A New Russia Framework for the New Order

If there has ever been a time for a comprehensive reassessment of Moscow’s foreign policy, the time is now. Since 2014, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and campaigns in Ukraine and Syria have highlighted the country’s military resurgence and marked a turning point in Russo-Western relations, necessitating new ways of thinking about Russia’s role in the world.

Bobo Lo’s Russia and the New World Disorder takes on an ambitious agenda of analyzing and positioning Russia’s foreign policy in the context of new global conditions where notions of power and international leadership are transformed. Lo’s book makes a threefold contribution: conceptualizing the new world order, or rather, the “new world disorder”; analyzing the process and apparatus of Russian foreign policymaking; and assessing Moscow’s policies, capabilities, and prospects in this new global context.

Lo’s new world disorder is an effort to conceptualize the increasingly evident gap between the expectations of the early 1990s for a unipolar world led by a sole superpower, the United States, and the realities of the 2010s. China’s rise, Russia’s resurgence, and the United States’ more constrained power and leadership in the global arena have raised discussions in some camps (particularly in Moscow) of a multipolar world led by multiple great powers. Lo unpacks these myths of the “decline of the West” and a “multipolar world,” demonstrating that these new global conditions are less about multipolarity than conditions of constant change and instability where soft power and small nations matter more than ever before. Moreover, the so-called new poles are underwhelming. China has not been willing to take on greater global leadership, while Russia’s capabilities are significantly limited. In this new world, Lo shows that an ability to perform under new conditions and embrace change will matter more for Russian foreign policymaking than Russia’s perceived great-power status, sense of entitlement to a sphere of influence, or even traditional military might.

Lo also offers a holistic look at Russian foreign policymaking, examining Moscow’s worldview, the different actors involved, and the political culture as well as structural factors, the role of events, and other changing conditions. The examination of the Kremlin’s decision-making apparatus and highlighting of the areas of responsibility for key subordinates such as Igor Sechin or Sergei Lavrov are particularly useful. Too often analysts focus on the overwhelming power of Vladimir Putin, the personalization of the regime, and the opaqueness of the Kremlin’s decision-making, leading to generic terms such as “Putin’s regime” or “Moscow.” Lo emphasizes the role of deeper structural factors within Russian foreign policymaking, such as geography and history, which contribute to the country’s identity as an empire and civilization and are responsible for its national humiliation complex and sense of being wronged by lost status. The resulting political mindset is “a strategic culture in which hard power is paramount” (p. 19).

In this comprehensive assessment of the main drivers, actors, and tools of Russian foreign policy, it would have been useful to award more attention to the unique hallmarks of Putin’s foreign policymaking—the use of energy influence; creation of transnational networks of commercial and ideological interest groups; soft-power efforts, particularly toward the “Russian world”; and information warfare campaigns.¹ While Russia’s soft power and status fall far short of its ambitions and those of the United States, the Kremlin has been largely successful in garnering gains by combining hard- and soft-power methods in the annexation of Crimea, the destabilization of eastern Ukraine, the Russo-Georgian war, ongoing efforts at subversion in Moldova and the Baltic states, and, among others, its recent information warfare campaign against Germany leveraging the European refugee crisis.

One of the book’s most valuable contributions is unpacking the dichotomy between Russia’s rhetoric regarding the multipolar world and the reality of Moscow’s Western-centric foreign policy. Here, the shallowness of Moscow’s much-touted “turn to the East” and efforts to position itself as a “Euro-Pacific power” becomes most apparent. Likewise, while the potential of...