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Russia Chooses Autarchy—and Isolation—Over Cooperation

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Posted: May 6th, 2018

By William Courtney

William Courtney is a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia. He is currently an adjunct senior fellow at RAND, a non profit, non partisan research institution.

In a provocative new essay, Vladislav Surkov, a top aide to President Vladimir Putin, says Russia is ending a centuries-long quest to join the West and preparing for “100 years (200? 300?) of geopolitical solitude.” If Russia goes this way it will be because of unwise policies, not a Western cold shoulder.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez told of fictional Macondo, an isolated town that became a bustling city then lost its way. Russia, too, has gone off course. A glaring example is its aggression in Ukraine, of which Surkov is a Kremlin architect. The war has alienated Russia’s largest neighbor and driven that neighbor westward, and led to unprecedented Russian isolation from the West.

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