Article on the United States and Russia's Relations

Elif Okan
POL 245 American Foreign Policy
Professor Shirk
16 March 2017
                                          Article on the United States and Russia's Relations

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-cold-war-russia-u-s-relations-lowest-point-1970s-n660126

This article talked about how there might be a new cold war between the USA and Russia since our relationship together has been at its lowest since the last cold war in the 1970s. Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, has denied the claim that we might be in another cold war saying that a "Real Cold War is when we're investing enormous resources in order to prepare seriously for a nuclear war against each other. This is not the case now." while retired Admiral James Stavridis from the United States said that "The trend lines are very bad. We're not in a new Cold War, but we're edging close to one". This article also talked a lot about American undercover spies, Russia hacking the United States, and how some of the United States officials with diplomatic passports were attacked when they went to Russia. The article talked about how Russia currently is economically weak and how also "Russia is making mischief precisely because it is weak and without friends" making it harder to have a global influence compared to the United States.
Our textbook reading talked about how President Obama was able to "reset" our relations with Russia since there were no major confrontations between the two so they could work together on a logical and practical basis even though the problem of the sleeper spies from Russia in the United States that were arrested in 2010.The textbook also talked about how Russia has a hard time finding allies from around them and from Europe itself. Even though the article did not talk about this much, it did say that Russia does not have many allies which show that even though the textbox was written in 2011, the article and current events shows more of a trend demonstrated by the textbook than a change. The fact that Russia still tried to hack the United States also shows a trend since Russia has sent spies to the United States before that have been caught. This shows their pattern of trying to keep spying and gaining more information about the United States. Also even though the United States knows about this, they have not done much to try to stop it from what I could from both the article and textbook. Also like the textbook said our relationship could change at pretty much any moment with Russia. The article showed the change from 2012 when the textbook was written to 2016 when the article was written