Russia’s ambitions, however, are not always backed up by the realities of power. Throughout its history, it has had to press hard, and often fight, in order to be recognized. It has learned to compensate for its deficiencies in military power, economic development and cultural standard. To succeed, it relied on quantity to offset quality, resorted to centralization and mobilization, displayed the temerity of punching way above its weight, demonstrated boldness and swiftness of action, and leaned on its time-tested capacity to pay a very high price to achieve its important goals.
After a period of good luck at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the form of ever rising oil prices, Russia was hit by their collapse, compounded by the structural problems of its own economy, the corrupt and stifling politico-economic system, and, on top of it all, the sanctions imposed upon Russia as a result of the Ukraine crisis. These are all massive challenges which put in question the capacity of the current ruling elite to hold the country together and lead it onto a path of economic development. A failure to respond adequately to those challenges will have dire consequences for the sustainability of the entire system and the stability of the country itself.
It is truly an irony of history that the United States should be overtly challenged by a party such as today’s Russia – a country whose GDP is a small fraction of America’s, whose share in the global trade is a mere 1 percent, and even whose defense budget is a tenth of the Pentagon’s. To most educated Americans, Russia is the day before yesterday’s news, a country on the long and irreversible trajectory of decline. It is a third- or fourth-tier actor in a remote corner of the globe, with a contemptible leadership mired in corruption, which can be a nuisance at best.
Figures of comparison, however, do not tell the whole story. Among the countries of the world, Russia has a unique quality: its ruling elite and its people strongly reject domination of the international system by any one power. And Russians are ready to push back when they see their own interests in danger, despite the long odds. Unlike the Chinese, the Russians are anything but incremental in their approach to world hegemons: they are bona fide in-your-face people.
In 2014, the Russians may have jumped the gun, and faced the consequences, but Russia’s rebellion against the post-Cold War order does not run against the current global trend. If anything, the Russians have found themselves ahead of the curve, but not too much. The quarter-century period of amicable relations among all the major powers, guaranteed by US near-hegemony in the system, a sort of Pax Americana, is over. China and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are becoming increasingly active in their respective neighborhoods. Major power relations are again becoming an issue, and their movements will reshape the global order.
In Eastern Europe, the United States has had to live since 2014 with a status quo which it does not accept. Washington has failed to make its rules stick and walked back from the assurances of Ukraine’s territorial integrity contained in the 1994 Budapest memorandum, which the United States signed alongside Britain and Russia. Few people in the world believe that Russia will hand Crimea back to Ukraine. Donbass remains an issue, where Moscow keeps insisting on a compromise political solution which Kiev resists. The result is another frozen conflict. The United States has no leverage to make Russia back down under pressure. Even though overall US power clearly dwarfs that of Russia, the stakes for Moscow in Ukraine are so much higher than Washington’s, and the Kremlin is prepared to go to much greater lengths. If push comes to shove, Americans would hardly send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine. As a result, the “balance of will” in the former Soviet Union is not in America’s favor.
In response to the Russian challenge, the United States has been able to consolidate allies and reinvent NATO for the mission for which it had been originally designed. However, what one is witnessing is not exactly the Cold War revisited. Most Americans do not see Russia as a threat. Thus, a new commitment to the defense of Europe is, to many, an unnecessary distraction from more important issues, such as the fight against ISIL. Sensing this, America’s new allies in Eastern and Central Europe fear that the United States will leave them in the lurch and deal with Russia behind their backs. The Baltic States and even Poland are worried that Russia will attack and occupy them, with the United States unable to protect their allies and unwilling to risk a nuclear exchange with Russia for the sake of Eastern Europeans.
As a result, the demand for a US presence on the ground in Europe’s east will be greater, but so will be the risks for the United States itself, in a situation which few Americans will find existential. The downing by Turkey, a NATO member, of a Russian warplane in Syria in 2015 is a case in point. An incident like this could have been much more dangerous over the Baltic or the Black Sea. For the time being, the United States has decided to rotate a brigade-size force in Eastern Europe to create a quasi-permanent military presence in the area, but this may anger the Russians more than reassure the Balts and the Poles.
In the Middle East, Russia reinserted itself into the region dominated for a quarter-century solely by the US. In doing this, Moscow broke the informal American monopoly on the legitimate use of force – and, so far, has got away with it. At minimum, Russia’s intervention carried the risk of inadvertent collision between US and Russian aircraft, but it also opened the possibility in Syria of a US–Russian war by proxy. Even when those risks were initially managed, Russia’s proactive diplomacy exploited the effect of its military engagement and returned Moscow as a player in the Middle East, hardly a welcome development for the United States. As already noted, this brought the Kremlin closer to its goal of reclaiming great-power status beyond the former Soviet space.
As the United States chose to work with Russia to produce a political settlement in Syria, it effectively played along with Moscow’s ambitions. Ever since John Kerry’s first visit as secretary of state to the Kremlin in May 2013, Vladimir Putin was suggesting something like a Dayton-à-deux solution in Syria, with Moscow and Washington as its two co-sponsors. At that point, this was unacceptable to the United States. Putin, however, deftly used Barack Obama’s reluctance to bomb Damascus after the chemical attack to offer a plan of Syria’s chemical disarmament as an alternative to US military strikes. Despite many doubts, the plan worked, with the US and Russia leading an international effort that, amid the civil war there, rid Syria of chemical weapons.
In 2015, the Russian military intervention, coupled with Europe’s influx of a million migrants, many from Syria, pushed the United States to probe the Russian Dayton formula. The Vienna/Geneva process has been exceedingly difficult, partly because even a US–Russian accord does not guarantee success without the endorsement of regional players, above all Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yet, even without the agreement, the very image of Russia and the United States presiding over the newest peace process in the Middle East helps to confer on Russia the status it covets. Such duopoly creates uncertainty among some of Washington’s allies and partners that the US is dealing with Russia over their heads.
While the “little Eurasia” of the former Soviet republics is unlikely to coalesce in the form of a new USSR or the historical Russian Empire, a Greater Eurasia is emerging, driven by China’s march westward and Russia’s coincidental turn to the east. Gone are the days at the turn of the century when the United States could claim to be the dominant power in Eurasia. For the first time since the empire of Genghis Khan, the great continent of Eurasia – from the Western Pacific to the Eastern Atlantic – is being integrated thanks to the dynamics coming primarily from Asia. This has the potential of changing all of Eurasia beyond recognition.