Dartmouth Dialogue

The Dartmouth Conferences is the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between Russia and the United States

The meetings between the representatives of the two countries have been taking place since 1960. The first conference was held at Dartmouth College in the United States. The meetings were attended not by public officials but by scientists, bankers, entrepreneurs, and prominent public figures. The Dartmouth Dialogue had a significant impact on the relations between the two countries during the Cold War era. The format became a supplementary communications channel between Moscow and Washington as, due to the strained relations between the two countries at the time, the official channels were insufficient. On the U.S. side, the Dartmouth movement was joined by such powerful personalities as Norman Cousins and David Rockefeller; on the Soviet side, by such political giants as Georgy Arbatov and Yevgeny Primakov.

Yevgeny Primakov had this to say about the Dartmouth Conferences: "They took place regularly in order to discuss or bring closer together the two superpowers' positions on managing arms control, finding solutions to international conflicts, and creating conditions for economic cooperation."

On the Russian side, the key roles in organizing the conferences were played by two scientific institutions – the Institute of World Economy and International Relations and the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies. On the American side, the conferences were actively attended by political scientists, retired senior officials from the State Department and Presidential Administrations as well as active bankers and businessmen.

The Dartmouth Dialogue was revived in 2014 at the initiative of the United States. Vitaly Naumkin, the Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Yuri Shafranik (starting in 2015) became the Co-Chairs of the Russian delegation. Since 2014, the United States contingent has been led by the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, James Collins.

During the work of the Dartmouth Conference

The Dartmouth Dialogue is a place where the leading experts from Russia and the United States can meet and attempt to find common ground. At the center of attention are not only political relations between the two countries but also such topics as education, culture, science, healthcare, and so on.

Yuri Shafranik notes that the Dartmouth Dialogue is more or less the only remaining platform on which Washington and Moscow can interact and where they can hear each other's positions and convey the jointly developed recommendations to their respective governments.

In December 2019, for the first time in almost 60 years, the Russian-American working group publicly addressed the governments of Russia and the United States. The delegates stated that the U.S.-Russia Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START or SNV-III) needs to be extended. The conference participants, including Yuri Shafranik, emphasized that the failure to extend the START treaty may have tragic consequences, launching a new, uncontrolled nuclear arms race.

According to the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, James Collins, the relations between the two countries are at an unacceptably low, dangerous level. In the public address to the governments of the two countries, he said: "Given the deep concerns we share about the security of our peoples, for the first time in our history we are compelled by the urgency of the situation to issue this public appeal to our governments, founded on our view that the clear threat of an uncontrolled nuclear arms race has re-emerged with the collapse in recent years of key elements of the post-Cold War arms control architecture."