News

Since the end of World War II, virtually every president has attempted to reset U.S.-Russia relations. Harry S. Truman confided in his diary that he was tired of “babying” the Soviets when they didn’t carry out the obligations they had undertaken at Yalta. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Spirit of Geneva” sought to make a new start with Stalin’s successors. John F. Kennedy sought to recalibrate relations with his disastrous Vienna summit, in June 1961, which paved the way for the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Richard Nixon sought détente with the increasingly sclerotic Brezhnevite leadership. Jimmy Carter also tried to change the terms of U.S.-Soviet relations early in his term, as did Ronald Reagan, who famously proposed a new strategy—“We win, they lose.” Some of these resets were based on the need to get tougher with Russia and some were based on a desire to find common ground. But after the Cold War, all of the efforts went unrequited. The specific irritants in each case were different, but at the end of the day, all of them failed because the Russian reform project faltered in the late 1990s. As a result, rather than joining the liberal international order, Russia became a revisionist state whose fundamental orientation limited the scope for successful engagement with Moscow. That is why Trump’s reset will almost certainly fail—and a good thing, too, since accommodating Moscow’s current demands would almost certainly mean sacrificing traditional U.S. interests.

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says the US Navy’s future frigate “needs to be a multi-mission capable ship” and gives Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian a status update on the program, including its recent request for information soliciting “industry’s ideas on what the frigate should be able to do,” during an August 2017 interview at CSBA headquarters in Washington.

Eric Edelman, who served as US ambassador to Turkey from 2003 to 2005, cited Giuliani's role as well as reports that Erdogan had personally mentioned the case with Tillerson and the Trump administration. "At a minimum," he said, those contacts give “the appearance that the Turkish government is engaged in hostage diplomacy.”

Hal Brands defines grand strategy as “the intellectual architecture that gives form and structure to foreign policy.”

Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the RFI “opens up the aperture too much” in terms of what that future frigate might look like.

“It makes it seem like it could be anything from … a relatively low-end ship or less capable ship, all the way up to a frigate that can do air defense for another ship and do anti-submarine warfare,” he said.

In an effort to save money, the Navy might buy a vessel with insufficient capabilities, he said.

The RFI “establishes a capability hierarchy that could support development of a less expensive and less capable ship that does not meet the Navy’s needs,” he said.

"There's a deep fundamental divide between the Freedom Caucus members in the House, the more mainline conservatives in the House and the Senate, and the Democrats in the House and Senate," said Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgeting Assessments.

Added Blakeley, "What exactly to do about defense spending is almost certainly going to get kicked down the road until about December," she said.