The bad old days are back? A structural and neoclassical realist assessment of Russian foreign policy
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2016-05-09
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en
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Modern realists are keen on using Russia’s increasingly assertive foreign policy posture to argue for the realist nature of international politics. In an attempt to gauge the cogency of such claims, this research applies two contemporary realist theories, structural realism and neoclassical realism, to Russia’s foreign policy from 1992 to 2014. I find that the explanatory power of structural realism remains limited as it would expect Russia to increase military spending and display balancing behavior towards its biggest objective rival: China. Instead, while mostly decreasing military spending, the vast majority of its external balancing behavior is directed towards the US. Neoclassical realism, with a focus on the filtering effect of worldviews of the country’s foreign policy executive, and applied to the founding of the SCO, seems much more apt to account for such deviant behavior as it explicates how Putin’s worldviews logically turned the US into Russia’s antipode and thus its most objective rival.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen