Containing Russia, Securing Europe

By authors including Pavel Luzin and Volodymyr Dubovyk (Luzin and Dubovyk are Visiting Scholars of the Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School)

Russia is at war with the West and its invasion of Ukraine has reshaped the geopolitical map. How can the West contain Russia’s ambitions and bolster European security?

Executive Summary

Russia is at war with the West.

Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while devastating in its own right, is only the opening salvo in a much larger campaign designed to upend a US-led global order that has maintained peace and prosperity in Europe and the United States for nearly 80 years. To restore stability, America and its allies must focus their efforts on containment, through a strategy designed to defeat Moscow’s ability to wage war now, and to disrupt its ability to even contemplate war in the future.

Russia’s attempt to remake the European and global orders by force has been long in the making, and it will be equally long in the unmaking. Restoring order will require diligence and vigilance from the United States for years, if not decades, to come. As the diplomat and influential foreign policy architect George Kennan recognized in 1946, when faced with an intransigent and intractable adversary capable of causing irreparable harm to American and allied interests, the only alternative to ongoing and escalating war is containment.

It is time for a new strategy of containment. This strategy, which must begin in Ukraine, does not end with victory in the present war. Effective containment will require renewed commitment to the security of NATO’s eastern flank, a concerted strategy to counteract Russian influence in Western societies and globally, and a principled refusal to cede any of Moscow’s former vassals in the post-Soviet space to continued domination.

US and broader Western interests are clear. If left unchecked, Russia will continue to manufacture forever wars on the European continent, threatening NATO allies with military and non-conventional violence. The Kremlin’s playbook is, by now, well known: it includes weaponizing energy, disrupting commodity and financial markets, and sowing internal and international discord to keep democracies off-kilter and create a blueprint for for other malign actors to follow. Moscow’s strategic objectives are also clear: to destroy the U.S.-led system of international rules and norms, and it will not be appeased by abdication of territories in Ukraine or elsewhere so long as Western institutions still find global appeal. A strategy of renewed containment thus represents a return to an interest-driven policy towards Russia.

For most of the three decades since the end of the Soviet Union, Washington and its allies were content to let the relationship be driven in the direction and at the speed determined by Moscow, falsely secure in the mistaken belief that convergence and even integration were inevitable. Containment, by contrast, must be guided by a clear and consistent articulation of US national security interests — chiefly the interests of durable security and stability in Europe and globally — as the fundamental determinant of the contours and content of any future relationship with Russia. And it must be rooted in a sober recognition of the stakes and difficulties involved in achieving them.

Read the full report here.

(This post is republished from CEPA.)