NEWSWATCH: “Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics. Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern.” – Foreign Affairs/Stephen Kotkin
For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with … Ivan the Terrible … Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass. * * * Throughout, the country has been haunted by its relative backwardness, particularly in the military and industrial spheres. This has led to repeated frenzies of government activity designed to help the country catch up, with a familiar cycle of coercive state-led industrial growth followed by stagnation. …. the impetus behind Russian grand strategy had not changed. And over the last decade … Putin has returned to the trend of relying on the state to manage the gulf between Russia and the more powerful West. * * * Russia today is not a revolutionary power … Russia has the ability to thwart U.S. interests, but it does not even remotely approach the scale of the threat posed by the Soviet Union …. The real challenge … boils down to Moscow’s desire for Western recognition of a Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet space (with the exception of the Baltic states). This is the price for reaching accommodation with Putin …. the sticking point that prevented enduring cooperation after 9/11 … a concession the West should never grant. Neither, however, is the West really able to protect the territorial integrity of the states inside Moscow’s desired sphere of influence. And bluffing will not work. …