Political analyst and assistant professor at the Department of World Politics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University Alexei Fenenko analyzes the latest history of Russian-American relations, debunks persistent myths, and says what to expect next.

– The Russian elites depend on Western financial institutions a lot. Still, Russia’s relations with the United States can be described as mostly negative. How can this be possible?

– Even having property in the West, educating children in Western universities, and the dependency on the U.S. dollar have not made the Russian elite a partner of the United States. After all, if the Americans talk about the need to contain Russia, it means that they admit that this is not enough. The Russian elite depends on the West, but the West still has to take measures to contain the Russian elite, build a buffer zone of hostile states around Russia, and bring NATO as close to Russia as possible. This is quite a paradox, is it not?

There is another psychological paradox. We are often told that Russia surrendered everything during the 1990s. If this had been the case, the Americans should have been satisfied. Yet, this is not true to fact. If you look at official documents and read through transcripts of speeches by U.S. leaders, you will see that the mixture of irritation, rage, and anxiety about Russia in those documents is striking. Even in the 1990s, Americans admitted that Russia’s residual power was too great.

History repeats itself indeed. Look at Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In the novel, all the Russian noblemen speak French. They know French better than they know Russian. They raise their children in France and have real estate there, but Russia still remains Napoleon’s greatest enemy. Napoleon was Russia’s enemy too. This is not a paradox at all. During those years, France was a real contender for world supremacy. A supremacist state needs to dismantle power potentials of its competitors.

Today, the United States is a contender for world supremacy as well. Russian and Chinese elites may know English very well and have many castles in the West, but this does not change much because America’s hegemony is impossible without dismantling the power potentials of Russia and China. This is the limit that no mutual financial or cultural dependency will cross.

– Does President Trump have any strategy for Russia at the moment?

– The Americans understand that Russia is the only country in the world that can technically wage war against the U.S. and that China is not capable of it yet. Therefore, President Trump, like Presidents Bush and Obama, has two goals to pursue in relations with Russia: to cut Russia’s military potential and to prevent the reintegration of the former U.S.S.R. in any form. Of course, the U.S. can use Russia situationally in the interests of American tactical problems, such as, for example, in Afghanistan or with regards to the North Korean nuclear program. Yet, tactical interaction does not eliminate strategic tasks.

The third objective is more alarming. It is very important for the U.S. to upset the political alliance between Russia and China. The Trump administration will have to think how to set Russia and China against each other.

We exaggerate differences between the policies of different U.S. administrations. The American strategy is based on the “pool of ideas.” During a certain period of time, a breakthrough strategy is developed, which is then implemented over 30-to-40 years. The Americans change it in two cases: when their strategy fails, or when conditions change. The current foreign policy strategy of the United States is based on the “ideological pool” that was developed in the late 1980s. The pool had four provisions: to contribute to the disarmament of the U.S.S.R. (then Russia), to maintain America’s military presence in Europe and East Asia, to prevent the rise of a new competitor comparable to the U.S.S.R. of the 1970s, and to prevent the change of regional balances, that is, the strengthening of regional powers unfriendly to the U.S. For the time being, all national security strategies of the United States are based on these ideas.

– In which areas can Russia and the U.S. cooperate? How can Russia benefit from it?

– Russia and the United States have three objectives: to develop a set of measures to reduce the danger of a hot military conflict, to resume strategic dialogue on preserving arms control, and to develop a set of mutual obligations in case of a conflict with third countries. These are priority measures. They were addressed at the first stage of the notorious “reset” policy, but it did not go beyond roundtable discussions. The Munich-2017 security conference has shown that the Trump administration is not ready to revisit that policy.

The war in Syria has destroyed the idea of Russia and the United States sharing the common anti-terrorist goal. The two countries conduct two parallel anti-terrorist operations in Syria, but we do not cooperate. Instead, Russia and the U.S. think of how not to bump into each other in Syria. U.S. officials persistently say that they will not cooperate with Russia in Syria. It means that we have lost another safety wire.

– How should Russia react to the increase of the U.S. defense budget?

– It is high time we should turn to the legacy of a prominent German military strategist and commander Helmut von Moltke, the architect of Prussia’s lightning victories over Denmark, Austria, and France. One can buy a lot of new weapons, but they will not do anything without soldiers. What if the soldiers dump all their weapons and run away? The weapons will become the trophy of the victor.

Second, one needs to see how the military budget is spent. One can spend a lot of money on unpromising expensive projects. During Moltke’s time, he would laugh at “battling balloons.” Nowadays, the Americans have been trying to build “space interceptors” for almost twenty years: the money is gone, but there is no result. One can spend military budgets on support infrastructure and supplies: acquiring new mattresses and thermoses is a good thing, but it does not improve the combat capabilities.

Third, Moltke said that it is not enough to outstrip the enemy in general terms – one needs to surpass the enemy in a specific time and in a specific place. The German strategist used to call it “realizable superiority.” Russia, for example, was a lot stronger than Japan in all quantitative respects in 1903, but Russia was stronger in general, rather than in specific terms. Otherwise, the weaker side resorts to the mechanism of survival: it finds weak points of the stronger opponent and ruthlessly strikes at it.

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – I believe, one of the best American defense secretaries – showed us a good example. He sounded an alarm in 2001: the American army was too dependent on systems of satellite navigation and communication.

– Many experts believe that it is impossible to build relations with President Trump in any format other than trade. Do you agree with this opinion?

– Trade is a very optimistic scenario. As soon as any new U.S. administration comes to power, the decisionmakers in Russia get their hopes up about making some sort of a landmark agreement with America. For example, Russia supports U.S. actions and expects that the U.S. will recognize Russia’s interests in the post-Soviet space, in Europe, etc. None of those hopes have ever been justified. Washington believes that even if Russia helps America somewhere, no concessions will be made to Russia. As Condoleezza Rice used to say, America does not sell democracy or allies.

Trade implies mutual concessions. The Americans understand that Russia will also ask for something in return. For a great power, trade and compromises constitute normal diplomatic practices. Yet, Washington is not interested in petty deals. The Americans do not see what major concessions Russia could make for them. They know that Russia will not agree to cut its nuclear potential or reduce its influence in the post-Soviet space or revise the Russian-Chinese agreement dating back to 2001.

– In early March, unnamed sources in the U.S. administration, as well as some Western diplomats, said that Donald Trump could temporarily postpone the work on agreements with Russia to combat the Islamic State. Then, the U.S. President did not disclose his plans in relation to Russia. What do you think is behind it?

– This once again proves that Russia and the United States have different goals in Syria. For Russia, it is a priority to eliminate ISIS and other radical groups. For the U.S., the prime goal is to topple the Assad government and reformat Syria to its liking.

I’m more interested in something else: what will happen if the United States, during Trump’s presidency, decides to establish cooperation with Russia on Syria? The result may not be as favorable for Moscow and Damascus, as we often think. For example, the Americans are very worried about the emergence of the “Astana format” of negotiations – the talks between Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Judging by open source information, Washington sees this format as a way to strengthen the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and lead to Turkey’s pullout from NATO. Let’s imagine that the U.S. decides to dilute the “Astana format” by becoming its participant or by introducing one of its partners into it. It will be a lot harder to counteract this threat for us.

– Strangely enough, most of the American establishment is extremely negative about Russia, while most of our leaders are ready to throw themselves into the Americans’ arms at any moment…

– This is a certain peculiarity of our mentality after the Second World War. Deep in our heart, we cannot agree with the fact that confrontation in one form or another is a natural state of our relations with the United States. Ever since 1945, the Russian society has been expecting a good president to come to power in the U.S. who would relieve the world of the never-ending confrontation and start building a dialogue with Russia. We’ve never seen this type of president. He won’t come. For some reason, it is difficult for us to admit that Russia’s contradictions are not associated with a specific president, but rather with the U.S. itself. Our intelligentsia does not consider normal the world where great powers are waging a tough and irreconcilable struggle with each other.

Now I see an opposite process – the attitude to the U.S. in the Russian society today is much worse than it was in Leonid Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. Back then, the Soviet society was convinced that it was communism that could not allow for good relations with America. Now we have more knowledge of what the United States is like, and what we have learned about it has not heightened the degree of popularity that the U.S. enjoys in our society. Most people in Russia understand that their love for American culture does not equal love for Washington’s policy. Kissinger was right: “The United States is losing Russia.”

Nobody in Russia had any superfluous hopes about President Trump. Our media have snatched a few of his phrases out of context – in places where he talked about the possibility of normalizing relations with Russia. Bush Jr. and Obama used to say the same things, by the way. All that was nothing but empty pre-election statements.