Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest

We all now live in a paranoid and polarized world of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s making. Through guile and disruption, the Russian leader has resurrected his country’s status as a force to be reckoned with. From foreign policy expert Angela Stent comes “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest” (2019, Twelve) a must-read dissection of present-day Russian motives on the global stage.

How did Russia manage to emerge resurgent on the world stage and play a weak hand so effectively? Is it because Putin is a brilliant strategist? Or has Russia stepped into a vacuum created by the West’s distraction with its own domestic problems and U.S. ambivalence about whether it still wants to act as a superpower? In her follow-up to “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century” (2014), Stent examines Russia’s turbulent past, how it has influenced Putin, the Russians’ understanding of their position on the global stage and their future ambitions—and their conviction that the West has tried to deny them a seat at the table of great powers since the USSR collapsed.

This book looks at Russia’s key relationships—its downward spiral with the United States, Europe, and NATO; its ties to China, Japan, the Middle East; and with its neighbors, particularly the fraught relationship with Ukraine. “Putin’s World” will help Americans understand how and why the post-Cold War era has given way to a new, more dangerous world, one in which Russia poses a challenge to the United States in every corner of the globe—and one in which Russia has become a toxic and divisive subject in U.S. politics.