Russia’s strategy has always been aimed at ensuring its own freedom of choice, but not at including other nations in the orbit of its own value concepts. An exception in this regard was the Soviet period of Russian history, but its end brought us back to the fundamental principles of foreign policy culture, which has absolutely no place for messianism, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev.
The most important paradox of the history of Russia’s foreign policy is that although its main goal has always been to ensure complete independence in making key decisions, success in doing so has always largely depended on the context in which the country defends its interests. Now, in addition to the internal stability achieved over the past 25 years, ongoing global challenges have played the most important role in determining how successfully Russia has resisted the destructive efforts of the West.
With regard to Russian priorities, the most important of these changes is that modern world politics has finally ceased to be European. Europe remains at the centre of global power politics, if only because it is here that the forces of the two most powerful nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, come into direct contact. However, Europe has definitely ceased to be the centre of world politics as such, since the European countries themselves have lost the ability to conduct even relatively independent policymaking. It has become truly global, and the behaviour of powers such as China or India is no longer a “background” for the processes taking place in the world, but determines their content.
From the Russian point of view, such transformations represent an opportunity and a challenge in equal measure. An opportunity, because they free us from the need to seek allies within the West in order to be successful in facing the dangers posed by Europe as a region. A challenge, because they force us to think about a new form of Russia’s global role and responsibility. The latter is not historically as characteristic of its foreign policy behaviour as one might think. Therefore, it is important for us to understand what the future global strategy of the country will be, given that messianic aspirations have never been the guiding star of foreign policy decisions and actions.
Russia entered the arena of international politics at a time when it was just emerging and acquiring the features that were to be inherent to it over the next 500 years. The emergence of the Russian state in the late 15th – early 16th centuries coincided with the discovery of America by Europeans, the beginning of colonial conquests there, the split of the Western church, and the spread of military technology that made Europe the dominant force for an exceptionally long period of time. Due to the fact that Russian statehood was formed as a cultural phenomenon outside the European political civilization, its relations with Europe have been conflictual since the very beginning.
Over several centuries of Western (European, in fact) dominance in world affairs, Russia retained its freedom of choice, which always carried with it colossal material costs, including human losses during bloody military clashes. At the same time, the Russian strategy itself combined two features. Firstly, it was never evangelical, i.e. aimed at spreading its ideas about justice far beyond its own borders. Russia did not pursue anything similar to European colonialism, not because it lacked the power resources for this: we know that the annexation of Central Asia took place at a time when the empire was exceptionally powerful. However, this enterprise, meaningless in the broad context of Russian history, did not lead to the creation of a colonial policy on the European model. The reason is that any kind of evangelical aspirations are completely alien to Russian foreign policy culture, which is turned more inward than toward other nations. Even the widely known concept of “Moscow as the Third Rome” was not, in essence, messianic, although such aspirations were attributed to it.
Secondly, the Russian strategy has consistently relied in its implementation on the search for and identification of those forces in the West that could become our situational allies. Since Russia’s opponents have been, as a rule, the most powerful European powers in military terms – the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, France or Germany, there were always forces in the West whose support provided Russia with relative advantages. All large-scale clashes between Russia and Europe, in which we were the victors, were accompanied by a split within the West itself. Both cases of Russia’s political, although not military, defeat – in the Crimean War of the mid-19th century and in the Cold War of the second half of the 20th century – occurred when the West had achieved a fairly high degree of consolidation. In other words, in both cases Russia did not even have a tactical ally among its historical opponents. After the Cold War ended on unfavourable terms for Russia, its strategy towards the West also proceeded from the high probability that Europe would gradually free itself from the complete dominance of the United States, and that this would play the role of a traditional factor in Russia’s resistance to pressure from our eternal adversaries. Russia’s desire to establish special relations with leading European countries or the European Union as a whole has repeatedly become the subject of vigilant criticism from European or American colleagues.
They were, in essence, not so wrong: Russia really considered the emancipation of Europe to be a key factor in a more balanced world policy in the future. This, however, did not happen: Europe was unable to achieve independence in world affairs, even if we assume that it seriously wanted to. By the beginning of the military-political confrontation in Ukraine, the internal crises that emerged one after another since 2009 and the degradation of political elites had returned the Europeans to a position of even greater dependence on the United States, liberation from which is now impossible to even imagine.
However, a new paradox has emerged: the next stage of Europe’s slide into strategic insignificance has not become a factor in strengthening the global position of the United States. The position of Europe has become insignificant as such, finally closing the chapter of world history where this part of the planet was the centre of world politics.
However, now the task arises to determine, including on a theoretical level, what Moscow’s global policy can be in conditions where the world is waiting for our presence, and Russia itself is returning to its inherent absence of any messianism. No less inherent to it is the pragmatism of foreign policy aspirations. The combination of the objective need for global participation in solving the most important issues and a deeply national foreign policy culture will become, as one might assume, a significant theoretical and practical task for Russia in the coming years.
