Carnegie Moscow Center
On May 9—the Victory Day—the majority of top-level visitors will come to Moscow from the non-Western countries. Russia’s quest for acceptance in or by the West is finally over, and its foreign policy will require a new identity and new orientation.
The Sino-Russian entente—with its unstated, but transparent goal of reducing U.S. global dominance—is easily the most important result of the Ukraine crisis and the preceding deterioration of Russian-Western relations. The West needs to take this seriously.
Russia’s “pivot to Asia” is meeting with a number of challenges, such as bureaucratic inertia, lack of workable ideas, and high levels of corruption. However, there are ways of dealing with all of them.
The post-Soviet elites use the system that Lee Kuan Yew constructed in Singapore to justify political crackdown. However, Lee himself believed that resource-based dictatorships will fail to replicate Singapore’s success, since restricting freedoms is not the cornerstone of his model.
Despite numerous statements declaring Russia’s “pivot to Asia,” the country still faces challenges connecting the goals of the government with the needs of foreign investors.
A Greater Asia, stretching from Shanghai to St. Petersburg, could transform the entire continent of Eurasia and have a significant impact on the global balance of power.
Though largely overlooked by international media, Russia has signed several significant nuclear energy agreements over the last several months. These agreements give Russia an opportunity to develop nuclear cooperation with India, Turkey, and Iran, as well as Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Egypt, where Russia plans to build nuclear plants too.
Ukraine and the global crisis over it point to the start of a new period in world politics. Great powers—Russia overtly, China covertly—are challenging the U.S.-dominated order. Also, in the foreseeable future, there will be no common security system in Europe.
Over the past few years, India has been paying increasing attention to the threats of crime, terrorism, and espionage in cyberspace.
While dreadful news continues to pour out of Ukraine and the Middle East, East Asia appears to have found an equilibrium—at least for the time being.