U.S.-Russian relations have reached a nadir not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes his country is engaged in a historic confrontation with the United States, which will determine the shape of world affairs for generations to come. The United States considers Russia an immediate and persistent threat to world order. While there are periodic high-level contacts to ward off crises, there has been no sustained, substantive dialogue between the two countries since Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The risk of direct military confrontation between the world’s two leading nuclear powers is intolerably high.  

To reduce that risk and promote global stability, the Trump administration will need to reestablish working relations with Russia. Any talk of a reset is misplaced: The two countries will continue to be rivals, as they have been for the most part since the United States emerged as a major global power at the very end of the nineteenth century. Rather, the task is to turn today’s perilous adversarial relationship into one of competitive coexistence, in which inevitable geopolitical and strategic disputes are managed responsibly.  

At The Top of the List Is the Russia-Ukraine War 

President Trump is right that resolving the conflict and ensuring an enduring peace is urgent, but he will find that task is embedded in the broader question of European security. Before he launched the war, Putin made clear that his goal was to revise the post-Cold War settlement, which he believed was imposed on Russia at a time of extreme weakness. NATO expansion, in particular, drove Russia to the margins of Europe, depriving it of the buffer zone in Eastern Europe that it considered critical to its security and standing as a great power. 

Since the invasion, Putin has railed against loose talk in the United States of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia or effecting regime change, which he interprets as evidence of Washington’s aim to eliminate Russia as a great power rival. Nevertheless, he wants to engage the United States in a serious dialogue on global affairs, in part because even contentious talks with the world’s preeminent power would validate Russia’s status as a world power.  

In these circumstances, a narrowly focused strategy for ending the Russia-Ukraine war will fall far short of its goal. To succeed, Trump will need a full-blown Russia policy.  

Deterrence and Diplomacy 

At a time of intense hostility, the default option for Russian policy in the minds of U.S. policy-makers is containment. The approach brought triumph in the Cold War and redoubles its appeal today. But the current state of affairs is radically different from that era. U.S.-Russia relations are no longer the main axis of global confrontation; U.S.-China relations are. Non-Western countries have grown their economies and acquired ever greater power to act autonomously in world affairs. The U.S.-Russian rivalry no longer carries the same far-reaching implications for them as it did during the Cold War.  

In this world, hard-edged containment will not succeed. Isolating Russia diplomatically and commercially is, for example, impossible when much of the global south, notably China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, are unwilling to follow Western strictures. Closing loopholes in the anti-Russian sanctions regime, especially through secondary sanctions, fuels resentment of American power and resistance to American goals in much of the rest of the world.    

At most, containment might have a role to play in Europe in preventing Russia’s further expansion westward. A critical task will be enhancing the West’s deterrent posture: fortifying the long NATO/Russian frontier, which stretches from the Barents to the Black Sea; expanding, modernizing, and rationalizing Europe’s defense-industrial sector; and hardening domestic societies against Russia’s grey-zone, or hybrid, tactics. 

In addition, the United States needs to demonstrate that it has a viable strategy to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression and the will to implement it. 

However, diplomacy will also be essential to easing tensions along the frontier. That will require arms control measures and confidence-building measures akin to those used during the Cold War but adapted to current realities. The United States will be central to this effort as the ultimate guarantor of Europe’s security; it is the only country with which Russia, under the Putin regime, believes it could hold serious negotiations. 

Successful diplomacy necessarily requires a mix of resistance to and accommodation of the other party’s goals and interests. That is the approach the United States should adopt in relations with Russia. The goal should not be defeating or containing Russia on the world stage, even though the United States should continue to vigorously counter Russian policy that threatens its interests. 

Rather, the United States needs to acknowledge that Russia will remain a key pillar of the international order for decades. Accordingly, the goal should be managing relations through firm defense of our principles and astute compromises and trade-offs within and across issues to advance American interests or to harness Russian power and ambitions for American purposes.  

The Agenda 

The agenda should be broad, given the scope of geopolitical competition and each country’s importance to the resolution of urgent transnational issues.

Given Russia’s blunt, aggressive negotiating style, skill, patience, tenacity, and resolve will be required to make progress. Initial expectations should be low, given the mutual lack of trust. Success should not be measured in the number of maximal goals achieved. Rather, the task is to accumulate incremental advantages over time and to limit the damage of inevitable setbacks in pursuit of the United States’ broader vision of a just and stable global order. 

Expanding on an earlier proposal, a notional agenda could look as follows:

Strategic Stability

The two countries share an abiding interest in avoiding nuclear war. The nuclear arms control architecture, which was built up during the Cold War largely based on bilateral U.S.-Russian treaties, will end with the expiration of the New START agreement in February 2026. While there is insufficient time and likely interest to negotiate a follow-on treaty, the two countries still need to discuss how to manage the nuclear equation going forward. A combination of parallel unilateral steps, tacit codes of conduct, and bilateral agreements regarding distinct elements of the nuclear relationship, all monitored by national technical means, might prove the best possible option for the moment.     

Eurasian Security

Both the United States and Russia have a keen interest in the future Eurasian security ecosystem—Russia because of the long history of invasions by Eurasian great powers, the United States because only the domination of the most advanced regions of the supercontinent by a hostile power could pose a serious threat to its security. The challenge will be to develop a set of understandings on how to promote peace, stability, and security in discrete subregions—Europe, the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and the Arctic—that can be combined to form an overarching security ecosystem for the supercontinent.    

Europe-Ukraine 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine dealt a fatal blow to European security as a cooperative effort between Russia and the West. The immediate task is to develop a framework for future European security that reduces the risk of conflict along the NATO-Russia frontier and defines the limits of non-threatening interference in the domestic affairs of other countries (on the assumption that in an interconnected world, some interference is inevitable). This framework will set the parameters for the steps needed to resolve the Russia-Ukraine war.  

Sanctions 

The Russians will insist on discussing the United States’ anti-Russian sanctions. Despite repeated boasts that Russia has thwarted them and grown stronger, the reality is that they have distorted the economy and raised obstacles to long-term growth. As a rule, the United States should only offer relief from discrete sets of sanctions in exchange for concrete steps by Russia that advance American goals on strategic or geopolitical matters.      

Managing expectations should be easy since few will expect much to come of such engagement in the current environment of profound animosity. The more challenging task will be pushing back against critics who will question the very effort to restore relations with a Russia that has engaged in such brutality in recent years. A constant effort will have to be made to explain the national interests that such a course promotes.       

Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was the senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff during the George W. Bush administration.

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