The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 21 U.S.-Russia relations are in disarray, with talk of a new Cold War pervasive. Fortunately, framing the conflict in terms of national interests points to a way forward. UNDERSTANDING RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY TODAY BY RAYMOND SM I TH Raymond Smith was an FSO from 1969 to 1993. He served in Moscow twice and while he was political counselor in Moscow drafted the 1990 cable “Looking into the Abyss: The Possible Collapse of the Soviet Union and What We Should Be Doing About It.” He also served as director of the Office of the Former Soviet Union and Eastern European Af- fairs in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. A longtime interna- tional negotiations consultant, he is the author of Negotiating with the Soviets (1989) and The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats (2011). I assume we would all agree that each country has its own national interests, which sometimes conflict with the national interests of other countries. Conflict is not necessarily a bad thing. Satisfactorily resolved conflicts can improve relations, create expectations about how future conflicts will be resolved and decrease the likelihood that countries will consider resorting to violence. A diplomat’s primary responsi- bility is to advance his or her own country’s interests. In doing that, they are in a unique position to contribute to the sat- isfactory resolution of conflicts by helping their leaders understand how the other country sees its interests. FOCUS ON RUSSIA Russia’s view of its interests has changed in fundamental ways in the quarter-century since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Much of that change would, in my view, have been likely whether Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin or not. The Russia that emerged from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union was intent on becoming part of the Western world and wildly optimistic about what that would mean. Boris Yeltsin, its president, had staked his political future on destroying both the Communist Party and the Soviet sys- tem in which it was embedded. His foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was as intellectually pro-West as anyone in his position had been throughout Russian history. They inherited from Mikhail Gorbachev a foreign policy outlook—the Com- mon European Home—that they intended to implement and extend. The Russian people, giddy from the collapse of the cor- rupt, oppressive regime under which they had labored for generations, hungered for a normal relationship with the rest of the world and believed that the result would be quick and dramatic improvement in their lives. In 1992 I wrote that these expectations could not be met, and that a period of disillusionment would inevitably follow.