Russia's Global Ambitions
In the wake of the Second World War, the Soviet Union emerged as one of the two dominant world powers and for a number of decades; the USSR was a major global player, with its influence spreading to all corners of the world. While the Soviet Union was undoubtedly a global superpower, its failure to modernize its economy in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the USSR being unable to maintain its global ambitions (or their costs) and this eventually led to its downfall. In its wake, a rump Russia, with just over half of the Soviet Union’s total population, was left to pick up the pieces.
However, the economic collapse of Russia in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union (which followed decades of economic decline in the USSR) prevented Russia from playing a global role in the two decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse. Now, Russia is seeking to return to the world stage as a power with global ambitions, although this is being driven partially out of necessity.
During the first decade after the collapse of the USSR, Russia was focused almost entirely on domestic issues and there were fears that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was just a prelude to the eventual dissolution of Russia itself. As a result, Moscow’s primary goal in the 1990s and early 2000s was to reunify Russia and to re-centralize power in Moscow. As soon as Vladimir Putin became president of Russia, he moved quickly to destroy or co-opt separatist movements across Russia, most notably in Chechnya, and he dramatically weakened the powers of regional governments that had grown strong during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin.
Eventually, Russia was able to turn its attention to its neighbors that were once part of the Soviet Union. Its goal in these countries was to bring them back into Moscow’s orbit and to prevent the spread of NATO or the European Union into the former Soviet Union, as these organizations had already admitted the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as all of Central Europe. As a result, when governments unfriendly to Moscow attempted to move Georgia and Ukraine closer to NATO and the EU, Russia used the pretense of backing separatist movements in each of these countries to launch wars aimed at carving out slices of these countries for Russia or their local allies, with the goal of increasing Moscow’s leverage of these hostile states.
While Russia’s focus will inevitably remain on its near-abroad, there has been a clear shift in policy in recent years, as President Putin is attempting to regain some of Russia’s lost influence further afield. First, Russia is committing a great deal of resources to the Arctic in order to ensure that Russia is the leading military and economic power in that region. Furthermore, despite Russia’s recent economic woes, it is spending an increasing amount of money on the country’s air, naval and nuclear forces that are designed to project power further away from Russia’s borders.
Like the United States, Russia is also shifting much of its focus to Asia with the hope that it can develop stronger defense and economic ties with rising Asian powers such as China. Finally, President Putin has recently moved to re-establish Russia as a significant player in the Middle East by committing Russian armed forces to the defense of the Assad regime in Syria and by proposing to support the US-led coalition combatting the Islamic State militant group.
For Russia, its efforts to become a world power are driven both by an ambition to regain superpower status as well as the necessity to find economic and political partners that can help it to offset the much more significant power of the United States and its allies. On the economic front, Russia’s economy has been battered by the combination of low natural resource prices and the impact of Western economic sanctions since its involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine. In order to diversify its economy and make it more resistant to such external threats, Russia needs new export markets for its natural resources as well as new sources of foreign investment to fund this economic diversification.
As a result, Russia has dramatically strengthened its ties with its former rival China in order to acquire foreign investment from that cash-rich economy as well as to gain access to the huge Chinese market. Moreover, Russia is seeking close ties with other authoritarian governments that are opposed to the United States’ constant calls for democratic reforms. As such, Russia is once again finding itself a larger role on the world stage, albeit one that can hardly be described as coming from a position of strength given the underlying weakness of the Russian economy.