Bosom Enemies, Bitter Friends: What Relationship Framework are Russia and the US Doomed to?

@pir_center_eng in partnership with @mgimo_university released Security Index Yearbook 2024-2025 - a collection of essays on most critical issues of global security. It features my chapter on why Russia and the United States are clinging to the Cold War paradigm, and whether there is any agenda left in bilateral relationship.

"In a number of occasions, the Cold War is counterintuitively portrayed as a gold standard that the contemporary great power rivalry should seek to reproduce should it find ways to avoid a disastrous nuclear war. The problem with such a vision today is that both the intentions of the actors and the structural factors of the rivalry are different."

"The issue of how Russia and the United States perceive one another is important in the sense that it helps understand a number of critical issues at the center of the expert debate, among others, those concerning the root causes of the confrontation and how far the two parties can go ... There are arguably 4 mutual perception images of Russia and the US that dominate the expert debate and policy considerations at the moment.
⭐️Both parties strongly believe that the other party started it first.
⭐️Both see one another as declining powers.
⭐️Both see each other as revisionist.
⭐️Both see each other as a source of global insecurity."

"Unlike the Cold War era, there is today a great asymmetry between the US and Russia in terms of what they each want from the world and from one another. The United States seeks to preserve its declining – yet still dominant – position against rising China.

Russia, in turn, does not seek to establish dominance in the world, nor does Moscow seek to prove that its socio-political formation is a more efficient development model than that of the US, as it did during the Cold War. Rather, deceived by the West in the 1990s and mistreated in the 2000s, Moscow has embarked on de-Westernization of the international system, even if Russia still occasionally attempts to engage with that system on its own terms."