Alexandros Petersen of ISS and CSIS has a short op/ed in the Boston Globe today pondering the “risks and rewards” or Russia’s resurgence. I often feel increasingly isolated when I insist that Russia’s return to the global power brokers’ table can be good for the international community, so long as they are held accountable for their decisions and policies and drawn into the same rule-based systems of international law just like everyone else. So far, this is not what is happening, but more attention should be given to the “Vancouver to Vladivostok” security alliance proposal.

This is the new Russia talking – a phoenix that has risen from the ashes of the 1990s, when the former Soviet empire was plunged into chaos by robber-baron capitalism and shamed by an ineffectual (and often drunk) President Boris Yeltsin. The Russia rebuilt by former KGB operative Vladimir Putin in the past eight years has relied on its vast territory’s immense energy wealth and on the export of arms.