Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, dissects Russia’s foreign policy in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs in an article entitled, “Russia Reborn.” Following is the passage I think resonates the most. I’m going to keep my lead-in short here because the excerpt is long and not all of you are going to like it, so brace yourselves:

Although the Kremlin did succeed in proving its strategic independence from Europe and the United States, there can be no talk of Russia’s overall equality with either of the two. This leaves Moscow with a paradox: it is unwilling to become a junior partner to Brussels and Washington, but they will not accept it as an equal. Likewise, as Medvedev has pointed out, Russia is excluded from any meaningful security structure in Europe, but the notion of a new treaty that would formally block further NATO enlargement has been rejected. It is wholly unrealistic to think that Europe’s security will be jointly managed by a troika of United States and NATO, the EU, and Russia and the CSTO. Similarly, the idea of a grand bargain — in which Washington would allow Moscow to dominate the former Soviet states on its borders in exchange for its support for U.S. and Western policies in the Middle East and elsewhere — is a chimera. Unlike during the Great Game of the nineteenth century, the political futures of countries such as Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine will be decided not by strategists in Moscow or Washington but by people on the ground.