Author’s Response: Russia and the New World Disorder—One Year Later

The review essays collected in this roundtable on my book Russia and the New World Disorder raise so many interesting questions that I can only respond to a few of the main points. I will do this under six main headings: (1) the new world disorder, (2) influences on Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, (3) understandings of empire, (4) hard and soft power, (5) successes and failures in Russian foreign policy, and (6) the outlook for Russia in the 21st-century world.

The New World Disorder

Michael Kofman accurately notes that “the thrust of the book’s argument is that the world in which Russia aspires to live does not exist, and much of its foreign policy outlook is based on an illusory foundation that is unlikely to materialize.” He argues, however, that the book fails to “offer an alternative conceptual model for this emerging world” and claims that I am premature in “announcing the end of multipolarity.”

There are several issues here. First, one of the attractions for Moscow of multipolarity, or, to use its favored expression, a “polycentric system of international relations,” is that this framework offers a certain clarity and structure. However, that is not the way the world works. It is disorderly, unclear, and full of contradictions. And it is the Kremlin’s unwillingness to come to terms with the world’s complexities that explains much of its failure to address the numerous challenges facing Russia today.

Second, it is misleading to suggest that I do not explain the nature of the new world disorder. On the contrary, I identify a number of key features: the changing nature of power, the end of leadership and the decline of the great powers, the de-universalization of norms and values, and growing inclusiveness and fragmentation (pp. 54–66). It is likewise inaccurate to say that I announce the end of multipolarity. I believe the multipolar world imagined by Moscow is a fiction. But a new polarity could well emerge out of the current “anarchy.” The challenge for Russia is to ensure that it becomes part of this new order if or when it happens. One of the fears in Moscow is that a new Sino-U.S. bipolarity could materialize, with Russia being sidelined due to its failure to modernize and adapt.

Olga Oliker questions whether the new world disorder is either new or especially fluid and considers that I might have given more attention to the information revolution and “shifts within societies and cultures around the world.” I recognize that there is a danger in overstating the stability of the Cold War era; after all, it brought us the Cuban Missile Crisis, not to mention a potentially disastrous misunderstanding over NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983. Nevertheless, there was an identifiable global system in place with generally clear boundaries, as well as multiple checks and balances. Today, by contrast, the boundaries have become blurred, and relative certainties have given way to mounting uncertainties. The current crisis in relations between Russia and the West is not a systemic confrontation on the scale of the Cold War, but in some ways it is harder to manage because no one quite knows where the red lines are, and because Putin injects a mercurial personal element.

With hindsight, I should have highlighted the impact of the information revolution and of changes within societies, given that both factors have reinforced the new world disorder. We have never had so much access to information, yet public trust in its veracity has rarely been more fragile. Truth has become a ubiquitous commodity. One reason is that trust in democratically elected governments is at a historic low. In the book, I wrote about the “end of followership”—the phenomenon whereby no state, however weak, is willing to take direction from a great power (p. 62). But I should have applied this concept more generally. The rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States, and of far-right politicians in Europe, highlights a general antiestablishment trend. Russia appears to be one...