Russian foreign policy is described as the “tyranny of the weak”. Explain how judiciously Russia has made use of her weakness vis-a-vis the West and USA. (1996)
The “tyranny of the weak” describes a state that turns its own fragility into bargaining power: the stronger side pays because the weak side’s collapse would cost it more. In the 1990s, under Boris Yeltsin, the economy shrank, Chechnya exposed the army, and Russian foreign policy moved from Andrei Kozyrev’s pro-Western line to Yevgeny Primakov’s multipolarity (1996). Yet Moscow repeatedly made the West underwrite its transition.
The logic: weakness as leverage
- Thomas C. Schelling (The Strategy of Conflict, 1960) showed that a party unable to concede, or likely to fall apart, can win concessions. Robert O. Keohane’s essay on “the big influence of small allies” (1971) made the same point about weak clients.
- In terms of asymmetric interdependence (Keohane and Joseph S. Nye), the West was more exposed to Russian disorder than Russia to Western displeasure.
How Russia used its weakness
1. The nuclear card. The fear of “loose nukes” brought Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction funding from 1991. Under the Lisbon Protocol (1992) and the Budapest Memorandum (1994), Russia became the sole nuclear successor of the Soviet Union, with Western help in moving warheads out of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
2. “Yeltsin or chaos”. The 1993 Duma success of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party and the communist revival of 1995–96 let Moscow present any reform failure as a threat to the West. It obtained an IMF loan of about $10 billion (1996) before the presidential election, Paris Club rescheduling and the $22.6 billion package of July 1998. Strobe Talbott’s The Russia Hand (2002) shows how fully Washington accepted that Yeltsin’s survival came first.
3. Status without power. Russia joined the Council of Europe (1996), was invited to the Denver “Summit of the Eight” (1997) and then into the G8 (1998). It also secured the NATO–Russia Founding Act (May 1997) with a Permanent Joint Council, in effect compensation for enlargement.
4. A free hand in the near abroad. CIS “peacekeeping” in Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan, and Chechnya, drew only muted criticism.
5. Spoiler and seller. Russia used its Security Council veto to shape outcomes on Bosnia and Iraq, and kept selling arms and nuclear technology: Bushehr to Iran, fighters to China and India. India felt both sides of this: Moscow signed a new Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation (January 1993) without the 1971 security clause, and in 1993 it dropped the cryogenic engine technology transfer under US pressure, proof that weakness also made it pliable.
How judicious was it?
Shrewd in the short run
- Moscow secured money, a nuclear monopoly and great-power symbols that its real power did not warrant, and set the terms of Western engagement.
Self-defeating over time
- Russia could not stop NATO’s 1999 enlargement or the Kosovo bombing. Primakov’s mid-Atlantic U-turn (March 1999) was protest, not influence.
- The August 1998 default exposed borrowed stability; aid tied to painful reforms discredited the liberals.
- Bailouts bought dependence and resentment. Stephen F. Cohen (Failed Crusade, 2000) argued that America’s missionary reform project deepened Russia’s collapse; the humiliation story of the 1990s later grounded Vladimir Putin’s revisionism.
Conclusion
Russia used its weakness judiciously as a tactic: it extracted resources, recognition and nuclear centralisation that a weak state could not otherwise have obtained. It was poor as a strategy: leverage resting on the threat of one’s own collapse wears out once that threat is believed or exhausted. The resentment it left shaped Russia’s later turn against the West, up to the war in Ukraine.