It maybe rising but it
has a dismal birth rate, population is around 120 million and is shrinking. Thus, to protect a vast country,
mostly with flat land, which is the greatest geo political vulnerability, Russia has and explains its militarization of
eastern European flank which makes it more dependent on technological innovation and
robotics. From UAVs, UUVs to Surface unmanned vehicles capable of deploying weapon systems are tested out frequently.
 Not a Threat

Russia isnt an expansionist threat too economically weak

Lynn 4 12 17 - financial journalist for Marketwatch [Matthew Lynn, Russian economy is a
basket case, which means Moscow has little power, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/putins-
russia-is-too-weak-to-threaten-anyone-2017-04-11]
His meddling in the war in Syria has plunged the region into a fresh crisis. He manipulated the results of the American presidential vote with a
tidal wave of fake news and may be about to do something similar in France and Germany. His agents of influence are undermining liberal
democracy, corrupting the internet, and steadily pushing his power base forward. To listen to much of the commentary,
Russian President Vladimir Putin has become a malign force, intent in re-creating the Soviet Empire
and a menace that has to be faced down. But hold on. There is no question that Putin has been a shockingly bad ruler of his own country,
and has been throwing money at influencing elections across the world. And yet, it is important not to exaggerate his
power. In fact, his economy remains a basket case, largely on account of his own incompetence. And we have a
few hundred years of geopolitical history to teach us that political and military power is
ultimately based on economic power and since Putin doesnt have much of the latter, he
will have less and less of the former with every year that passes. The re-explosion of the crisis in Syria, with President
Bashar Assads horrific gas attack on his own people, and President Donald Trumps immediate response to that, has heightened tensions between
Russia and the West once again. There are already discussions of a renewal of sanctions against the country. Putin has refused to meet with the
American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Russia has sent warships toward Syria. It is as if the Cold War had never ended. In the
background, there has been simmering tension for months. During the American presidential election, there
were constant reports of Russian meddling, and worries about the countrys ties to Donald Trump. In France, Putin has met with far-right leader
Marine Le Pen. There have been allegations that Russia helped fund the Brexit campaign, and Germany has already taken measures to prevent
Putin attempting to influence its election later this year probably wisely, since Chancellor Angela Merkel has been one of the leading
champions of tougher sanctions on Russia. There can be no question that Putin is intent on expanding his
countrys influence in the world. He has already annexed Crimea, interfered in the Ukraine, and now in Syria he is intent on
expanding its influence into the Middle East. An old-school autocrat, he is a believer in Russian power, with a fondness for the geopolitical might
that disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, as a man who started his career in the Soviet KGB, can there be any doubt that he is
willing to use whatever dark arts are necessary to achieve his goals. Fake stories, back-channel funding of campaigns, blackmail and deception?
None of them are likely to bother Putin. And yet, it is also important to maintain some perspective. Seventeen
years after he first took power, following the resignation of Boris Yeltsin, the Russian economy remains in a dire state.
In the latest quarter, growth just about managed to turn positive, with an expansion of output but only by a meager 0.3%. The ruble USDRUB,
+0.5122% has recovered some of the ground it lost following the Crimean crisis, and the stock market has clawed back some of its losses. And
yet, the recession of the last few years has been a deep one, and has left its finances in terrible
shape. More seriously, if you take the 17 years since Putin came to power, it is clear that he has made virtually no progress on the economy.
It remains almost entirely dependent on energy, a declining industry, with massive oversupply, and increasingly
under threat from cheap solar power. Energy still accounts for 68% of its exports, and the money that energy brings in is
about the only thing that keeps the country afloat. Its population is still falling, with only 142 million people, down from 148
million when Communism collapsed. Russia should be a vibrant emerging market by now. If Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic can re-
invent themselves from state-controlled heavy industrial economies into fast-growing, Western-oriented hubs and parts of those countries are
now as rich as parts of Italy or France there was no reason why Russia could not as well. But there is no sign of any form of
industrial development. Has anyone ever bought a smart phone made in Russia? Or a TV? Or a car? Or anything at all? Other
emerging markets are flooding the world with high-quality manufactured goods, and creating new companies with powerful brands. All
Russia has are a couple of huge energy companies controlled by the president and his
cronies. It is hard to think of a country that has been dealt such a good deck of cards, and
then played it so badly and that is entirely Putins fault. True, investors have seen a recovery in Russia since the collapse that
followed the Crimean crisis. The benchmark Moscow index is back up to close on 2000, after touching lows of less than 1300 back in 2014. But
that is just a bounce from very low levels, and there is unlikely to be any genuine growth to power it forward from here. If they are smart, they
will get out before Putin manages to engineer another round of sanctions and yet another collapse. In
the end, political power
is based on economic power that has been true for a few centuries and it is unlikely to
change now. Sure, the country can fund populist politicians, and pump out self-regarding propaganda on TV stations that few people
watch, or on websites that not many of us read. In truth, that is only keeping up the faade of a great power,
while its real wealth and influence declines with every year that passes. There are lots of
threats to the developed world. But while its economy remains completely feeble, Vladimir
Putin is not one of them.
 Military Deployments
Russian military deployments in the Ukraine threaten European stability
the US should respond
Andrew Rettman, EU diplomats warn US of Russian military threat, 3-8-17,
https://euobserver.com/foreign/137153)
Poland and Lithuania have called for US troops to stay in eastern Europe and for US arms
and communications technology to counter Russian aggression. The EU and Nato states
ambassadors to the US issued the request at a hearing with the Senates armed services
committee in Washington on Tuesday (7 March). Piotr Wilczek, the Polish envoy, said that a US-
led force that was recently sent to the region by Nato should have a long-term character. A
long-term American commitment is absolutely essential, he said. Lithuanias Rolandas
Krisciunas said there should be US and Nato troops in the Baltic States on a permanent
basis. He added that the US should restore its military presence in Europe back to a pre-
2009 level. Krisciunas asked the Senate to assist Lithuania in procurement of US anti-tank
rockets and high-calibre artillery shells. He also requested $1 million of military intelligence
technology, social media analysis software, and more powerful radio transmitters to broadcast
Western media into Russia. Russia has said that any permanent new Nato bases near its
borders would violate a Nato-Russia treaty. The country has also said that Nato troops in the
Baltic region posed a threat to its security. But Polands Wilczek told senators that Russia had
turned its Kaliningrad exclave into the most militarised region in Europe. He said anti-aircraft
and anti-ship missiles there restricted Nato movements on Natos own territory in an area
spanning from north-eastern Poland to the Baltic states. Wilczek went on to say that Russian
ballistic missiles, which were deployed in Kaliningrad last year, were capable of hitting
targets in Europe as far afield as Germany. Lithuania echoed Poland. Krisciunas said Russia
had 25,000 troops in Kaliningrad and that two Russian warships stationed there last year were
capable of blocking the entrance to the Baltic Sea. He also noted that Russian forces
regularly held offensive military drills on Lithuanias borders. The Polish ambassador
said Russian aggression against Ukraine ended the period of a post-Cold War stability. Russia
aimed to restore [its] superpower status and military power [has become] the Kremlins chief
tool for pursuing its policy objectives, he added. Hybrid warfare Poland and the Baltic states
said Russia was already waging non-military warfare against Europe. The Polish envoy said
the Kremlin used gas exports as a political weapon. Countries cooperating with Russia
benefit from large discounts on their energy bills. Those seeking integration with the West end
up paying high prices or are threatened with being cut off from supplies, he added. He said if
Russia and Germany built the Nord Stream II gas pipeline it would hinder the [energy]
diversification efforts of the whole region. The Lithuanian ambassador said Russian spies were
trying to aggressively interfere in national politics and that Moscow was funding Russian-
speaking groups in the Baltic states in order to incite ethnic tensions. He remarked that Russian
spies and hackers tried to steal information on Lithuanian MPs in last years elections. He also
said Russian state media was spreading toxic propaganda, such as a fake story that German
soldiers in the Nato force in Lithuania had raped a local girl. Information attacks against Nato
military personnel deployed in the region are highly likely to be repeated in the future,
Krisciunas said. The Latvian ambassador to the US asked the Senate to help fund EU counter-
propaganda projects, such as the British-led Creative Content Support Fund. Estonias US envoy,
Eerik Marmei, said it would be a mistake to think Russias actions were limited to eastern
Europe. We, as neighbours to Russia, are just a bit more used to witnessing such behaviour, he
said. Long arm He noted that the Kremlin was increasingly reliant on anti-EU and anti-
Nato populist political parties all over Europe. Upcoming elections in the Netherlands,
France, and Germany are a perfect theatre for the Russian disinformation warriors, he said. The
Ukrainian foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, also spoke on Tuesday. He told the Senate that
when Russian proxy forces fought the Ukrainian army in and around the Ukrainian town of
Avdiivka in January a US-trained Ukrainian battalion was one of the most effective in
repelling the Russian-controlled attacks. He thanked the US for its provision of defensive
weapons to Ukraine. But he said Russia was still pouring weapons into eastern Ukraine,
including heavy flamethrowers, radar jamming systems, and drones. The EU and US
imposed sanctions must be not only preserved but enhanced in order to prevent Russian
escalation, he added.

Russia expanding Syrian military deployments

Sam LaGrone, Russia Reported to Start Syrian Naval Base Expansion this Spring, 3-13-17,
https://news.usni.org/2017/03/13/russia-reported-start-syrian-naval-base-expansion-spring
Russia will start construction on a planned five-year expansion of its naval base in Syria this
spring, officials said in Russian state media. Viktor Ozerov the head of the Russian Federation Councils defense committee said
planning work was underway to start the expansion of the Russian logistics hub in Tartus,
Syria into a full-fledged naval base capable of supporting 11 ships. The survey works were launched,
including those, connected in particular with the construction of a pipeline for fuel. We have started to prepare documents and Syrian companies
will carry out a number of [modernization] works. We have started to reinforce quay walls and reconstruct temporary facilities of security
services into permanent ones, Ozerov told state-controlled newswire Sputnik. In January, the Kremlin announced a deal with the government of
Bashar al-Assad to kick off the base expansion. The deal stipulates that 11 Russian vessels can be present in the harbor of Tartus at once,
including the ships equipped with nuclear marine propulsion, provided that nuclear and environmental safety guidelines are respected, read a
January report in Sputnik. The Russians have operated the installation in Tartus since 1971 and it has served as a key logistics hub for the Navy
during their fight against ISIS in support of the al-Assad regime. The expansion will to much to extend Russian influence in the Mediterranean
and beyond into the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In the last year, the Russian Navy has operated off the coast of Syria. In November, the
Russian Navy sent a carrier strike group to assist in the taking of Aleppo by pro Al-Assad forces. The Kremlins military aid to the government in
Damascus is one example of why the base is expanding, one analyst told USNI News. Thisagreement is an example of the
rewards Russia is beginning to reap from having played a major role keeping the Syrian
regime in power. The planned upgrades at Tartus will no doubt turn the base into an even
more important naval and military facility for Russia in the future, Eric Wertheim, author of U.S. Naval
Institutes Combat Fleets of the World, told USNI News in January. This is also the latest sign of Russias intention
to increase and project its presence in the region, commensurate with its efforts to expand
its naval and military power.
 Arms Control
These cards came from the first two pages of a basic, date-limited google
searchthere are several viable affs.

Arms control is a core issue in the Russia-U.S. relationship

Ulrich Kuhn, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
U.S.-Russian Relations and the Future Security of Europe, ARMS CONTROL TODAY, 124
17, http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/01/24/u.s.-russian-relations-and-future-security-of-
europe-pub-67784, accessed 4-19-17.

All this does not bode well for the bilateral arms control agenda. Arms control policies are built
on certain recognition that preserving the status quo is beneficial. The United States and Russia,
however, view each other at present as challenging the status quo.
The fact that Russia reaps benefits from its unpredictable behavior makes it necessary to change
the Russian calculus so that Moscow views the gains from cooperation as outweighing those
from confrontation. Yet, that would mean that Washington would have to be willing to offer
something significant that goes beyond the immediate arms control goals of predictability,
stability, and transparency.
An unofficial recognition of spheres of privileged interest, together with a more respectful
relationship under Trump, could be something that interests Putin. Nevertheless, the widely
shared disdain for arms control among many Republican policymakers would certainly work
against a serious U.S. arms control push.
One of the true concerns of the Russian military is the conventional superiority of the combined
forces of NATO. In turn, the regional Russian superiority in eastern Europe, particularly vis--vis
the Baltic states, is a concern in Washington and at NATO headquarters in Brussels. At the sub-
regional level, Russia is concerned about the security of Kaliningrad. This Matryoshka doll-like
situation offers at least the theoretical possibility of a quid pro quo arrangement for the wider
Baltic region with mutual geographical limitations on manpower, equipment, and reinforcement
capabilities, coupled with intrusive and verifiable transparency measures.25
Another issue Washington should explore is Russias alleged breach of the INF Treaty. Since
2014, the U.S. government has accused Russia of violating the treaty by flight-testing a ground-
launched cruise missile with a range capability of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.26 Meanwhile, a U.S.
report claimed that Russia is producing more missiles than are needed to sustain a flight-test
program,suggesting that deployment may be imminent.27
Russia tabled a number of countercharges, among which was the claim that the U.S.-led Aegis
Ashore ballistic missile defense launchers being deployed in eastern Europe had been tested with
systems banned under the INF Treaty, suggesting that Aegis Ashore could be used for offensive
purposes. The scenario of a decapitating strike seems to rank quite prominently among Russian
concerns.28
Much depends on Russian intentions. The agreement to address compliance issues by convening
the INF Treatys Special Verification Commission in November for the first time in 13 years was
a positive development. Yet if Moscow continues down the current path of producing and
perhaps deploying new INF Treaty-range weapons, Europe risks entering a new Cold War
Euromissiles crisis, awakening some of the turmoil encountered during the 1970s and 1980s.
If the Russian rationale is really based on fear of a decapitating strike, U.S. officials could
consider options to reassure Moscow about the Aegis Ashore launchers deployed in Romania,
such as technical consultations and site visits, demonstrating to Russian experts that the United
States is ready to undergo hardware changes that make it technically impossible for these
launchers to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles.
If much of Russias concern stems from third-country nuclear and conventional missiles within
the INF Treaty range (e.g., Chinas capabilities), Washington and Moscow can consider reviving
a 2007 UN General Assembly initiative put forward by Russia and supported by the United
States that called for a multilateralization of the INF Treaty. Putins latest remarks seem to point
in that direction.29 In this way, both sides could take account of emerging technologies and the
changing geopolitical landscape, which no longer may be resolved in the traditional bilateral
manner.
Either approach would require both sides to pursue a face-saving solution. A grimmer scenario
has both sides finding powerful incentives to walk away from the INF Treaty. Trump adviser and
former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who was among the candidates for
secretary of state, has advocated withdrawal from the INF Treaty, referring to states such as
China, Iran, and North Korea, which face no limits on developing intermediate-range
weapons.30
Even though both sides can extend New START for another five years, the U.S. Senate will most
likely not give its advice and consent to any follow-on agreement absent a resolution of the INF
Treaty issue. The Trump administration might even use Russian noncompliance and nuclear
modernizations as reasons to opt out of New START implementation. Moscow might be ready to
go down that road as well.
A follow-on agreement to New START is important, particularly in order to understand both
sides nuclear modernization activities, to preserve transparency, to prevent backsliding into arms
race instability, and to convince non-nuclear powers that Russia and the United States take
seriously their nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations to pursue nuclear disarmament.
Washington and its European allies will need to remind Moscow that, without INF Treaty
compliance, further strategic nuclear dialogue and a New START follow-on may be impossible,
closing off Russias most productive path toward preserving its influence and enhancing its
security.
Therefore, the new U.S. administration should engage with Moscow as early as possible on arms
control issues. It needs to remind the Kremlin that respect for Russia will be influenced by
Russias respect for mutual security. It also needs to remember that existing problems will not go
away by acting as if arms control talks are a reward for Russia. The reality is just the opposite:
arms control talks are in the genuine national interest of all partiesthe United States, Russia,
and the international community.

More evidence.
Julianne Smith, Senior Fellow and Director, Strategy and Statecraft Program, CNAS and Adam
Twardowski, Research Intern, Strategy and Statecraft Program, CNAS, The Future of U.S.-
Russia Relations, PAPERS FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT, Center for a New American
Security (CNAS), 117, p. 11.

Since the end of the Cold War, the operative assumption in western circles has been that Russia
seeks to enhance ties with the West and explore new areas of defense and economic cooperation.
The events of the past two years have exposed that assumption as dangerously obsolete. One
particularly alarming development already noted has been Putins decision to withdraw from the
2000 Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement, under which the United States and
Russia have worked to eliminate their stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium.50 Putin indicated
that Russia would resurrect the agreement only if the United States lifted sanctions and paid
Russia compensation for economic losses generated by the sanctions.51
But this development is not the only example of Russias willingness to connect arms control to
other increasingly contentious facets of its relationship with the United States. The next president
must be prepared to address Russias reinvigorated investment in its strategic nuclear forces and
understand that there is a high risk that Russia will further diminish arms control efforts. Since
returning to office, Putin has elevated the importance of Russias strategic forces in its national
security doctrine and unleashed costly efforts to modernize its nuclear triad.52 In March 2015, he
revealed in an interview that he was ready to put nuclear forces on alert over the crisis in
Crimea.53 The United States has simultaneously raised concerns that Russia is not in compliance
with the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.54 Putin has resisted U.S. efforts
to negotiate new reductions of nuclear arms after his predecessor, Dmitri Medvedev, concluded
the New START accord in 2010.55 That effort will expire in 2021, and there are no replacements
on the horizon.56
To reinvigorate arms control efforts, each side would have to address the others claim that it
violates elements of earlier agreements. For example, according to news sources, Russias
ground-launched cruise missiles likely violate the INF Treaty.57 Former Supreme Allied
Commander General Breedlove cautioned that any attempt to deploy the system could not go
unanswered.58 For the time being, Russias concerns about its inferior conventional capabilities
will likely lead it to avoid new efforts with the United States to reduce nuclear arms. The next
president must pay close attention to developments in this domain and strive to avoid a
downward spiral that could lead to a new nuclear arms race. Although the prospect for future
arms reduction with Russia seems bleak, given the stakes involved with nuclear weapons, the
next President should seek opportunities to engage Russia on this issue if possible.

Yes Virginia, there are strategic engagement affs.

Alexey Arbatov, Director, Center for International Security, Institute of World Economy and
International Relations and full member, Russian Academy of Sciences, Understanding the US-
Russia Nuclear Schism, SURVIVAL v. 59 n. 2, April-May 2017, pp. 33-66.

The deep strategic differences between the US and Russia, and the origins of those differences,
have never been properly understood by either side. After the Cold War, the discrepancies stayed
in the background of political and strategic relations, having never been openly discussed, let
alone mutually adjusted. They did not dissolve on their own, however, like medieval
scholasticism did centuries ago under the impact of scientific and social progress. They returned
with shocking speed and power during the new confrontation over Ukraine. Now that the
attention of policymakers and the general public has been drawn back to core issues of nuclear
strategy, the time has come to correct this deficiency.
As long as nuclear weapons stay with us, and nuclear deterrence remains at the core of the US
Russian strategic relationship, joint efforts at nuclear-war prevention should continue
regardless of fluctuations in political relations and the international environment. As a first step,
and in the aftermath of the deep reductions in nuclear arsenals of the last three decades, the two
powers political leaders should revive their predecessors commitment to do everything
possible to avoid military confrontation and prevent a nuclear war, and reconfirm their
conviction that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The state of US
Russian relations has recently deteriorated so much that even such trivial joint statements would
not be easy to negotiate. Nevertheless, this is not enough. The leaders and top officials of the two
nations must elaborate a common understanding of such fundamentals as the role of nuclear
weapons in politics and war, the possible causes of war, and the state and dynamics of the
strategic balance. This should be done through regular military and civilian dialogue, translated
into follow-on arms-control treaties with elaborate qualitative and structural limitations on the
model of START I, and enhanced by comprehensive confidence-building measures related to
strategic offensive and defensive arms.
Peace is not to be taken for granted; it requires relentless efforts to sustain whether relations
between the great powers are good or bad. This is the main lesson to be learned from the quarter-
century after the end of the Cold War.

Such as working to preserve the INF

Steven Pifer, Director, Brookings Arms Control Initiative, Briefing: How U.S. And Russian
Leaders Can Avoid Renewed Nuclear Tensions, Amrs Control Association, 32217,
https://www.armscontrol.org/events/2017-03/briefing-us-russian-leaders-avoid-renewed-nuclear-
tensions, accessed 4-19-17.

A second challenge is the preservation of the treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That
treaty was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 and it bans the United
States and Russia from testing or deploying ground-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges
between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, and it resulted in the elimination of almost 2,700 American
and Soviet missiles back by 1991.
The United States has charged Russia with testing a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile at
intermediate range and as we heard two weeks ago, the U.S. military believes that the Russians
have begun to deploy that missile. The Russians have leveled several charges about American
non-compliance with the treaty. And that poses a problem, can the treaty be preserved.
I think the Obama administration in its last several years was hoping to find a way to bring
Russia back into compliance. And I'll talk about the American violations in a moment. That
presumably is going to be much harder to do if we're now talking about Russia deploying a
prohibited missile as opposed to testing.
You have discussions going on now, I think. A senior American official yesterday raised the
question, what leverage does the United States have to bring Russia back into compliance. There
have been suggestions on Capitol Hill about perhaps building an American intermediate-range
missile. And my guess is that would actually get the attention of Moscow. Certainly, in the
1980s, the deployment of the American Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missile in
Europe focused Soviet attention and was important to getting the treaty on Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces in the first place.
Personally, I would prefer to avoid steps that add to the numbers of nuclear weapons, but those
who are advocating this idea I think need to answer two questions. One, can the U.S. defense
budget afford to build this missile and two, if the United States built it, would NATO agree to
deploy it. And unless the answers to both of those questions are yes, I'm not sure that's a doable
option.
Other possibilities would be looking more at countervailing conventional capabilities. I think I'd
build on the point that while this is a treaty dispute between the United States and Russia, the
real security threat, if Russia is in fact deploying an intermediate-range ground-launched cruise
missile, is to its neighbors in Europe and Asia.
And I think it would be worthwhile for the U.S. government to be doing what it can to begin to
get those countries that would be directly threatened by this missile -- Germany, France, Finland,
Hungary, Italy, Japan, China and South Korea -- to begin to make this an issue on their agendas
with Moscow.
My sense is we're probably not going to get a lot of traction making this just a U.S.-Russian
issue. We should be trying to make this an issue between Russia and the other countries for
whom this missile would be a threat if in fact it is being deployed.
Also, there's an importance to dealing with the Russian concerns about American compliance. I
think that a couple of the Russian concerns are, probably can be handled fairly easily but there is
one concern that to my mind has merit, and that is the Russian concern that the site in Romania
to deploy SM-3 missile interceptors is a potential violation of the treaty or is a violation of the
treaty.
And the argument goes, if you look at that site which is based on the Mark 41 Vertical Launch
System, if you take those launchers and them on U.S. Navy warship, they can hold SM-3
interceptors but they can also hold sea-launched cruise missiles which are virtually identical to
ground-launched cruise missiles.
So, I think that's an issue the U.S. government needs to pay attention to in terms of preserving
the treaty, and this will require a significant degree of political will on both sides. Preserving the
treaty at this point is going to be very, very difficult. But if that treaty unravels, it has significant
consequences and perhaps could lead to an unraveling of the overall nuclear arms control
regime.

Or bolstering New START

Steven Pifer, Director, Brookings Arms Control Initiative, Briefing: How U.S. And Russian
Leaders Can Avoid Renewed Nuclear Tensions, Amrs Control Association, 32217,
https://www.armscontrol.org/events/2017-03/briefing-us-russian-leaders-avoid-renewed-nuclear-
tensions, accessed 4-19-17.

The third issue is the New START Treaty and what happens there. Under the terms of New
START, the United States and Russia by February of next year each are allowed no more than
1,550 deployed strategic warheads on no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and
bombers. According to press reports in a February phone conversation, President Putin raised
with President Trump the possibility of considering the extension of that treaty. The treaty goes
until 2021 but by its terms it can be extended to up to five years if the sides agree.
Reportedly, President Trump was a bit confused as to which treaty was being discussed and then
was dismissive of it. I hope that reflects the fact that the President is still learning about some of
these questions. It's very clear that his military supports this.
Two weeks ago, the Commander of Strategic Command and Vice Chairman of Joint of Chiefs of
Staff in testimony on Capitol Hill made clear they support the treaty. They like the fact that it
caps the overall levels of Russian strategic forces, and they like the fact that the treaty provides
for semi-annual data exchanges, thousands of notifications every year, and the opportunity 18
times a year to go and look at Russian strategic forces. That gives both sides a lot more
information about the other side in a way that prevents having to make worst case assumptions.
Now, yesterday, Chris Ford who's at the National Security Council staff indicated that the U.S.
policy would be to observe New START up until at least February, 2018 which is when the limits
take full effect. And that period runs roughly with the time where the administration will be
conducting its nuclear posture review.
I very much hope that that review results in an agreement to continue to observe New START
and perhaps to extend it to 2026. But then, the question comes up, could you do more. I
personally would like to see us do more. I believe it's in the U.S. security interest to further
reduce nuclear weapons. I would prefer fewer Russian nuclear weapons that could target the
United States. And my guess is that Sergey would like fewer American weapons that could
target Russia. But I'm not sure if that's going to be where the Trump administration comes out.
If the Trump administration would like to pursue those further reductions, my guess is they're
going to have to deal with several questions the Russians have raised over the last four or five
years. One would be missile defense which will be a very tricky issue in this town. A second
issue would be Conventional Prompt Global Strike. And then, the third question might be could
you begin to limit some of the capabilities of third country nuclear forces.
That's going to be a question though not only of preserving the arms control regime, but could
you strengthen that regime. And that's going to be a question both for the Trump administration
and also for how the Kremlin wishes to pursue it.

Several mechanisms to explore, plus Trump adv!

Blake Narenda, former speical Advisor, Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau,
U.S. State Department, Trump Can Boost National Security, Own Legacy with Russian Arms
Deal, THE HILL, 32717, http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/325959-
trump-can-boost-national-security-legacy-with-russian-arms, accessed 4-19-17.

President Trumps freewheeling instinct may not always make for great policy and likely
makes for sleepless nights for Press Secretary Sean Spicer but it does show the presidents
fondness to shun deeply held orthodoxies.
The same Republican Party that criticized the Obama administration for what it saw as a botched
reset with Russia relations in 2009 now has as its leader a president who is open to a reboot of
the reset.
President Trump has yet to articulate what exactly would be included in a deal with Russia.
The new president did hint in an interview that he might consider relieving sanctions on Moscow
in exchange for its embrace of nuclear arms control negotiations.
But Getting to Yes on a comprehensive package of non-like issues is not likely in the cards.
Moscow will not deliver a mea culpa for its interference in the 2016 presidential election and is
likewise unlikely to withdraw from (much less own up to) its military presence and equipment in
the Donbas region of Ukraine.
However, the Trump administration can do as his predecessors have done find space for a
win-win agreement that reduces their nuclear weapons footprint. Negotiating on this narrower
set of like issues for which there is decades of cooperation protects the president from
having to forgive or to forget Russias worst offenses.
One such offense, Russias violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), will
remain an irritant, but it need not stall progress in other areas. For instance, the United States and
Russia are due to meet the central limits of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)
at President Trumps one-year mark in February 2018.
While the President reportedly lampooned New START in his first call with Russian President
Vladimir Putin, extending the treatys on-site inspections and data exchanges regime for an
additional five years would earn him praise from arms control advocates and Russia hawks in
Congress alike.
Additionally, the president could propose using New STARTs data exchanges for each side to
voluntarily report on the number and location of their non-strategic nuclear weapons stocks.
Nervous NATO Allies that live on Russias periphery would welcome such a move in what
would be a first step to negotiations on their elimination.
Finally, the United States and Russia could announce a freeze on the development of the costly
next generation Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) the Russian RS-28 and the U.S.
Minuteman III replacement both of which are slotted to come online by 2030.
A reciprocal U.S.-Russian move on ICBMs would boost the chance for talks on deeper cuts
below New START levels and would free up funds for other defense priorities.
These modest, low-risk steps are in the presidents interest. First, President Trumps openness to
negotiations would likely attract support from some of his harshest critics. If past is prologue,
President Trump can count on Democrats in Congress to stay true to their unfailing support of
nuclear arms control.
Likewise, European capitals that have been rattled by the presidents (at best) lukewarm view of
NATO would view a robust arms control dialogue with Russia favorably. After all, many of the
threats from Moscow are directed against Europe, as are its INF Treaty-offending ground-
launched cruise missiles.
Additionally, NATO allies that host U.S. nuclear weapons on their soil could also use these
negotiations to weaken the pull of the ban movement, the one hundred plus countries that
support a treaty that would ban nuclear weapons.
Second, negotiations with Russia on strategic (and non-strategic) nuclear weapons offer
President Trump a chance for a much-coveted victory on the international stage.
After all, a major critique from Secretary Clinton in the 2016 election was that Donald Trump
could not be trusted to have his finger on the nuclear button particularly as the decision to
use nuclear weapons rests alone with the president.
Past presidents have recounted the chilling briefing they are provided by the Commander of
Strategic Command (STRATCOM) on the U.S. nuclear war plan. Not surprisingly, two of the
more revered presidents of the nuclear era are remembered for how they dealt with the most
powerful weapon ever created.
It was President Kennedys insistence on a diplomatic track over the 13 fateful days of the Cuban
Missile Crisis in 1962 that helped avert a nuclear cataclysm with the Soviet Union.
Months after the crisis, Kennedy joined with his one-time belligerent, Russian President Nikita
Khruschev, to sign the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) the leading edge in a series
U.S.-Russia bilateral arms control treaties which halted the nuclear arms race.
A generation later, it was President Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev who
signed the INF and START Treaties, turning what was thought to be a failed outcome from their
1986 Summit in Reykjavik into a seminal foreign policy achievement for both leaders.
President Trump may discover, as his predecessors did, that cooperation on bilateral arms control
will fail to transform Russias overall behavior. What President Trump can learn from Kennedy
and Reagan, though, is that it is possible to burnish a legacy by spending political capital on
reducing nuclear risks.
In making such an investment, President Trump can best deliver on his pledge to Make America
Safe Again.

Yes arms racing advantage

Steven Pifer, Director, Brookings Arms Control Initiative, Briefing: How U.S. And Russian
Leaders Can Avoid Renewed Nuclear Tensions, Amrs Control Association, 32217,
https://www.armscontrol.org/events/2017-03/briefing-us-russian-leaders-avoid-renewed-nuclear-
tensions, accessed 4-19-17.

Finally, just my concern about what happens if the INF treaty does collapse and if you don't get
an extension of New START. For the first time in 50 years, the United States and Russia would
be in a situation in which there are no negotiated limits covering their strategic nuclear forces.
And I think potentially that has significant costs, particularly for the United States. First of all,
we lose limits on overall capabilities; we lose the transparency, we're not going to know things
like how many warheads are on deployed Russian systems.
There is a potential for a nuclear arms race which from the American perspective is not a good
idea. My guess is the Russians can build nuclear weapons more cheaply than we can. It's not an
area of American comparative advantage.
Moreover, if we start this competition around 2021, it would begin at a time when the Russians
have hot production lines, they're in the midst of their strategic modernization program. Our
program only cranks up in the 2020s. And it would have a significant impact or it could have a
significant impact on the U.S. defense budget.
We already have a strategic modernization program which the Pentagon or the Obama Pentagon
said they did not know how to afford. How do you then add to that on the nuclear side when you
also have a White House that wants to have a 350-ship Navy and additional manpower for the
Army and the Marines?
The other cost we have there is that other countries will react, in particular my concern is about
China. China has modestly increased its nuclear forces, but if the United States and Russia are in
a situation where they are not limited and the limits go away, can we count on the Chinese to
show restraint?
So, it seems to me that there are real costs to an end of that negotiated arms control regime. It
needs to be preserved, that's in the interest of the United States; it's an interest to Russia and of
Europe. But it's going to be a difficult challenge in the next couple of years.

Another impact card.

Katherine Baughman, CGI Rising Experts Program and M.A. student, Center for Eurasian,
Russian, and East European Studies (CERES), School of Foreign Service, Georgetown
University, STARTs and Stops: The Precarious State of U.S.-Russia Arms Control, Center on
Global Interests (CGI), 41017, http://globalinterests.org/2017/04/10/starts-and-stops-the-
precarious-state-of-u-s-russia-arms-control/, accessed 4-19-17.

Should U.S.-Russia relations worsen and should the above developments come to pass, the
deterioration of arms control and the nonproliferation establishment will be among the
unintended consequences. Under these circumstances, China may decide to break its current
pattern of moderate nuclear growth, which could provoke a costly and dangerous arms race or, at
the very least, a nullification of one or both bilateral treaties.
In a setting in which both New START and the INF are reneged upon, a return to an unregulated
1960s-era global nuclear configuration is plausible. This outcome would increase the likelihood
of more states and non-state actors gaining nuclear capabilities, undermining decades of progress
in nonproliferation. Such high-stakes scenarios must be avoided at all costs.
In an era of decreasing interest toward nuclear issues and of increasing multilateralism in the
global nuclear environment, the fragile state of U.S.-Russia arms control is cause for serious
concern. Neither Washington nor Moscow should dismiss or disregard the importance of these
agreements and should be fully aware of the advantages they bring, as well as the potential
consequences that they guard against. This understanding necessitates a concrete effort to ensure
that President Trump is fully briefed and informed on the nuanced dynamics of New START. The
U.S. defense establishment should also be more candid and vocal in its consultations with the
Trump administration about its budgetary needs regarding nuclear arms. These steps would help
to prevent a premature collapse of New START.
Both Presidents Trump and Putin should actively work to strengthen the existing agreements, as
well as the diplomatic foundations on which they are based. Substantive actions to this effect
include both more caution on the Russian end in operating within the confines of the INF Treaty,
and more careful deliberation on the U.S. end on the effectiveness, timing and manner of
communicating concerns over violations to that fragile agreement. As demonstrated by North
Koreas hack of Sony Pictures in 2014, the government has a choice of whether and how to make
announcements of violations to U.S. security and official agreements rather than quietly deal
with the issue via diplomatic or other channels. The United States tendency to publically release
accusations of Russian violations without disclosing the intelligence proving the violations has
left European allies unable to back us in our claims in good conscience, limiting us to rather
ineffective unilateral, official declarations. A de-emphasis or scaling back of rhetorical support
for missile defense by the Trump administration would also help to ease tensions with Russia in
the nuclear sphere. These measures, along with Senate hearings that highlight the numerous
advantages of New START, will improve the likelihood that the agreement will be renewed or
replaced in 2021.
Though it may seem to some to be composed of bad deals for one side or the other, the
bilateral U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control establishment must be upheld to preclude a major
reversion with severe geopolitical, military and, potentially, human costs.

Other Citations:
Robert Legvold, Return to Cold War (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016).

Robert Legvold, The Challenges of the New Nuclear Age in the 21st Century World
(Dis)Order, in The Multipolar Nuclear World: Challenges and Opportunities (Moscow:
Carnegie Center, forthcoming).
Neg Approaches
Incentive CP
 CP Solvency Advocate

Michael Mcfaul, How Trump Can Play Nice With Russia, Without Selling Out America, 1-6-
17, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/06/how-trump-can-play-nice-with-russia-without-selling-
out-america/
Obviously, the change from Obama to Trump creates the first condition for a possible
detente with Russia. Often, the change of U.S. administrations starts a honeymoon in U.S.-
Russian relations, but 2017 is extraordinary, as the United States has never had a president make
so many glowing statements about a Kremlin leader as Trump.
But a second condition for closer ties also exists today: the end of popular mobilization
against autocracies. In Russia, Putin has crushed and contained the opposition. In Ukraine, the
new government is struggling to advance democratic and economic reforms while still fighting
Russian-supported insurgents in eastern Ukraine. In Syria and Egypt, autocrats are reasserting
their control, at least for now. In short, the main cause of increased tensions in U.S.-Russian
relations in 2012 is now absent.
Trump must use this moment wisely. Above all else, he must reject Putins formulation of ends
and means for a new reset. Putin seeks several very concrete objectives from the new American
president: Lift economic sanctions; endorse his way of warfare in Syria; acknowledge a Russian
sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union; suspend missile defense deployments in Europe;
and, in his dream of dreams, recognize Russian-Crimean unification. In return for these
concrete outcomes, Putin will give Trump his ephemeral, empty goal of better relations with
Russia. For that list, Putin would personally organize the most elaborate state dinner in St.
Georges Hall of the Kremlin that any American president has ever attended. Obtaining these
concessions from the president of the United States also would help nurture Putins image as a
powerful global leader, which in turn might embolden him to pursue even more aggressive
policies in the former Soviet Union and eventually regarding European institutions. With Trump
on his side, Putins brand of conservative nationalism could begin to rival liberal democracy as a
competing ideology with global appeal.
Thats a bad deal for America. Instead, Trump first needs to develop his own list of foreign-
policy objectives, and then try to use this new opportunity to engage Putin to achieve some
of these outcomes in which Russia can be a cooperative partner. But Trump must also be
ready to ignore Russias desires and even contain Russian behavior when such policies serve
American national interests.

The seven-step path

Though Trump has been disparaging about the value of traditional American alliances, the first
move of his administrations policy toward Russia should be the reassurance of our NATO allies.
Endorsing recent NATO decisions to enhance deterrence against Russian threats would signal
needed continuity with more than a half century of American foreign policy. In doing so, Trump
will incentivize our allies to spend more on defense without even uttering a word about burden-
sharing.
During the coming honeymoon phase, Putin is less likely to threaten a NATO ally. Obtaining
sanctions relief or recognition of his policies in Syria and Ukraine are much more immediate
priorities; Putin understands that these goals will be less likely achieved if, for instance, Russia
increases tensions with the Baltic states. The unfolding tensions within the European Union and,
to a lesser extent, NATO are unfolding very nicely from Putins perspective. Why rock the boat
now? A Trump declaration of support of NATO will not hinder his Putin courtship. On the
contrary, such a move by Trump first might reduce criticisms of rapprochement with the
Kremlin from some American allies and within the ranks of his own Republican Party.

Second , Trump must outline his conditions for lifting sanctions. To do so unilaterally,
without consultation with our European allies and partners, and without getting anything in
return from Russia, would be complete capitulation a really bad deal. Such a decision would
effectively condone annexation and intervention, and thus have negative consequences for the
stability of the entire international order. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Obama
successfully worked together to impose sanctions against Russian individuals and companies in
response to Russian military intervention in Ukraine. While the response to the annexation of
Crimea was slow, subsequent sanctions in reaction to Russian support for separatist movements
in eastern Ukraine were extensive and costly for individual Russian officials and companies. So
far, Putin has not changed his position at all regarding annexation and intervention in Ukraine.
Consequently, one obvious strategy would be to maintain the status quo sanctions will be
lifted when Russia implements its commitments in the Minsk Agreement, including first and
foremost restoring control of the state border between Ukraine and Russia to the Ukrainian
government. If however, the new Trump administration concludes that Minsk will never be
implemented, it must engage with Moscow, Kiev, Berlin, and Paris to replace this agreement
with something else. Simply walking away while lifting sanctions would equal total victory for
Putin and validate the notion that the strong can invade the weak without penalty.

Third , the Trump administration must provide smarter economic aid, political assistance,
and technical help in order for Ukraine to succeed both as a market economy and
democracy. Putin supports the continuation of low-level conflict in eastern Ukraine as a means
to undermine Kievs legitimacy and slow reforms. The new Trump administration must do more
to seek the opposite outcome, including using a change in administration to put additional
pressure on Kiev to reform. If Ukraines economic and political reforms fail again, it would hand
Moscow a giant victory. Conversely, democratic consolidation and economic growth in Ukraine
will constitute a major setback for Putins hegemonic agenda in the region.

Fourth , Trump must not simply endorse Putins military intervention in Syria, but define
his own objectives regarding this tragic civil war. Trump wants to join forces with Russia to
fight the Islamic State, but Putin seems perfectly content to watch the United States and our
allies do the major fighting against this terrorist organization in Syria and Iraq. In another
departure from Obamas policy, Trump has called for the creation of safe zones in Syria. Maybe
he could use his powers of persuasion with Putin to persuade him not violate the borders of these
no-fly zones, or, even better, to contribute relief aid to those living in these safe areas? Trump
also must decide to whom American and allied forces will hand sovereignty if Operation
Inherent Resolve succeeds in pushing the Islamic State out of Raqqa. Returning the keys of the
city to Assad should not be an option.

Fifth , the Trump administration must develop a more effective cybersecurity policy, which
would include deterring Russia but also other countries. Trumps first move toward this end
must be to recognize the problem: Its time to stop doubting the overwhelming evidence
marshalled by our intelligence community that Russian actors stole information from the
Democratic Party and party leaders and then released this information with the intent to influence
our democratic process. We will never be safe until the Trump administration acknowledges this
violation of our sovereignty and then takes action to prevent such attacks in the future. Trump
should then tell Putin that Russia will not be allowed to execute future cyberattacks and the
leaking of stolen data without paying a price. In parallel, the new administration must increase
our cyberdefenses and resilience to protect the homeland from Russia, as well as other countries
and domestic actors. Down the road, Trump should consider engaging Putin to agree to some
basic norms about cyberwarfare. Thou shall not use cyber-capabilities to interfere in each
others elections could be the first norm codified in some new agreement.

Sixth , Trump should consider pursuing some smaller, quick wins to demonstrate the
virtues of his rapprochement with Putin, and thereby build momentum for doing bigger deals.
For instance, Trump could ask Putin to lift the ban on American parents adopting Russian
orphans, a policy that only punishes innocent children. Given that both Trump and Putin seem
disinterested in deeper nuclear weapons cuts in fact Trump has argued for expanding our
nuclear arsenal the two presidents could instead endorse an extension of the New START
agreement to keep the treatys limits in place and, equally importantly, maintain the rigorous
inspections regime codified in this agreement. Or, now that the Treaty on Conventional Armed
Forces in Europe has lapsed, the two presidents could agree to provide greater transparency to
each other about military training exercises and deployments in Europe.

Seventh , Trump has to begin to disentangle some of the contradictions in his policy
statements during the campaign and transition. His pledge to rip up the Iran nuclear deal will
not win favor with Putin. The Russian president will never agree to impose new sanctions on
Iran, since Russia is seeking to expand economic ties and military sales to the Islamic Republic,
and has allied with Tehran in the Syrian war. In addition, Trumps full-throated embrace of
Russia creates more tension in our bilateral relations with China. Trumps promise to look into
recognition of Crimea as part of Russia completely contradicts his vow to review Americas one-
China policy. Trumps most recent pledge to strengthen and expand our nuclear weapons arsenal
eventually will complicate his pursuit of other cooperative policies with Moscow. And Russian
military officials are waiting anxiously for greater clarity on Trumps approach to missile
defense. If his campaign promise to increase military spending also means new enhancements for
our missile defense systems in Europe and Asia, the honeymoon with Russia could be a quick
one.
 Engagement Solves/pressure Fails

Untied engagement solves best way to insure positive long term changes in
russia
McFaul 16 Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Senior Fellow
at the Hoover Institution, and Professor of Political Science at Stanford [McFaul, Michael.
"Negotiating with Kremlin: Considerations for Future US Policy towards Russia." Harvard
International Review 38.1 (2016): 22]
Work with the Russian Government on Issues of Mutual Interest
Even after Putin decided to portray the United States as an enemy in order to bolster his domestic support,
he continued to engage with President Obama and his administration on a limited set of issues on which our interests
overlapped. For instance, during this period of confrontation, the two governments still
managed to work together to remove chemical weapons from Syria and to maintain unity in the P5+1
process to achieve an agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. When opportunities to cooperate with

Russia arise on issues of mutual benefit, the United States should pursue them, and not link

cooperation on these issues to progress on other issues of disagreement . The United States should not
continue to pursue engagement, however, without results. Putins military intervention in Syria, for instance, has achieved his goal of shoring up
Assad and his regime, at least in the short-term. The United States has no interest in associating with this objective. The United States must
demand more from our Russian counterparts, and push them to pressure Assad to do more, including allowing more humanitarian assistance to
reach distressed Syrian communities, and engaging more seriously in a political negotiation process.

Deepen Engagement with Russian Society

Many Russians in government, business, and society quietly believe that Putins current course of
confrontation with the West does not serve Russias long-term economic and strategic interests.
The United States should not isolate these people, but instead maintain contact with them. The United States and its
European allies should increase efforts to engage directly with the Russian people, including students through exchanges and scholarships, peer-
to-peer dialogue with non-governmental organizations, and allowing Russian companies not tied to the state to continue to work with Western
partners. There is no better way to undermine Russian propaganda than a three-week trip to Palo Alto. There is no better way to show that
Americans are not obsessed with destroying Russia then to send Russian students to spend an academic year in our schools and universities.
Likewise, there are no better ambassadors for our country than young Americans studying at Russian universities or interning in Russian
companies. The more interaction that can be promoted between the two societies, the better.

Lift Sanctions (at the Appropriate Time)

The United States and our allies should lift sanctions against Russian companies and
individuals immediately after Putin and his surrogates in eastern Ukraine implement the Minsk agreement. Lifting sanctions beforehand
would be terribly damaging to US and European credibility. Likewise, a partial lifting of sanctions in return for a partial implementation of Minsk
is a dangerous, slippery slope. Sanctions put in place in response to the annexation of Crimea should stay in place until Russia leaves Crimea,
however long that may be.

Counter Russian Propaganda with Factual Journalism

The US government should not seek to counter Russian propaganda with US propaganda. Instead, the best method for countering disinformation
is real reporting from credible journalists in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries in the region. US direct funding of these media outlets would
taint them. Instead, our focus should be on providing short-term training opportunities, yearlong fellowships at US and European universities, and
internships at Western media organizations. Education and the free-flow of information are our best tools in this long struggle against Russian
propaganda.
The next US president, to be decided in November, will have to deal with Putin and the Russian government. And, it is
possible for the next president to engage Russias president without undermining our allies, without
abandoning Ukraine, without checking our values at the door, and without fueling false
expectations about the possibilities of a new kind of relationship. We can use our
understanding of Mr. Putins goals for democratization and deeper market reforms at home, or greater integration
in Western institutions, to further our response to strained relations. Many projects from earlier days in US-
Russian relations are over and cannot be revived for the foreseeable future. Instead, we must play a longer
game engaging when we can for mutual benefit, containing Putins foreign endeavors when we must, and hoping
that long-term forces of modernization inside Russia will eventually create more permissive conditions for
deeper engagement in the future, however distant that future is likely to be.

Cooperation key to stabilizing US-Russian cooperation

Stent 16 - Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at
Georgetown [Angela Stent, Putin's Power Play in Syria; How to Respond to Russia's
Intervention, Foreign Affairs,
February 12, 2016, Pg. 106, lexis]
At the end of September, Russia began conducting air strikes in Syria, ostensibly to combat terrorist groups. The strikes constitute Russia's
biggest intervention in the Middle East in decades. Its unanticipated military foray into Syria has transformed the civil war there
into a proxy U.S.-Russian conflict and has raised the stakes in the ongoing standoff between Moscow and Washington. It has
also succeeded in diverting attention away from Russia's destabilization of Ukraine, making it impossible for the West to continue to isolate the
Kremlin. Russia is now a player in the Syrian crisis, and the United States will have to find a way to deal with it. Once again, Washington has
been caught off-guard, just as it was in March 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and began supporting pro-Russian separatists fighting
Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine. For all of Russia's domestic problems-a shrinking economy, a declining population, and high rates of capital
flight and brain drain-it has projected a surprising amount of power not only in its neighborhood but also beyond. U.S. President Barack Obama
may refer to Russia as a regional power, but Russia's military intervention in Syria demonstrates that it once
again intends to be accepted as a global actor and play a part in every major international decision. This will be a vexing
challenge not only for Obama during his remaining time in office but also for the next occupant of the White House. Why has Washington been
so slow to grasp the new Russian reality? Russian President Vladimir Putin has not kept his agenda a secret. In February
2007, for example, he delivered a scathing critique of U.S. foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference. "One state and, of course, first and
foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way," he warned. Countless times since, Russia has vowed to replace
what it sees as a coercive U.S.-led global order with one in which the West respects Russia's interests. In retrospect, Russia's war with Georgia in
August 2008 signaled Moscow's willingness to use force to prevent its neighbors from drifting toward the West and to reassert its influence in
areas that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. But the United States and its allies have repeatedly underestimated Russia's determination to
revise the global order that Moscow feels the West has imposed on Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. As the
United States gears
up for the 2016 presidential election, it faces two central challenges in deciding how to deal with Russia.
First, it needs to determine the nature of Russia's objectives in Syria and Ukraine. Second, because Russia
depends on a highly personalized political system, Obama and his would-be successors need to decide how to manage
relations with Putin, an especially difficult task given the overwhelming pressure on the campaign trail to look tough. The
evidence suggests that if the next president wants to engage with the Kremlin in a way that is consistent with
U.S. interests, he or she should focus on concrete areas where the two countries can and must
work together-particularly nuclear and conventional military issues. Continuing to isolate Russia is not likely to
work. Instead, the next U.S. administration should clearly communicate to the Kremlin what
American interests and values are and join with U.S. allies in resisting further Russian attempts to unravel the post-Cold War
order. INFERIORITY COMPLEX Over the past quarter century, Moscow and Washington have worked together most successfully when
Moscow has felt that it has been treated as an equal. This explains the success, for example, of U.S.-Russian arms control treaties, such as New
START, which were designed to deal with the nuclear legacy of the Cold War. Similarly, although the negotiations were arduous and drawn out,
Russia and the United States successfully worked together, alongside four other world powers, to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. Indeed, Putin
earned rare praise from Obama for his role in securing the agreement. Moscow and Washington have also been able to work together in instances
in which they shared narrowly defined common interests. In the fall of 2001, for example, Russia aided the United States in its initial military
campaign in Afghanistan, providing information and intelligence that contributed to the U.S. defeat of the Taliban. As Russia's former foreign
minister, Igor Ivanov, subsequently explained, "We wanted an antiterrorist international coalition like the anti-Nazi coalition. This would be the
basis for a new world order." That rather lofty goal has remained predictably out of reach. And in fact, Russia and the United States have had
difficulty maintaining their counterterrorist cooperation, largely because they often disagree on which groups to designate as terrorist
organizations-a problem that has cropped up most recently in regard to the various Syrian opposition groups. Nevertheless, Russia and the United
States have been able to cooperate on other security issues, working together in 2013, for example, to eliminate the Assad regime's stockpile of
chemical weapons. In that instance, Russia took the initiative after the United States proved reluctant to act. Cooperation
has been
least successful on issues involving Russia's neighboring states and the NATO alliance. It has
become clear that despite the West's numerous efforts in the 1990s to reassure Russia that an enlarged NATO would not represent a threat to
Moscow, the United States and its allies have been unable to create a post-Cold War security architecture in which Russia feels that it has a stake.
Perhaps doing so would have been impossible, especially given Russia's belief in its right to a sphere of "privileged interests" in the post-Soviet
space and its desire to limit its neighbors' sovereignty. The wars in Georgia and Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea have represented, in part,
Russia's answer to its perceived exclusion from the post-Cold War European security order. The same sense of grievance explains Putin's ongoing
push to establish a new arrangement among the great powers that would give Russia more leverage on matters of European security. Specifically,
Putin seeks an agreement that would ensure that no additional post-Soviet states will join NATO.

Finding areas of cooperation with Russia key

Stent 16 - Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at
Georgetown [Angela Stent, Putin's Power Play in Syria; How to Respond to Russia's
Intervention, Foreign Affairs,
February 12, 2016, Pg. 106, lexis]
The next occupant of the White House will have to define U.S. interests in Syria and Ukraine; determine the extent to which Washington should
counter destabilizing Russian moves in those countries and elsewhere; decide when and where the United States should cooperate with Russia;
and consider, as U.S. options become more limited because of shrinking resources and public opinion, whether the West is ready to acknowledge
that Moscow has in fact succeeded in modifying the rules of the game in its favor in both Syria and Ukraine. Since
the collapse of
the Soviet Union, four U.S. presidents have tried to "reset" relations with Russia and find a
more productive way to interact with Moscow, and each attempt has ultimately failed. Russia has not evolved in the way the
West believed it would in the 1990s: the United States has to deal with the Russia that exists, not the one
Americans might wish for. Indeed, for the foreseeable future, Washington should expect the
U.S.-Russian relationship to be defined by tension and antagonism rather than cooperation.
The next U.S. president should not attempt another reset. He or she should work with Russia on issues on which
Moscow and Washington share clearly delineated common goals, in Syria and elsewhere. Issues the two
countries can work on together include keeping nuclear weapons from Iran and North Korea and managing emerging resource and security issues
in the Arctic. But the next president should also clearly define and defend U.S. interests and accept that so long as the Kremlin continues to
portray the United States as its main enemy, dedicated to weakening Russia and the primary source of all its troubles, common action on shared
goals will be shaky and elusive.

Pressuring Russia has the opposite effect

Darden 17 - Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University
[Keith A. Darden, Russian Revanche: External Threats & Regime Reactions, Daedalus, Spring
2017, Vol. 146, No. 2 , Pages: 128-141]
Has the development of post-Soviet Russia in an international system dominated by a democracy-promoting United States bred an authoritarian
reaction in Russia as a response to perceived threats from the West? Beginning with the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in
1999,
Russian elites have increasingly seen the United States as a distinctively threatening power ,
one with a strategy to exploit civic organizations, ethnic groups, and other forms of domestic pluralism as fifth columns in
an effort to overthrow unfriendly regimes. With each new crisis in U.S.-Russian relations
Ukraine 2004, Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014 the Russian leadership has tightened controls over society , the
press, and the state. The result is that the United States muscular promotion of democracy abroad
has produced the opposite of its intended effect on Russia, leading successive Russian
governments to balance the perceived threat from the United States by pursuing greater military
and intelligence capacity to intervene abroad, and by tightening internal authoritarian
controls at home to prevent foreign exploitation of the nascent internal pluralism that emerged in the wake of
Communism.

Additional Citation
Piet 16 Research associate on political economy and foreign policy at the Florida International
University [Rmi Piet, Shifting Priorities in Russia's Foreign and Security Policy, Routledge,
Mar 9, 2016, ISBN 131705539X, 9781317055396]
 Cites

Robert David English, Russia, Trump, and a New Dtente, 3-10-17,

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2017-03-10/russia-trump-and-new-d-
tente
 Pressure DA
DA Pressure bad/containment type arguments most affs on the topic would
incur retaliation from Russia or cause Russia to more closely align with
China.
Bandow 14 (The Doug, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan, How Many Enemies Does America Want? Congress Sacrifices U.S.
Security with New Sanctions against Russia, December 15,
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/how-many-enemies-does-america-want-
congress-sacrifices-us-security-new)//cmr

Congress appears determined to turn an adversary into a forthright enemy and

encourage retaliation against more significant American interests. Observed my Cato Institute colleague
Emma Ashford: the provisions in this bill will make it all the more difficult to find a negotiated settlement
to the Ukraine crisis, or to find a way to salvage any form of productive U.S.-Russia
relationship. No wonder Congress didnt want to debate it openly. President Barack Obama expressed some concerns about the bill, but is expected to sign it. Unfortunately, the
legislation offers a belligerent foretaste of what to expect from the incoming Republican Senate. The legislations chief sponsor was Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), slated to become chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His earlier proposal, The Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014, was even more confrontational, providing for greater sanctions on Russia, more
military aid for Ukraine, and intelligence sharing with Kiev; conferring major non-NATO ally status on Georgia and Moldova as well as Ukraine; expanding training, assistance and defense
cooperation with Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, and Serbia, as well as Kiev; mandating non-recognition of Russian annexation of
Crimea; and subsidizing energy development in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. As chairman he is likely to encourage equally misguided military meddling elsewhere. Ukraine has suffered
through a tortured history. It was ruled by Moscow, both the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, for centuries. After World War I Ukraine was briefly independent and gained Galician territory
from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was reconquered by the Bolsheviks. Only after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 did Kiev achieve more enduring nationhood, and then it
suffered through corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent governance. Russian-Ukrainian relations were sometimes difficult, yet Kiev consistently accommodated Russia, which retained strong
economic and cultural ties with much of the population. Despite the lack of any direct interest in Ukraines status, Washington openly intervened in Kievs political struggles, including through
taxpayer-funded NGOs. The U.S. backed Viktor Yushchenko in the so-called Orange Revolution in 2005. He proved to be querulous and ineffective and was trounced in the 2010 race by the man
he had earlier defeated, Viktor Yanukovich. The egregiously corrupt Yanukovich in turn was ousted by protests backed by rabid and sometimes violent nationalists. The U.S. and Europe flaunted
their support for the opposition. Indeed, American officials openly discussed their investment in Yanukovichs overthrow and who should take power after his ouster. That Moscow would be
unhappy at what looked like a Western-orchestrated putsch against a friendly (and even elected!) president in a nation considered vital to Russias security should have surprised no one. Russian
President Vladimir Putin still was not justified in dismembering Ukraine, but America would have reacted badly had Moscow helped overthrow a Washington-friendly government in Mexico.
Putin acted to defend what he saw as Russian interests, not to challenge U.S. security. It might shock some Americans, especially those on Capitol Hill, but not everything that happens in the
world is about the U.S. Moscows intervention in Ukraine was all about Russia. While Americans, especially ethnic Ukrainians, care about Ukraines fate, it is not a serious security interest for
the U.S. America got along quite well over the centuries when Kiev was ruled from Moscow. Who runs the Donbass or Crimea is even less important to Washington today. The Ukrainian conflict
raises humanitarian concerns, but no different than those elsewhere around the globe. Kievs status matters more to Europe, but largely for economic reasons. The Europeans understandably
prefer a stable and intact Ukraine, but Kievs failure places no European nation at risk. Theres no evidence that Russia plans to launch resuscitated Red Army tank divisions from Ukraine to

If
sweep across Poland to the Atlantic. And if there was such a threat, the Europeans should be spending more on their own defense, rather than sub-contracting their protection to America.

the European Union and its members nevertheless want to confront Russia over Ukraine,
they should do so. But without Washingtons involvement. Theres no need for the U.S. to
take the lead in Europe when the continent has both a larger population and economy than
America. It is time for the Europeans to do some heavy lifting. Of course, President Putin is an unpleasant
autocrat who doesnt much like America. But Russia is not the Soviet Union. Like the old Russian Empire, Moscow today
wants respect and border security. Washington has no reason to deny the first or challenge
the second. Yet from expansion of NATO to dismemberment of Serbia to treatment of Georgia and Ukraine as allies the U.S. and Europe
have increased Moscows insecurity. Now Congress seems determined to turn Russia into what Mitt Romney mistakenly thought Russia already
wasAmericas number one enemy. Putin
could do much to take on that role by, for instance, arming Syria and Iran
with advanced anti-aircraft missiles, defending Tehrans right to reprocess nuclear fuel,
and hindering U.S. logistical support for Afghanistan. Worse, he could continue to move
closer to China. There is plenty of tension between Russia and the Peoples Republic of
China, but one factor could unite them: U.S. threats. Legislators appear to have forgotten that one of the most
fundamental objectives of U.S. foreign policy, going back to Richard Nixons opening to Beijing, was to keep the two apart. Now America is
acting the part of the Soviet Union while Putin is playing Nixon. Having failed to diagnose the problem correctly, legislators naturally came up
with the wrong solution. The Obama administration has tried to impose its will on Moscow. Theres hardly a nation on earth that the U.S. does
not lecture, sanction, bully, or threaten. Russia is not exempt. But again in a revelation that might shock Capitol Hill, it turns out American

power is not unlimited. Other countries are inclined to resist U.S. dictates just as the U.S.
would do in the reverse situation. Thats certainly the case with Russia. Moscow believes that it must
prevent a united Ukraine from aligning with the West (no doubt, Putin also appreciates the popularity boost that
his actions have delivered). The importance of this perceived interest is evident from his willingness
to annex Crimea and inaugurate quasi-war in Ukraines east. He obviously is willing to risk
conflict with the West. The only good news from Congress is that its anti-Russian legislation did not include any of the many fevered
proposals for the U.S. to court war by introducing troops to Ukraine, daring Moscow to attack. If pressed , Russia might well

take up the challenge , forcing Washington to back down or escalate . The first would be
humiliating, the second catastrophic .

Hard-line on Russia backfires only encourages aggression hurts coop on a

number of issues like terrorism, Syria, non-prolif, Iran deal working
towards respecting Russias SOI and further overtures are key
Ackerman 16 (Reuben, Special Features Editor for the London Globalist, Russia and the
West: the Grand Strategy Debate, November 28, http://www.thelondonglobalist.org/russia-and-
the-west-the-grand-strategy-debate/)//cmr
War and Peace: World War Three? Whilst
Russia is certainly revisionist Putin is almost certainly not
aiming to resuscitate the Soviet Empire. Russia has a GDP that is a similar size to Australia
and as such can have no realistic hope of re-establishing Soviet power. We need have no
fear of a major war engulfing Europe if we give way to Putin in the same way that
appeasing Hitler did in the build up to WWII. Putin is seeking minimal changes that will
ensure Russias position as a respected geopolitical player and to reverse Western
encroachment into Russias sphere of influence. Western Arrogance: Russia has legitimate
grievances against the West. We have made fundamental errors that have humiliated
Russia, showed Russia that the West operates to double standards and indicated that the
West has designs to undermine their regime. The expansion of NATO ever eastward after the Cold War, despite the
generally accepted spirit of the 1990 negotiations, which implied that there would be no further expansion, was seen as both a threat and a
humiliation to Russia. This dismissal of Russian interests was taken to its highest point by implying that Ukraine and Georgia would become
members in 2008. Ukraine holds a key cultural significance as homeland of the Kievan Rus, and also a geopolitical significance that determines
whether Russia is a cross-continental or purely Asian power. Russias response to the Ukrainian coup was no more extreme than could be
expected from the USA if Justin Trudeau had been overthrown and a pro-Russian regime erected in his place. The West laid the foundations for
the demoting of the importance of territorial sovereignty in the recognition of Kosovan independence in 2008, despite assurances to Russia that
the West valued Serbian sovereignty. At the time Putin said this is double ended stick and the other end will come back and hit you in the face
and his conduct in the Ukraine has brought his words home. The West again showed that their word could not be trusted when Russia acquiesced
to the NATO air campaign in Libya on the understanding that Gadhafi would not be toppled from power. The removal of Gaddafi raised fears
about the Wests enthusiasm for regime change, which made Putin worry for his own stability. The concert of powers: If
the West
works to calm tensions with Russia it would not only end the potential conflict but also
enable them to work together to help bring peace to a turbulent world. As was seen during the
American invasion of Afghanistan, Russian co-operation could be a crucial weapon for the West in its
on-going battle with terrorism. The failed Syrian truce deal in September presented an
opportunity for a concert of great powers that could have potentially worked to calm the
Syrian conflict. As Amitai Etzioni has argued, the Wests stance on Syrian negotiations: that Assad must step down immediately before
negotiations even start has actively discouraged Assad from stopping fighting. The influence of Russia over Assad means that Russia will need to
play the key role in any future negotiations. Furthermore, Russian co-operation is crucial on the issue of non-
proliferation of nuclear weapons and material. Recent tensions between the US and Russia, worsened by a
confrontational Western attitude, has led to Russia pulling out of the Nuclear Security Pact. Russian assistance was vital in
the success of the Iran deal; by promising to provide all necessary power they effectively removed Irans rationale for needing a
large domestic enrichment capability. Peace: In order to avert war and to reduce Moscows information
warfare we must address the causes of Russian fear and aggression. Whilst I would not go so far as to
suggest a roll-back of the over-extension of NATO, as this would only encourage Russian annexation of the Baltic states, there are less extreme
steps that would show that the West respects Russian sphere of influence. The West should publicly
rule out NATOs further expansion. The West should also recognise Russian control over Crimea as a genuine expression of the rights of self-
determination, similar to how we recognised Kosovan independence. Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine as a self-interested political move
in 1954. This decision cannot be considered more binding or legitimate than 82.8% of Crimeans voting for reunification, or the continued polls
that say that the vast majority of Crimeans are still in favour of Russian rule. The West should encourage Ukraine to enact on its commitments in
Minsk II and enact constitutional reform to allow for greater regional autonomy. This should be combined with a steady role-back of sanctions in
line with Russian withdrawal from Eastern Ukraine. By combining recognition of Russian interests with a firm statement that NATO will not be
going anywhere we provide assurance of security for both Russia and the surrounding states. The West should re-admit Russia into the G8 as a
sign that we value their role as a global actor and disarm Putins dangerous siege narrative. This should be combined with a relaxation of
Russia bashing from leading European and American politicians. Instead there
should be an attempt to embrace
Russia as a member of the European community and thus make our relationship more
open, interdependent and predictable. The EU should offer the incentives of Most-Favoured Nation trading status and offer
visa-free travel to Russians, as they have done for Turks and Ukrainians, as rewards for Russia reducing its military and propaganda aggressions
against the West. We should increase the number of scholarships and exchange programmes with Russian universities in order to increase
understanding. Russia
has legitimate grievances against Western incursions into their traditional
sphere of influence, a clear indication that the West takes this and the Russians geopolitical
position seriously would dramatically reduce tensions. Secondly, by showing that working with
the West brings more economic and political benefits than conflict does we could start a
new era of Russian and Western co-operation.
Critical Arguments
 Discussion

There is a wide variety of critical literature on the problematic approach of coercive foreign
policy, including how military threats are used/misused to distract from domestic problems, set
up a flawed epistemological framework, or otherwise enforce a particular worldview.
 Articles/Books

James Der Derian, Principal Investigator, Project on Information Technology War and Peace,
War as Game, THE BROWN JOURNAL OF WORLD AFFAIRS, 2003

John Hoffman, Reconstructing Diplomacy, The British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, Vol 5, Issue 4, 2003
Conventional views on diplomacy emphasise the centrality of the state. This article will argue
that the state is incoherent, and that this incoherence necessarily extends itself to statist
diplomacy. Traditional concepts of diplomacy note the tension between negotiation and
violence, so that if we are to make use of the conciliatory potential of diplomatic practice, we
have to look to rework radically the concept of diplomacy. A rigorous distinction between
violence and coercion (and constraint), and the state and government, enables us to
reconstruct diplomacy so that it acquires a consistency which its association with the state
makes impossible.
 Diplomacy K

James Der Derian, professor of international relations at Brown University, Infowar & Politics:
A discussion with James Der Derian, by Ian R. Douglas,
http://www.infopeace.org/vy2k/derderian.cfm

IAN R. DOUGLAS: When you talk about virtual diplomacy , what exactly do you have in
mind?
JAMES DER DERIAN: Technically it means bringing there, here; collapsing distance,
collapsing time. Unfortunately in the very use of the technology there is also the possibility of
collapsing the distinction between fact and fiction, because its very easy to manipulate the
images used. But the whole idea is that you have dual use. Here, at Ars Electronica, everyone is
talking about the use of information for warfare. But this is about applying it as a mediation.
So you a medium, meaning youre separating belligerents, using the "media", but youre
also using the medium to convey messages in new ways that can maybe break people out of
their states of antagonism.
IAN R. DOUGLAS: So insofar as it fits with military practice its part of the process of
deterrence?
JAMES DER DERIAN: Well .. there are people who want to appropriate virtual diplomacy
to those ends. Im arguing for more of a more civilian based, non-governmental, transnational
application of virtual diplomacy. There is a beltwaymeaning the Washington beltway
version, that is completely on the same continuum as virtual war. For instance, people down
at STRICOMthe newest military base (Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command)
have projects now that use the same technologies that are used for command and control warfare,
for getting people around a table to talk about what do you do when the last bullet is fired. They
claim that it can be used to prevent warfare, but their idea of preventing warfare means
often to subdue without fighting, the philosophy of Sun Szu; the best war is won where you
dont have to go to the battlefield to win. So, to be sure, there is a continuum between violence
and diplomacy , where we saw in Bosnia where virtual diplomacy was used at Dayton Ohio,
where they brought in the exact same technology that pilots used to train for the bombing runs of
the Serbian installations, to convince mainly Slobodan Milosevic that he should widen the
Gorazde corridor: this was the main sticking point, the whole Dayton accords was going to
collapse. So they brought him into this map room (we have this anachronistic term for it) and
projected 3D images of Bosnia. They showed him exactly how if you only made it five miles
there was all kinds of lines of fire that would make it impossible for you to have a peaceful
transit. Slobo actually got a hold of the joystick, and started flying over Bosnia, and looking at
other possibilities, and came away convinced. So this was a case where it worked. But it really
only worked because he knew that the same technology could be used against him once again in
a bombing campaign, if he did not agree. So the pure use of this I think has not been exercised
yet, but certainly the coercive diplomacy what we might call coercive virtual diplomacy
(virtual diplomacy backed by force )has been effective.

IAN R. DOUGLAS: Is it the immediacy of the medium which makes it different?

JAMES DER DERIAN: Yes.
IAN R. DOUGLAS: Because weve had for a long time the idea of the armchair-general, shifting
pieces around a tablearmies, artilery, cavalrywhich is essentially a visualization of the
theatre of war. Whats so different when its digitized and represented on a computer screen?
JAMES DER DERIAN: The enemy has a face, for one. The iconic representation of the enemy,
gives you all kinds of distancing, so that the virtual element of it minimizes; doesnt collapse, but
minimizes. Now, is this a good or bad thing? It is if you want to be able to have a dialogue. Now
suddenly you can project an image on a Barco tablewhich is basically a very large, very high
resolution computer screenwhich allows 3D representation of the opponent. You get people in
the room, who wouldnt normally ever sit across from each other; they can be on the screen,
interacting. That can be a good thing. It means that you can have a give and take; its not static,
like little pieces in a chess game, or figures moved around on paper. But, theres danger, which I
think youre aware ofits implied in your questionwhich is that you might mistake this new
"more real" representation with the real thing. If you put Yasser Arafat and Netanyahu on a Barco
table under virtual diplomacy, I dont think youre going to mistake each others iconic
representation for the real thing, for they have a long of history. But that history is missing. And
it is believed that you can do this kind of sui generis creation of identities that people can
negotiate from. When you go from that Barco table to the real world that agreement is going to
fall apart; for it was based on what amounts to an artificial intelligence of their positions. So
really what you try to do is create something that is in between: that combines experiencial
history, takes away the gut level animosity that keeps them from meeting, and adds enough
verisimilitude through technology that they can hash out issues, and get back to the so-called real
world.
IAN R. DOUGLAS: One the things that Virilio asks in Bunker Archaeology, at the end of the
first essaywhich is republished in The Virilio Reader (Blackwells, 1998, ed. James Der
Derian)is by the way, who invented Peace? As we know, alongside Kant when he writes his
treatise on perpetual peace lies Clausewitz who takes war as a societal model, if not the very
engine of history. What seems to have happenedwhen we think about virtualizationis a
blurring of these positions, war and peace , so that now we no longer know in which state
were in, or which is better than the other. Foucault, of course, also critiqued an overbearing
politics of tranquility imposed from above from what was termed in the 1700s as the police.
Virtual technologies seem to allow us to further blur the lines between war and peace, and further
question whether peace is a solution to war; or at least bring to attention the dangers of winning
wars in advance of the battle (which is what virtual technologies seem most to used for; theyre
actually not so good in the context of "real war"). Is there any way for ordinary people like me
and you resist this blurring, and its attendant dangers?
JAMES DER DERIAN: It is interesting you use this example of the police, because I think
youre right. A lot of people hereat Ars Electroncahave been arguing about the role of the
military. But increasingly the military is seeking out a policing role. Technology allows them to
intervene in civil society. What we traditionally conceive of as warbeing organized
violence between nation statesis clearly devolving into new forms, often invested within
civil society; what Virilio calls " endocolonization ". Its a fusing of peace and security, and
this is what Virilio is trying to resist. All too often in the discourse of security peace is simply
the absence of war. Now, how do you construct something which is based on a negativity? This
is one place where the virtual can play a very positive role. Because the virtual, according to
Deleuze, is not in opposition to reality. Its in opposition to the actual. The virtual, according to
Deleuze, is based on pure difference: it doesnt have the same relationship as reality does to
possibilities. It has a very creative constitutive relationship to the event. And so what you can do
is usenow that we have the meansthe virtual to make peace, and take these creative leaps,
but at least its not based on the pure negativity of security discourse.
IAN R. DOUGLAS: One of the things that Virilio suggests is that this move toward a domestic,
or civic role for the military has long been in preparation. He sees this civic role as the last
phase of the war machine: the idea of the war of preparation Pure war, total war which is
internalized in modern society. So the endpoint of the militarywhich was in fact always its
starting pointis essentially the control of civil security. It seems, at least, with this discourse
of information war, were still laboring under this illusion of the external enemy, without coming
to terms with the possibility that the first object of military intelligence is the internal population.
All of this money is being spent in war-gaming, simulations, and so on, which can all be
applied to a domestic insurrection. And yet this cannot be stated publicly. Are we being fooled
by a mass dissuasion, or are external threats still important to the high command?
JAMES DER DERIAN: I wouldnt put it quite in the terms of agency that you do; that the
military is choosing to take a more internal pacification role. I think its one of these cases where
the discourse is lagging behind new realities. Now, theres always going to be this give and take
between the extent to which a discourse shapes reality and reality determines discourse, but as I
think some of the best students of transformation have demonstrated, is that its in periods of
great cleavage between reality and the discourses which are supposed to help us understand it
what we may call the structures of experiencethats when crisis arrives. This point about
states of emergency that Benjamin talks about. What you have to do is mine those
emergencies, because theres are alsoas we knowopportunities within the dangers that they
present. So yes, I think there is this internalization of threat, because for one weve lost our
most significant threatthe Soviet Unionwhich means weve lost the "we" behind the
statement we have lost the Soviet threat. So many of these tactics and strategies of war-
gaming are about maintaining the "we" in light of the lack of the "them". So to that extent
Ill agree with your synopsis of the situation. That yes, theres a weird disfunctional disjuncture
of military planning ; that it almost seems to be fishing for an enemy . Even to the extent to
which, for instance, when I go and observe some war games , they make up these ludicrous
enemies. They take them from Marx brothers movies; "Freedonia", and so on. Here we are
sitting on the Danube drinking our Ouzo and honoring the Turks who came up the Danube, and
at the same time the 1st Armoured Division that crossed this river, up in Germany, is doing war
games about invasions involving characters from a Marx brothers film. Either the war gamers
have a remarkable sense of humorwhich I doubtor theyre really hard pressed to come up
with a political, and politic, enemy at the moment.