No Russia war — framing it as likely causes it.

Despite the shrill warnings of some NATO members and hawkish types in the United States, the great "Russia Threat" appears to be highly exaggerated. True, Russia is still a significant regional power militarily and economically, but it is not a global power or even a credible candidate to be a regional hegemon. The Kremlin would have difficulty executing anything more than a very limited expansionist agenda, even if it has one.

Russia lacks the economic and military wherewithal for conducting a vast wave of aggression and territorial conquest. The difference in economic and demographic features between the USSR and Russia is massive. The Soviet Union was the world's number two economic power, second only to the United States. Russia has an economy roughly the size of Canada's, and it is no longer ranked even in the global top 10.2- Even taking into account purchasing power parity, Russia is still a second-tier economic player that is not in the same league as leading economic powers such as Japan, China, and Germany — much less the United States. It also has only three-quarters of the Soviet Union's territory (much of which consists of nearly empty Siberia) and barely half the population of the old USSR.

If those limitations were not enough, it has a shrinking population afflicted with an assortment of public health problems, especially rampant alcoholism.2U TCF days Russia is merely a first-tier regional power with limited extra regional interests and reach. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a superpower. All of these factors should make clear that Russia is not a credible global rival, much less an existential threat to the United States and its democratic system. Russia's power is a mere shadow of the Soviet Union's. True, Putin has sought to rebuild and modernize Russia's military, and has had some success in doing so.22 Russia's navy once again includes some modern vessels, and the air force is now flying modern, and even some cutting-edge, aircraft. Putin's regime also has focused on developing and deploying long-range, precision- guided weapons and is pursuing considerable military research and development efforts, especially with respect to hypersonic aircraft and missiles.

Even those trends must be put into perspective, however. The restoration and modernization follow a decade of military decline and decay during the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin. Moreover, Moscow's 2018 military budget was a modest $63.1 billion.22 Not only was that amount dwarfed by the gargantuan U.S. military budget of $643.3 billion, but it is also far less than China's $168.2 billion and only slightly more than India's $ 5 7.9 billion or France's $ 53.4 billion.2- Perhaps most significant, in contrast to the robust annual increases in U.S. spending levels, Russia's military spending is declining, not rising.2Z The 2017 budget was $69.2 billion, some $6.1 billion greater than the subsequent budget. That is an odd trend for a government that supposedly harbors vast offensive ambitions.

The only undiminished source of clout is Moscow's large nuclear arsenal. Of course, nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent. But they are not very useful for power projection or warfighting, except in the highly improbable event that a country's political leadership is eager to risk national and personal sui- cide.22 And no evidence whatsoever suggests Putin and his oligarch backers are suicidal. Quite the contrary, they seem wedded to accumulating ever greater wealth and perks.

Finally, Russia's security interests actually overlap modestly with America's — most notably the desire to combat radical Islamic terrorism. If U.S. leaders did not insist on pursuing provocative, intrusive policies such as expanding NATO to Russia's border, undermining longtime Russian clients in the Balkans (Serbia) and the Middle East (Syria), and excluding Russia from key international economic institutions (such as the former Group of 8 (G-81, now G 7), there would be relatively few occasions when important American and Russian interests collide.

A fundamental shift in U.S. policy is needed, but that requires a major change in America's national psychology. For more than four decades, Americans saw (and were told to regard) the Soviet Union as a mortal threat to the nation's security and its most cherished values of freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, a mental reset did not take place when the USSR dissolved and a quasi-democratic Russia emerged as one of the successor states. Too many Americans, including political leaders and policymakers, act as though we are still confronting the Soviet Union at the height of its power and ambitions.

That obsolete view is causing multiple problems. Writing in 2016, Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, concluded that Western actions had produced an ominous situation. "Russia today is increasingly an angry, nationalistic, elective monarchy, and while it is still open for business with America and its allies, its leaders often assume the worst about Western intentions."

As he noted, that unhappy situation was not inevitable. "Vladimir Putin's Russia is not a superpower, and its top officials are realistic about their country's military, geopolitical and economic limitations. Russia does not have a universal ideology predicated on the West as an enemy. " Richard Betts likewise cautions that the West is overreacting to an (inflated) perception of a Russian threat. "Russia's intentions constitute no more of a threat than its capabilities," he concludes. "During the twentieth century, there were intense territorial conflicts between the two sides and a titanic struggle between them over whose ideology would dominate the world."

Those considerations no longer apply, but the United States and its NATO allies act as though little or nothing has changed. It will be the ultimate tragic irony if, having avoided war with a messianic, totalitarian global adversary, we now stumble into war because of an out-of- date image of and policy toward a conventional, declining regional power. Yet unless U.S. leaders change both their mindsets and their policies toward Russia, especially their policy regarding NATO, that outcome is a very real possibility.