Russia’s security policy since the late 1990s reflects a striving for agency in an international system perceived as Western-dominated. However, the “end of history,” as proclaimed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1989, meant very different things for the West and for Russia. Since 2014, official discourse increasingly frames the confrontation with the West as a struggle in civilisational and existential terms. Yet Russia’s capacity to exercise agency in a genuinely multipolar order will be constrained by economic and geopolitical limitations.

Russia and the West: Clashing histories

Having emerged as one of the victorious powers after the Second World War, the Soviet Union exerted unprecedented global influence, usually in opposition to the United States. This stance was perhaps best signified by its permanent membership on the UN Security Council and, of course, by its nuclear arsenal. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation became its de jure successor. In this vortex of shifting power, both established and emerging political elites in the newly formed Russian state were under the impression that its superpower status had not disappeared. This view was also reinforced by Western decision-making and behaviour at the time. The fact that the Russian Federation retained both a seat on the Security Council and its nuclear capabilities testifies to the persistence of this notion among Russian decisionmakers.

After a brief period of accommodation with the West pushed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the twilight years of the Soviet Union, Russian security policy decidedly swung in a more confrontational direction under the guidance of Yevgeniy Primakov. After having worked as a researcher, journalist, and diplomat, he became head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) from 1991 to 1996. He was then Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 1997 and Prime Minister from 1998 to 1999. Primakov was a prescient political thinker, and his ideas reverberate strongly in the current Russian political leadership. According to Primakov, the liberal rules-based international order, which had the United Nations Charter and the Security Council at its core, had gradually come to be an expression of Western, and in particular American, hegemony. This order had become a tool for dominating the Russian Federation and other non-Western states. For Primakov, the prevailing distorted world order needed to be substituted by a concert of great powers, similar to the diplomatic system of the 19th century in Europe.

This turn in Russian security policy is perhaps best illustrated by the literal midair U-turn of Primakov’s jet over the Atlantic, which took place when Primakov decided to cancel a visit to the United States over the NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999. According to Primakov, it was exactly this type of unilateral American measure that undermined global stability. In his words, commenting on the American intervention in Iraq, “the US is pushing forward with a singularly minded agenda of ‘unilateralism’ where it wants to unilaterally address mankind’s vital problems on the basis of Washington’s biased views of the global situation. Generally speaking, the world must decide which of the following two models are the most acceptable for preserving the world order: one based on the joint efforts of the global community to counter various threats arising in the world and stabilise the international situation; or the other alternative which calls for unilateral decisions and actions which are in opposition to the UN Charter, as well as the opinion of a majority of states.”

Primakov believed that globalisation had increased mutual dependencies. Therefore, it had become more difficult for a single pole to dominate the world; in other words, the process of globalisation undermined American hegemony. As countries became more developed and new centres of power arose, they would challenge the existing hegemon and reshape the world order. However, neither the Russian Federation nor China would ever subordinate themselves to an order dominated by the United States. A multipolar world, he wrote in 2003, “is therefore the main vector of the world’s development.”

Pushing for an end to the liberal world order

Primakov’s belief that the current world order would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions is an example of the influence of the dialectical approach, inherited from Marxism-Leninism. According to this interpretation, Russia, as the antithesis of the West, is challenging the status quo and ushering in a new (and better) reality. According to this line of thinking, there can be no stable “end-state,” and conflict between Russia and the West is therefore permanent and unavoidable. The current political leaders of the Russian Federation continue to be influenced by dialectics, something of which Western policymakers are often unaware. This inevitably leads to misunderstandings of Russian behaviour and actions.

President Putin’s famous 2007 Munich speech was significant not because it introduced new ideas (it did not), but because it signalled that Russia was ready to exercise its existing agency to shape the world order and to create conditions for expanding that agency in pursuit of a greater balance. Agency in this context refers to the ability of a state to shape international norms, institutions, and outcomes rather than merely adapt to them. Russia’s agency took the shape of both military interventions (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine) and of increased cooperation with China, India, and non-Western multilateral organisations such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The Western sanctions imposed on Russia after the annexation of Crimea gave impetus to Russian efforts to begin decoupling from Western-dominated financial systems. Though progress in this area has been mixed, Russia has managed to weaken the system of global financial and economic governance established at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944.

Russian official discourse on world order after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 has assumed a more openly ideological character. For Russian leaders, it is not just a question of power distribution; it is a question of norms and values. Human rights and democracy are considered Western tools for waging indirect warfare against Russia, and they are therefore viewed as a threat to Russia’s existence. In addition, and relatedly, in line with Samuel P. Huntington’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?” from 1993, the idea of Russia as a "civilisational state” has become even more important. There is a strong intellectual-historical tradition in which Russia is seen as a separate civilisation with unique values and historical experiences; this tradition goes beyond ideology, time, and state formation. Russia, therefore, deserves to be a “pole,” not just on the basis of material and economic factors, but because it is a distinct civilisation. Russian civilisation is, of course, seen as founded on Eastern Orthodoxy. The Russian framing of great power competition as a struggle between civilisations with different religious identities also reintroduces metaphysical elements into world politics.

Seeking agency in a new world order

Although the Russian Federation has actively taken steps to dismantle the liberal rules-based world order, it is not clear whether it would enjoy stronger agency in a world order based on the art of the deal and the principle that “might makes right.” The emergence of a pole in the multipolar world order, as envisioned by Russian political thinkers over the past thirty years, requires the capacity to attract and influence other countries. That capacity cannot be based solely on military power or nuclear weapons. This translates into two major challenges in the Russian search for agency in a new world order.

The first challenge is that Russia lacks the economic resources to compete with other, wealthier countries. RAND estimated that, in 1980, the Soviet Union spent about 7 per cent of its Gross National Income just to maintain its sphere of influence, through subsidies to Eastern and Central Europe, military aid, and covert operations. Today Russia spends perhaps 8 per cent of its GDP on military expenditure, and more still on other expenditures related to the war in Ukraine. It can ill afford to pour resources into a network of alliances, especially if other powers can bid more for their loyalties. Beyond the mere geographical aspect, the recent cases of Venezuela, Iran, and Syria illustrate that Russia is not able to shield its allies from American pressure, even if it would want to. This fact again presents the leaders of the Russian Federation with the issue of credibility. Yet, agency on the cheap still generates some influence, which is better than none.

The second challenge facing Russian agency is its chronic inability to leverage its existing cultural capital in a global context. Both the United States and the Soviet Union managed to master this aspect of agency and attraction during the Cold War with the help of an overarching ideological framework. These respective images of progress and liberty (with fundamentally different points of departure, and thus outcomes) could be used as tools for influence. On the surface, this competition primarily hinged on aesthetic preferences, but its scale shifted from local to regional to global at immense speed during the past decades, with the advent of the internet as a tool for mass communication. Today, when Russian
leaders and government pundits moan over the Westernisation of the “Russian way of life,” it is not only over the content of competing cultural expression, but also over the lack of means and capabilities to communicate its own ideal reality to the rest of the world.

Conflicting agency in the future

The story of Russia’s post-Cold War trajectory is not one of mere revisionism. For many in the West, the crisis of the liberal world order appears as an unexpected unravelling. For Russian leaders, this is a long-awaited correction. Yet, dismantling one order is not the same as commanding or even influencing the next one. The ghost of Marxist-Leninist dialectics will continue to haunt Russian security and geopolitical thinking for decades to come, and the metaphysical war between opposites is thus bound to continue in the Russian political realm.

For the past thirty years, Russia has undoubtedly exercised the agency that it does possess, both with tanks and trolls. However, Russia needs more than just defiance to prosper in the multipolar world order that it strives for. It needs attraction, capital, and credibility. On the other hand, Russia’s strife for renewal stands in contrast with the country’s struggle against modernity itself. Military power may shatter norms and mutual understandings, but it cannot easily build durable coalitions. Nuclear weapons are a means of deterrence, but in themselves they do not generate prosperity. Civilisational rhetoric may mobilise domestic audiences, but is far more difficult to translate into global appeal.

If the threads of the liberal world order are fraying, Russia has indeed helped to pull them. The question is whether the Russian Federation as a state and society has the will and capability to contribute to its imagined multipolar utopia. Agency achieved only through resistance and defiance against a hegemon risks becoming agency confined to obstruction. In a world moving toward transactional power politics, Moscow may find that escaping Western hegemony is easier than escaping its own limitations.

This article is written by reserachers Maria Engqvist and Emil Wannheden, as part of the report Strategic Outlook 11: Wide Awake in a World of Disorder. The report examines how geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and rapid technological change are reshaping the international system and challenging established patterns of cooperation. It explores key security, economic, societal, military, and technological developments emerging in an era of strategic rivalry and systemic competition.