The Sources of Russian Aggression

Sumantra Maitra is a senior editor at The American Conservative, a senior contributor to The Federalist, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, and an associate fellow at the Royal Historical Society, London.

Sumantra Maitra's work looks carefully, and from a realist perspective, at actual Russian behavior, its implications, and the conclusions we can draw from it, and all without the strong ideological spectacles that so many bring to the issues. He rightly concludes that Russian actions are rational, do not need some kind of Russian Sonderweg or civilizational exceptionalism to account for them, and can in large part be explained by its perceptions, justified or otherwise, of threats to its self-defined interests. At a moment when so many observers argue for the inevitability of an open-ended and possibly existential confrontation with Russia, it is timely to consider that a more clear-sighted realist approach could be more productive for Western policy-makers. --David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost, The Rt Hon. Lord Frost of Allenton, CMG PC This is a truly excellent study of Russian foreign policy since the Cold War. It makes it manifestly clear that Putin consistently acted according to realist logic and that he does not have an imperial agenda. Hopefully, The Sources of Russian Aggression: Is Russia a Realist Power? will be widely read in the West, where misconceptions about Putin's thinking abound. --John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago