The Russia We Have

With Russia and the New World Disorder, Bobo Lo has written an engaging, accessible, and comprehensive overview of Russian foreign policy as it has evolved in recent years. He draws on his extensive experience as a Russia watcher to paint a clear and sobering portrait of Russia’s attitudes and actions, region by region and topic by topic. In doing so, he unpacks which aspects of domestic policy are relevant to Russia and which are not, considers the impact of Russia’s history on its strategies and tactics, and cogently describes Moscow’s approaches around the world.

Lo’s overarching thesis is that Russia’s perspective on how the international system works remains rooted in the experience and mores of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, combined with Moscow’s related inability to let go of a proprietary attitude toward some of the other states that once composed the Soviet Union, serve the country poorly in a new and evolving global “disorder.” As noted above, the book provides an excellent overview of Russian policies. I share with Lo the assessment that Russia is neither neo-imperialist in its attitude toward its neighbors nor completely rid of the baggage of imperialism. I would tend to call this less postmodernist than confused, but in the end that is a matter of semantics. I also agree that the United States remains at the center of how Russia looks at the rest of the world and that the Kremlin is instrumentalist when it comes to international institutions. The overview of Russian approaches to Europe (pp. 180–96) is excellent, as is the on-point discussion of Russia’s China-centered approach to Asia and the problems inherent in it (chapter five). A bit more discussion of the Middle East, where Russia has, as it has in Asia, at times found it difficult to clearly define its interests but has now made some significant progress, would have been interesting. The implications for how Russian policy may adapt elsewhere remain underexplored—and worth exploring.

But while Lo’s descriptions of Russia’s policies, their sources, and their effects were to my mind accurate, they did not appear to me to provide evidence for his broader argument.

To say this is not to detract from Lo’s accomplishment. I enjoyed this book, in no small part because I agree with so much of it. But I am not fully convinced that a new world disorder is upon us. Or, if it is, that it takes the forms that Lo describes. Among the characteristics he notes as exemplifying this new universe is a world that has less conflict overall but is nonetheless messier, one in which military power is less valuable, and one in which a continuing paradox exists between a rise in “inclusiveness” and more fragmentation (pp. 56–67). On the whole, these points were underspecified and his lists of changes at times surprised me. I, for one, might have focused more on the information revolution, which is one of the things that has led to some real shifts in how policy is made and, importantly, implemented. I am also fascinated by shifts within societies and cultures around the world and curious as to how these may affect policymaking. But it seemed that Lo actually wanted to avoid specifying this new system too clearly because his point, after all, is that the new world is one of fluidity and change, placing a premium on adaptability.

For my part, I doubt that the world we live in today is that much more fluid than the times that have come before, at least as far as interstate relations are concerned. After all, the notion that change is the only constant is most often attributed to Heraclitus. Indeed, it is unclear whether Lo is all that certain of the disordered nature of our time either. When he talks about Russia’s past, present, and future, the discussion is grounded in historical analogies to other countries, including, importantly, how empires respond to their own end. Despite the change that has been a constant throughout history, the ways in which countries...