The UC Interview Series: Dmitri Trenin

Interviewer:     

Katherine graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs with a Master of International Affairs and a Certificate of the Harriman Institute in 2019 and now works as an engagement manager at Avascent, where she designs and produces studies on domestic and international defense strategies and planned procurements for industry and U.S. government clients. Katherine's areas of expertise include U.S. national security policy, U.S.-Russia and Russia-NATO relations, and defense platforms and systems. Katherine’s recent research includes her Harriman Certificate paper on Russia-NATO conflict in the Baltics and a report on Russian disinformation targeting American audiences on Twitter.

Interviewee:     

Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. He had been with the center since its inception. He also chaired the research council and the Foreign and Security Policy Program. He retired from the Russian Army in 1993. From 1993–1997, Trenin held a post as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. In 1993, he was a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. He served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993, including experience working as a liaison officer in the external relations branch of the Group of Soviet Forces (stationed in Potsdam) and as a staff member of the delegation to the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms talks in Geneva from 1985 to 1991. He also taught at the War Studies Department of the Military Institute from 1986 to 1993.

This interview happened in December 2021.

Past Experiences: On growing up in Cold War Moscow, a translator’s work, and the Geneva nuclear arms talks

Katherine:             First, on behalf of the University Consortium, I’d like to thank you for participating in this conversation as part of our Interview Series. So, first let’s talk a bit about your career and some of the lessons learned from those experiences and then we'll shift more to the present. Starting a bit broadly, I'd love to know a bit about what inspired you to enter into the field of foreign and military policy?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, I got interested in these things—not so much on the military side, but got interested in foreign policy—as a teenager. I was born and raised in central Moscow, pretty close, maybe half mile away from the building of the Foreign Ministry. So, in the area where I lived in those days, we had a number of embassies. There may have been a dozen embassies within walking distance of my house, maybe more, though it was not, formally speaking, a diplomatic quarter.

Foreign cars, foreign flags in those days—we're talking the late 1950s and the 1960s—those things were pretty weird in the Soviet Union. My school was just behind the fence from the Italian Embassy. Then, down the street, there was an Israeli Embassy that interestingly was closed in 1967 when the Soviet Union broke off relations with Israel, and then the embassy went to the Chileans. Six years later, when there was a coup in Chile, in 1973, and Pinochet rose to power, the Soviet Union broke off relations with Chile, and the embassy became orphaned a second time. From I think the late 1970s or 1980s it has been the home of the Embassy of Gabon. There were no problems with the Gabonese, so the embassy is still there.

A bit later I got interested in foreign languages, English above all, and I started reading serious newspapers about what was going on in the world. I still remember there was an advertisement across the Garden Ring—that’s a major street inside the city center in Moscow—and the lines of that advertisement rhymed. In English, it would say: "In order to know about what's going on in the world, read a newspaper in each household." And I became an avid reader. Of course, these were Soviet, communist newspapers, but they were serious and covered various important events.

And then there was a very peculiar newspaper in the Soviet Union that was called “Abroad” which published clippings from the international media. Of course, the clippings were doctored in a way that would leave out criticism of the Soviet government. But it still had a lot of interesting information about the outside world, about how other people saw the world. That was the time of the U.S. war in Vietnam, so a lot of the Pentagon Papers were there, and a lot of U.S. media criticism of the war in Vietnam. That was interesting, and I read that with a lot of attention.

So, I got interested in foreign affairs and in foreign languages early on, and I wanted to enter a school in Moscow that is now called MGIMO University. In those days, it was just MGIMO. MGIMO stands for the Institute for International Relations. And it was, I think even in those days, under the foreign ministry, so a school for diplomats. I wanted to be a diplomat or maybe a foreign correspondent, and I was being very serious about it. But competition was very strong and also somewhat unfair. In order to have a better chance of entry, you either needed some good connections in the Party, or because of the official class nature of the Soviet Communist regime, you had to be a manual worker. If you were a manual worker, you had a better chance of entering any school. And I was not really ready to go into a working profession after graduation. So, I was having my doubts about whether I would be able to enter that school.

Then just a few months before graduation, our school was visited by a colonel from the foreign languages institute run by the military. He basically made an appeal to us that a career in military would be an interesting option that could take us to various countries abroad. That was in the early 1970s, when the Soviet Union was very actively expanding its presence in a number of areas from the Middle East to South Asia, to Africa, Latin America, to everywhere, except for Europe and North America. And then I had a conversation with the guy and he basically said, “We offer a much fairer deal than anyone else. We don’t care about your connections. We don’t care about the Party, but we care about your capabilities and what you could bring to the Army.” And I fell for that offer. Competition was very strong, but I got accepted.

So, that’s how I became an officer cadet specializing in English and German and doing area studies with emphasis on the English-speaking world and the German-speaking world. I spent a year during my study period in Iraq with the Soviet military assistance group. And then upon graduation I was sent to Germany for five years. I was in Potsdam, and often traveled to West Berlin as a military liaison officer. So that’s more or less the beginning of my career.

Katherine:             I'd love to talk more about your time in Iraq that you just mentioned. I know you acted as an interpreter there, and I’d like to know how that role informed the way you think about engagement and communication? Did it teach you lessons about the best way to communicate across languages and cultural barriers?

Dmitri Trenin:     Oh, indeed. I think an interpreter is placed in the best possible position to walk across various barriers. That’s my takeaway from having been an interpreter for a long time in different situations, essentially through the end of my military career.

Through interpreting, you get to understand that the people you interpret for have their own interests that they want to push, promote, protect, and often they do shortcuts with the truth in order to do that. There's no such thing on earth as absolute truth. It belongs to God. But you know, whether it’s the Soviet Union versus the United States or whether it’s Iraq versus Israel or anything else you can think of: there are two sides to each story. And you need to listen very carefully and try to understand where each side is coming from, but you should not accept anything at face value. It doesn’t mean that the truth lies exactly between the two positions, that’s not always the case. And actually, in most cases, that’s not the case. The truth—or what you can call an approximation of truth, because as I said the truth is something that is out of this world—but an approximate truth is something that can only be generated by someone who has seen many sides of the story and then come to his or her own conclusions based on what he knows and based on the values that one holds. Because the values are the benchmarks, the guidelines that form your world internally.

So, for example, I sat through many sessions in Geneva between Soviet and American negotiators when they were developing the INF Treaty of 1987 and the first START Treaty that was concluded in 1991. And it was very, very useful. You appreciate, I think, your own country best when you look at it both from the inside and the outside. Naturally you see your country from the inside, and I think that’s immensely important, but you need to take a step back to look at the country from the outside and find a way to marry the two visions. So, I’m very glad that I spent countless hours interpreting to all sorts of people from very ordinary types to very senior figures—political figures, royalty, etc. So, I consider myself fortunate in terms of my life experience.

Katherine:             You mentioned your time in Geneva working on the nuclear arms talks. I'd love to talk more about that. Were there particular elements of those negotiations that were especially contentious or was the general environment at the time contentious in a way that bled into the negotiations?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, the negotiations started in 1985 and they ended in 1991—that is the lifespan of the Gorbachev leadership. What impacted the negotiations more than anything else was the change in Gorbachev’s—and the Soviet leadership’s—position on the issues that were discussed, in addition to changes in positions more broadly.

I think we started negotiations in March 1985, but I was not there for the first round. I came in September 1985, just before the Geneva meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev. The negotiations started in a pretty frosty atmosphere. It was just a couple of years before that, in 1983, that the Soviet Union and the U.S. came closest to military collision and to a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a very scary and somewhat underappreciated moment in not only in Soviet-American relations, but in the history of the world.

It was the change in the domestic policies of the Gorbachev leadership, the fundamental change in his foreign policy that had a great impact on the negotiations. Essentially, the Soviet Union, in order to get a deal with the United States on Western financial backing for Perestroika, made a lot of concessions: geopolitical, strategic, political—many of them on the foreign policy front, but many of them at home as well. At the same time, I think that the first START Treaty really was still a treaty between two equals because in terms of military power, particularly nuclear power, the Soviet Union was America’s equal in those days and it was recognized by the United States. But the context, as I said, was constantly fundamentally, drastically, and rapidly changing.

From 1988 and particularly 1989, things started going downhill for the Soviet system, for the Soviet Union itself, very, very fast. In some ways, many changes were very welcome in principle: more openness to the system, more radical liberalization of just about everything. But there was another side of the story, which was essentially fewer and fewer goods you could buy in shops, money becoming worthless, people becoming destitute very rapidly. The internal security system, police, et cetera, were degrading very fast too. It was the death of a state, frankly. Well, it was a communist state, I grant you that, but the ascending alternative to the communist state was essentially lawlessness. Lawlessness in which the strong would always prevail and the weak would be downtrodden and which lasted through the 1990s, even after the end of the Soviet Union.

So, it was a very, very uneven situation. On the one hand, you welcomed a lot of things—openness and Glasnost and peace with the outside world, hope for a very different relationship with the United States and the Western world and the European countries. But on the other hand, your own country was going down the drain. And I’m not talking about the disintegration of the Soviet Union, per se, I’m talking about the disintegration of the state in places like Moscow or Leningrad, everywhere. That was a very, very difficult period.

Katherine:             In the midst of a very successful career you decided to pursue a PhD in history. In what ways do you think an understanding of history is important to conducting foreign or military policy in the present and why did you choose to pursue that path?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, history was my other passion as a young kid. As I mentioned, I was born in the center of Moscow. Besides all the embassies, the other thing about that neighborhood is that it’s a very old part of the city. A lot of houses date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are no older buildings, because Moscow was burnt down almost completely in 1812 when Napoleon stayed there briefly, but this is the place where ancient churches, ancient monasteries used to stand. My passion was Russian history of the pre-revolutionary period. I didn’t think much of the post-revolutionary period about which I was essentially taught as a kid a bunch stories that clearly omitted a lot of important details. But, history prior to 1917 was very much my passion.

Once as a young kid, I drew a lucky ticket in a lottery in a bookstore very close to my school, and I won 10 rubles—which was a fairly big sum of money in those days, like 10% of an average salary. I decided to buy several volumes of the historical encyclopedia that was just being published in the Soviet Union. Prior to having won the ticket, I would come to the bookstore and I would ask for a volume and then I would copy some articles of interest to me by hand. With my lottery money I was able to buy three volumes, and my parents gave me 8 rubles more for the rest, and I really read that encyclopedia. As a history textbook, it was very professionally done. Of course, it was a communist era encyclopedia, so the worldview was that of Marxism-Leninism, but it contained a lot of very interesting, very professional information.

I’m passionate about history, particularly the history of Russia. Even before I wanted to become a diplomat, I thought of becoming an historian. But I was told by everyone I knew that historians would either be sent to teach history to schools or they would have to rehash Marxist-Leninist ideas. And so, I was turned off from that career, but I still consider myself an amateur historian. I accepted an offer made by a British publisher just a couple of years ago to write a book on Russian history in the 20th century and to keep it to a 45,000-word text. It was a big challenge, as you can imagine. I had to come up with my own attitudes and ideas and then back them up with a lot of data, all while packing it tightly and making sure that foreign people would understand, because it was written in English. The book actually became pretty successful.

I think that you cannot really understand another country or another person if you don’t know their history. I am very skeptical of those who believe that somehow the world is to be understood through more general instruments and that you can do away with area studies and just study how economies grow and then apply those patterns to various countries. I don’t think you get very far—it’s a little bit like the communist approach, which was all about class struggle. Communists would leave a lot of things outside of their field of vision. For example, they would have little time for religion other than as a tool for the upper classes to keep their populations under control. And that clearly is a very distorted view of the role of religion. And the Soviet Union paid dearly for that misconception in Afghanistan in the 1980s. So, yes history, I think, is immensely important. Without history, you're walking in the dark.

Current Issues: On the current state of Russia-West relations and the impact of China’s rise

Katherine:             I’d like to shift focus a bit and talk about current issues now. We’ll delve into several areas, but I thought I'd start with a simple yet potentially challenging question: what worries you the most about the current state of Russia-West relations?

Dmitri Trenin:     I think what worries me the most is the inability to compromise. In the days of the Cold War, there were bitter clashes and a much higher degree of conflict than today. And yet, both sides managed to come together and split the difference. That is not the case now, and it is not going to be the case in the foreseeable future, which means that confrontation will continue. Hopefully it will be well-managed—meaning that it will not be allowed to degenerate to the level of an actual war, which, I believe, is a much higher possibility than a lot of people think. But those contacts that just allow you to manage a very bad situation are not nearly enough to come up with some sort of lasting compromise between the two parties. I think that the Soviet slogan, which was initially a tactical slogan and later became a strategic objective, of “Peaceful Coexistence” is something that is seen today in the West as akin to appeasement: you cannot peacefully coexist with a dictator, you cannot peacefully coexist with authoritarians. That I think adds an element of instability to the entire system. So, I don’t know how things will develop. I hope that somehow things will work out, but we are certainly crossing a long and dangerous patch.

Katherine:             I’d like to dig in a bit more on the risk of military conflict that you mentioned just now. You've written about those risks in the past—particularly about the strain in military-to-military relations and growing exercise activity as exacerbating the risk of conflict. First, I’d like to know whether you view the risk of inadvertent escalation today as comparable to what it was during periods of the Cold War?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, I think that the difference between now and then is that in the areas that mattered most to both parties during the Cold War, no war was thought to be possible. No military conflict of any kind was considered possible. There was a phrase repeated maybe thousands of times that “one shot in Berlin could set the world on fire.”

Today, since we somehow do not believe that tensions are as high, we are engaged in pretty dangerous moves and maneuvers. The closer NATO aircraft fly to the Russian territory, the closer Russian aircraft fly to NATO aircraft. Just to give you one example: in the Cold War, there was a clear dividing line drawn across Europe, Germany, and Berlin, and things were simpler. Today, there are countries that are considered to be, to use the American political expression, “battleground states”. Whether you're talking Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova or Georgia, they can easily become, actually they have become some of them, sources of military conflict and certainly of tensions.

People have started fearing a world war far less than they did in the years of the Cold War. The fear is no longer paralyzing. Today, yes, there are nuclear weapons, but they are unlikely to be used even though they are still around. And, as a result, you can do more and you can even talk about military engagement or conflict, that would be run below the threshold of a nuclear war. So, people are seriously considering wars in the Baltic Sea area, in the Black Sea area. And that is very disturbing.

Also, I think during the Cold War, there was some sort of a grudging—very grudging—acceptance of the other side. Soviet communists did not like American imperialists and world capitalists, but they had to deal with them. Americans and other Westerners despised Soviet communism, but they respected the military might, political influence, and technological prowess that the Soviet Union demonstrated. I wouldn't say it was a healthier climate, certainly not, and I wouldn't want to change now to the Cold War environment, clearly. But in some ways, it had some features that were stabilizing and which are absent today.

So, we'll see. After we have ended this confrontation at some point, there will be a different era, a different kind of relations—as there always is, as there always will be—and we can look back on this confrontation, this post-Cold War confrontation between the United States and Russia, and draw lessons from that. It’s not over, so I don’t know how it will end. I hope it will end peacefully.

Katherine:             Are there particular battleground regions or hotspots that you think present outsized risk? And if there are, what non-military measures do you think could be enacted to reduce that risk?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, let’s look at the scenarios that are on the minds of Western and Russian leaders in Europe. Particularly in Eastern Europe, people talk about Russian military aggression against the Baltic States and Poland. Poland has been living with the idea of a Russian intervention, Russian invasion, Russian aggression for ages. To them, anything that Russia does is essentially geared to the objective of restoring control over Eastern Europe. That says something about how the Poles and the Baltic States value Article V of the Atlantic Treaty. Having been accepted into NATO, they should in principle be relaxed, feel protected and safe, but are not. To me, that suggests that they do not really believe that they will necessarily be given protection by the United States.

The scenario that is being discussed on Russian television right now, as we speak, is that Ukraine is preparing a major provocation in Donbas to retake the territory. That would lead to a clash with Russian forces, and then Russia would be deterred or severely punished by Western forces deployed to the Black Sea. There are indeed several U.S. Navy ships in the Black Sea and some U.S. aircraft patrolling the area. The Russian Defense Ministry says the U.S. is studying the theater of war in preparation for a war.

I think that something could happen in Ukraine. The government in Kiev is weak. The president has taken on the oligarchs and essentially united them against himself. He is not getting, in his view, enough support from the United States or the European Union—not in financial terms, not in political terms, and not even in personal terms. He was mentioned in the Pandora Papers, the most recent revelation about corrupt officials around the world, and to him, it’s not just some private group that’s making those accusations, it’s a sign that Washington is prepared to write him off. So, my own analysis is that in this situation, any president of Ukraine, not just Zelensky, could rationally decide that the only means for him to strengthen his domestic position and get the support he needs from the outside is to provoke Russia into showing its true colors by attacking some targets in a Donbas in a big way so that Russia responds and overreacts. That would mobilize the Ukrainian people around him. Also, Ukraine would be involved in an actual, undeniable clash with Russian forces—not with proxies, not with invisible Russian forces, and that would set the chain reaction: NATO, the United States, etc. Ukraine would not be allowed to fall, and Russia would be given a bloody nose. I’m not suggesting that this is what President Zelensky is thinking. I don’t know what he's thinking, nor will I ever know, but this is one of the rational possibilities.

For the purposes of an analysis, this could be a rational plan of action that puts Russia in a very difficult position. If Russia is indeed provoked in a big way, what do you do? Can you ignore that and abandon Donbas or the part of Donbas that’s outside of Kiev’s control and that’s essentially a protectorate of Russia today? Do you move in? If you move in, you know what you're going to lose: you will probably be risking all your remaining connections to the West, including energy ties, including revenues that come with those ties. And then if you decide to respond militarily, how far will you respond? Do you simply restore the line of contact in Donbas or retake the rest of the Donbas area that is now under Kiev control, or go all the way to Kiev and maybe all the way to the Polish border?

Doing nothing is not an option because Russia may not have public politics, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have any politics. There's a lot of politics within the elite, and among the parties with vested interests in all that. Putin basically said that if he is provoked in a big way, Ukraine will cease to exist as a state. It’s a strong warning, but if it should be exposed as a bluff, it would be costly. But if you back up that warning with real force, you may be losing all you have at stake in your relations with the West.

I don’t think that the United States really wants that to happen that way, but some people in Russia believe that there are forces in the U.S. who actually are pushing developments along that path. I don’t think that that includes President Biden or the [current] administration, because it is not easy at all from the other side of the table either. What do you do as an American leader if Ukraine is invaded? Do you allow Putin to take over Ukraine? If you do, what does it mean to NATO? It could be Ukraine today, the Baltics tomorrow, and Poland the third day; with that your entire system of alliances is over and you can only watch what China will do. For an American leader this situation presents almost the same kind of a dilemma that it presents to the Russian leader.

The current situation in Ukraine is built on the experience with Mikhail Saakashvili in 2008. Saakashvili decided to retake the wayward province of South Ossetia by using force, hoping that he would be able to secure it before Russia was able to send in reinforcements. It’s a very difficult area—there's only one overland connection to Russia, a rocky tunnel. So, if you can block that tunnel, Russia can only attack from above, and that’s a different kind of war. Moreover, and most importantly, he was hoping that he would be backed up by the United States. I heard that he mistook some non-binding conversations. I heard that people around then-Vice President Cheney were pushing him towards very bold action. President Bush or Secretary Rice were not in the picture, they didn’t care that much. But Saakashvili still thought that he would have U.S. support. Then, when Saakashvili failed to secure the rocky tunnel and saw the Russian forces moving in, he turned to the American ambassador and asked him where the troops and support are, but the American ambassador said, “What support? We didn’t promise you any.”

Georgia was a small case. It was basically over within weeks and just about six months after the war President Bush was succeeded by President Obama and he initiated a reset with Russia. But the Georgian case is still important as a template. If something like that were ever to happen in Donbas, the Donbas playing the role of South Ossetia, and the Ukrainian president playing the role of Mikhail Saakashvili, then we would have a much worse crisis in our hands. It would be much more difficult to bring to a close, but maybe much easier to escalate than to end.

So that’s my biggest worry. I don’t believe that other things are as serious right now. Some people suggest there could be a Western-supported uprising in Belarus, but I don’t think that’s a likely scenario. Maybe, it would be a crisis if Moldova and Ukraine decided to block the small Russian military contingent in Transnistria and not allow it to connect to Russia. That could be a problem, but I think it would be easier to prevent it and resolve it.

But Donbas I worry about. I’m worried, as many are in Russia, that the U.S. leadership, having adopted Ukraine—as a partner, formally, as a client in reality—does not actually control its Ukrainian clients very closely. And within the Ukrainian body of politics, there is a very small but influential group of ultra-nationalists and they could push a weak government along a very dangerous path.

Katherine:             We’ve covered a lot of the most pressing current issues, but one country we haven't talked about is China. I’d like to discuss how you think Russian policymakers are currently balancing relationships with the U.S. versus China. In the long run, do you think the rise of China is going to change how Russia thinks about relations with either the U.S. or China?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, it’s a very interesting relationship. You have these three powers—of very unequal size—in the top tier of geopolitical and military players. There are other countries that are bigger economically than Russia. But in terms of the capacity to operate freely, these are the only three major independent players. The European Union and Japan are very much a part of the U.S. system and their foreign and security policy is, shall I say, delegated to a significant degree to Washington. The US makes collective decisions for the West; that is the nature of the American system of alliances. Their allies have been happy with that, although they would not publicly admit it.

The United States and Russia and the United States and China, are in a state of confrontation. Very different kinds of confrontation, yet you have confrontation along those two axes. Russia and China are partners, increasingly close partners, but they have not merged in a block, nor do I expect them to do so for a number of reasons. Most importantly, both countries see themselves as fundamentally independent powers. Certainly, China is a superpower alongside the United States in the 21st century, but Russia sees itself as a great power too. That means they don’t take orders, even friendly orders, from another power. So, Russia and China can be pretty close, but each wants to retain its capacity to act independently of the other. In other words, the China-Russia relationship is based on the principle of not turning against each other, but not necessarily following each other either. As a result, what Russia does, China does not necessarily support. China does not rush to Russia's help. Similarly, if something were to happen between China and the United States, Russia would not rush to support China necessarily.

China is a big challenger to the U.S. But not necessarily for global leadership–I don’t think that China aspires to global leadership nor it is capable of it. The United States is uniquely capable of global leadership. Not universal [leadership]—it used to be universal for maybe 20 years following the end of the Cold War—but still global. But China, Russia, and even India are independent powers. India is a friend and partner of the U.S., but will never in my view become an ally of the United States. Never will India become what Japan or the Europeans have become to the U.S.; India will always act out of its own interest.

Now in that triple relationship, Russia doesn’t rival China for leadership in a way the United States and China are competing over it. Russia is out of that competition. As a result, China’s rise as such does not terribly concern Russia. They see China as a huge country, as a very big economic player that is expanding its political and military roles, and from the Russian standpoint, that is a kind of organic process. But Russia would push back if China were to start trying to dominate Russia or to turn Russia into a vassal state.

The Chinese have been very smart following the downfall of the Soviet Union: never offending Russia publicly, never saying that Russia is anything but a great power. In the West, by contrast, people were relieved that there was no Soviet Union anymore. Russia was reduced in its international role and they danced upon the dead body of the Soviet Union. They have been diminishing Russia beyond what Russia actually was: “A filling station masquerading as a state,” “Nigeria with snow”. You would never hear that from the Chinese, whatever they think privately.

If the Chinese become too dizzy with their own success, if they become not careful enough dealing with Russia, there’ll be a push back, but I don’t expect that to happen. I think that they are far too intelligent for that. But you never know for sure.

So, it’s an interesting trio. I hope that it will not come to an open military conflict, to large scale conflict between China and the United States or between Russia and the United States, whether over Ukraine in the Russian case or Taiwan in the Chinese case.

Looking, say, 10-15 years ahead, I would add India to the triangle to make it a quadrangle. And then it will be a still more interesting combination or constellation of powers. If you take Russia and India, for example, they are friends between themselves and each has befriended an enemy of the other. Russia has befriended China and India has befriended the United States. It’s interesting, something that we're likely to see more of in the late 2020s and in the 2030s.

Katherine:             To dig a little deeper into the Russia-China relationship, something that I hear Americans speculating about is what will happen when the changing climate becomes a bigger factor. China will certainly struggle with many aspects of climate change, whereas Russia, in many ways, will continue on as it is or even thrive under the changing climate given differences in latitude. As China faces a combination of climate and population challenges, do you think it may become increasingly interested in changing its approach towards Russia and potentially moving to a more adversarial approach, just given the desire for access to attractive land and resources? Do you see climate as presenting a challenge for the region over time?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, I think climate change certainly does present a challenge, even to Russia. It’s a major challenge.

Yes, parts of Russia will see milder climate and more territory where you can grow plants or that you can use for other reasons. And of course, the melting of the Arctic ice would allow more shipping across the Northern Sea Route and many other things. On the other hand, the other side of the ledger is that the permafrost will be melting and there’ll be a melting away of the infrastructure built in the northern regions of Russia. So, it’s a mixed bag of implications for Russia.

With regard to China—it’s interesting, I think I would not exclude more pressure from China looking ahead. Talking about history, we have been living side by side for about 350 years, mostly happily, sometimes not. Sometimes China succumbed to Russia’s greater power, which the Chinese resent to this day. But now China is the top dog, which it was not during the entire previous period. And you never discount the power of nationalism.

That’s another thing that I believe history teaches you about—the importance of the nation state and nationalists. You may spend a lot of time talking about globalization, but too often, it doesn’t really get to the roots of a national behavior. So, even though China is considered to be a strategic partner of Russia, it’s no secret at all that China is spying on Russia. Once in a while there is mention in the Russian media of a trial with a Chinese agent who was after some military or industrial secret.

So, China is a friend, but it’s also major power that’s not looking after Russia’s interests, it’s looking after its own interests. It’s a country with a huge population that may be facing, as you've suggested, some challenging developments on the climate side. As a result, they may be attracted to the area where they normally were not attracted in the past. The Chinese were attracted by Southeast Asia previously, they were not attracted by Siberia because of Siberian climate. Even going north of the Great Wall was not in the natural habitat of the Chinese people. Manchuria for generations of Chinese people was essentially a foreign land until the 17th century, at least. Yes, things may change and we may see a different constellation of powers. History teaches you that everything is changeable—that alliances are not carved in stone, that countries change their relationships as circumstances allow it or demand it. So, things may happen, but I’m not suggesting that it is likely to happen.

But, I think one would feel more relaxed and be better off with the continuation of the present political dynasty in China, the Communist Party. If China at some point reaches an internal crisis and the power of the Communist Party is done away with, China will go through a period of turmoil. Then nationalism may become a rallying cry inside China, and historically, Russia was in the good company of European imperialist powers and Japan as a predator at the expense of China. Some people may claim that territories that have been Russian since the mid-19th century should belong to China—Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, all that that Mao Zedong was talking about: 1.5 million square kilometers that Russian tsars had grabbed from China. These things are never forgotten in China, but they’re also never forgotten in Russia.

Katherine:             It will definitely be something to watch for in the coming years.

Message to the Younger Generation: On the importance of understanding others’ culture and history

Katherine:             I’d like to close with a question about what you would say to Russians, Europeans, and Americans in my generation about what we should be doing differently. How can we better approach relations what you think is the greatest challenge that this generation of policymakers and diplomats and analysts will face?

Dmitri Trenin:     Well, it’s a difficult question. My provisional answer to that question would be this: try to have a good grasp of history—the history of various countries, the history of relations. Try to build a sort of empathy toward the country that you're looking at. You don’t have to go as far as sympathy—that’s not necessary, that’s also detrimental to the task. But try to understand why people are doing things that they are doing.

One particularly bad thing about today’s environment in the West is the wholesale demonization of Russia and Putin. It is especially harmful because people in the West tend to believe what they read in the media which they believe are free. People in the Soviet Union, by contrast, always understood that the media was controlled by the Party, and that it’s the authorities telling us what they want us to think. As a result, people were often skeptical, not necessarily because they were disloyal or because they were anti-communist, but from a healthy skepticism toward what you hear from people with some interest. In the West, there's a myth about the press being a free and objective. And I think this is a pretty serious challenge for anyone who wants to understand what's going on. If you look at the United States today, there are two sides to the American story that contradict each other every minute, every second one is broadcasted by CNN the other one by Fox News. But neither has the whole truth. And even if you combine them, that will not give you the truth, the approximate truth that I was talking about.

So, try to understand what other people are really thinking. To do that, try to learn their language, and try to learn it well so that you can understand what they actually mean. I’m often struck by treatises on Russia that only quote Western or non-Russian authors. That’s inadequate, it only enhances the biases and the slants that already exist. You don’t have to agree with what Russian authors write, absolutely not, but you need to understand their way of thinking.

And then there's another thing: I believe in a strange way that the West, in some ways—again, I may be wrong about it—is where the Soviet Union used to be. The liberal part of the West believes that they know the truth, that they are the future of humanity, that their way is the right way. And that reminds me of this much harsher Soviet system that told you that communism was the only way, that you have to look at everything from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism and communist theory.

                                    It’s also interesting that in order to back up communist propaganda, the Soviet Union used to reach out to the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the U.S., or to some supposedly progressive American journalist or writer for comments on what is happening in America. Now, people in the West tend to reach out to the critics of the Putin system when they try to understand Russia, because they believe that the critics are the holders of the truth. That is one distortion being added to another distortion of things.

So, what I would say is: try to get to the roots of things. This is something I tried to do as a kid in the Soviet Union and later—as I said, I was fortunate with the positions I took in Germany, in Geneva, in other places where I could see things in real terms, not through some prism, which always distorts the reality.

Katherine:             Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about such a wide range of interesting topics. I think one of the great things about the University Consortium, to your point about not just hearing from sources from your own country, is that we can have these kinds of conversations. Especially as a young person, it’s really exciting to have the opportunity to hear from people of such varied backgrounds and experiences. So, thank you.

Dmitri Trenin:     Thank you.