10/27/2026
Diplomacy Beyond Official Channels: Track 1.5 and Track 2 Engagement in U.S.-Russia Relations
On October 22, the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program hosted Arik Burakovsky, Associate Director at the Tufts University Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, for a lecture on the role of unofficial diplomacy when official relations break down. Burakovsky, who was recently elected a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, framed the lecture around a question of how governments can keep diplomatic channels alive when they cannot speak freely due to conflict or the sensitivity of the discussions, a problem that defined U.S.-Soviet relations and defines U.S.-Russia relations today. Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues, he argued, can sustain relationships, test proposals, and lay groundwork for agreements when official engagement is limited.
Defining the tracks
Burakovsky began by distinguishing the levels of diplomacy. Track 1 is authorized, official diplomacy between governments. Track 1.5 is mixed or semi-official, bringing officials and non-officials together. Track 2 involves influential non-officials, and Track 3 refers to civil society and grassroots engagement. Backchannels are confidential routes for communication that may involve officials or private intermediaries. Whether an exchange is official depends on the participants’ mandate. He noted that the boundaries between these categories are often blurred, particularly today, amid the shuttle diplomacy conducted by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner among various countries.
How Track 2 influences policy
Track 2’s value, Burakovsky explained, begins with its protected setting, which lowers the political cost and risk of speaking candidly. Over sustained meetings, participants can jointly diagnose a problem, clarifying one another’s interests, fears, and constraints. From there, dialogues can generate new options and signals, and feed ideas into official processes through policy transfer. Changed relationships among participants are an important intermediate outcome, he said, but the ideas must still travel beyond the room to have an effect.
He traced four intellectual traditions in the field: John Burton, the diplomat and conflict resolution scholar who developed problem-solving workshops; Herbert Kelman, the Harvard psychologist whose interactive problem-solving approach focused on pre-negotiation, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Joseph Montville, who first coined the term “track two” and emphasized relationships; and Peter Jones, whose work centers on theories of change and policy-relevant dialogue. Track 2, Burakovsky added, can be high-level and general or deeply technical, depending on the situation.
Measuring its impact is difficult, however. He urged distinguishing visible products from deeper undercurrents and noted the methodological obstacles to analysis as there are selection effects, secrecy that obscures how ideas are transmitted, long time lags, and counterfactuals that cannot be observed. Participants’ recollections require corroboration, but analysts can still assess impact by tracing who first raised an idea and who wanted what to give a sense of diplomatic trends.
Lessons from the Cold War
Burakovsky then turned to historical cases. The Pugwash Conferences, which grew out of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto and first convened in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, brought scientists together around the shared threat of nuclear weapons. Through small, confidential workshops conducted in a shared technical language, participants sustained contact even when official relations were frozen, and the work was ultimately recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize. The Dartmouth Conference similarly convened American and Soviet participants throughout the Cold War, organizing task forces and building a model of sustained dialogue that continues today. These cases, he argued, show that maintaining such institutions matters most precisely when official relations break down.
He also cautioned against labeling every quiet exchange as Track 2. Robert F. Kennedy’s talks with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which kept the secret understanding on U.S. missiles in Turkey hidden, took place through an authorized backchannel, with both men acting under official authority. Likewise, the presence of scientists does not make a process Track 2: the technical work behind the 1972 ABM Treaty and SALT took place within authorized official negotiations, even though scientists often participate in Track 2 dialogues to inform such talks.
After the Cold War
In the post-Cold War period, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program and lab-to-lab relationships contributed scientific expertise to cooperation between the two countries. Burakovsky surveyed several later initiatives: the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative, which brought expert attention to the broader security relationship but ultimately did not get very far; the Elbe Group, founded in 2010, which brought together senior retired military and intelligence officials; and the Fort Ross Dialogue, launched in 2012, which focused on academic, cultural, and business exchange.
He highlighted the Boisto Group, which met in Finland in 2014 to discuss Ukraine and produced a 24-step proposal that partially informed the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements. The effort’s central weakness, he said, was that it excluded Ukrainians from its expert groups, drawing criticism from Ukraine. The same problem shadows today’s bilateral Track 2 meetings on the Russia-Ukraine war, from which Ukraine and Europe are absent. Arms control faces a parallel challenge, as a trilateral U.S.-China-Russia framework has become the new frontier, meaning that direct Track 1 talks are difficult, opening opportunities for effective Track 2 dioplomacy.
Academic engagement under pressure
Burakovsky described the growing obstacles to U.S.-Russia academic exchange, with a particular focus on his own personal experiences taking part in unofficial diplomatic engagement. Visa restrictions predated 2022 and the tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, while the State Department’s travel advisory for Russia remains at Level 4, “Do Not Travel,” and he said he could think of hardly any American experts who still travel to Russia; he himself has not been since January 2022. Risks of wrongful detention, espionage accusations, and surveillance, along with financial constraints stemming from the fact that U.S. credit and debit cards do not work in Russia and transfers from the United States are severely restricted, shape how dialogues are organized. Meetings with Russian experts now often take place in other mutually accessible countries, such as Turkey, Armenia, Serbia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.
Reflecting on his own experience, Burakovsky noted that before March 2022, Fletcher maintained academic connections with Russian universities and think tanks; Fletcher severed all formal ties with Russian academia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has since participated in a National Academy of Sciences convenings comparing dialogue efforts across countries and issue areas and in recent work with the Council on Foreign Relations, and he follows the Stimson Center’s dialogue efforts, one of the few remaining channels in which some experts still travel to Russia. Participants in these dialogues carry no government mandate to negotiate, he emphasized, and rarely even brief policymakers. Their value lies in facilitating connections and comparing views across communities to break down misconceptions.
Opportunities and limits
Burakovsky identified several areas where unofficial dialogue could support risk reduction: the war in Ukraine, Arctic science and deconfliction, arms control following the expiration of the New START treaty, and space security. The United States and Russia still cooperate in outer space, including on the International Space Station, which can open discussion of mutual fears about weapons in space.
He was clear, however, about the limits of bilateral dialogue on Ukraine. U.S.-Russia conversations are legitimate on nuclear risk and escalation control, military deconfliction, and the treatment of embassies and detained nationals. But the conversation changes when it turns to Ukrainian territory and sovereignty, since neither party can decide Ukraine’s future. Europeans must be involved as well; at the October 2026 Warsaw Security Forum, he said, the gap between American and European views of the war was plain to see. Excluding key stakeholders creates practical problems, leading participants to misjudge situations and produce recommendations that cannot be implemented. He warned against repeating the mistakes of great power bargaining, citing the Minsk agreements, which he said Ukraine was forced to sign essentially at gunpoint.
