Russia has already emerged as the big winner in the final year of the closing Obama era, which will officially end as of January 20, when Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th US president.
Since the shocking election nearly two months ago, US liberals and centrist Establishment figures on both sides of the aisle have been aghast that Vladimir Putin's klepto-petrostate has apparently emerged as a peer competitor again, able to challenge and even thwart US interests for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Quite a far cry from Obama's dismissal of Moscow as merely a regional power back in 2014, when it annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine at the outset of the current standoff with the West.
In fact, Russia's indeed merely a regional power - today no less than three years ago. But it just so happens to be simultaneously situated in every single part of the world that truly matters geopolitically: Europe, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, the Far East, and the Americas. No wonder, then, that merely being a regional player in the Kremlin's case still seems to accord it with such seemingly global clout.
This is, from start to end, a function of plain geography: Russia's very essence is land, land, and then more land. Endless landmass from sunrise to sunset: even after losing a third of its territory, primarily on its southern and western flanks, from the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moscow boasts sovereignty over 11 of 24 global time zones; as the sun sets on St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad in the far west, it still rises over the Chukchi peninsula in the far eastern tip of the Siberian Arctic.
It goes without saying that this alone dictates the imperative for one of the world's most formidable military forces and most extensive security apparatuses. For Russia is no isolated continental mass like Australia or subsidiary northern expanse like Canada (to the US); on every side she pushed outwards towards more temperate and hospitable climates or warmer and deeper access to the sea, she encountered firmly established rival powers which were typically aggressive militarist empires in their own right - and in the case of Eastern foes like China and the Ottoman and Persian empires, far older and more experienced ones, at that.
So in hindsight, Russia's hiatus from the world stage in the 1990s was an anomalous blip: as soon as the center reasserted itself, it was only a matter of time that Moscow would be back at the apex of the global power structure as a broker whose wishes must be heeded, whether or not they were benign or honest.
The Syrian crisis, which has singularly catapulted Putin's resurgent nationalist Russia back into the exclusive elite with the US and a rising China, has also demonstrated conclusively that this didn't require two ingredients which no previous Russophone imperium ever relied on for strategic expansion, either: a dynamic economy or a first-class navy. Since the Kremlin launched its Levantine adventure in late 2015, the world has also relearned that the warfare-driven Russian economy utterly lacks civilian or consumerist innovative capacity even as its land-centered military utterly underwhelms in naval power projection (as the embarrassing flop of the expeditionary deployment of its sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, so glaringly revealed).
After all, that's the double-edged sword if you happen to be Russia: the minute you pursue these luxury characteristics which befit a far more maritime-tailored and open socioeconomic order, the minute you betray your own essence. It's hardly a coincidence that both maritime or naval expansion and greater exposure to international financial flows tend to be associated with the fall of Moscow's empires, not their rise or heyday: the Russian state's inherent strength as a centrally command-and-controlled continental economy - its longstanding place as the world's regional power par excellence, if you will - has as its flip side an unusually strong aversion to laissez-faire finance and commerce which is the domain of decentralized seafaring states.
To put it in other words: What makes Russia such a formidable regional power - so much so that it appears to be a global power - is also what makes it impossible for even the most ambitious Czar to match the Anglo-American supremacy on the three-quarters of the world's surface which is water and not land. In the new Trump era, this stands to remain Pax Americana's saving grace against a Sino-Russian Eurasian axis (should it even come to pass, considering Trump's clear attempt to pry Moscow out of Beijing's orbit).
