Russia is poised to invade Ukraine. And the United States and its Western allies are, once again, forced to reckon with Russian power.
Until recently, it was fashionable to minimize Russia as a great power. In 2014, after Russia seized Crimea, then-President Barack Obama referred to it as a “regional power that is threatening some of its neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Two years before, during a 2012 U.S. presidential debate, Obama mocked GOP nominee Mitt Romney for exaggerating the threat posed by Russia. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” he said pointedly. And Obama wasn’t alone in his cavalier attitude.
Pundits and policymakers on both sides of the aisle spent years treating Russia as a spent force whose “great power” days were in the past. Russia, the late Sen. John McCain said in 2014, is simply a “gas station masquerading as a country.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, it has often been said, has merely played a “weak hand well.”
But geopolitics and history tell us that Russia will always, at least for the long-term, foreseeable future, be a force on the international stage.
Russia’s importance extends beyond the rise and rule of Putin. The country’s massive size, abundance of natural resources, and location striding the continents of Europe and Asia ensure as much. So does the country’s sense of self. Stephen Kotkin, a Russian scholar at Princeton University, has pointed out that “Russia has a sense of itself as a special nation with a special mission in the world.” It believes itself to be a “providential power.” That sense of destiny has long underwritten Russian actions — and not without reason.
Russia has often been counted out, only to reemerge. As Kotkin noted in a recent interview: When the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution during the First World War, “people assumed that was it; Russia was gone.” Other ancient, dynastic empires were destroyed by the war; the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans dissolved, never to return. But Russia, Kotkin observed, “came back pretty quickly — within a generation.” The newly formed Soviet Union soon began to reconstitute the empire, seizing lands previously ruled by the czars.
Indeed, after Russia was defeated by Japan in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt was convinced that the future lay with Tokyo, not Moscow. He was right — for a while. Russia’s defeat also helped convince the British to end the so-called Great Game, the 19th-century imperial struggle with Russia over Central Asian trade routes. Russian power, it was thought, was ebbing.
And when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, hollowed out by its economic and political failures and defeated by Western resolve, it was thought that this, too, was the end. Indeed, the territory of its empire, Kotkin noted, was even more diminished than that of czarist Russia after World War I. The West celebrated what one scholar famously called “the end of history.”
But history is clear: Russia always returns.
The writer is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
