On October 20, The Jamestown Foundation held a workshop in Washington D.C. titled “Russia in Decline,” with the participation of a veritable Who’s Who of senior American experts on Russia. It was the concluding exercise of an extensive research project on Russia designed to provide policy guidance to the next president of the United States. Prior to the workshop, the leader of the project, S. Enders Wimbush, had solicited written contributions by a dozen of the best-known Russian political commentators and economists.  The bottom line of both the workshop and Russian contributions was a remarkable consensus: Russia has entered a period of prolonged decline that will take many years to reverse even if it could be stopped soon, which is unlikely. The decline is man-made and predates Russian aggression in Ukraine and Western sanctions; it is the aggregation and interaction of a variety of negative systemic trends in Russian society already in existence....(Read Full Article)