Many believe that the new Russian-American and Russian-Western antagonisms differ from Cold War-era tensions because of the absence of an ideological basis for the conflict. According to this view, the new confrontation is a classical geopolitical rivalry: America seeks to sideline Russia, while Russia naturally resists, biting back wherever possible. Hence the expectation is that Moscow will start “taking revenge” on the U.S. in the Middle East, East Asia, and elsewhere.

However, as was mentioned above, Russia would pay a significant price in a struggle like this. Yet there are two other options that are complementary, rather than mutually exclusive. One involves avoidance of any further, and termination of all existing, assistance to the United States without direct conflict. The other option is ideologizing the confrontation under the banner of building a new and more just world order in place of the U.S.-centric one that is now under increasing strain.

Let’s first discuss avoidance of assistance. It is widely believed in Russia that the United States, which has voluntarily assumed the role of world leader, is overstrained and unable to cope with this task. In practical diplomatic terms, this means that without assistance from its partners, Washington is unable to control many difficult processes in the world simultaneously, especially as their number is growing. In the most important conflict areas—Iran, Syria, North Korea, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine—the U.S. needs the participation of other countries. Even Russia is an integral part of solutions to some of these issues and others, as Americans themselves admit. Or rather, without Russia, there may be no solutions that do not require excessive expenditure.

At the same time, against the background of unending public political discussions, Russian and American diplomats cooperate in a businesslike manner on a wide range of issues, including Iran’s nuclear program, Syria’s chemical disarmament, coordination of an international response to North Korea’s behavior, the settlement of endless contradictions within the WTO framework, and responses to local conflicts in Africa. In many cases—such as the Iran, Syria and North Korea ones—Russia’s connections and capabilities significantly facilitate communication and enable progress or, at least, prevent regression. Numerous conflicts in Asia, which are bound to escalate, are an obvious area where Russian-American interaction might be useful. In some cases, Russia is viewed as a more neutral participant, considered acceptable to all sides, than is the U.S. or Europe (the post-Soviet space is an obvious exception to this, but here one can only note the ever-continuing “agreement to disagree”).

According to many Russian diplomats, if Russia simply ceases to participate in all these processes and ends its cooperation, the U.S. will soon be faced with growing problems. In this case, America’s military-political and economic weight will play against it, since expectations are high, but most complex conflicts require political solutions based on a multilevel and subtle approach. Russia’s disengagement would make this more difficult.

Last fall’s chemical weapons agreement on Syria is an elegant example of this. Without the Russian President’s contribution, the U.S. might have been involved in yet another military campaign in the Middle East, with unpredictable results. The alternative to either reaching a deal or going to war was that America would have backed away from its own “red line.” Judging by what is occurring in Iraq today, it is easy to guess who would have benefited from U.S. strikes against Bashar al-Assad’s troops: the Islamic State, which is now occupying much of Iraq, and which was also a significant component of the Syrian opposition. Obviously, Vladimir Putin pursued his own and Russia’s interests, and in doing so helped America to avoid taking unnecessary and dangerous political-military actions.

Generally, the scale of U.S. involvement in world affairs and the expectations associated with it are so great that U.S. leadership has turned into a heavy yoke that cannot be cast off, but is also increasingly hard to carry. Several years ago, when Barack Obama was preparing to become president,[2] the idea of global burden-sharing—that is, delegating to key regional states the powers of supporting U.S. partners—became extremely popular. This was seen as a substitute for the unilateral leadership of the preceding Bush administration. Now we can say that the result is the opposite: the United States once again has to rely mainly on itself, while potential regional supporters behave more and more independently. But while unilateral leadership was previously a conscious choice, now it is the only possible option.

Passive behavior—meaning not only that Russia will not use its capabilities against the United States, but also that it will not use them at all—would be quite in line with the philosophy of many martial arts, including dodging blows and benefiting from the rival’s mistakes.[3] Russia would not apply this tactic in the post-Soviet space, where it plays sports like Thai boxing or even ultimate fighting, but in the rest of the world, where Russia has few if any vital interests.

The second option is to take advantage of America’s setbacks in global governance and of the shortcomings in the global economic architecture. The Ukraine crisis has an important aspect that not everyone has been able to perceive: in a bid to punish Russia, the United States has used its power as a regulator of the world economic system as a weapon. By threatening to withhold the “keys” to globalization, it prompted its opponents to reclassify anti-Americanism into a conceptually much broader phenomenon: anti-globalism or, rather, alter-globalism; that is, moving beyond the current design of the global economy in favor of some other system.

The White House’s decision to impose sanctions against the Russian officials it sees as being closest to Vladimir Putin led to sanctions being imposed against four Russian commercial banks. The payment systems Visa and MasterCard complied with the sanctions and blocked credit card services to these banks, which caused problems for the banks and fueled long-discussed plans to establish a national payment system in Russia. Also, Russia’s Ministry of Finance tightened rules for the two credit card companies, demanding that they make a huge security deposit as protection against force majeure. The possible outcome of the conflict is unclear; the credit card companies are threatening to leave the Russian market, but in the context of this discussion, this is not the most important consideration.

Denying banks access to international transactions is a powerful lever, but demonstrating who the master in our shared global home is has a downside. U.S. world leadership is based on the conceptual premise that it not only ensures prosperity for all but that it is also just—it is not someone’s subjective will that decides everything; instead, the laws of the free market are supposedly decisive. Excluding Russian banks from payment systems, limiting the use of software produced by major IT companies, or shutting Russia out of the SWIFT system of international banking payments, a measure that was earlier taken against Iran, demonstrate an indisputable fact: one power has dominant influence and uses it for political purposes.

As long as such measures were used against countries like Iran, not to mention odious governments like Gadhafi’s in Libya, they did not have such a strong effect. But when such pressure is put on one of the most important and influential countries in the world, it means that no one can feel safe. It also means that, in a heated conflict with the United States, global rules can be changed and directed to work against any target Washington desires.

This stimulates new trends—the fragmentation of the global economy and society, the creation of zones of preferential trade rules and national or regional payment systems, and hedging against non-economic methods of global competition. American efforts to establish the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade zones actually undermine the WTO’s principle of universal rules for world trade. The rapidly strengthening partnership between Russia and China suggests that in response to U.S.-centric economic zones, they may try to compete with their own major projects—Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and China’s Silk Road Economic Belt. Coordinating Russia’s and China’s interests in order to facilitate cooperation between these two entities will be difficult, yet hardly more so than is reaching an agreement between the U.S. and the EU on new trade rules.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukayev have both already promised to challenge U.S. sanctions in the WTO as unfair competition. If filed, this suit could take several years to be investigated, but it will support the key goal of demonstrating how the U.S. undermines its own principles for political purposes.

After the end of the Cold War, the world saw little real institutional redesign. Some global governance institutions survived from the previous era, and some others, which formerly provided economic and financial services to the West, extended their operation to the rest of the world. At the rhetorical level, they came to reflect universal interests, but in practice there were continuous charges that these institutions remained instruments of Western control and dominance. The campaign of sanctions against Russia provides additional support for this view: for example, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which in theory is an institution operating outside of politics, is being used by major shareholders to apply pressure on Russia.