But the implosion of the empire in 1991 left Russian leaders adrift, uncertain whether to steer their nation toward a more modest role in the world or to revive what they considered their country’s past imperial glory.
Along the way, imperial nostalgia has pervaded Putin’s thinking.
A Ukrainian nation, with its own language and culture, had existed for many centuries, had been ruled by a variety of nations during that period, and, in 1991, had held a referendum in which 92 percent of the electorate voted for independence from the Soviet Union.
In the aftermath of World War II, as decolonization gathered momentum throughout the far-flung British Empire, the guardians of the Old Order worked to suppress independence struggles and bitterly lamented the decline of imperial grandeur.
In 1958, when the people of Guinea voted, instead, for independence, the embittered French government turned to sabotaging the ungrateful new nation by destroying government records, flooding the country with fake banknotes, diverting shipments of food and medicine, and even removing the lightbulbs from government buildings.
Meanwhile, French military officers, convinced that their own government would fail to subdue the Algerian rebels, seized power, toppled the Fourth Republic, and stepped up France’s counterinsurgency war.
military intervention in numerous lands, including Vietnam, where, as Lyndon Johnson remarked, the United States could not allow itself to be defeated by a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country.” Although Donald Trump is best-known for promising to “Make America Great Again,” this backward-looking incantation was also employed by earlier presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, to rally Americans behind reviving the nation’s Golden Age.
Condemning China’s more recent years of humiliation at the hands of the colonial powers, he vowed “to achieve the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Xi amplified on this theme in 2018, when, in a speech to the 13th National People’s Congress, he declared that “we are resolved to fight the bloody battle against our enemies .
Therefore, as we cope with a planet riven by international conflict and war, let us consider how dreams of imperial grandeur might be discarded and how a strengthened United Nations might be used to fashion a more secure and cooperative world.