There is consensus, or something approaching it, on several other counts. For one, the team agrees that the Russia threat is an asymmetric one. 

Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken observes that President Vladimir Putin has made “an art form [of] tak[ing] a relatively weak hand … and play[ing] it incredibly well,” while Burns, a former ambassador to Russia, writes that Putin “regularly demonstrates that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising powers.”

 Many of Biden’s appointees appear to have what two academics call a ‘Wilsonian bias,’ where Russia’s international behavior is largely or entirely attributed to its domestic order. 

Commenting on the sources of Russian conduct, Sullivan says that Putin “needs to be understood as having an overriding interest in preserving and extending his own power, first and foremost.” 

Meanwhile, Andrea Kendall-Taylor — the National Security Council’s incoming Russia and Central Asia senior director, an intelligence analyst by background, and a comparativist by nature — holds that “Russia underscores the link between rising personalism and aggression.”

Blinken similarly argues that Putin’s Russia entered into conflict with the West because “when Western democracy is successful, it’s the most profound indictment of the system that [Putin has] built in Russia,” adding:

At a certain point, it became against Putin’s personal interest to actually pursue Russian integration [with the West], because he couldn’t accept the rules, the transparency, the norms that come with that. That would undermine the kleptocracy that he was building.

Where several picks stand on the Sino-Russian relationship has gone uncommented on, surprisingly so. 

Blinken, Nuland, and Kendall-Taylor all perceive a need or opportunity to divide one country from the other.