ABSTRACT
This chapter places Russian foreign and defence policies within the context of the post-cold war world. It analyses the role of the institutions and bodies involved in policy making. The chapter explains the influences upon foreign and defence policy making. It introduces the key foreign and defence policy documents. Russia has travelled a long way from its westernising domestic and foreign agenda of the early 1990s. This does not mean that Russia has reverted to knee-jerk anti-westernism as a result of the lingering soviet legacy or to a resurgent, retrograde Russian nationalism. However, during the cold war the two superpowers were engaged in a global ideological struggle, which is no longer the case. Putin defended Russia's national interests but he has not replaced soviet ideological anti-westernism with an Eurasianist belief in a perpetual EastWest conflict of civilisations. In the 1990s Russia was an impoverished, debtor-nation with outdated armed forces and reluctantly assumed the role of junior partner to the USA.
