
Short of Westernizing and accepting that no European power has any designs on Russia anymore, the country’s strategic priority must be to restore preponderance in the “near abroad” in order to satisfy its insecurity complex. Once that it accomplished, Russia can start thinking about forming global alliances to challenge the world’s dominant oceanic power, America.
Even the Soviets, for all their early internationalist pretensions, found they could not ignore Russia’s geopolitical imperatives. The First World War had left Russia bereft of an empire. Finland, the Baltic states, the Western Borderlands, including Ukraine, and the Trans-Caucasus were all lost. Germany was defeated but the new states of Eastern Europe were too weak to resist it. Read more “Imperial Restoration: Russia’s Foreign Policy Imperatives”