The New Russian Foreign Policy

Read an excerpt of The New Russian Foreign Policy.

Nothing is more important for the security of Europe and the peace of the world than the foreign policy of the new Russia, which remains the world's largest country in geographic terms, possesses one of the two major stockpiles of nuclear weapons on the planet, and is part of the three regions that are the world's most important in strategic and economic terms: Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. That judgment is central to The New Russian Foreign Policy. This book offers the first authoritative, comprehensive account of Russian policies toward the world in the wake of communism’s collapse. It consists of four essays.

In the first, Leon Aron assesses the domestic basis of Russia’s foreign policy and the evolution of the doctrine Russia has developed to guide those policies. In the second, Sherman Garnett discusses Russia’s troubled ties with its western neighbors that were once republics of the Soviet Union, the three Baltic countries--Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia--and Ukraine. Rajan Menon describes Russia’s policies toward its new neighbors to the south, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, in the book’s third chapter, and addresses the question of whether they add up to an effort to reconstitute a Russian empire. Finally, Coit Blacker writes on the future of the relationship between Russia and the West. The book’s introduction, by Michael Mandelbaum, places in historical perspective the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia facing the task of devising an entirely new set of foreign policies.

The New Russian Foreign Policy provides indispensable background for a wide range of current issues and anticipates the future for international relations with one of the newest, most important, and least predictable countries in the world.

A Council on Foreign Relations Book