Russia and the New World Disorder

Once again, Bobo Lo has written an illuminating book on Russia's foreign policy. With elegance and precision, Lo has explained why Russia, as a declining power, is still so important for international stability, crisis management, and global issues. A must-read for now, and certainly a classic book for the next decade. - Dr. Thomas Gomart, Director of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), Paris Bobo Lo offers a trenchant analysis of the challenges and choices that confront Russia in today's rapidly changing global environment. He asks whether Russia is capable of jettisoning its imperial mindset and becoming a modern nation-state capable of interacting more effectively both with its neighbors and with the wider world. His answer is sobering - and sometimes surprising. -Angela Stent, Director, Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES), Georgetown University, and author of The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century. Bobo Lo's new book is elegantly written and has a masterful grasp of the pressures and temptations that have acted on Putin in foreign and security policy. He puts us all in his debt. -Robert Service, Fellow of the British Academy, and Emeritus Fellow, St Antony's College, University of Oxford [Lo] adopts a commendably calm approach to a topic which attracts plenty of polemic. At every stage he outlines Russian views of the world fairly, and highlights Western mistakes and misapprehensions, before proceeding to paint the full picture in precise and sometimes scathing terms....Mr Lo's book is the best attempt yet to explain Russia's unhappy relationship with the rest of the world. It does not make comforting reading. Nor should it. - The Economist It is an insightful take from one of the West's leading Russia scholars on the different tracks Russia's foreign policy can take, and the results of each. As Russia continues to position itself at the center of world affairs - from annexing Crimea to joining the Syrian civil war - policymakers should look at the world from the Kremlin's point of view and assess Russian strategic thinking from the inside out. This book does exactly that. - New Framework