The United States has generally enjoyed good relations with Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union fifteen years ago. Washington, Moscow, and the world have benefited from this cooperation on issues ranging from weapons proliferation to counterterrorism after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In recent years, however, particularly during the second term of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian society and foreign policy have continuedtochange inwaysthat raise questions andcauseproblems for the United States. The Council on Foreign Relations established an Independent Task Force in the spring of 2005 to take stock of developments in Russia, assess the U.S....

Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is time to take stock of what has, and has not, been accomplished in the effort to create a ‘‘strategic partnership’’ between Russia and the United States. Russia is not the same country it was a decade and a half ago. It is not even the same country it was when President Vladimir Putin took office in May 2000. U.S.-Russian relations have changed as well.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, American presidents and policymakers have believed that the interests of the United States are served by engagement with...

The watchword of the Putin era is stability, but its true distinguishing feature is change—political, economic, and social. The changes underway, moreover, point in very different directions and imply very different forecasts for future development. The stunning regeneration of economic growth has encouraged upbeat readings ofRussia’s prospects, especially among many business leaders and economists. As President Putin approaches the end of his second term, Russia’s society and its economy seem to be becoming, slowly and tentatively, more modern. By contrast, the recentralization of power and the decline of pluralism under PresidentPutin generally lead those who follow political developments to...

The sustained growth record of the past half-decade has accelerated the transformation of Russia’s economy and of its society, but this process is extremely fragile and its results still poorly consolidated. President Putin’s advisers have frequently described their goal as the creation of a modern state, one that can protect and enlarge the benefits of social and economic change. They have no interest, they say, in returning to the obviously failed formulas of the Soviet system.

President Putin’s sustained popularity has certainly given him the power and opportunity to steer Russia through a new phase of post- Soviet institution-building, and...

The end of the Cold War left the United States with the challenge of creating a new relationship with Russia, the largest and most important of the Soviet successor states. Since then, three presidents have grappled with this problem, and although their responses differed in ways that reflected the specific issues before them, all recognized that productive relations with Russia were one of the highest priorities of American foreign policy.

All three aimed to leave nuclear and ideological rivalry behind and to build relations between Moscow and Washington on a solid foundation of compatible national interests.

Each sought to lubricate...

Russian and American leaders have for many years used the hopeful term ‘‘partnership’’—and often the still grander one, ‘‘strategic partnership’’—to describe their vision for relations between Moscow and Washington. Reality has, with brief exceptions, usually been more modest. Russia and the United States have only very rarely acted as partners in any meaningful sense of the word.When they have cooperated, it has been because their interests on this or that narrow issue were sufficiently similar to allowthemto work together. But cumulative effects—an accretion of trust, the habit of joint action, a spillover to other issues—have been...

In fashioning its policy toward Russia over the next half-decade, the United States clearly has to address a very full agenda—from problems where the two sides still operate on the basis of broadly similar assessments to those where disagreements have come close to preventing reasonable discussion. Of all these, no issue has created greater confusion both at home and abroad than that of how democracy fits into American policy as a whole. The United States needs to explain more clearly and consistently why the advancing authoritarianism of Russian politics is a legitimate American concern and how it may affect...

Every major category of U.S.-Russian relations—military security, economics, politics—includes issues on which cooperation can bring important benefits to the United States, others on which the potential benefit seems to be declining, and still others on which Russia and the United States are increasingly at odds. The challenge for U.S. policymakers in the future is to design and implement policies that serve U.S. interests no matter how much cooperation they actually achieve.

The United States must expand its cooperation withRussia to keep the most dangerous international actors from acquiring the most dangerous weapons, technologies, and materials. This is a...

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and second-largest exporter of oil, and it should therefore play a central and positive role in global energy markets. To this end, the United States should seek to reinvigorate the U.S.-Russian strategic energy dialogue, giving it high-level attention and an ambitious agenda that brings benefits to both sides.

The goal of this revived dialogue should be to strengthen the energy security of the United States,which depends on strong global production, diverse sources of supply, effective markets, fair and consistent treatment of foreign investors, cooperation on crisis management, the physical security of...

The Bush administration has been right to acknowledge, as it has done in the past year,Russia’s retreat from democratic norms. As Russia enters a critically important political season—with parliamentary elections to be held next year and presidential elections in 2008—Western governments will have to give these questions still greater prominence, both publicly and privately.

Starting now, the United States should begin to work with its European allies to communicate publicly the main criteria that they will use for judging the legitimacy of this process. It will be hard to treat leaders who emerge from this process as fully...

We have prepared this report to answer the difficult question of what policy should the United States pursue toward Russia.

Because we believe that Russia ‘‘matters,’’ we have paid close attention to those problems that cannot be effectively addressed unless Moscow and Washington cooperate. Several of these are of critical importance—most notably, the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program and the risk that inadequately secured nuclear materials in Russia could fall into the wrong hands.The United States has every reason to preserve and expand such cooperation.

At the same time we have sought to identify those issues on which...