America today is grappling with a transition from its “unipolar moment” of the 1990s to renewed great-power competition with Russia and China. As U.S. decision-makers look for the best way forward, quite a few international-affairs analysts have argued that attempts to figure out a Russia policy that would give the U.S. an edge in that competition have been stymied by a failure to align policies with a hierarchy of U.S. interests. What, in short, are America’s vital national interests? How can they be protected or advanced? How does and can Russia impact them, and can changes to U.S policies make that impact benign? The volume posted here (links above and below) includes five primers that were written in the past year in an attempt to answer some of these key questions. The five vital U.S. national interests the primers tackle come from a list compiled by a task force that grew out of the Commission on American National Interests. That, to the best of our knowledge, was the last collective effort to define such a hierarchy of interests. They are: (1) preventing the use and slowing the spread of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, securing nuclear weapons and materials and preventing proliferation of intermediate and long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons; (2) maintaining a balance of power in Europe and Asia; (3) preventing large-scale or sustained terrorist attacks on the American homeland; (4) ensuring energy security; and (5) assuring the stability of the international economy. Below we summarize some of the primers’ key findings.
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