foreignaffairs.com
The Coming Risks to Russian Power
The United States has long viewed Russia as a power in terminal decline. This assessment formed in the 1980s as the Soviet Union began showing clear signs of imperial overstretch, and it congealed after the collapse of first the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union itself. Washington went on to pursue a policy agenda, including NATO enlargement, that treated Russian power and interests as an afterthought, and the long-standing conflict over Ukraine turned dismissiveness into condescension. In March 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama called Russia “a regional power” that was “threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” President Donald Trump shows more fondness for Russian President Vladimir Putin than his predecessors did, but most Russia watchers in the West still dwell on Russia’s lagging technology; its failure to rescue allies in Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba; and what they see as its reduction to a vassal of mighty China. This picture of Russia as feeble and fading may suit the biases of Putin’s many critics, but it is fundamentally at odds with reality: Moscow consistently punches above its weight in global affairs. Thirty-five years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia remains...
