Getting Russia Right, With Thomas Graham

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is getting Russia right. With me to discuss U.S.-Russia relations is Tom Graham. Tom is a distinguished fellow at the council. Before joining CFR, he served as the special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the staff of the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007.

 

During his time there, he managed a White House-Kremlin strategic dialogue. Tom is the author of a new book, Getting Russia Right. It is hitting bookstore shelves today. Congratulations, Tom, on the publication of Getting Russia Right, and thanks for coming back on The President's Inbox.

 

GRAHAM:
Thank you very much, Jim. Glad to be with you.

 

LINDSAY:
Now, Tom, before we can begin discussing U.S.-Russia relations, I want to let listeners know how they can win a free copy of Getting Russia Right. To do so, all they have to do is go to cfr.org/bookgiveaway. Let me repeat myself, cfr.org/bookgiveaway. There they can read the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register their entry. The registration for the giveaway will be open until October 17th.

 

After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of Getting Russia Right. And for any listeners struggling to find a pen to jot down all that information, please note that we have provided a link to the giveaway in the show notes for The President's Inbox on CFR.org.

 

With those logistics out of the way, Tom, let's talk about Russia. U.S.-Russian relations are as tense as they have been in my lifetime. This certainly isn't where any of us expected to be three decades ago when the Soviet Union collapsed. What happened?

 

GRAHAM:
It's a good question. There are a lot of things that have happened in the past twenty-five to thirty years. You know, part of this is a question of the evolution of Russia itself and the way Russia began to rebuild itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Part of this is U.S. policy and what we were trying to achieve and how our goal overlapped with Russian strategic imperatives. And I think if you go back and look at this relationship back in 1991, the United States had a number of, I think, illusions about what was possible with Russia.

 

The United States, starting with the end of the Cold War, really set out on a mission to change Russia. It wanted to take a country that had been authoritarian for most of its history, a rival of the United States, and turn it into a liberal Western democracy, more or less. A country that could partner with the United States across a broad range of global issues, but in many ways a junior partner of the United States in what was the United States-dominated international system at that point. So our real goal was to change Russia to make it something different from what it had been for the past pick-your-number of centuries.

 

LINDSAY:
Why was that a mistake?

 

GRAHAM:
It was a mistake because of the material that we were working with. And I think it exaggerated our ability to change a country that had a proud history, a country that thought of itself in a different way, a country that was really intent, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, on rebuilding its power, coming back as that great power that Russia has always been, and a country that always valued what we would call a strategic autonomy. It wasn't going to be anybody's junior partner.

 

It had certain ideas about how the Russian state itself should be organized, the role that Russia should play in the global stage. And so yes, in an ideal world, the United States should want to change countries. "Let's advance democracy. This is good for the United States." On the other hand, you have to, I think, take into account the material that you're working with, the traditions of another country, and whether that is really possible.

 

Changing other societies is something I think that the United States has not done well. Change comes largely from inside. It's an evolutionary approach, and unless you totally defeat a country the way we did, say Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan in the second World War. Occupy it. You have very little capacity to change the evolution of another country.

 

LINDSAY:
Let me draw you out on that, Tom, because my recollection of the early 1990s wasn't so much that the United States wanted to change Russia, but that Americans believed Russia wanted to change. Russia wanted to be integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community. It had thrown off the shackles of the sclerotic Communist Party, which had committed numerous atrocities over the course of its seven decades of rule.

 

And from that point, what the United States was doing was trying to help Russians achieve what Russians wanted, which was prosperity, peace, to be able to enjoy the freedoms that many other countries did. Not become Americans or become Germans or Italians, but to have a more prosperous, freer society. What was wrong with that?

 

GRAHAM:
Well, I think the problem here is that it's certainly true that there was a significant segment of the Russian political elites at that point that wanted to integrate into the Euro-Atlantic community, talked about reform of building a democratic society. But there was also a significant element that wasn't on that wavelength, and an element in Russian society that we tended to look at as retrograde, people who didn't matter, and so forth. And therefore, we picked what we saw as the positive element and then expanded that to say this is a direction in which Russia as a whole wants to move.

 

If you're on the ground in Moscow, and I was on the ground in Moscow for much of this time. It was a much more complicated situation than that. We can even look at some of the things that occurred that gave you a sense of where the country wanted to go. The reformist governments ran into significant resistance from the legislature at that time. Most Americans who looked at the Russian Congress of People's Deputies is what it's called, saw it as retrograde. It was filled with nationalists and communists. But what they failed to recognize is that that body was actually elected in one of the freest and fairest elections that had ever occurred in Soviet history, was actually elected during the Soviet period.

 

When that body was disbanded and a new body was elected in its place, the State Duma in 1993, who won those elections? ... Not the reformers that we were working with. The people who came out on top were a nationalist group, headed by a man named Vladimir Zhirinovsky at that time, called the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia—a misnomer if there ever was one, but a nationalist party.

 

The other big winner were the communist. And so there was significant resistance within the population and within elite towards this movement towards Europe. Now, that doesn't mean that...

 

LINDSAY:
Were they resisting movement toward Europe or were they resisting the consequences of the dismantlement of the Soviet state? The loss of benefits, the injection of uncertainty, this unbridled capitalism that was suddenly foisted on them?

 

GRAHAM:
Well, yes, that's part of it as well. Again, most Russians associated—before the breakup of the Soviet Union—democracy with prosperity. What the Russians wanted, I think by and large, was to live better. Not unusual. They thought the democratic processes would bring them that type of prosperity. That's not what happened in the 1990s. The 1990s was a period of socioeconomic crisis in Russia, collapsed the economy that grew out of the misdirection and disfunction of the Soviet economy itself. So in some ways there was inevitability about it.

 

But the United States was preaching free market democracy at that point, free markets. And I remember working at the embassy in Moscow at that time, and you go down to the subway stations and you would see a lot of older women selling cutlery, lace doilies, and other things that they had taken out of their home to try to make a living, and the reaction to many people: this is a good sign; this is entrepreneurial activity; this is a sign that Russians are grasping the free market and moving in that direction. On the other hand, this was really underscored to my mind the dire circumstances in which many people felt.

 

LINDSAY:
It was certainly a very rough transition in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union on an economic front.

 

GRAHAM:
Right, and it was. And the fact that many Russians thought that these types of problems were being foisted upon them by a class that wanted to reform the country, wanted to turn the country in a democratic direction, soured many people on democracy as a concept. And it's something that Putin, for example, could play on in the 2000s as he began to peel back some of those democratic rights that a small segment of the Russian society had enjoyed during the 1990s.

 

I mean, it's interesting. If you go back and look at polling in Russia in the 1990s and the 2000s, in the 1990s, the majority of Russians did not believe they lived in a democratic society. In the 2000s under Putin—after he begins to restore order, to crack down on some of the oligarchs, these rich business magnates—in fact, the number of people who believe that Russia is moving in a democratic direction increases. So it's one of these paradoxes. We look at Russia through our own eyes and see a regression. For the Russians themselves, they thought they were moving in the right direction.

 

LINDSAY:
I'm glad you mentioned Vladimir Putin because there's obviously a big debate in the social sciences among historians about to what extent history is made by big geopolitical forces, by culture, and to what extent it's made by individuals.

 

As you know, there are a lot of people who would argue that Russia would've gone in a very different course if it hadn't been for Putin who came in and basically won free and fair elections but then proceeded to basically defang Russian democracy. How do you respond to arguments like that, Tom?

 

GRAHAM:
Well, I mean, there are a lot of different ways to look at this. First, I think the movement away from democracy, strangely enough, begins right after the breakup of the Soviet Union. When historians look at this many, many decades in the future, they will conclude that the freest and fairest elections in Russia in the last half of the twentieth century, the first decades of the twenty-first century, actually occurred in the late Soviet period under Gorbachev.

 

The elections in Russia, in independent Russia, actually began to backtrack on that. And you began to see the restrictions being put in place that made those elections increasingly less free and less fair as we move forward. And Putin has continued that process and taken it to the extreme under his rule. So first I think we need to see that the trajectory is somewhat different from what the normal narrative is in the United States. Putin, in many ways, is a continuation of some of the things that Yeltsin and Yeltsin's government was doing in the 1990s.

 

The second point I would make is that Putin, as a personality in the early 2000s at least, was very much within the mainstream. Almost anybody who followed Yeltsin would have undertaken some of the things that Putin did. The state was crumbling in the 1990s. You can't in fact have a well-functioning democratic society without a well-functioning state. And so the authority of the state had to be rebuilt in some fashion. And that meant that you had to crack down on the oligarchs, for example, who are using their private wealth to influence the political processes, dictating who occupied ministries, where tax revenue was spent, and so forth. You had to reign in the powers of the regional leads to maintain the integrity of the country.

 

So some of those steps that were taken in the early 2000s, what I call the process of trying to build an authoritative state, would've been taken by anybody in...

 

LINDSAY:
But Putin didn't stop there.

 

GRAHAM:
He didn't stop there, and he took Russia down an authoritarian path. Some of that is reaction to what is happening domestically in Russia. Some of that is a reaction to how Russia is being treated on the global stage, but in particular, the relationship—I think in Putin's mind—with the United States. This interference that he saw in Russia's domestic politics, which again, we in the United States thought, well, we're doing what the Russian government has asked us to do: We're supporting democratic reform, free market processes, and so forth. But the increasing number of Russians, you know, Putin in the lead on this, who looked at what had happened to Russia in the 1990s, began to see this U.S. effort in the pernicious light, that this was really meant to keep Russia down. And what we needed to do is return to the Russians, ourselves, being the people who run this country in the way that we want to. And we need to throw off our dependence on the West, the United States in particular, for our economic welfare, for advice at how we should run our domestic political system. And so pushing back against the United States is part of this process.

 

There's another important element here as well. I think you'll see that the movement accelerates down the authoritarian path after the color revolutions in the former Soviet space, particularly Ukraine in 2004, which the Kremlin, Putin in particular, saw as a U.S. effort to put in place a pro-American government in Ukraine at the expense of a pro-Russian government, one that Putin has supported quite actively in the run-up to the elections, the presidential elections.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, I have to ask you, because you worked in the Bush administration, was that what the Bush administration was trying to do, Tom?

 

GRAHAM:
To a certain extent, yes—that we wanted to support Ukraine as a democratic society, I think appropriately so, but with the understanding that a free and independent Ukraine would put limits on Russia's ability to rebuild its power in the future. So there's a geopolitical element to this as well, not saying that the United...

 

LINDSAY:
Do you think President Bush saw this as a way to check Russian power?

 

GRAHAM:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the administration saw it as a way to check Russian power in the future, to ensure that Russia went down a path that was consistent with American interest at this point. But Putin did react to this, although the United States clearly wasn't the central factor behind what happened in Ukraine.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, that's important point. We shouldn't deny agency to the Ukrainian people.

 

GRAHAM:
Well, this is... Basically, it occurred because of indigenous factors inside Ukraine that the United States then supports in some way. But we're not the people who launched this, the color revolution. We came in afterwards in an effort to be supportive of what we thought, and I think demonstrably so, where the Ukrainians themselves wanted to go. But that's not the way it looked in Moscow. And that's the thing that we need to understand. They saw this...

 

LINDSAY:
See the world from the viewpoint of the other.

 

GRAHAM:
Well, if we're going to develop an effective policy, we need to be able to do that, to see through the eyes of the others, but to know how they're going to react. Now, you know, the point that I always make is strategic empathy is an important element, but empathy doesn't mean that you agree with necessarily with what the other country wants to do, and that the next...

 

LINDSAY:
You're just trying to understand how they see the issue.

 

GRAHAM:
How they see the issue and what that means for your ability to advance your own interests, what the complications might be, what adjustments you might need to make, greater confidence, reach the goal that you seek to reach over time. So you need to look at it through Russian eyes. But, you know, to get back to where we were—Putin saw this, I think wrongly, as a U.S. effort to install a pro-American regime at the expense of a pro-Russian regime, that this was all an American plot denying any Ukrainian agency at all.

 

What he, at that point, then decided to do was to crack down on Russia on those instruments that he thought were similar to the instruments that the United States had used in Ukraine to affect this Orange Revolution—non-governmental organizations that were promoting democracy, for example.

 

LINDSAY:
This is when you start to see sort of the political or civic space in Russia begin to collapse.

 

GRAHAM:
Narrows is in a very dramatic fashion, the point at which Russia, the Kremlin, goes after those organizations that enjoy foreign funding in particular when it's engaged to politics. And politics has a very wide interpretation in Russia at that point. So you see Putin beginning to do what he needs to do internally, to harden Russia against what he sees as a future effort by the United States to launch a color revolution inside Russia itself.

 

And this is interesting because... I mean, we don't see this, but I had conversations with senior Kremlin officials at this point who made that point quite explicit.

 

LINDSAY:
So what precisely was the United States supposed to do differently to have elicited different Russian behavior? I take your point—your argument being that the U.S. effort to integrate Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community was doomed to failure because Russians didn't see themselves and would not see themselves playing that role—but I'm not sure what it is the United States should have done differently that would've produced a different Russian behaviors.

 

It's hard to imagine any American president in a situation like President Bush found himself in 2004, not supporting people who are demanding democratic freedoms that we as Americans and our friends and allies in Europe have.

 

GRAHAM:
No, I think that's absolutely true, but remember, the deterioration in the relationship does not come simply because of the Orange Revolution. That's an important element of it, but there are other factors here that are also critical to understanding why the relationship, in fact, goes off track in the 2000s. Orange Revolution is part of that. I think the way the United States handled the Chechen conflict is another part of that.

 

Remember that with the Bush administration, the big change in the quality of the contact between the two countries actually comes after 9/11—after that major terrorist attack, Putin's offer of support for the United States, and this idea that we're going to build a counter-terrorist...

 

LINDSAY:
He was anticipating, Putin was anticipating getting similar support from President Bush.

 

GRAHAM:
Absolutely, dealing with the Chechens. And remember the way that President Bush presented the counter-terrorist campaign is, "You're either with the terrorist or you're for us." It's a binary choice. There's no sort of middle ground here. You know, the reason we go after the Taliban in Afghanistan is not because we had considered the Taliban terrorists before that. In fact, we had some working relationships with the Taliban in the 1990s. We go after the Taliban because they refused to give up Al-Qaeda at that point. They are now supporting an international terrorist. They become part of that international terrorist network. And we expect the rest of the world to rally, not only against Al-Qaeda, but against the Taliban ... and something that we would want the Russians, the Chinese, our European allies and partners to do.

 

When it came to Chechen, whom the Russians consider the Chechen rebels to be terrorists, all of a sudden the United States is talking about, well, we've got to differentiate between, you know, Chechen rebels have legitimate grievances against Moscow and those who may have contacts with international terrorist organizations. That doesn't compute. Again, if you look at the history of Chechenya, you could make an argument that they had been oppressed and then under Russian imperial rule during the Soviet period. In fact, the Chechens had been deported to Kazakhstan in 1944.

 

The point is that if we were consistent with the way we were dealing with the terrorist challenge elsewhere, any Chechen rebels who had contacts with people we consider terrorists should have had to make a choice to fight those terrorists. And that means that they wouldn't have been fighting Russia at the same time. So Putin expected the same type of support. He didn't get that support. So counter-terrorism is really not a joint effort where we're going to be partners. It's the United States seeking advantage, geopolitical advantages at Russia's expense in Chechenya, part of the Russian Federation. You have other areas where the United States is clearly favoring other parts of the Soviet Union at Russia's expense. We never recognized the Commonwealth of Independent States, for example. We never recognized the Collective Security Treaty Organizations.

 

LINDSAY:
So President Putin has a long list of complaints about the United States and how he was treated. I will note that over the course of those two decades, nineties into the aughts, U.S. military presence in Europe plummeted. We had 300,000 troops in Europe in 1990 down to 60,000 by 2020. So it's not as if everything the United States was doing was posing a threat to the Russians. But that takes up to the present day with the decision by President Putin to invade Ukraine.

 

You've called it an unjustifiable invasion. President Putin has argued, as best I can tell, that he was forced to invade precisely because of American policy. Is he right?

 

GRAHAM:
In his own mind, he might be right. But the answer, I think objectively speaking, is no. He's wrong. And there's a change, I think, in the dynamics of American-Russian relations after Putin returns to power, to the presidency in 2012. Why I'm critical of the administration I worked for is that we were clearly the dominant power at this point, and that we could have risked more in the relationship in an effort to build a more constructive relation.

 

We really needed to challenge Russia, to challenge its bona fides, to see whether it wanted to work with the United States on a broad range of issues. And if it turned out that Russia wasn't, we would've lost very little by reaching out to Russia in part because of this great disparity in power. After 2012, its Putin that really begins to drive U.S.-Russian...

 

LINDSAY:
This is when he returns to the presidency of Russia.

 

GRAHAM:
He returns to the presidency. And he returns to the presidency against the background of what he claims was a U.S. effort to overturn the Duma elections in 2011, deny him reelection as president in 2012.

 

LINDSAY:
Particularly critical of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

 

GRAHAM:
Clinton, right, exactly. And he begins to build a... what turns into a crusade against the United States. And you see that with his reaction to the events of... in Ukraine in 2014, the seizure of Crimea, the fomenting of unrest and instability in Eastern Ukraine. You see that in Syria.

 

LINDSAY:
So on those things, should the United States have struck a more aggressive response in the face of Russia's seizure of Crimea, sending troops into Syria?

 

GRAHAM:
We should have paid more attention to Russia at that point and the challenges that it was going to present. Going forward we needed to, I think at that point, have had a more intense dialogue with Russia than we did to see where this relationship was tending or going to tend over the long run. And yes, we should have been, I think, more forceful in the response to Russia's annexation of Crimea than, in fact, we were at that point, of trying to determine what was really going on, what the limits of Putin's ambitions were at that point... The same thing in Syria.

 

But we didn't, for one reason or another. I think the Obama administration at that point still thought that Russia was not serious enough a power that it should push back harshly against Russia. But beyond that, it was that there's still a couple of things that we need to do with Russia in terms of nuclear nonproliferation. The Iranian deal was still hanging out there at that point. So I think the Obama administration looked at Crimea and Iran nuclear, decided Iran nuclear was more important, and that's what we're going to prioritize.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, that's acknowledging Russia's role as a major power. You needed the Russians to help you get the deal.

 

GRAHAM:
Yes, and that was a deal that, in fact, did help, in some respect, improve the relationship between the United States and Russia. We needed Russia, or the administration thought they needed Russia at that time in Syria to deal with ISIS, the Islamic State. Now, that didn't turn out nearly the way that the United States wanted it to because Russia was more intent on supporting Bashar al-Assad than dealing with ISIS at that point.

 

But any event, there's a reason why the United States in 2014, 2015 did not push back as harshly as they might have under other circumstances because they still thought they could use Russia to advance goals that the administration considered much more important, quite frankly, than whatever happened to Crimea at that point.

 

LINDSAY:
I suppose historians, Tom, are going to argue about how to allocate the blame on these issues for decades to come. I'm more interested in turning to the question of what comes next? We are where we are. How should the United States approach Russia going forward given that it doesn't appear, as long as President Putin is in charge, that he's interested in, dare I say it, a reset in U.S.-Russian relations. If anything, he is, as I think you suggested moments ago, looking to lead a coalition of the aggrieved, of countries that have a beef with the United States. How do you navigate that going forward?

 

GRAHAM:
It's a complicated challenge, I think, for the United States. And we have short-term needs and long-term needs. You know, long-term ... And we need to recognize that Putin isn't going to be the head of Russia forever. When that moment arise, we don't know. But it will, certainly in the next couple of decades and maybe sooner than that. And we're going to have to deal with Russia, I think still a significant power on the global stage, and think about what type of relationship we want with that country going forward.

 

Now, you know, the point I would make is that if you look at the history of the past thirty years—you look more broadly at the historical development of Russia, the relationship between the United States and Russia over the past 150 years—we're not talking about a reset. We are competitors on the global stage. We will be competitors.

 

And the question is, can you move the competition away from the adversarial type of relationship we have now to one that is more constructive rivalry, more responsible rivalry, that doesn't run the risks of direct military confrontation and escalation to a nuclear cataclysm? That's what we need to be thinking about. We need to be thinking about how you work with a Russia in a global environment that's going to be much different from the one that we've had over the past fifty or sixty years which will have multiple centers of power. Whether we call it a multipolar world, multicentric, there's a diffusion of power. This isn't going to be a world that's dominated by the United States the way it has been for much of the past half century, for example. Russia will be an element in this environment. It will be an important player.

 

And the question is how do we work with Russia to create those types of equilibria going forward that advance American interest? How do we use Russia in creating a balance in and around China that is advantageous to the United States going forward? How do we do that to make sure that the Arctic region is a region that is developed in a way that's consistent with American interest? How do we deal with Russia to ensure that we can still have a stable and prosperous Europe?—which again is something that's important in the United States.

 

So there's a long set of long-term challenges in which we're going to have to deal with Russia as less than a strategic partner, a rival of some sort, but a rival that you can work with to prevent the worst from happening and can use a relationship with the rival in order to help you better position yourself against other rivals.

 

LINDSAY:
I will concede all of that. My question would be, how do you do that while you still have the war going on in Ukraine?

 

GRAHAM:
Part of this is messaging—the way you talk about Russia and what type of messages you send to the Russian elite about how you envision this future, which I think can have some positive impacts in shaping the environment in which Putin makes the decisions at this point. But that has to be coupled, in the near term, with a very firm response to what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.

 

We are right to build up the deterrent capacity of NATO, at this point. We are right to bring it in Finland and Sweden to build a more robust European deterrent. We are right to support the Ukrainians in their battle against the Russians, at this point. We need to have a policy that thinks over the long term with Ukraine as well. The goal should not be simply to drive the Russians out of all the territory they've occupied—and indeed, that may be an impossible task at this point—but our goal should be to anchor a strong prosperous Ukraine in Europe.

 

That is something that is a challenge for years going forward, given Ukraine and the problems that it faces. And so victory is not simply victory on the battlefield. Victory comes when you build the type of Ukraine that is anchored in Europe that also provides something of a barrier against the expansionary impulses that have driven much of Russian foreign policy. So in many ways, what you're trying to do in the current situation is in a sense creating the landscape that will allow you to deal with Russia over the long run.

 

Now, again, while you're pushing back, I think the message has to be that we are prepared to deal with Russia in a reasonable fashion. We know that Russia has legitimate security concerns that we're prepared to deal with in a constructive way. But the condition for getting there is Russia ending its aggression against Ukraine. Now, I think that's important because it does send a message to the Russian political elites that there's a way forward, that this isn't simply outright hostility, that our goal is not to crush Russia going forward. And that I think begins to shape the environment in which Putin decides.

 

Final point here, what we really want to see, and what we want to encourage through our own actions, is a return to what I would call the fundamental way that Russia has pursued its foreign policy and its foreign interest over the centuries, which is really realpolitik, a pragmatic calculation of the balance of power, and not the messianic impulse that you see playing a role in the way Putin has proceeded in Ukraine. This is something that I think is actually been quite rare in Russian history. We always see Western commentators talking about Russian messianism and the problems that created, but when you actually look at the way Russian rulers throughout history have made the decisions about foreign policy, that Messianic stuff never interfered. It's been real hard calculations of power since the ... at least since Peter the Great.

 

LINDSAY:
That's not where Putin is today.

 

GRAHAM:
That's not where Putin is today. Putin has developed a messianic streak. I think you saw the elements of that when he returned to power. Isolation during the pandemic has exacerbated that. And now he talks about or sees himself as this great Russian czar who's rebuilding the Russian Empire, returning, gathering the Russian land since the land we're taking in Ukraine is Russian land after all, it's not Ukrainian land.

 

LINDSAY:
In his view.

 

GRAHAM:
In his view ... And positioning Russia as this leader of an anti-colonial movement against the West, the "golden billion" as they call it, which is curious because it's not clear that there's an anti-colonial movement out there. If there is, it's not clear that these people want Russia to be its leader.

 

You look at what happened at the G20 in recent weeks, and it's India that invites the African Union to become part of the G20. India also has a long history of anti-colonialism and sees itself as a major player in this field, and the type of relationship it wants to strike with the United States is radically different from the type of relationship that Putin would want to strike with the United States at this point.

 

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Tom Graham, a distinguished fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the new book, Getting Russia Right. Tom, thanks for joining me.

 

GRAHAM:
Glad to be with you.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org.

 

As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Molly McAnany was our recording engineer. Special thanks brought to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.