Getting Russia Right by ThomasGraham. Washington: Polity Press, 2023. 272 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5095‐5689‐2

Though relations between Russia and the United States had been in crisis for years before, the 2022 invasion of Ukraine marked a turning point, the moment when post-Cold War hopes for Russia’s eventual convergence and integration with the liberal-democratic West ended for good. As Thomas Graham shows in this provocative, well-argued book, that long-running crisis is largely because Russia—like the United States—has always been an expansionist power, albeit one that mainly “expanded out of geopolitical necessity in an unending search for security” (p. 43). U.S. policy mistakes, Graham argues, made the problem worse. After the end of the Cold War, the United States pursued a dual-track strategy, seeking both to integrate Russia into a preexisting Western security architecture while at the same time hedging against the possible return of a revanchist Russia. Graham argues that Washington demanded too rapid a transformation of Russia’s national character—and then overdid the hedging when it became clear Russia was not going to turn into post-1945 West Germany or Japan. In that sense, Graham sees the West’s misreading of Russia in the years leading up to 2014 as the principal factor in Russia’s transformation into an aggressive, revanchist state. From 2014 on, though, Graham sees Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s embrace of an ideological vision as the primary cause of the war in Ukraine. Putin, like his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, started off by making a “wager on the United States,” supporting the global war on terror to facilitate Russia’s strategic reassertion in Eurasia and midwife “a ‘special relationship’ with the United States” (pp. 109, 107). This bid for a special relationship provoked skepticism among Russian elites, but in other ways, Graham sees Putin’s geopolitical assertion and demands for respect of Russian interests as very much within the Russian foreign policy mainstream. Graham nevertheless emphasizes Putin’s personal responsibility for starting the wars in Ukraine. Ukraine (and Belarus) occupies a special place in Russian elites’ mental maps as both the cradle of Russian civilization and a demographic reserve to reinforce the Slavic, Orthodox essence of Russian identity. For these reasons, any Russian leader would be reluctant to see Ukraine fall out of the Russian orbit. Yet Graham sees Putin as having a peculiar fixation with Ukraine that led him to drag Russian foreign policy in a dangerously ideological direction, away from the traditional emphasis on “geopolitical necessity” driving Russian expansion. Similar to previous rulers such as Emperor Nicholas II, Putin’s pivot to an ideological foreign policy is fraught with perils for Russia and for the world at large. Like much of his foregoing analysis, Graham’s recommendations for pulling Russia back from the brink will be controversial. Graham urges U.S. policymakers to acknowledge and respect Russia’s “legitimate interests,” including its demand for strategic depth around its borders and acceptance of its authoritarian political system. In the short-term, Graham calls for an “effort to secure Europe against Russia” before pivoting to a new effort to build a “security system based on cooperation with Russia” in Europe (pp. 193, 192). Graham recognizes that Ukraine, which has suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties during the war Putin started, will pose an obstacle to this approach. He therefore proposes excluding Ukraine from talks on settling the conflict, forcing Kyiv to accept a kind of armed neutrality underpinned by enhanced security cooperation with Western states. Such demands may be hard for the United States to accept—in part because of what Graham’s sees as the expansionary (if not messianic) nature of U.S. power itself. For such a country, acquiescing to Moscow’s demands for deference in its neighborhood might be hard to swallow. Washington’s post-Cold War strategy, after all, was not only about Russia, but also about sustaining and securing erstwhile U.S. allies in central and eastern Europe. Even if it produced tensions with Russia, this American strategy produced real benefits by creating a zone of prosperity and security across much of the former Warsaw Pact. Closing the door to Ukraine’s inclusion in this zone would look like a betrayal to most Ukrainians. It could also imperil democratic, pro-Western governments around Russia’s perimeter. If, as Graham asserts, the conflict in Ukraine is Putin’s war more than Russia’s, a better approach for policymakers might be to hold the line until Putin is gone before seeking any lasting arrangements with the Kremlin. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.