Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute of the United States and Canada, which used to be so influential, recounts the economic and geopolitical indices showing the decline of Moscow's power since the triumphalist time of the 1970s ("Russia and the United States at the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century"). According to Rogov, Russia is now a second-rate power whose isolation and lack of allies and partners are the key problem that Russian foreign policy makers need to address. As for the future of Russo-American relations, they will depend on whether the United States seeks to exercise the power of the world's only superpower in a unipolar world or instead adapts to a more multipolar world in which good relations with allies and with Russia receive priority.