ABSTRACT
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian officials have struggled to articulate a new intellectual framework for their country’s foreign policy. The process has been uneven, in part because the Russian Federation was fundamentally new as a state, its identity and interests still loosely defined for several years after independence in 1991. What is Russia? Not a nation-state, given its vast territorial expanse and wide range of ethnic groups inhabiting its territory, but no longer an empire either; and clearly not a superpower (although it continues to maintain the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the United Nations [UN] Security Council). But whilst the Soviet Union may have lost the Cold War, it was not bombed out, crushed, and occupied the way Germany and Japan were in 1945. Post-1991 Russia remained a major, if diminished Power, especially in its own neighbourhood, where other new states were still weaker, more chaotic, and continued to look to Moscow as the principal arbiter of regional conflicts.
