RUSSIA`S MISREADING OF AMERICA FIRST / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Russia’s Misreading of America First

Multipolarity means little without the ability to withstand U.S. coercion.

By Geopolitical Futures 

By Andrew Ryvkin

Moscow has pursued a multipolar world order to replace the era of U.S. dominance that has prevailed since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

A number of major geopolitical developments appeared to favor Moscow’s vision, chief among them the rise of China. 

For Moscow, a key piece of the puzzle was supposed to be America’s withdrawal from the Eastern Hemisphere and its tacit recognition of Russia’s sphere of influence, primarily in the post-Soviet space. 

But the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran showed Moscow that it had fundamentally misjudged U.S. President Donald Trump’s America First doctrine as isolationist and accommodating of Russia’s sphere of interests. 

Now, Russia is faced with a fundamental problem: If it wants to pursue a multipolar world, it first needs to create a security architecture that could withstand an America that’s emboldened, aggressive and unrestrained.

In the past five years, Moscow has made a number of fundamental, if not catastrophic, foreign policy miscalculations. 

Its invasion of Ukraine was supposed to end quickly, with a government in Kyiv loyal to Moscow. 

The Kremlin also appears to have modeled the Western response on its experience in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and faced substantial sanctions – but not the kind that required a wholesale reorientation of the Russian economy. 

Although it had prepared for some of the measures it expected – such as being cut off from the SWIFT interbank messaging network – it was clearly unprepared for Europe to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian assets, sever economic ties, drastically reduce imports of Russian hydrocarbons and provide massive military aid to Ukraine. 

Moscow’s third mistake, no less fundamental, was the way it approached relations with Trump.

Moscow initially saw Trump’s 2024 win as a chance to normalize relations between the two countries. 

Trump’s stated foreign policy objectives, such as reorienting America toward the Western Hemisphere, reducing its military presence in Europe and minimizing values-based diplomacy in favor of a more pragmatic approach to non-democratic states, were seen as beneficial to Russia. 

The Kremlin also considered Trump to be interested in downgrading the war in Ukraine from a central issue in bilateral relations to a secondary one, focusing instead on commercial projects and traditional areas of cooperation, such as nuclear nonproliferation and space exploration. 

But almost 18 months into Trump’s second term, Moscow finds itself increasingly cornered – and shocked – by an American foreign policy it has failed to predict, interact with or even understand.

Moscow is now confronted with an America that is aggressively pursuing its geopolitical objectives with less regard for alliances, institutions or, at times, even its own laws. 

For many in the Russian foreign policy establishment, this approach is made more dangerous by the absence of the Cold War’s checks and balances or the values-based diplomacy of the 1990s and 2000s. 

Trump’s stated pivot to the Western Hemisphere is real, as is his reluctance to promote Western values that Russia has long viewed as hostile and undermining of its political system. 

But, to Moscow’s dismay, this has not translated into a willingness to let Russia establish its own sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. 

The multipolar world remains one dominated by the United States. 

As one Russian foreign policy analyst put it, “Trump respects spheres of influence, but only his own.”

More dangerous for Moscow is the broader shift in how the United States conducts foreign policy. 

Russia remains under sanctions and is still being pressured to reach a peace deal on Ukraine. 

Trump’s willingness to blur the line between negotiations, sanctions and military force in pursuit of a favorable outcome has raised alarm in Moscow. 

Many in the Russian foreign policy establishment agree that a direct Iran- or Venezuela-style confrontation with the United States is unlikely because of Russia’s nuclear status. 

But they now view sanctions not merely as an instrument of economic pressure but as an instrument of war.

For a country that is already the most heavily sanctioned in the world, that suggests, as some argue, that some form of force may eventually be used against Russia. 

Under the current White House administration, America has already stepped up military pressure on Russia, albeit indirectly.

Under Trump, Ukraine no longer refrains from conducting long-range strikes inside Russian territory. 

That had been a fundamental limitation during the first years of the war – not only because of limits to Ukraine’s arsenal at the time but also because the Biden administration pursued a policy of non-escalation toward Moscow. 

While refusing to negotiate with Russia, the administration generally responded to Russian escalations rather than initiating its own, as reflected in its reluctance to provide Ukraine with certain weapons systems and, when it did, imposing strict limits on how they could be used.

Trump entered negotiations with Russia, but at the same time, it became clear that restrictions on Ukrainian strikes inside Russia had effectively been lifted. 

Western intelligence now helps Ukrainian missiles and drones evade Russian air defenses and strike Russian oil refineries and military production sites – to the point that Ukraine is conducting major air raids on Moscow.

This has pushed Moscow toward a different understanding of multipolarity than the one it spent years promoting. 

The older version was essentially political: The United States would lose its monopoly, China would rise, the West would fragment, and Russia would regain room to act as one of several great powers. 

The reality Moscow is confronted with is different: Multipolarity stems from the state’s ability to resist coercion. 

And Russia’s primary goal becomes less about securing its sphere of influence and more about building a security architecture against the new and emboldened United States.

Judging by the mood in Moscow, the war against Iran is likely to produce a more sober Russian strategy. 

The Kremlin no longer expects Trump’s America to withdraw from the Eastern Hemisphere in a way that would recognize Russia’s sphere of influence. 

Nor does it expect a stable settlement with the West. 

Sanctions, in the words of one senior analyst, are a matter of decades, not years.

There is also a growing recognition in Moscow that Russia’s sanctions-era commercial realignment has limited political value. 

China, India, Turkey and other non-Western partners have helped Moscow soften the impact of Western restrictions, but they have not become a security coalition. 

Russia has accumulated partners – China foremost among them – but, aside from North Korea, not allies in the military-political sense. 

Even within the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which Moscow leads, Russia carries more responsibility than it receives in return. 

What it lacks is the one instrument that would make multipolarity meaningful below the nuclear threshold: a bloc capable of raising the cost of American pressure without forcing Moscow to rely immediately on nuclear deterrence.

Russia is not abandoning its pursuit of a multipolar world order, but it no longer assumes that such an order can be established through a bilateral deal with the United States. 

After the war in Iran, Moscow views such agreements as either temporary or fundamentally unreliable. 

Instead, it believes a new security architecture must be built first, with nuclear deterrence at its core, Eurasian partnerships around it, and new military-political arrangements capable of withstanding prolonged pressure from a United States that declares maximalist goals and is willing to use intimidation, threats, tariffs and force to achieve them.

Andrew Ryvkin is a journalist and analyst who writes for Air Mail and The Atlantic on Russia and U.S.-Russia relations. 

He previously worked in Russian politics and media, and has lectured at universities including Harvard and Yale on the Kremlin’s political messaging.