We should be concerned that the Biden administration is considering appointing Matthew Rojansky to lead the National Security Council’s Russia portfolio.
Rojansky, the head of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, has made statements that are rather dovish toward one of our greatest adversaries. In 2017, Rojansky said that the United States expresses “Cold War style paranoia about the Russian bogeyman.” Although he admitted that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is a huge problem for the United States,” Rojansky warned that increasing tensions create “unacceptable risks.”
It should be clear to anyone with eyes that this is a delusional analysis.
It is Russia, not the U.S., that is causing tensions between our two nations. It is Russia that is militarily threatening Ukraine. It is Russia that is seeking to undermine U.S. interests through cyberattacks. It is Russia that is assassinating political opponents. It is Russia that is targeting U.S. elections, seeking to undermine the nation’s democratic credibility. It is not “Cold War style paranoia” to acknowledge this reality.
Last year, in the National Interest, Rojansky observed that “Despite many shortcomings, we should remember, Russians defeated both Napoleon and Hitler, who grossly underestimated their resilience.” This is only sort of true.
Napoleon largely defeated himself by catastrophically overextending his supply lines, and the Soviet Union relied heavily on U.S. support to defeat the Nazis. But history should not be a template for current policy. Today, Washington and Moscow have obvious and mutually incompatible competing interests. In the energy sector, Putin’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline is close to completion. It threatens Europe’s energy dependence on Putin, and thus his greatly increased ability to hold energy supplies hostage to political deference. In Syria, Russia is propping up Bashar Assad’s genocidal regime and supporting other Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah. And Russia remains the potent nuclear threat that it was during the Cold War.
President Joe Biden isn’t taking Russia to task in any of these areas. But where is the outrage from the crowd that obsessed over Russia during Donald Trump’s presidency?
Were Rojansky to head Russia policy on the National Security Council, it would have dangerous implications for U.S. policy toward Moscow. Biden needs to live up to the pledges he made during the 2020 campaign and pursue a robust policy toward the former KGB man.
Jackson Richman is a journalist in Washington, D.C. Follow him @jacksonrichman.
