Post-Cold War Europe is history. In less than a decade, and powered by the soaring price of oil, President Vladimir Putin has turned Russia into a powerful international player. Russia’s reliance on Western credits has turned into Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. Russia’s military budget has increased six-fold since the beginning of the century, and Russia’s intelligence networks have penetrated all corners of Europe. Russia has regained its influence in Central Asia, and it has established strategic cooperation with China in the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The general mood in Moscow these days is that “Russia is up, America is down, and Europe is out. Russia, previously a Pluto in the Western solar system, has spun out of its orbit, powered by the determination to find its own system.”

The rhetoric of EU–Russia cooperation and partnership cannot mask the fact that mutual suspicion, misperception, frustration, and paranoia are starting to determine the dynamics of the relationship between Russia and the European Union. Russia’s opposition to the West-sponsored independence of Kosovo and to the proposed installation of an American anti-missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic on the one hand, and Brussels’ growing concerns about Russia’s aggressive energy policy in Europe on the other, have poisoned the relationship by bringing back memories of the Cold War. “The Soviet Union was easier to deal with than Russia is today,” observed a senior French diplomat. “Sometimes the Soviets were difficult, but you knew they were being obstructive in order to achieve an objective. Now Russia seeks to block the West systematically on every subject, apparently without a purpose.” In the eyes of the West, Russia has turned from a partner-in-the-making into an adversary-in-the-making. The mixture of mercantilism and messianism that is at the core of the Kremlin’s new foreign policy frightens Europe.

Putin’s new assertive foreign policy, expressed most powerfully in the Russian President’s speech last February at the Munich Security Conference, rests on two key assumptions and one strategic calculation. The first assumption is that the United States’ global hegemony is unsustainable and the decline of American power is irreversible. Russians are tempted to view the current crisis of America’s global power as an analogy alongside the crisis of Soviet power of the 1980s. The Russian media views the debacle in Iraq as “America’s Afghanistan.” Washington’s conflicts with its European allies in the aftermath of the American invasion in Iraq are conceptualized as the dismantling of the informal American empire in Europe. The recent U.S. mortgage and banking crisis is seen as a signal of the fundamental weakness of the American economy.

The second assumption is that the European Union is a threat to Russian interests by way of its very existence as a post-modern empire. In Russia’s view, however, the European Union is a temporary phenomenon exactly because of its post-modern nature. Russia’s European strategy is based on the expectation that sovereign nation-states will determine Europe’s future. This explains Moscow’s stress on bilateral relations with big European member states and its growing reluctance to deal with the European Union. In the early years of his presidency, Vladimir Putin tended to view the European Union as a benevolent competitor and a strategic ally in Moscow’s desire for a multipolar world. But the Orange Revolution in Ukraine became Russia’s 9/11; it had a revolutionary impact on Russia’s foreign policy thinking. Moscow realized that the European Union is the only great power with unsettled borders and that the urge to expand its principles and institutions are built into

the European project. In response to the explosion of the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine and America’s endorsement of regime change as a legitimate policy objective, Putin adopted the concept of sovereign democracy—security understood as absolute sovereignty—as the less interference from the outside, the safer you are.

Moscow’s strategic calculation is that “the West is losing its monopoly on the globalization processes,”3 and the next decade presents a window of opportunity for restoring Russia’s global influence. Otherwise Russia will be overshadowed by the rise of China and Moscow will remain an “economy class” great power. In this sense, Russia’s newfound taste for confrontation with the West is not an emotional overreaction or theatrical grandstanding—it is a strategic choice. The Kremlin’s new foreign policy is not circumstantial in nature. It is the expression of a new foreign policy consensus within the Russian elite and the Russian society at large. The change of personalities inside the Kremlin is unlikely to change this consensus.

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