The Coming Risks to Russian Power

Foreign Affairs | Andrey Kortuno

The United States has long dismissed Russian geopolitical influence by treating Moscow as a power in terminal decline since the 1980s. This persistent strategic assessment directly shaped Washington's post-Cold War policy agenda, including the expansion of NATO, which treated Russian security interests as a mere afterthought. This perception of decline originally congealed during the late Soviet era as the USSR exhibited severe imperial overstretch.

The subsequent collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself solidified Washington's dismissive posture. Tensions escalated further as the long-standing conflict over Ukraine transformed American dismissiveness into overt condescension. In March 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama explicitly characterized Russia as a weak regional power threatening its neighbors. This was a critical moment. Ultimately, Washington's policy decisions have consistently reflected this long-standing framework of Russian decline, shaping decades of intense bilateral friction and strategic instability across Europe.

Comment

American strategic planning during the post-Cold War era treated Russian security objections as secondary, a direct consequence of the perceived terminal decline of Moscow's power. This dismissive posture facilitated the rapid expansion of NATO, most notably during the 1999 accession of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. By framing Russia as a structurally weakened actor, Washington assumed that European security architecture could be unilaterally redrawn without triggering a sustainable military counter-response. This assumption fundamentally miscalculated the long-term durability of Russian regional deterrence.

The mechanism driving this miscalculation was the reliance on gross domestic product and institutional decay as the primary metrics of national power, ignoring Russia's residual nuclear superiority and geographic depth. Consequently, the Alliance's expansion proceeded without establishing a reciprocal security framework, leaving the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 functionally hollow. This structural disconnect ensured that any future Russian military modernisation would directly threaten NATO's highly exposed eastern flank along the Baltic corridor.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the structural assumptions underlying NATO's 1999 enlargement were based on a flawed metric of Russian national power, what does this reveal about the Alliance's current capacity to deter Moscow along the Baltic corridor?

The pattern of Russian military resilience suggests that traditional Western metrics of national power, which heavily weight economic output, fail to account for Moscow's highly centralised resource mobilisation and asymmetric warfare capabilities. Consequently, the Alliance's current deterrence posture along the Baltic corridor remains vulnerable to rapid, localised Russian escalations that bypass conventional economic constraints. This trajectory indicates that geographic proximity and concentrated artillery mass continue to offset Russia's broader macroeconomic weaknesses.

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