Preview: This essay examines the United States’ key policy objectives toward Russia and discusses the extent to which the Sino-Russian relationship can facilitate or hinder these objectives. It starts out from the premise that the key drivers of U.S. policy toward Russia and China differ considerably. The major driver behind U.S.-Russian relations is that the United States and Russia are the world’s two nuclear superpowers with the lion’s share of nuclear weapons. They are also on opposite sides of a number of international conflicts and have a limited economic relationship. A key driver of the U.S.-Chinese relationship, by contrast, is the fact that the United States and China are the world’s two economic superpowers. Differences over security issues such as Taiwan or the South China Sea have also played an important role, but trade and investment questions loom much larger in this relationship than they do in U.S.-Russian relations. The stakes in the U.S.-Russian relationship are therefore of a very different order of magnitude than those involved in the U.S.-Chinese relationship.
