‘New Cold War’ or twenty years’ crisis? Russia and international politics

Abstract

President Vladimir Putin's foreign policy can be characterized as a ‘new realism’, repudiating some of the exaggerated ambitions of Yevgeny Primakov's tenure as foreign minister in the late 1990s while asserting Russia's distinctive identity in world politics. Rather than acting as a classic ‘balancing’ power prescribed by classic realist theory as the response to the hegemonic power of a single state, Russia under Putin tended to ‘bandwagon’ and the country has been a vigorous ‘joiner’. Putin insisted that Russia retains its ‘autonomy’ in international politics while moving away from earlier ideas that Russia could constitute the kernel of an alternative power bloc. However, the opportunity to integrate Russia into the hegemonic international order may have been missed because of what is seen in Moscow as the resolute hostility of groups in the West who continue to pursue Cold War aims of isolating and containing Russia. The Cold War was transcended in an asymmetrical manner, and this has given rise to four major failures: political, strategic, intellectual and cultural. The world faces the danger of the onset of a new era of great power bloc politics, thus restoring a Cold War structure to the international system. With none of the major strategic issues facing the international community at the end of the Cold War yet resolved, we may be facing a new twenty years’ crisis.

Nationalism for Export? The Domestic and Foreign-Policy Implications of the New ‘Russian Idea’

“…Though Western policy is not the focus of this article, I certainly agree that if there is a 'Russia problem', then there is a 'West problem' too (Sakwa 2008a). Western policies have certainly created an environment where the Russian elite can readily portray the nation as isolated, victimised and threatened, even if the Kremlin milks this environment opportunistically.…”

“…From this perspective, even if the Kremlin outlines a moderate, controlled nationalism that underpins its official doctrines, its persistent habits of exploiting less benign public phobias and complexes perhaps provides the basis for a 'tide of populist nationalism' (Shevtsova 2007). As Sakwa notes, Russian popular anti-Americanism ebbs and flows, but after each ebb the residual level remains ratcheted up (Sakwa 2008a). …”

Informal Political Networks and Putin’s Foreign Policy: The Examples of Iran and Syria

“…23 Even Sakwa resorts to standard realist power politics analysis when writing about Russian foreign policy. 24 No one seems yet to have seized the opportunity that current Russian foreign policy truly provides for beginning the process of theory-building about the foreign policies of states dominated by informal politics. My goal in this paper is to sketch out the arguments that might be the basis for such a theory, which should hold both in the Russian case and beyond.…”

One Europe or None

“…As in the interwar years, this was another 'twenty years' crisis', in which not a single fundamental problem of European security was resolved (Sakwa, 2008).…”