Department of National Security Affairs - Department of National Security Affairs
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Global Connections Speaker Series
Date: February 17, 2016 to February 17, 2016
Time: 1200-1330
Location: Glasgow Hall, Room 322
Paul Kennedy, in his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000, developed the theory that imperial decline sets in when expenditures on internal and external security exceed the economic resources of the state. The Soviet Union was one of his case studies. The question to be discussed now is whether current Russian policies are replicating Soviet policies of overextension, i.e., whether Putin is taking Russia down the same road travelled by Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. Putin, after all, in 2011 said: “The Soviet Union, that, too was Russia – only under a different name.” Three years earlier, in a rare moment of publicly taking “an objective and realistic look at the situation,” he acknowledged that unless radical and comprehensive changes were made, the very “existence” of Russia was at risk. Such changes were never attempted. Not only did the “modernization” rhetoric, when Medvedev was president, fail to be transformed into substance but the rhetoric itself was scrapped by Putin once he resumed office as president. If then, Russia is on the decline, as the combined impact of collapsing oil prices, devaluation of the ruble, Western sanctions and GDP contraction suggest, what are we to expect: more risky and costly “adventurist” policies to shore up internal legitimacy or a Russian “reset,” that is, a return to cooperation with the United States and Europe?
Dr. Hannes Adomeit is a political scientist focused on Russia. Adomeit was professor for Russian and European studies at the Warsaw campus of the College of Europe until 2013. Previously, he served as senior research associate and head of the research section on Russia and Eurasia at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin, as a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and in other teaching and research roles.
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