In Russia today many in the foreign policy elite believe that the current liberal international order is in a state of systemic crisis and that 2016 marked the year that ended Pax Americana. They link this to the decline of U.S. relative power, growing opposition to political liberalism, a decline in the governing capacity of multilateral institutions, and a backlash against globalization.Footnote 1 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian elites have struggled to find an alternative to liberal triumphalism—some kind of international architecture that places them within the West, yet allows them the distinctiveness of their long history as a global rule-maker.Footnote 2 The Russian leadership has reflexively relied on an order premised on a pragmatic realism, combined with support for patriotic nationalism at home and abroad. While it is popular in the United States today to refer to Russia as the revisionist power bent on overturning the existing liberal international order, Russians respond that it is the United States—bent on a messianic quest to spread liberalism—that has persistently disrupted the multilateral order since the end of the cold war. There is still a contentious debate among Russian foreign policy elites over whether the decline of U.S. hegemony bodes well for Russia's own continued political and economic rise, as they do not all agree on either the terminal diagnosis of the liberal international order or the official prescription for how to cure it. After some triumphal celebrations and not inconsiderable schadenfreude in 2016, Russian foreign policy elites are now markedly more sober and somber about the future of the international order and Russia's place in it.Footnote 3
Three Liberalisms: Between International and World Society
Three forms of liberalism exist in the web of international organizations, laws, markets, norms, and practices that make up the world order today: post-war “Charter liberalism,” liberal humanism, and economic neoliberalism. As this section will describe, Russian foreign policy elites do not oppose the first, but they do reject the latter two, which emerged in the late 1990s. They view these two as anti-pluralist liberalisms, based on elevating human rights and democracy and homogenizing Anglo-Saxon capitalism over state sovereignty. Commitment to “hard” sovereign statehood as a core ordering principle is one of the few commonalities that Russian foreign policy elites share with those in Brazil, China, and India. It is not enough to solidify these rising powers’ support for an alternative to the UN system, as that system remains their best guarantee of the sovereignty they so prize. Nor do Russian leaders have any clear idea of what a post-liberal order would look like.Footnote 4 In order to understand Russian views of a post-liberal world order, it is necessary to review briefly the three liberalisms that coexist and collide in the current order, and Russian experience with them.
Post-War Liberal Pluralism
International order today is constituted by the web of security and economic institutions established by the United States and its allies in the wake of two global conflicts.Footnote 5 This is the pluralist “Charter liberalism” of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization—nondiscriminatory multilateral institutions that have preserved great-power peace and expanded prosperity for millions since 1945.Footnote 6 Charter liberalism emphasizes “tolerance, diversity, and openness together with agnosticism about moral truth,” but, critically, is supportive of states as the central actors domestically and internationally.Footnote 7 This order continues the post-Enlightenment liberal tradition of using reason to rule force, a trend that was first adopted at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and that has been used in all subsequent efforts to ensure great-power peace and manage and limit war.Footnote 8
This is a state-centered order in which the great powers have established the necessary rules of an international society—enlightened rules of coexistence that enable the states-based-system and statehood to persist. These include the great-power management system of the UN Security Council that sits atop the democratic General Assembly, and the secular institutions of international law, laws of war, diplomacy, sovereignty, and nonintervention. Most critically, however, this institutional framework bans aggressive war. To these basic rules of coexistence, the world community has added a large number of rules and institutions facilitating cooperation on additional goals, such as economic exchange, maritime navigation, health and safety, human rights, and sustainable development, to name but a few.Footnote 9 This order undoubtedly reflects and preserves the preferences and power of the United States and other Western countries.Footnote 10 Nonetheless, it is engagement with this order that has enabled Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa to gain sufficient economic power to be considered rising or resurgent powers. This form of liberal international order is thus largely embraced by Russia and other rising powers, as it affirms their rights as states and recognizes that with greater power should come not only greater rights but also greater responsibilities for maintaining global peace and prosperity. As a result, it is incorrect to assume that foreign policy elites in Russia and other rising powers are necessarily anti-liberal, as they overwhelmingly support Enlightenment rationalism and Charter liberalism, and they generally do not contest the rules of that system.
Two Anti-Pluralist Liberalisms and the Post–Cold War World Order
The rules of the post-war order began to be challenged in the late 1970s with the rise in the West of two forms of “liberal anti-pluralism” predicated on human and economic freedoms.Footnote 11 These two liberalisms insist that the international community has a right, legally, institutionally, or morally, “to question seriously the democratic and humanitarian credentials of its members” and that private nonstate actors have rights at the international level that outweigh states’ rights to nonintervention in their domestic affairs.Footnote 12 This ushered in the current era in which the West demands that states increasingly resemble one another internally, both politically and economically.
Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century and accelerating in the 1990s, a wave of liberal humanism challenged the doctrine of sovereign equality that had enshrined states as the proper vessels of sovereignty. The international community has increasingly elevated the legal rights of individuals against their governments.Footnote 13 This is not only a Western movement, as suggested by the 2002 creation of the International Criminal Court and the UN World Summit's unanimous establishment of a state's Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). Nor was this done against the will of Russia and China, as the Security Council has repeatedly reaffirmed the RtoP principle.Footnote 14 No longer is the sovereign state system universally accepted as a horizontal and equal society, with states unable to hold other states accountable for domestic policies and behavior. Instead, a new hierarchy based on political “good governance” has been established.
The third form of liberalism gained prominence in 1979 with the onset of the Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal revolution. Here the mantra was “Privatize, liberalize, and deregulate.” This led to the Washington Consensus, in which Western states, along with the IMF and World Bank, exhorted states to give way to private actors in governing the economy.Footnote 15 One of the most far-reaching neoliberal reforms, the removal of capital controls, began in the 1970s. This freed capital to move globally, significantly reducing state sovereignty over macroeconomic policy.Footnote 16 By the 1990s the neoliberal economic ideology had largely replaced “embedded” or social democratic liberalism as the framework for international economic order. In so doing, it created a contest of authorities among states, their polities, and private economic actors.Footnote 17
Also beginning in the 1970s, technological advancements revolutionized global systems of production, finance, transportation, and communications. Multinational corporations and transnational financial markets created a new form of global economy that is more interdependent and complex than even the golden age of pre-1914 capitalism.Footnote 18 The extraordinary growth of global financial markets began to pose ever greater threats to states’ abilities to manage their economies. As a result, “territorial sovereignty,” Richard Falk lamented in 1997, has become “diminished on a spectrum of issues in such a serious manner as to subvert the capacity of states to control and protect the internal life of society, and non-state actors hold an increasing proportion of power and influence in the shaping of world order.”Footnote 19
Many countries, including the BRICS, prospered enormously through their partial conformity to the neoliberal economic order. However, the 1998 Asian financial crisis that engulfed Brazil and Russia led to widespread criticism of the Washington Consensus and demands for a new international economic order. That new order has yet to take form even after the 2008 global financial crisis shattered what was left of the West's legitimacy to impose rules for the global economy. It was Brazil, China, and India's partial rather than full conformity to the neoliberal order that largely saved them from the disastrous consequences of the 2008 financial crisis. When they tried to exercise their newfound economic muscle in the World Trade Organization, however, their Development Agenda was blocked first by the West and ultimately by their own internal disagreements. The West meanwhile began to pursue “open” economic regionalism in the form of megaregional trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, rather than cooperate with these newly strong economies under the existing global nondiscriminatory trading order.
Russia and the Liberal International Order
Russian leaders have been a bit at sea in a world in which democratization, economic liberalization, technological change, and increasing economic and climatological interdependence have softened sovereignty, elevated nonstate actors to the world stage, and made global security inseparable from the choices that states make regarding human security. Since the mid-1990s, being unquestioningly pro-American has been seen as unbefitting Russia's greatness, yet Russian elites remain essentially inclined to see Russia as part of the West. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, they attempted and ultimately rejected rapid and total domestic liberalization after a disastrous dalliance over the course of the 1990s. In 1993, Boris Yeltsin forced a hyper-presidential constitution onto a protesting parliament, using tanks to shell the parliament building. This, combined with overt U.S. support for his reelection in 1996, did not give Russians a positive image of their new democratic system. From 1992 to 1997, Russia also underwent neoliberal “shock therapy” under the guidance of the United States and the IMF. Economic liberalization produced massively undervalued insider privatization of state assets, hyperinflation and price volatility, and lack of state funds to pay state employees for much of a decade. Colossal debt led to desperate government efforts to raise foreign currency reserves, which ultimately led to mass capital flight during the 1998 Asian financial crisis, currency devaluation, and government default. The experience permanently convinced Russia's new entrepreneurs and leaders to stash their wealth outside their country, depriving Russia of much-needed funds for investment. President Yeltsin resigned abruptly in late 1999, leaving his designated replacement, Vladimir Putin, to handle the fallout from this crisis.Footnote 20
In foreign policy, Russia's post–cold war leaders were never quite willing simply to take the West's lead. They instead focused on Russia's distinctiveness as a great military and nuclear power, a two-continent-sized Eurasian country with vast energy resources, and a unique multicultural civilization. Even under Putin, most Russians today want to participate in the contemporary, Western-dominated international society, but on their own terms—terms that were defined in the early 1800s, before the global dominance of liberalism.Footnote 21 But perhaps most fundamentally, owing to the Soviet legacy, they reject out of hand any kind of ideology as a guide to foreign policy, preferring instead pragmatic realism.Footnote 22 In the view of Russian policymakers, what rocked their commitment to the liberal post–cold war order was the marriage of U.S. military power to liberal anti-pluralism over the course of 1998–2011, beginning with NATO's intervention in Kosovo and most recently in Libya.Footnote 23 This was, in their view, an unprecedented, unwarranted, and illegal overthrow of sovereignty and great-power management—two of the fundamental rules of coexistence that make up international society. Many Russian foreign policy experts therefore pejoratively refer to the U.S.-led order as “collective unilateralism,” not multilateralism.Footnote 24
In these very fundamental ways, Russian and Western decision-makers have significantly different understandings of the values underpinning world politics. Today, both of the liberal anti-pluralist challenges to the pluralism of the UN order are viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility, by mainstream Russian foreign policy elites, a view that is shared to a greater or lesser degree by their peers in Brazil, China, and India. Yet it is not clear that they have an alternative or non-liberal world order firmly in mind.
As the preceding suggests, the question of whether it is democracy and human rights or rather sovereign statehood that is sacrosanct will continue to produce the deepest—and deadliest—conflict between Russia and the West.Footnote 25 It is these issues, together with the perceived lack of respect for Russia's great-power status, that have led Russia to use force repeatedly in the post–cold war era. Russian leaders simply do not view human rights or human security as an international concern. From the Russian perspective, the United States and its NATO allies are set on the “further demolition of international law,” evidenced “by [the] barbaric bombing of Yugoslavia, the separation of Kosovo, and aggression against Iraq and Libya.”Footnote 26 As human rights and democracy promotion are likely to continue to be the fault lines between Russia and the West, it is worth reprising how Russia came to see them as threats not only to the UN system but also to itself.
Russia first used force in response to the West's liberal anti-pluralism during the Kosovo crisis in 1998–1999. From Russia's perspective, NATO's war against Serbia broke every one of international society's rules of coexistence: it ignored Russia's historical role as a great power and protector of the Southern Slavs, discredited the Security Council great-power management system, and violated sovereignty over an internal matter. When NATO's campaign began, Russian troops immediately moved from Bosnia to seize the Pristina airport ahead of NATO forces, surprising NATO commanders and delighting the Russian populace.
The conflicting worldviews between Russia and Western powers became much more serious after the pro-democracy “colored” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s. Whereas Kosovo challenged Russia's status as a global power, Western support for pro-Western forces in the former Soviet Union denied Russia the status of even being a regional great power with exclusive rights in its sphere of influence. Then in 2008, at U.S. behest, NATO stated that Georgia and Ukraine would one day join the alliance, a declaration met with fury in Moscow. A few months later, Russia invaded Georgia, the most overtly pro-U.S. ally in the former Soviet Union, nominally to protect the rights of Russian citizens and prevent ethnic cleansing. Russia's action was a war for status, a way to re-stake its claim as a great power with special rights and responsibilities in its sphere of influence. Russia also put the West on notice that if it could unilaterally invade in the name of human rights, Russia could too.Footnote 27
In 2014 sustained protests in Ukraine pressuring the pro-Russian president to align with the European Union caused him to suddenly flee the country. Moscow declared it a coup d’état orchestrated by the United States and the EU. Shortly thereafter, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and invaded Eastern Ukraine, again ostensibly to protect the human rights of Russian nationals. This was followed by intervention in Syria in 2015. According to Sergei Karaganov, a foreign policy advisor to all three post-Soviet Russian presidents, the rationale there was “to keep the terrorist threat as far away from Russia as possible, and to strengthen its position in the region and the world at large. Russia's action is quite consonant with the spirit of the status quo power and complies with the Russian and Soviet legalistic tradition; that is, it relies on the invitation of the legitimate government of Syria.”Footnote 28
The King is Dead, Long Live the King!
It is through such reactive efforts that Russia has attempted to redefine the contemporary international order as an intentional great-power management system and to cast the liberal West as a threat to that order. In its own view, “Russia responded in the Transcaucasia and Ukraine despite its strong legalist approach to foreign policy,” further signifying a return to a world where the “role of military force coupled with responsible and skillful diplomacy is coming to the fore as a means of maintaining relative global peace.”Footnote 29 By this definition, the United States is an irresponsible state not worthy of being labeled a great power because of its reckless ideological wars against sovereign nations and its heavy-handed democracy promotion. Russia and China much prefer an absolutist or “hard” sovereignty, rather than a sovereignty contingent on good governance and a government's responsibility to protect the human rights of its population. The former conception situates them as major players in a hierarchy of sovereign nations, while the latter challenges their position as full members of the sovereignty group. Such efforts to redefine the international order as a great-power management system, as the preceding examples suggest, will provide ample grounds for the use of force in what Russia views as its sphere of influence and more widely in support of sovereign governments under threat from violent nonstate actors.
Russian officialdom may have in mind the creation of a conservative interstate order akin to the early nineteenth-century Concert of Europe system, what Karaganov calls a “Concert of Nations.”Footnote 30 His model would resemble the Vienna Congress System designed to keep down revolutionary France and especially republican nationalism.Footnote 31 The original Concert of Europe great-power management system, created in 1815 by Great Britain and the conservative Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, is claimed to have kept the peace among the great powers until 1914. A new Concert of Nations, in Karaganov's view, could similarly keep the peace and allow economic development for a hundred years if the great powers act appropriately.Footnote 32 Greater Eurasia, jointly led by China and Russia, would contain the radical inclinations of a U.S.-centered West. The model relies on a grand partnership between Russia and China in which “China will provide investment and resources, and Russia will contribute security and geopolitical stability.”Footnote 33 Of course, some historians question how well and how long the original Concert truly prevented war among the great powers, as the late nineteenth century saw plenty of great-power wars fought across four continents.Footnote 34
This mainstream Russian vision of international order is not necessarily illiberal. Indeed, it accepts the Enlightenment rationalism that calls for reason to rule force, and to a degree it reflects the noninterventionist national liberalism of John Stuart Mill.Footnote 35 This vision of world order is on one hand compatible with Charter liberalism in that it supports religious and political pluralism in a world made up of sovereign national states free to organize and disorganize their societies as they see fit. On the other hand, its insistence on a nineteenth-century version of great-power politics, in which spheres of influence are governed by separate laws from those of the UN Charter, is incompatible with Charter liberalism, though it is commensurate with U.S. and Soviet practice throughout the cold war. Such a global order embraces “conservative realism,” Russia's status as a great stabilizing military power, and states as the only actors in world affairs.Footnote 36
When we take this model together with Russia's renewed commitment to multilateral institutions in Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific, we see a state seeking rules-based means to govern interstate relations mainly through the addition of new multilateral and regional institutions, not a grand plan to overthrow the existing system. Russia has recently “pivoted” to Asia in a more serious way, though its leaders’ instincts and centuries of practice mean we still see Russia focused more on the transatlantic region than the Pacific one. Russia is actively seeking to build a new and institutionalized governance system for Greater Eurasia, recognizing full well the need for institutional frameworks to manage its Asian peer competitor. The good news is that Russia is not per se committed to geopolitics. It sees the value of international institutions and cooperative organizations not only as a means of building influence and allies but also and importantly as a means of cooperating on mutual interests and identifying and potentially resolving points of conflict, as well as a crucial means of limiting the use of force among great powers.
There are an impressive number of regional organizations that Russia and China are developing in Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific. While many were created to bind Eurasian states to Russia, they embody on paper most of the liberal principles we find in the UN system. The BRICS club and its related development bank similarly are founded on the multilateral liberal tenets of the global development institutions, just without the neoliberal conditionality that characterized them until recently.Footnote 37 And Russian liberals remain a fixture in Putin's entourage and government. They continue to argue that there is no profound crisis in the existing liberal order and that Russia has much to gain from continued participation in it. Enlightenment rationalism, a “set of rules and standards of behavior observed by all players,” and open global governance are much more desirable for Russia than the alternative.Footnote 38
Would a Post-Liberal World Order Benefit Russia?
Outside the West and in Russia the softening of sovereignty brought on by globalization and neoliberalism is often seen as a strategic grand plan of the United States to assimilate, undermine, or contain its rivals and enrich itself. In this view, as U.S. hegemony wanes, sovereignty will automatically harden again as U.S.-style globalization disappears. This, according to prominent Russians, will only redound to Russia's benefit.Footnote 39 Russian experts recognize that their country is not an economic great power.Footnote 40 Putin started out in 1999 to rectify this situation, but his limited success to date reflects not only the difficulty the leadership has had in creating a high-tech economy but also the Russians’ long-standing belief that military might and a strong state are the main prerequisites for great-power status.Footnote 41
Putin's view of global economic integration stems fundamentally from economic nationalism, or perhaps more aptly neo-imperialism.Footnote 42 This led Putin to adopt what Nigel Gould-Davies calls a “sovereign globalization” strategy, essentially neomercantilism under the guise of economic integration, which in effect limited economic interdependence between Russia and the outside world while creating European dependence on Russian oil and gas. This approach succeeded in creating a Russian middle class and a stratosphere of hyper-wealthy Russian individuals. Economic recovery and stability are the primary sources of Putin's extraordinary popularity at home. The World Bank reports that “from the 1998–99 crisis until 2011, Russia experienced nearly uninterrupted strong growth and unprecedented gains in shared prosperity,” making Russia the sixth largest economy in the world in terms of purchasing power parity, up four places since 1998.Footnote 43 Some, I believe mistakenly, even suggest that Russia has the longest staying power of all the BRICS.Footnote 44
Such a vision is challenged by the few Russian foreign affairs experts who focus on how the global political economy has enmeshed the state system. Millions of Russians, including Putin and his powerful supporters, have benefited mightily from Russia's engagement with the global economy and its integration into European markets, not to mention their use of sovereignty-free zones such as offshore financial havens. De-globalization, which some argue began in 2008, puts all this at risk. According to Aleksandr Losev, a director of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (a prominent Russian think tank) and hedge-fund manager, Russia does not come out the winner in a protectionist world in which the United States will be able to regroup economically through its internal market and in which “China's imperial mission implies not only the projection of power and extension of its influence to the periphery, but also control of the political, economic, and information space.” Losev foresees Russia losing its political independence to China in the latter's bipolar standoff with an economically revived United States.Footnote 45
Moreover, Russian foreign policy elites and many Western international relations scholars have yet to grapple with the deep-seated features of contemporary capitalism that distinguish the present global economic order from previous ones—features that have both softened sovereignty and enabled the rise of Brazil, China, and India as economic powerhouses. Of particular importance here are three sources of private power over states: the globalization of production (and foreign direct investment) that has intimately linked the fates of economies in Europe, North America, and Asia; the globalization of high-tech research and development that has created cooperative alliances among companies in these regions; and the enormous “shadow banking sector” that has become one of the largest sources of finance since the 1990s.Footnote 46 The very same globalist nonstate actors lambasted by Russian elites as threatening the dominance of states in the international system are today too deeply engrained in—and too politically and economically necessary for—every country engaged in the global economy for their power and presence to be rolled back by a single state, or even a coalition of states. Their clout, together with still robust multilateral institutions and the globalization of technological development, is likely to temper China's rejection of the current global economic system.
Given all of the above, it is not at all clear that Russia can prosper in a more protectionist global economy, or in one that continues globalizing. Putin's sovereign globalization strategy is too dependent on a world in which Russia is an energy superpower, oil and gas prices remain high, and technology changes slowly and is driven mainly by state programs.Footnote 47 Such an approach, which has failed under conditions of global openness, will become all the more difficult in a world dominated by economic nationalism. Putin's strategy is also fundamentally reliant on energy as Russia's “super power,” a power now eclipsed by the shale-gas revolution in the United States and new estimates of large Chinese shale-gas reserves.Footnote 48 Russia's energy-export-based economy is also vulnerable to the impact of a global shift to cleaner fuels, and its own stagnating population makes the Russian market too small to galvanize high levels of economic growth. Russia's economic pivot to Asia is further complicated by its lack of population and infrastructure in its Far East, while China faces the need for more resource-rich land for its burgeoning population. In-migration of Chinese nationals has already proceeded to such an extent that a Chinese national became mayor of a Russian city. None of this gives Russia a durable footing among the world's advanced economies.
The final challenge for Russia in promoting a new state-centric order is one of its own making. Putin has very successfully fostered a conservative and xenophobic nationalism at home over the past decade. More recently, Russia has sponsored far-right nationalism and distrust of government in the West.Footnote 49 One could locate evidence of this strategy's success in the vote for Brexit, the increased seats of far-right parties in European parliaments, and the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But this would be attributing too much foresight and influence to Russia, as the forces that brought about the massive increase in global prosperity in the last forty years are the same that have created rising inequality.Footnote 50 Together with increased climate-induced conflict and migration, these have created a political backlash against the establishment political parties that have failed to address them. Thus, while ethno-nationalism is on the rise, it is a mistake to give Russia too much credit for the effects of broader economic and climatological forces that have generated population movement on a scale unseen since the great migrations of the nineteenth century.
In seeking to unleash nationalism, Russia is playing a dangerous game it has never in its long history mastered. Putin is more likely to resemble Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II, whose empire crumbled in the face of economic inequality and repressed democratic aspirations. Putin hopes that fomenting conservative nationalism can hold off the democratic stirrings unleashed in 2011 when he announced he would return to the Kremlin. He has taken great pains to instill patriotic nationalism as the ideal that unifies the eighty-five titular nations of the Russian Federation and to wed them to “leader democracy” and “managed capitalism.” Yet such nationalism is precisely what ended both the imperial age, which official Russia pines for, and the Soviet Union. Playing the nationalism game is sooner to unravel the Russian Federation, as well as China and India, than it is to overturn the Western capitalist order. Unlike these three multilingual, multiethnic, multi-confessional former empires, the West has had the bitter experience of two devastating world wars and has built a regional and global order to overcome the nationalist forces that threaten democracy and market capitalism. Despite its current problems, the West has a well-honed toolkit for overcoming such threats in the form of the multilateral economic and political institutions that formed the post–World War II order. Russia, by contrast, stirs a beehive by fostering nationalism at home. In the medium term, Russia's turn to Asia for its export markets may generate anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment among the elite and broader society. Such sentiment appeared immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when conservative and nationalist media outlets warned of a “yellow peril” invading the Russian Far East, and continued a subterranean existence in the form of daily violence against Asians in Russia's cities. It is more likely that nationalism will fracture Russia's relations with both Europe and China in ways that harm Russia's economic prospects more than it harms either Europe or China. That fracturing in turn could tip the world again into a great-power war, but one that begins in Eurasia. And it would make Russia, and most other countries, much poorer.
Conclusion
As noted, while Russian leaders are clearly dissatisfied with the United States and the European Union, they are not inherently opposed to a liberal world order. The question of Russia's desire to change a liberal international order hangs on the type of liberalism embedded in that order. The liberalism of Enlightenment rationality, popular sovereignty, and normative legalism enshrined in the United Nations system are familiar and welcome principles to Russia, ones that it has claimed to uphold since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia therefore would likely be content with a return to the post–World War II great-power management system and the liberal pluralism of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods era—if the United States were only to abide by its rules and respect Russia's great-power rights to its sphere of influence.
