Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War

This is the first book to explore U.S. policy toward Russia from Bush to Bush, and to do so with both a sophisticated conceptual framework and inside information. Goldgeier and McFaul do not try to explore every dimension or every major issue in U.S.-Russian relations. Rather, they focus on the core challenge of aiding Russia's domestic transformation and promoting its constructive integration into a changing international system. Thus, the analytical interplay is between the contrasting ways Republican and Democratic administrations approached this challenge, on the one hand, and the different weights they attached to security concerns versus support for Russian economic and political reform, on the other. The subtlety, balance, and insight of the analysis gives the book weight; the wealth of highly revealing material, gathered from interviews with a wide range of officials from the first Bush and Clinton administrations, gives it depth.