Preview: Many observers believe that the greatest damage Russia has done to U.S. interests in recent years stems from the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Although there is no question that Moscow’s meddling in American elections is deeply worrying, it is just one aspect of the threat Russia poses. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has embarked on a systematic challenge to the West. The goal is to weaken the bonds between Europe and the United States and among EU members, undermine NATO’s solidarity, and strengthen Russia’s strategic position in its immediate neighborhood and beyond. Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War.
Country or Region: Russia
Tertrais, Bruno
Abstract: The Russian nuclear problem is real and serious – but it is political more than it is military.
Topychkanov, Petr V
Description: In this essay, the author provides an overview of dialogues between the United States and the Soviet Union, later Russia, regarding India’s nuclear weapons program in two major historical periods: from India’s test of Pokhran I in 1974 to the end of the 1990s, and from the late 1990s to 2000s. The first period, the author argues, was marked by a consensus of concern, while the second was plagued by mistrust between the two states that prevented a unified response to India’s test of Pokhran II in 1998.
Ajir, Media, and Bethany Vailliant
Abstract: The advanced threat of Russian disinformation campaigns against Western democracies and the United States in particular begs the questions: What are Russia’s strategies for information warfare, and how can the United States combat them? This article explores the evolution of anti-Western propaganda coming from Russia in three ways: state-funded global social media networks, controlling Western media outlets, and direct lobbying of Western society. Recommendations to combat these threats include analysis of deterrence theory and its applicability to the domain of information warfare.
Zysk, Kataryzna
Abstract: The assessment that Russia envisages limited nuclear first use, potentially including low-yield nuclear weapons, as a coercive advantage over a symmetrical adversary has contributed to justify additional capabilities in the US nuclear arsenal. Contrary to the critics’ claims, Katarzyna Zysk shows that the Russian military strategy has been corroborated in strategic documents and official statements, defence acquisition programmes and deployments, and operational pattern.
Kaura, Vinay
Abstract: The partnership between India and Russia has been a success of Indian diplomacy, but the relationship is beginning to show signs of strain. The growing closeness between Russia and China and the possibility of the Kremlin’s strategic embrace of Pakistan, as evidenced by its willingness to engage with the Taliban, has fuelled the perception that Moscow and New Delhi are drifting apart. Vinay Kaura argues that, with the changing geopolitics of South Asia, New Delhi and Moscow need to pay greater attention to strengthening their relationship.
Podvig, Pavel, editor
Abstract: This encyclopedic book provides comprehensive data about Soviet and Russian strategic weapons, payloads, and delivery systems and on the nuclear complex that supports them. The data are drawn from open, primarily Russian sources. All the information is presented chronologically, arranged by individual systems and facilities, and is not available elsewhere in a single volume.
Following an overview of the history of Soviet strategic forces, the book discusses the structure of the political and military leadership in the Soviet Union and Russia, the structure of the Russian military and military industry, nuclear planning procedures, and the structure of the command and control system. It describes the nuclear warhead production complex and the Soviet nuclear weapon development program. It then focuses on the individual services that constitute the so-called strategic triad—land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the strategic submarine fleet, and strategic aviation. It presents an overview of Soviet strategic defense, including air defense systems, the Moscow missile defense system, the radar and space-based early warning networks, and the space surveillance system. The book also includes a description of the Soviet nuclear testing program, including information on test sites and on all Soviet nuclear tests and peaceful nuclear explosions. It concludes with a look at the future of strategic nuclear weapons in Russia.
Korolev, Alexander
Abstract: The beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of balancing responses to the US hegemony, among which Russia’s foreign policies stand out as corresponding to what is understood as ‘hard balancing.’ Why is the United States being balanced against? This paper categorizes the existing theories of non-balancing into six conditions that together guarantee the absence of balancing and demonstrates that the current unipolar system can satisfy only one of them. This eases the systemic constraints and makes balancing possible. The paper then presents three cases of balancing with reference to President Putin’s foreign policy. It argues that even though in terms of relative military capabilities unipolarity still holds, the emergence of counter-hegemonic balancing is indicative of important changes in the nature of post-Cold War American domination.
Meijer, Hugo, Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, Paul Holtom, and Matthew Uttley
Abstract: The rise of China has been fuelled by a massive military modernisation programme relying, in large part, on the acquisition of foreign military equipment. The question of how the world’s major powers define their arms transfer policies towards China is therefore crucially important. This article makes two original contributions. First, drawing on neoclassical realism, it proposes an explanatory framework integrating international and domestic factors to explain variations in major powers’ arms transfers. Second, based on a large body of elite interviews and diplomatic cables, it offers the first comprehensive comparison of American, British, French and Russian arms transfer policies towards China since the end of the Cold War.
Adamsky, Dmitry
Abstract: The recent Russian approach to strategy has linked nuclear, conventional and informational (cyber) tools of influence into one integrated mechanism. The article traces the intellectual history of this Russian cross-domain concept, discusses its essence and highlights its destabilising effects. By analysing a case outside of Western strategic thought, it demonstrates how strategic concepts evolve differently in various cultural realms and argues for a tailored approach for exploring coercion policies of different actors. The findings of the study are applicable beyond the Russian case, and relevant to scholars and actors exploring, utilising or responding to cross-domain coercion strategy.
Krickovic, Andrej, and Yuval Weber
Preview: Although a general task of social science is to measure and predict change, international relations (IR) paradigms and theories have been unable to keep up with the rapid pace and destabilizing effects of change in international politics. When addressing Russia, IR’s “change problem” becomes clearer: the world’s largest country is treated as an object struggling to adjust to changes rather than a protagonist introducing them into the system. Yet, twice within the last quarter century, Russia has acted as a catalyst for changes in international politics that few saw coming and which confounded IR paradigms. The Soviet leadership’s decision to withdraw from the Cold War standoff and dismantle its empire in Eastern Europe was one of the most surprising events of the twentieth century. Russia’s interventions in Ukraine, Syria, and the 2016 US presidential elections have similarly caught most observers by surprise. IR theories have struggled to account for these actions and have not been able to integrate Soviet/Russian behavior into their larger understanding of change in international politics.
Our underlying premise is to treat Russia (in both its Soviet and present-day incarnations) seriously as an agent of transformational change in international politics. Most theories that deal with transformational change focus on the effects of larger social and economic forces. However, change is seldom a smooth, linear process. Larger global forces may be operating, but individual agents catalyze changes produced by these deeper historical forces. What is needed to understand Russian foreign policy decision making is an evolutionary theory of change that is able to integrate historical (root) causes of change with proximate and contingent ones. In both cases examined in this paper, larger historical root causes push the international system toward change, but Russia’s status aspirations and status dissatisfaction have been the proximate causes catalyzing change.
Larson, Deborah Welch
Abstract: Research on rising powers has made advances in studying new actors, broader questions, conceptualization, and models of world order. Instead of the previous focus on a hegemon and rising power in the power transition literature, scholars are focusing on major and middle powers such as India, Brazil, and Turkey. Instead of a narrow concern with prospects for hegemonic war, researchers are examining the effects of rising powers on global governance and world order. Some scholars argue that rising powers are not trying to overturn the international order, but to establish a parallel order within it. Advances have also been made in conceptualization, such as the important concept of accommodation, transcending the earlier narrow concern with territorial accommodation or appeasement. More work has been done on the concept of clubs such as the BRICS and the G20. Finally, scholars are identifying new, more pluralistic patterns of world order, in which countries specialize in various tasks.
Tichý, Lukáš
Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyze the main characteristic features of the security culture of the Russian Federation (RF) during Medvedev’s presidency in the context of the Russian foreign and security policy in the period 2008–2012. The second aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the continuity of the main features of the Russian security culture represents a possible starting point for understanding the reasons for the current Russian military intervention in Crimea. The main features of the Russian security culture will be searched for on three levels: firstly, the level of key foreign and security strategic documents of the RF; secondly, that of the Russian position toward military interventions; and finally, that of Russia’s relations with the West.
Kanet, Roger E
Abstract: The focus of this article is on global governance in an era in which major new actors join those who have for the past quarter century, and longer, set the rules for the liberal international order. That order has been characterized by Western political and economic dominance, the expansion—one might even say imposition—of democratic political institutions and ‘open-door’ economic policies. For the past decade, Russia has increasingly challenged the West and the existing international order across a broad set of fronts. These actions have ranged from rhetorical challenges to the global system to the use of military intervention meant to impose its policy objectives on other states, as well as cyber-attacks on national elections and direct support for right-wing political groups in the West seemingly meant to instill instability within the member states of the Western community, to support like-minded right-wing political groups, and to challenge the very existence of that community itself. Russia’s efforts to redefine the existing world order and to reduce the dominant position of the USA in defining and maintaining that order seem to have gained an important new ally in Donald Trump and some of his key advisors, who appear to question the very foundations of that order and to call for the US withdrawal from it.
Rozman, Gilbert, ed
Abstract: A breakthrough between Japan and Russia is being vigorously pursued in 2016. Sixty years after the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Moscow, there is a prospect of a peace treaty and final resolution of their territorial dispute. Yet few have taken notice or considered the ramifications. This volume takes the prospect seriously, while recognizing the hurdles that stand in the way. It presents the insights of former diplomats and specialists from Japan and Russia, adding a U.S. perspective on geopolitics, and, in this introduction, draws together arguments in the volume while assessing the prospects for a breakthrough. We seek to inform readers about what has taken place over the past three years, and, even more, about the forces impacting this ongoing quest, whose strategic impact in the wider great power context could be notable.
