ABSTRACT
Russia is faced with a major choice in the direction of its future foreign policy. This chapter provides an attempt to contribute to both of those goals by examining the foreign policy preferences of a key set of Russian domestic actors: managers of the remnants of Soviet defense industrial firms. Western actions can help to determine the international economic preferences of Russia's military-industrial complex. The particular policies they should favor as a sector include the freedom to search for foreign markets, the encouragement of foreign investment, and state subsidies to improve their own cost competitiveness. The firm-based model seems to describe well the conflicting international economic interests of Russian defense industrial managers and, by association, their foreign policy preferences. The West could choose to view the situation in realist terms, using the dependence of Russian defense industrial firms on Western openness to influence indirectly Russian foreign policy.
