Russia in Global Affairs

The main objective of the next stage of international politics is to prevent any savage behaviour as rules and institutions crumble and it becomes every country for itself. This is hardly a very uplifting mission, but it is what the past thirty years amounted to.

Everyone agrees that US-Russian relations are in a perilous state. No one believes a reset is possible; indeed, neither Moscow nor Washington wants one, so great are the contradictions between them. Both have settled for the less ambitious goal of stabilizing relations to halt, if not reverse, a dangerous downward spiral. That sounds good and responsible. But what does it mean?

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.

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.