Professor at the School of International Studies at the University of Denver, Jonathan Adelman, believes that under the able leadership of Putin, Russia has accomplished the impossible - in a short period of time it has become a great power, filling the vacuum left by other former great powers, which today are losing territory, power and influence.
The image of Russia and Putin in the West has been extremely negative in recent years. President Obama has publicly labeled Vladimir Putin a "sprawling schoolboy" and has sarcastically described his country as merely a "regional power."
All of this raises a very natural question: how did Russia become a major power again after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? How did Putin manage to achieve this without an agrarian and consumer revolution and amid a massive decline in oil prices? If Putin is really such an insignificant leader, how do you explain the successful interventions in Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), Ukraine (2014-2016) and Syria (2015-2016)?
In reality, however, Putin is a very skillful and forward-looking leader, with a brilliant foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, backed by a powerful foreign policy department. Putin has restored Russia's military capabilities with a military budget of only $ 49 billion a year. With a population of 140 million and 13 million graduates of higher and secondary educational institutions, Russia has almost a million first-class scientists, engineers and technicians, most of whom work in the military sphere.
At the same time, many former great powers have lost this status. So, for example, Japan, which defeated the Russian army in 1904 during the Sino-Japanese War, occupied a significant part of China in 1937-1945, and has a 4 trillion dollar economy, is no longer a great power. After defeat in the Second World War, which ended with the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the post-war occupation, Japan renounced any interference in world problems and renounced attempts to acquire nuclear weapons.
Europe, once abundant in such great powers as Germany and France. England and Austria-Hungary, today have gone in a completely different direction. Germany successfully fought the Russians in almost all the battles of the First World War and almost reached its goal in 1941 and 1942. Today, with little power projection, these three major powers have fewer than a thousand medium tanks and only a few aircraft carriers. Weak economic growth (1.5 percent per year), divisions between the 28 EU member states, migrant flows from the Middle East, serious problems with economically weak countries such as Greece - all this leads to the prevalence of domestic tasks over international ones.
China, with a GDP of 10 trillion, more than 2 trillion in exports and a reserve fund of more than three trillion dollars, with a population of 1.35 billion and an area of almost 10 million square kilometers, is a future great power. The country made a huge economic breakthrough after Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reform plan in 1978, known as the Four Modernizations.
However, the problems that still have to be addressed by China are no less ambitious than the achievements: catastrophic air pollution, 675 million uneducated peasants, gigantic scale of corruption, authoritarian one-party autocracy, lack of the rule of law, rapidly aging population, hundreds of thousands of street children and the level of GDP at the capita is only 7.5 thousand dollars a year. The armed forces of China, despite military expenditures in the amount of 150 billion dollars, will be able to turn into a truly modern army only in the next decade.
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In India, 20 percent of the population is elementary illiterate, 300 million people are forced to live without electricity, and its GDP per capita is $ 1,300 a year, less than 3 percent of the US. The long-term conflict with Pakistan is a heavy burden on the economy. So, India, with its more than one billion population, may become a world power, but not in the next few decades.
And finally, the United States of America, the only superpower in the world since the victory in the Cold War and one of the two superpowers since 1945. An economy of $ 18 trillion, 17 of the world's top 18 universities, solid leadership in high technology, more than $ 550 billion in military spending and a population of 330 million give America a significant advantage over Russia. However, with the rise in popularity of neo-isolationist presidential candidates, the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, a downturn in the manufacturing sector, the administration's plans to reduce military forces to 1940 proportions, and an inconsistent retreat from the Middle East. by Obama,previously tightly closed doors were thrown open before Russia.
What was impossible to imagine yesterday is turning into reality. Russia, which seemed to be finally defeated after its defeat in the Cold War, is today again emerging as a promising world power capable of challenging the West. Russia has done the impossible - it has become a great power, filling the vacuum left by other former great powers, who are now losing territory, power and influence.
Igor Abramov