June 2002
Vol. VIII, No.4

Sustaining U.S.-Russia Dialogue

Recent agreements between Russia and the West represent a "new era" in U.S.-Russia relations.

In May, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an accord with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that allows Russia to participate in NATO deliberations on major security issues such as arms control and efforts to eliminate terrorism. British foreign secretary Jack Straw described the agreement as the Cold War's "funeral." Also in May, Putin and President George Bush signed a treaty that calls for Russia and the United States to dismantle two-thirds of their nuclear warheads over the next decade. In Bush's words, the treaty represents a "new era of U.S.-Russian relationships" and will "liquidate the legacy of the Cold War."

That legacy is discussed in James Voorhees' new book Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference. Co-published by the U.S. Institute of Peace Press and the Kettering Foundation, Dialogue Sustained details the history of the Dartmouth Conference meetings, initiated in 1960 at Dartmouth College in an effort to prevent U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict. Influential U.S. and Soviet citizens with no government positions gathered for dialogue to promote peace between their two nations. Until 1990, Dartmouth Conference plenary sessions continued as nearly annual events; today the work of conference task forces continues, most notably perhaps in the nine-year-old Inter-Tajik Dialogue. According to Voorhees, the Dartmouth Conference hastened the end of the Cold War—for example, by contributing to a 1963 partial ban on U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing.

What are the greatest threats to U.S.-Russia relations today? On May 6, this question was addressed at the Institute by Voorhees and six Dartmouth Conference veterans:

Landrum Bolling, consultant to international humanitarian organizations; William D. Rogers, senior partner in the law firm of Arnold & Porter; Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute of USA and Canada Studies; session moderator Harold Saunders, director of international affairs at the Kettering Foundation; Nikolai Shmelev, director of the Institute of Europe; and Vitaly Zhurkin, founding director of the Institute of Europe.

The panel discussed U.S.-Russia disagreements with regard to Chechnya, weapons proliferation in Iran, U.S. and Russian missile defense, and the U.S. military presence in such former Soviet republics as Georgia and Uzbekistan. "Multilevel" dialogue that includes the kind of unofficial citizens' interaction elaborated in Dialogue Sustained will help manage, if not resolve, such issues, panelists agreed.