Russia Has Grand Designs For the International Order

... Russia” — no longer a superpower, with modest ambitions beyond its borders, and willing to go along with the Soviet Union’s former adversaries who became Moscow’s new friends and mentors. It was not immediately clear what this new Russia’s national interests were – and whether or how they differed from those of its American and European friends. But armed conflicts on the outskirts of the former USSR, the wars in the Balkans and NATO’s enlargement to the east, taught Russia’s elites and public some pretty hard lessons about the country’s post-Soviet role. NATO enlargement, the Kosovo crisis and the war in Chechnya marked the end of the early benign attitude toward the West,...