The Ninth Session of the Eurasian Online Seminar

On Friday, May 15, 2020, the International Laboratory on World Order Studies and the New Regionalism, Department of International Relations and the Master’s Program “Socioeconomic and Political Development of Modern Asia” were honored to host a distinguished US expert on international affairs and US-Russian relations Thomas Graham. The topic of his talk is “The Big Triangle China-Russia-US: Past, Present, and Future”.

Thomas Graham is a managing director at Kissinger Associates, Inc., where he focuses on Russian and Eurasian affairs and a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007 and Director for Russian Affairs on that staff from 2002 to 2004. From 2001 to 2002, he served as the Associate Director of the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State. From 1998 to 2001, Mr. Graham was a senior associate in the Russia/Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 1984 to1998, he was a Foreign Service Officer. His assignments included two tours of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where he served as head of the political/internal unit and acting political counselor. Between tours in Moscow, he worked on Russian and Soviet affairs on the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State and as a policy assistant in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. 

Graham is one of the founders and co-Directors of the Russian Studies Project at Yale University. He was a lecturer in global affairs and political science at Yale from 2011 to 2019, teaching courses on U.S.-Russian relations and Russian foreign policy, as well as cybersecurity and counterterrorism. He served as a Senior Fellow at Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2011 – 2017. 

In his lecture, Thomas Graham described the main features of Soviet-Chinese and Soviet-American relations that influenced the formation of the strategic triangle “Russia-China-USA” in the second half of the 20th century. Despite the fact that the US strategy was particularly effective in the 1970s, in the 1990s its role was significantly weakened, and then was no longer required with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the formation of a unipolar world. Despite the fact that we have reason to believe that the Russia-China-USA triangle was be formed again after the crisis in Ukraine, in the modern period of international relations this strategy no longer functions in its original form, because, despite the fact that the US by opposing Russia and China simultaneously lead to their rapprochement, they are skeptical of the prospects for Russian-Chinese equal cooperation, assessing Russia's foreign policy ambitions and the specifics of China’s foreign policy in recent years. At the end of his lecture, Thomas Graham also mentioned that he sees gradual rapprochement with Western European partners, mainly Germany and France, as one of Russia's successful foreign policy directions, but everything will depend on the characteristics of the US foreign policy over the next few years.