Valdai Club

Looking ahead, the Biden administration will have to make fundamental decisions in pursuing competition with Beijing and Moscow. The first and most important such decision is whether to compete equally and simultaneously with each or, alternatively, to continue strong competition with one while seeking less a tense form of competition with the other.

The US-China competition seems unlikely to produce a wholly multipolar system despite the many differences from the US-Soviet Cold War. In practice, the international system will probably combine features of bipolarity and multipolarity; it may even resemble a competition between bipolarity and multipolarity, in which each structure enjoys advantages in certain sectors, writes Valdai Club expert Paul Saunders.

All human works are inherently flawed because human beings are themselves flawed—the United States is no different from other nations in this respect, though its relatively high degree of transparency ensures that its flaws are rapidly visible, writes Valdai Club expert Paul Saunders.

While Russia appears to have prevailed in its latest showdown with Turkey in Syria—helping Damascus to blunt Turkey’s operations around Idlib and securing an advantageous cease-fire afterward—Moscow’s longer-term strategy for Syria has become murkier after the crisis.

Observers in the West, Russia and Ukraine already doubt the other parties’ commitment; if any of them are right, then the format in which negotiations eventually collapse is irrelevant. Yet even here, Normandy has an advantage: a more advanced process probably cannot conceal insincere intent as long as a new one.

Russia probably has greater prospects as a “sovereignty provider” than a security provider, if one defines this narrowly to mean that Moscow’s great power status, United Nations Security Council veto, and demonstrated willingness to oppose the United States can give other governments somewhat more flexibility in defying Washington by turning to Russia.

None of this should suggest that the G7 is fully unified or that differences among G7 members don’t matter. After all, agreeing on goals without agreeing on approaches is not enough to allow for cooperative action; for the G7 to operate effectively, its members will have to coordinate their policies.

President Trump may be looking for “good deals” for the United States in working with Russia—meaning deals in which he believes that America gets what it wants and needs from Moscow at the lowest reasonable cost to Washington. Negotiations like this could be unpleasant for the Russian government—no one likes to be an object of pressure and leverage—but could well serve both U.S. and Russian interests.

Russia’s successes in Syria so far produce not only advantages for its policy, but also some significant problems.  President Donald Trump’s deliberate unpredictability is a powerful asset here as well as it provides the United States with broad tactical flexibility in managing the triple challenges of Syria’s civil war, the fight against ISIS, and rebuilding the U.S. position in the region.

The rise of populist political candidates and movements in the United States and some European countries has provoked many questions about democracy, its effectiveness as a governing model, and its specific characteristics in America and elsewhere. Elites in the United States and the European Union are especially troubled by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, and similar backlash against elites and government institutions elsewhere.