Russia's Unformed Foreign Policy

Robert Legvold

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2001

Article preview: first 500 of 4,804 words total.

Summary:  Although Russia has projected itself more forcefully on the world stage since the beginning of the Putin era, its foreign policy still lacks any sort of grand strategic vision. Russian leaders continue to squabble over issues from NATO expansion to the world economy. But they are particularly concerned about Russia's identity, especially with regard to the post-Soviet states. If the Bush administration fails to devise a coherent policy of its own toward its former rival, it may face serious problems down the road.

Robert Legvold is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and also reviews books on eastern Europe and the former Soviet states for Foreign Affairs.

TEN YEARS AFTER

Nothing distinguishes contemporary Russian foreign policy more than the uncertainties surrounding it. Alone among great powers, Russia faces fundamental questions of identity -- if anything, more intense today than they were ten years ago. Is Russia a country of consequence in the world, and if so, how and why? Who are the Russians, and where does the country belong -- with the West, with China, or somewhere on its own? Harsher yet, who will have it?

Russian leaders spend a fair amount of time reassuring themselves about the greatness and importance of their country. The government's official foreign policy strategy, announced June 28, 2000, refers to the Russian Federation as "a great power ... one of the most influential centers of the modern world ... [with a] responsibility for maintaining security in the world both on a global and on a regional level." Such preening is hard to imagine from, say, Berlin or Tokyo, but Moscow feels the need.

Yet Russian leaders also know that their country's share of world GDP is now down to 1.5 percent, compared with the United States' 21 percent contribution. (We know they know because the figures come from an article in the journal Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn written by the deputy director of the planning staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and published at roughly the same time as the official foreign policy doctrine.) In his first state-of-the-union address, two weeks after the doctrine's unveiling, President Vladimir Putin admitted that the Russian population has been shrinking by 750,000 a year and raised the possibility that "15 years from now there may be 22 million fewer Russians. ... If the present tendency continues there will be a threat to the survival of the nation." Russia's feebleness, as he and nearly every other Russian know well, is manifest at every turn.

This is hardly what one would expect of one of the "most influential centers of the modern world." Still, to take Russian weakness as the reality they know and the boasting as the gloss with which they compensate would be to miss the way Russians are struggling with the "who are we" question. They are aware that, for all its weaknesses, Russia matters to others for three reasons: the atom, the veto, and the location. Nuclear weapons and Russia's permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council are important reasons not to think of Russia as a disempowered nonentity. In addition, Russians realize that they still have potent influence within their immediate neighborhood and that if that neighborhood is important to the larger world, Russia must be important as well. Russian elites, including the president, quite consciously see their capacity to shape events in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as a key to strengthening their international standing. Their uncertainty is over how to muster and deploy this capacity.

To complicate the picture further, Russians perceive the impact of their country in terms beyond its (missing) material power. Russians want to ...

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