Russia’s challenge: a declining power’s quest for status

For many U.S. and Western observers, Russia has emerged as the most aggressive and
assertive challenger to U.S. leadership and the American-led liberal world order.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Eastern Ukraine confronts
the long-standing prohibition against using force to make territorial changes, one of the
hallmarks of the post-WWII international order. Its intervention in Syria goes against the
informal prerogatives the United States established for itself as the global policeman and
main outside arbiter in the Middle East. Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential
elections, and in European elections, is seen as a serious danger to liberalism and
democracy. Even the Trump administration, which initially promised to improve
relations with Russia, calls the country a “revisionist” power seeking to “undermine the
legitimacy of democracies” in its 2017 National Security Strategy.
Russia’s challenge has found its way to the top of Washington’s agenda. Yet,
mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship offers little guidance to leaders in
the way of understanding Russia’s behavior or formulating policies to address it. As
such, Russia not only represents a challenge to U.S. leadership and the liberal
international order, but also to established IR theories, which have failed to recognize
how Russia’s anxieties about declining status have pushed it toward a confrontational
revisionist foreign policy. Though deeply committed to preserving Great Power status,
Russia‘s revisionist aims are constrained as its leaders are well aware of the limits of
their country’s power. For policymakers, the fundamental challenge lies not in
containing Russia, but in encouraging it to bolster its status in peaceful and constructive
ways.