01/07/2008 The CSIS/IFRI joint project “Europe, Russia, and the United States: Finding a New Balance” seeks to re-frame this trilateral relationship for the relevant policymaking communities. We are motivated with the possibility that new opportunities may be emerging with leadership change in Moscow and Washington. In particular, we hope that our analyses and recommendations will be useful as France takes over the chair of the EU on July 1, 2008.

The title of the project reflects our sense that relations between Europe, Russia, and the United States have somehow lost their balance, their equilibrium. The situations of the key actors have changed a great deal for a variety of reasons including, but not only, new wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expansion of NATO and the EU, and the unexpectedly rapid economic recovery of Russia. At a deeper level, we find ourselves somewhat perplexed that nearly twenty years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent conclusion of the Cold War that relations between Europe, Russia, and the United States seem strained on a multitude of issues. In Berlin in June 2008, Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, invoked the language articulated fifteen years ago by Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin about “unity between the whole Euro-Atlantic area from Vancouver to Vladivostok.” Despite many achievements over the past fifteen years, it is hard not to conclude that collectively we have under-achieved in building greater trust and cooperation. We are convinced that both for enhanced European security as well as global security, we must increase the level of trust and cooperation between the trans-Atlantic allies and Russia, and that this cooperation must rest on a firm economic and political grounding.

We must humbly acknowledge that we certainly have no “magic bullet,” but we hope that the series of papers to be published in the summer and fall of 2008 as part of this project may contribute to thinking anew about some of the challenging issues that we in Europe, Russia, and the United States collectively face. We are very grateful to the excellent group of American, European, and Russian authors have engaged in this task: Pierre Goldschmidt, Thomas Graham, Rainer Lindner, Vladimir Milov, and Dmitri Trenin and Julianne Smith. We also want to thank – Keith Crane, Jonathan Elkind, Stephen Flanagan, James Goldgeier, Stephen Larrabee, Robert Nurick, Angela Stent, and Cory Welt - the participants of the workshop we held on May 16, 2008 in Washington DC for their rich and thoughtful comments about the papers and the project. Finally, we also want to thank Amy Beavin, research associate of the Russia and Eurasia Program at CSIS, Catherine Meniane and Dominic Fean of the Russia/NIS Center at IFRI for their indispensable support in making all aspects of the project a reality.

This project is the continuation of the IFRI/CSIS transatlantic cooperation started in 2006. We would like to thank warmly our financial supporters: France Telecom, the Ryan Charitable Trust, and particularly the Daimler Fonds.

By publishing some articles in Russian, Russia in Global Affairs will also take part in this project.

Thomas Gomart                                                  Andrew Kuchins
IFRI                                                                      CSIS

Report

Pierre Goldschmidt, US- Russia Strategic Partnership against Nuclear Proliferation (pdf-802k)

Thomas Gomart, EU-Russia Relations (pdf-789k)

Thomas Graham, U.S.-Russia Relations, Facing Reality Pragmatically