ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union may have retreated from a policy of globalism, but the Soviet Union did not last that long. For the new Russia state, its military capabilities ensured that policy would be torn between two conflicting impulses. This is always the dilemma: new tactics and new weapons open up new opportunities to the policy makers, and an awareness that something could be done very easily becomes a belief that it should. In the light of the problems besetting Russia, the temptation to use military force in diplomacy proved near irresistible. This was despite the best efforts of those who took Afghanistan and effective defeat in the ruinous game of financial beggar-my-neighbour that we called the Cold War as proof positive that Russia's interests could only be advanced by diplomacy, co-operation and regional and global integration. Men like Foreign Minister Kozyrev, for example, for whom the only future for Russia lay in close alliance with democratic states in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and for whom the Cold War was definitively over. Heirs of the backlash that followed the war, these 'Atlanticists' were the champions of a moral and open-handed foreign policy, of transparency in global dealings, of 'normal' diplomatic relations.
