Thomas Graham, <i>Getting Russia Right</i>

In the first few months of 2025, the new administration of Donald J. Trump upended the U.S. approach to Russia as practiced by all his predecessors, including himself during his first term. His tentative inclination to mend ties with Russia despite its brutal war against Ukraine has baffled even those beholden to the old adage that, at the core of the problem, was the West's supposed failure to integrate Russia into Western organizations and to focus instead on helping the young democracies of East Central Europe.In Getting Russia Right, published before the advent of the second Trump administration, Thomas Graham, a former senior staff member of the U.S. National Security Council and former official at the U.S. State Department, develops a slightly more nuanced thesis. At the root of the problem of Russia's turn against the West, he argues, was the U.S. effort to integrate Russia on Western terms rather than treating Russia for what it is: a traditional great power with its own aspirations and worldview grounded in geography, geopolitical circumstances, and historical baggage and haunted by its own experience with cycles of collapse, renewal, and decline. The flawed strategy was, according to Graham, at the core of the deterioration of the liberal world order prior to 2014: “Until Putin returned to the Kremlin as president in 2012, it was U.S. policy that enflamed relations, even as Washington talked of integration” (p. 172).Graham's “realist” account presents Russia as a traditional great power whose interests are somehow legitimate. Yet, at the roots of legitimacy of the liberal international order, as practiced by the West in unison until January 2025, was the 1990 Paris Charter signed also by the USSR, the United Nations Charter–derived principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and other agreements in that spirit. Western governments were averse to accepting the legitimacy, let alone wisdom, of a return to spheres-of-influence as expected and demanded by Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader who has restored dictatorial rule to his country over the past quarter century.To be sure, there is a lot to Graham's sweeping historical analysis that juxtaposes Russia with the United States. Until this year, the U.S. self-perception, rightly or wrongly, was of the United States as the defender of universal principles and values that everyone should emulate as a workable system. On the other hand, the Russian state was a vast area with an unforgiving climate and sparsely populated areas with no natural borders that were potentially vulnerable. Combined with feeling perennially insecure, this situation led to a permanent quest for strategic depth by expansion. The result was the emergence of two powers with diametrically opposed worldviews. Although things were different after the Cold War, Graham insists that it was naïve to ignore the long-term historical realities.The original sin, according to Graham, was President Bill Clinton's conviction that his predecessor (George H. W. Bush) missed an apparent opportunity to turn Russia into a normal, modern democracy at peace with itself and the rest of the world. Graham maintains that the Clinton administration embarked on an effort to change Russia irrespective of its past and self-perception.Surprisingly, Graham does not find much good to say about the Obama administration´s approach in 2009–2010, which until Donald Trump's return to the White House in 2025 was arguably the closest to Graham's prescription of how to get Russia right. Obama launched yet another “reset” of U.S.–Russian relations in the wake of Russia's war against Georgia in August 2008, implicitly accepting Russian dominance in the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine. Graham finds fault with Washington's criticism of the rigged Russian Duma elections in late 2010 and with Vice President Joe Biden's negative comments after Putin's terse announcement in September 2011 that he would return to the Russian presidency in 2012.The first Trump administration receives relatively short shrift in Graham's book. Despite Trump's usual antics and occasional homage paid to Putin, the policy of his first administration toward Russia was shaped in large part by aides who were much more skeptical of Putin's intentions. They hardened some late measures taken by the Obama administration in the wake of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. The first Trump administration continued to redeploy U.S. troops to Europe, sought higher budgets for European defense, and sold highly effective anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine.According to Graham, the Biden administration, starting in 2021, unhelpfully depicted the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war as a fight between good and evil, while at the same time not offering crucial support. The post-Crimea sanctions remained weak. Graham rightly points out that in the leadup to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Biden sharply eroded U.S. leverage by repeatedly affirming that he would not deploy U.S. troops to defend Ukraine.Graham clearly blames the current crisis on Putin, who departed from his and his predecessors’ Realpolitik and espoused delusional Slavophile messianism in trying to erode Western dominance. But Graham insists that different policies might have prevented the 2022 invasion. He blames Clinton for supposedly tarnishing Russia's democracy, George W. Bush for alienating Putin with his supposed quest to include Ukraine and Georgia in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Obama for supposedly failing to bolster the then seemingly more liberal-minded interim president Dmitrii Medvedev.There is no gainsaying that the West made mistakes in dealing with Russia. The hubristic paeans to Western values, combined with periodic resets, produced only confusion and resentment without changing the way Russia defined its security interests. Alienating high-mindedness often replaced a consistent strategy.After a compelling analysis of the Putin regime, Graham asserts without sufficient justification that post-Putin Russia will inevitably and substantially be different. He envisages it as a more normal country willing to eschew the warfare that has characterized Putin's entire tenure. Graham is unapologetic about an adults-in-the-room approach whereby “Washington will have to talk to Moscow about Ukraine and Europe without the Ukrainians and Europeans in the room” (p. 198). His unstated premise is that the most important U.S. national interest in Europe/Eurasia is “good relations” with Russia, as opposed to the defense of the independence, liberty, and security of Europe. Graham's erudite analysis leads to little in terms of a consistent strategy of containment beyond vague calls for increased defense and deterrence efforts.One only wonders what Graham would have to say about the second Trump administration's approach, which in many ways seems to follow his logic. Only time will tell whether, by getting Russia right in Graham's way, Trump and those around him might be getting everything else wrong.