Russia's Many Foreign Policies
What are Russian foreign policy objectives? It depends on whom you ask.
In making assessments of Russia's behavior in the world, it is absolutely
critical that we recognize that Russia today is not a totalitarian state ruled by a
Communist Party with a single and clearly articulated foreign policy of expanding
world socialism and destroying world capitalism and democracy. That state
disappeared in 1991. Rather, Russia is a democratizing state - a weakly institutionalized
democracy with several deficiencies, but a democratizing state
nonetheless. Russia's foreign policy, in turn, is a product of domestic politics in
a pluralistic system.