Reviving Détente?

John Richard Cookson

Security, Europe

Thawing the new cold war between Russia and the United States. 

On Capitol Hill yesterday there were echoes of the closing decades of the Cold War in which first détente, then Ronald Reagan’s direct engagement with Mikhail Gorbachev prevailed in Washington’s relationship with Moscow. On Wednesday, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) convened a panel of four experts from the recently re-founded American Committee for East-West Accord, an update on a similarly titled organization established in 1974. The four speakers, with backgrounds in diplomacy, business and academia, set out, in the words of board member and noted Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen, “to promote debate and discussion about American-Russian relations at a time when these relations are really lousy, and getting worse.”

The panel’s concerns, however, dated not from the 1970s and ‘80s, but rather were very much of the present. Borderless terrorism, the fallout from failed states and civil wars and rogue groups obtaining loose nuclear or chemical materials are threats common to both the United States and Russia. They are also threats that have been undercut by unnecessarily abrasive relations between the two countries, the panelists argued. “Much of the rhetoric today is reminiscent of the Cold War,” said former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock. “Actually,” he added, “our deepest interests with Russia are consistent.”

Former Procter & Gamble chairman and CEO John Pepper spoke of his long-standing business and personal ties with Russia. “It’s so clear that Russian men and women,” Pepper said, “really care about the same things that U.S. men and women care about, and that’s how their families grow up, safety in their country, being free from terrorism.”

Washington and Moscow have substantive points of disagreement, the panelists noted, in Ukraine and in Syria, for example. The intention was not simply to ignore these differences. Indeed, Cohen said, “the chance for a permanent Washington-Moscow partnership was lost sometime after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, and it was lost so completely, so profoundly, that we are now in a new American-Russian cold war.”

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