beyond, and venturing into parts of the globe from which it retreated after the Soviet collapse. Moreover, Putin s Russia sought to revise many of the major agreements it had concluded with the West in the 1990s, when it was weak and had to accept an agenda imposed on it by Europe and the United States. This is the restorative aspect of the new Russian foreign policy, symbolized by its hosting the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg in 2006 and its award of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The revolutionary part is that Russia is, for the? Rst time in its history, a major global economic player, especially in the energy? Eld, after years of strong domestic economic performance driven by high oil prices. It could become a serious outward investor as it is poised to dispose of potential sovereign wealth funds and as its corporations go global. As First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said at the 2008 Munich Security Conference, we don t export ideology anymore-we only export goods and capital (Ivanov 2008). Moreover, the Putin administration, by recapturing the commanding heights of the economy, created a system whereby the Kremlin is directly involved in international economic activity, blurring the lines between what is political and what is commercial. This new Russian reality expressed itself in increasingly confrontational rhetoric toward the West. Putin s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech lambasted American unilateralism (Putin 2007a) and in his? Nal address to the State Council he accused the West of unleashing a new arms race and trying to gain access to Russia s natural resources (Putin 2008). This rhetoric had a negative e ? ect on Russia s political relations with both Europe and the United States, although economic ties with the West became robust. Russia remains without allies, pursuing multi-vector policies. As Foreign Minister Lavrov explained, Russia will continue playing its balancing role in global a ? airs. It will never be part of new holy alliances against anybody (Lavrov 2007 ). It seeks to ensure that no major international problems can be resolved without its participation and ability to in? Uence the terms of the settlement. Russian foreign policy under Putin underwent a dramatic evolution, mirroring the domestic changes implemented by the president. Taking o ? ce in the aftermath of the 1998 financial collapse and the pluralist bu...
