Russia's World Order explores the ideas underlying the undeclared New Cold War between Russia and the West. The first Cold War was a struggle between capitalism and communism; most Western politicians and policymakers imagine the new one to be a struggle between democracy and autocracy. Russia's World Order explains that in Russian eyes, the conflict is about something very different: it is a fight between two incompatible visions of where history is leading. Russia's World Order describes the civilizational theory that has come to dominate Russian official discourse, and that has come to dominate Russian official discourse and that is being used by the Russian state to justify its clashes with the West. Whereas the West promotes a vision of history that drives all nations toward convergence on a single social, political, and economic model (that of modern Western liberalism), Russia's political leaders increasingly portray the world as consisting of numerous distinct civilizations,
