From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the Russian challenge.
Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a “rational” Western nation—even though Russian leaders for centuries have thought and acted based on their country's much different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders from the czars to Putin almost always act in their own very predictable and rational ways. For Western leaders to try to engage with Russia without attempting to understand how Russians look at the world is a recipe for repeated disappointment and frequent crises.
Keir Giles, a senior expert on Russia at Britain's prestigious Chatham House, describes
