Reset Expectations: Russian Assessments of U.S. Power

June 17, 2011

Russian perceptions of the United States and its role in the world provide a powerful lens not only for framing how Russia conceives its foreign and security policies—far more broadly than U.S.- Russia bilateral relations—but also for understanding deeply rooted notions of contemporary Russian identity and even its domestic political system. For most of the second half of the twentieth century the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a competitive struggle for global power and hegemony, and each country viewed its adversary as the principal “other” around which much of each country’s identity and foreign policy revolved. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a searing event for citizens of Russia as well as the other newly sovereign states of the region, yet for most policymakers and elites in Moscow old habits of measuring success or failure through a U.S.-centric prism have endured. Now, nearly 20 years past the Soviet collapse, perceptions of the United States probably remain more significant for Russia than for any other country in this study.