No to Russia Engagement: Final Answer of the Trump Administration?

About the lecture: Speaking at IWP in April, Nikolas Gvosdev discussed the balance between Russia-engagers and Russia-skeptics in the Trump Administration. Over the summer, the balance of forces, along with the passage of major new sanctions against Russia by the Congress, has shifted strongly in favor of containment. Why has a candidate Trump who called for improved relations with Vladimir Putin's Russia morphed into President Trump a seeming Russia hawk--and what does this say for how future encounters between Washington and Moscow will go? About the speaker: Nikolas Gvosdev is Professor of National Security Affairs, holding the Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair in Economic Geography and National Security at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He also serves as a Senior Fellow for the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Eurasia Program and Program on National Security. He was formerly the Editor of The National Interest magazine and a Senior Fellow at The Nixon Center in Washington, D.C. Gvosdev received his doctorate from St Antony's College, Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. A frequent commentator on Russian and Eurasian affairs, his work has appeared in such outlets as Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Orbis, and he has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BBC. He is the co-author of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower, and the co-author of Russian Foreign Policy: Vectors, Sectors and Interests.