The New Rules: Debunking the 'Russia Threat' Hype

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was completing my doctoral dissertation on Warsaw Pact-Third World relations. I immediately understood that my time in Soviet studies was done. Why? Because I knew that Russia was full of brilliant political scientists who, once free to pursue their craft free of ideological constraints, would do a better job explaining things there than outsiders could.

The generation of Russian scholars that emerged in the post-Soviet era proved me right, and none has consistently impressed more than Dmitri Trenin, who heads up the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trenin, born a mere three years after Josef Stalin's passing in 1953, has just put out a brilliant book entitled, "Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story." In it, he adeptly explores and, better yet, measures the profound ideological distance between the Soviet Empire we once knew and the post-imperial Russia we struggle to understand today. ...