Correcting Mistakes

Russia in Global Affairs. 2026. Vol. 24. No. 1. P. 5–6.

Lukyanov F.

A quarter-century ago, in January 2001, George W. Bush took the oath of office as President of the United States. “If our country does not lead the cause of freedom, it will not be led,” he proclaimed at his inauguration. “Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.”

Bush took the reins at probably the height of America’s global power. In the decade after his father had declared victory in the Cold War, no one dared challenge U.S. dominance. Soon that would fundamentally change. 9/11 revealed forces that even the mighty U.S. could not crush, and sparked a chain reaction that would sweep away the ‘unipolar moment’ in just over two decades. And the global financial crisis in the fall of 2008, triggered by the collapse of the American mortgage market at the end of Bush’s second term, rang the death knell for liberal globalization.

The U.S. National Security Strategy released in December 2025, by the administration of another Republican president, seems quite critical of the post-Cold-War period. American strategies “have not clearly defined what we want,” but instead “stated vague platitudes” and “often misjudged what we should want.”

The Trump administration’s new approach is not grounded in “traditional, political ideology,” but rather “is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, ‘America First’.”

Keywords: внешняя политика, Россия, Russia, foreign policy, мировой порядок, world order