Russia's Foreign Policy Strategy, A New Approach or More of the Same: A Comparative Historical Analysis

This thesis examines Russia's foreign policy within a comparative historical framework and theorizes that Russian foreign policy while briefly deviating from its historical pattern following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has realigned its current trajectories with its more traditional foreign policy strategies. This correction is largely consistent with Soviet notions of great power status and is rooted in a desire to secure its own national interests and achieve geopolitical objectives.

This thesis is divided into six chapters. For context, chapter one provides an historical overview of the traditional challenges faced by the Russian state, many of which remain today. Chapter two examines several core theories of foreign policy, providing a theoretical foundation from which the following chapters will routinely reference. Chapter three offers an historical synopsis of three discrete periods of Russian foreign policy and hypothesizes that the modern Russian state implements its foreign policy within a Defensive realist framework consistent with that of the former Soviet Union. Chapter four demonstrates how periods one and three are similar and fit within a consistent theoretical framework while concurrently demonstrating that period two was a temporal anomaly in the Russian approach to foreign policy. Chapter five addresses the implications associated with the continuation of Defensive realist foreign policy actions conducted by the Russian state. Finally, chapter six revisits the central theme of the work and contends that based on all demonstrated evidence the foreign policy of Russia today is in fact consistent with its historical patterns of behavior.