Russia’s Long Descent
Being a great power is central to Russian national identity. As Dmitry Medvedev put it when he was Russia’s president, “Russia can exist as a strong state, as a global player, or it will not exist at all.” Vladimir Putin, since he assumed power more than a quarter century ago, has been on a mission to restore his country’s power after its chaotic 1990s. He has been determined to reassert its prerogatives as a great power in the multipolar world that he is confident is rapidly emerging as U.S. global hegemony wanes.
That mission is now in jeopardy—not because the West is seeking Russia’s strategic defeat, as Putin insists, but because he decided to launch the war against Ukraine in February 2022. What he thought would be a blitzkrieg has turned into a grueling war of attrition, one that is slowly eroding the foundations of Russia’s power.
The war has exacerbated the stiff economic and demographic challenges Russia has long faced. Less than a tenth of the U.S. economy in nominal terms, Russia’s economy has never fully recovered from the 2008–09 global financial crisis: while it grew by less than 10 percent in the decade before the war, the U.S. economy rose by more than 25 percent. The Russian economy surged by more than 4 percent in 2023 and 2024 as the Kremlin poured money into the war effort, but this military Keynesianism has run its course. The economy grew by less than 1 percent in 2025 and is forecast to expand by a similar amount this year.
For the past decade, Russia’s natural population growth rate has hovered around zero. Indeed, population figures have gone up during that time only because they now include people inhabiting the Ukrainian land Russia seized. War casualties, already more than 1.2 million and mounting, will only put further downward pressure on population growth.
Meanwhile, Russia is investing little in the cutting-edge technologies that could increase the productivity of its shrinking workforce—and, more important, enable it to compete with the world’s leading powers. In 2025, Russia did not rank among the top ten in investment in artificial intelligence, and it ranked sixtieth in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2025 Global Innovation Index.
The war has also compounded Russia’s geopolitical challenges. Most dramatically, it has unified Europe in opposition to Russian aggression. Finland and Sweden abandoned their longstanding traditions of neutrality to join NATO. Last summer, NATO allies committed to raising their defense outlays to 5 percent of GDP by 2035. A consolidated Europe with hard power capabilities could lie far in the future, but if it ever emerges it will dwarf Russia in population, wealth, and latent power, much as the United States does today.
Elsewhere, Russia is ceding geopolitical ground. It could not save its Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad, from being ousted by rebel forces in December 2024. It did nothing to counter the U.S. move against its Venezuelan partner, Nicolás Maduro, in January 2026. It has largely stood aside in the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, with which it signed a comprehensive strategic partnership in January 2025. It is playing no visible role in the diplomatic effort to end the war, which is being led by Pakistan, Turkey, and some Gulf states.
Even in the former Soviet space, where Moscow has historically considered its preeminence essential to its security and prosperity, the Kremlin has watched its position erode: Moldova is accelerating its movement toward Europe, Turkey and the United States are penetrating the South Caucasus, and China has displaced Russia as the Central Asian states’ leading commercial partner.
As it is squeezed geopolitically, Russia has fallen ever more tightly into China’s embrace. Beijing’s diplomatic support, supply of chips for weapons production, and provision of other dual-use items have been critical to Moscow’s war effort. Nevertheless, despite rhetoric about a “no-limits” partnership, the Kremlin is wary of the strategic implications of excessive reliance on China. It has no intention of breaking with its partner, but to maintain its strategic autonomy and restore balance, it needs a counterweight. There is only one place it can find it: the United States. That reality lies behind the Kremlin’s desire to normalize relations.
Despite those current severe constraints, Russia is nevertheless not going to vanish as a major global actor or as a challenger to the United States. Its continuing relevance is guaranteed by its territorial expanse, one-ninth of the world’s landmass; its central geopolitical location abutting Europe, the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and the Arctic; its huge, phenomenally rich natural resource endowment; and its massive nuclear arsenal. For decades, it has also shown an uncanny capacity to adapt cutting-edge technology to military purposes.
Moreover, Russian history is cyclical, a story of rise, fall, and rebirth. Strategic setbacks tend to galvanize political will for a concerted effort to regain Russia’s lost status. That occurred after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century. Russia’s rulers responded with a decade of “great reforms” to restore Russian power. Its devastating defeat in the First World War and the chaos of the ensuing civil war eventually led to Joseph Stalin’s forced industrialization, which enabled Russia to defeat Nazi Germany.
Similarly, the crisis of the 1990s—when the economy plunged by more than a third, regional authorities defied Moscow, and oligarchs privatized parts of the federal bureaucracy—led to Putin’s sustained effort to rebuild. His mistake was misreading the global balance of power and moving too quickly to reassert Russia’s global position; thus, the current strategic setbacks. How long this period of strategic weakness will last is unknowable, but Putin’s failure will likely give way to another effort to retrench and rebuild. Nothing suggests Russia has lost the mindset of a great power.
The task for the United States is thus to counter Russia’s aggression in Europe while taking advantage of its current vulnerability to prepare for Russia’s possible return as a more formidable power in the future. This calls for a policy that abandons traditional containment in favor of competitive coexistence, an approach that recognizes that the United States’ ability to transform Russia is negligible, that rivalry with Russia is permanent, and that Russia is likely to return as a major power.
Such an approach would include multiple elements. The United States would cooperate with European allies in support of Ukraine while engaging with Russia diplomatically to end the Russia-Ukraine war and stabilize the Russia-West frontier stretching from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea. It would hold renewed strategic stability talks with Russia and other great powers to prepare new arms control arrangements to fortify deterrence and reduce the risk of nuclear war. It would create a regional balance in the Middle East that is sufficiently flexible and resilient to absorb any future Russian effort to reinsert itself into the region as a major player. And it would accommodate Russian interests in Northeast Asia and the Arctic, as long as doing so did not jeopardize long-term U.S. objectives. Competitive coexistence thus offers the United States an effective way to deal with a Russia it can neither dominate nor vanquish.
More from the Future of American Strategy >>