We probably won’t be seeing any reset buttons anytime soon.
It’s also highly doubtful that the new American president will be looking into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and getting a sense of his soul.
He certainly won’t have a backslapping friendship with Putin like the one Bill Clinton enjoyed with Boris Yeltsin. Nor will there be anything like the businesslike partnership George H.W. Bush enjoyed with Mikhail Gorbachev.
No, as far as the post-Cold War world goes, we’re pretty much entering uncharted territory.
In fact, not since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981 has a U.S. president entered the White House with a more adversarial relationship with Moscow than the one president-elect Joseph R. Biden will inherit next month.
But unlike Reagan, who came to office with the entire U.S. national security infrastructure and the transatlantic alliance calibrated to containing the Soviet Union, Biden will need to reconstruct that architecture almost from scratch.
So what can we expect?
Michael Carpenter, managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration, joins us this week to discuss the future of U.S.-Russia relations.
The Power Vertical Podcast is produced by the University of Texas at Arlington’s Charles T. McDowell Center for Global Studies and the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
