Russia in Global Affairs

Nuland’s push to visit Moscow is likely driven by the Biden administration’s attempt to gauge the chances for a real and risky escalation between Russia and Ukraine. It is simply not in the interest of the White House for such a conflict to happen, given Washington has a list of other priorities.

More than three and a half decades have passed since the start of the process of change in the Soviet Union known throughout the world as perestroika. I have been trying to find answers to the questions put to me by scholars, journalists and ordinary people in the letters that I receive. It has not been relegated to the past. The experience and the lessons of perestroika remain relevant today.

Since the creation of the US-led unipolar global order the US has enjoyed the benefits of hegemony. However, the rise of non-Western powers within a still forming multipolar global order has sparked attempts by the US to limit the strengths and opportunities of those rising powers and thereby retain a relative power and influence advantage.

The new set of global and regional actors can be taken for the new, multipolar hardware of the global system; its software is shaped by new structural realities, within which actors operate. These are conceptualized as the mismatch between material globalization and the decline of ideational universalism: the latter determines conflict while the former limits escalation. The article outlines the mode of competition within these structural realities, i.e., indirect coercion.