ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how global structural changes and domestic systemic changes have affected Russian perceptions about and policies toward the United States. Clearly, with the demise of strategic bipolarity, the collapse of the USSR, Russia's economic crisis, and the emerging multipolarity in which (geo)economics and managing trade relations are becoming more salient than geopolitics and managing the arms race. In terms of the external structural determinants of Russia's relations with the United States, in the immediate post-Soviet period these continued, as in the late-Soviet period, to be primarily related to economics and questions of aid. In order to better compete in the global economy Russia would give up its global military-strategic role. In the bipolar East-West struggle, military-strategic issues were dominant. At the psychological level, perceptions of the United States, as the significant other in the Cold War bipolar competition for power and influence, affected individual leaders' reasoning, judgements, and policies, from Stalin through to Mikhail Gorbachev.
