If this continues much longer, it will be bad, and potentially tragic for the country. In the present situation of long-term confrontation with the West the consequences could be dire. Like World War I, which began with an apparent surge of Russian patriotism and support for the Romanov dynasty but finished off the empire and the dynasty within three years, the present conflict with the West, which started exactly a century later, has the potential to bring latent domestic tensions to a head. Russia is not a country where leaders are changed every four, five or six years by means of a ballot box, but it is a fact that in the last century the Russian people brought down the entire Russian state twice. The last such cataclysmic event occurred twenty-five years ago.
Russia’s present crisis is the worst since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the future as difficult to foresee. In contrast to that of Gorbachev, Putin’s foreign policy is unlikely to grow more conciliatory as the crisis worsens, but the post-Putin era will probably provide a repudiation of many of the current practices, including in foreign policy. Russia, of course, will stay Russia: it will not attempt a new “docking” with Europe, but it may look for accommodation with it and with other neighbors. Such accommodation can only be shallow, given the differences in political, social, economic and values systems, but it might be sufficient to defuse many of the current risks. As a result, Russia’s Realpolitik may become more realistic.
Whereas the challenge to the West regarding Russia is essentially a foreign policy issue, the challenge facing Russia in its stand-off with the West is overwhelmingly a domestic one. The real battlefield for Moscow is neither Ukraine nor Syria, but Russia itself. How Moscow manages the crisis and whether it succeeds in putting the country on a development trajectory will crucially depend on the Russian elites. So far, they have been found lacking. The question is whether they can rise to the challenge of relaunching the Russian economy. Should they fail, Russia’s future certainly looks bleak.
Further Reading
There is a small library of literature on present-day Russia and its foreign policy. Much of it is devoted to the person of Vladimir Putin. Quite a few books are obviously polemical, and many are superficial. I will supply the reader with a reasonably short list of titles, which, I should add, with just one exception, depict the difficult relationship between Russia, on the one hand, and the United States and Europe, on the other, from a Western standpoint.
Serious works on the issue of relations between Russia and the West include Georgetown University Professor Angela Stent’s treatise on the US–Russian relations, The Limits of Partnership: US–Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), which appeared on the eve of the Ukraine crisis, and Columbia University Professor Emeritus Robert Legvold’s Return to Cold War (Polity, 2016).
Specifically on this seminal crisis, I would recommend Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, by Lehigh University’s Rajan Menon and my Carnegie colleague Eugene Rumer (MIT Press, 2015); Kent University Professor Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (I. B. Tauris, 2015); British researcher Andrew Wilson’s Ukraine Crisis: What it Means for the West; and veteran journalist and Brookings scholar Marvin Kalb’s Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).
On the wider issue of Moscow’s foreign policy, I would recommend Andrei P. Tsygankov’s Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity (4th edn, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Jeff Mankoff’s Russian Foreign Policy: the Return of Great Power Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). Another notable recent contribution to the body of research is Nicolas Gvosdev and Christopher Marsh’s Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors, and Sectors (Sage, 2014).
Great background reading is Dominic Lieven’s Empire:The Russian Empire and its Rivals (Yale University Press, 2001); Walter Laqueur’s Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West (Thomas Dunne, 2015); and Charles Clover’s Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2016).
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Praise for Dmitri Trenin
“No one is a wiser, more sophisticated, more subtle or more balanced student of Russian foreign policy than Dmitri Trenin. No one, anywhere. So, should the West fear Russia? His answer is, yes, but for reasons that are different and vastly more complex than the reasons driving the discourse in the West. US and European leaders will not get their policy toward Russia right until they come to terms with the arguments in this book.”
“Dmitri Trenin makes a clear and compelling case that Russia’s Realpolitik may become more realistic and argues that the West should fear its weakness more than its strength. Trenin’s voice of reason makes an important and hopeful contribution to the current policy debate.”
“Dmitri Trenin is one of the most lucid analysts of Russia writing today. In this short but rich volume, he traces the recent history of misguided policy and conflicts of interest that have produced the current sharp deterioration in relations between Russia and the West. A ‘new normal’ has emerged, he argues. It is not a second Cold War but a period of new challenges and opportunities, in which seeing Russia clearly is critical to peace and security. To that end, there is no better place to start than this present essay.”
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