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THREAD: One of the more intellectually lazy trends of the past few years has been the attempt to portray all of the Kremlin’s foreign policy adventurism as manifestations of hybrid warfare and the so-called Gerasimov Doctrine. 1/
An important new article by my colleague Eugene Rumer challenges conventional wisdom and explains the role of hard power in the Kremlin’s more assertive behavior. 2/
Unfortunately, all of the hoopla about hybrid/Gerasimov means that many Western observers have failed to recognize that “the actual doctrine that has guided Russian policy for over two decades [is] the Primakov doctrine.” 3/ 
Yevgeniy Primakov, Russia’s 1990s era prime minister, foreign minister and spy chief, played a pivotal role in reformulating Russian foreign policy. It’s hard to exaggerate the extent to which his worldview overlaps with the Kremlin's overarching priorities today. 4/
Primakov emphasized that “a unipolar world dominated by the United States is unacceptable to Russia.” 4/
Instead, “Russia should strive toward a multipolar world managed by a concert of major powers that can counterbalance U.S. unilateral power.” (That world looks a lot more like the picture on the left and less like the one on the right.) 5/
“Russia should insist on its primacy in the post-Soviet space and lead integration in that region and oppose NATO expansion.” 6/
Our collective fixation on Gerasimov also overlooks that “military power is the necessary enabler of hybrid warfare. Hybrid tools can be an instrument of risk management when hard power is too risky, costly, or impractical, but military power is always in the background.” 7/
“Nuclear weapons …are not an instrument for risky endeavors—they ensure that other powers do not engage in such endeavors against Russia.” 8/
“The implementation of the Primakov doctrine has been anything but reckless. Russian uses of hybrid warfare and military power— Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014- ), Syria (2015- ) have been calibrated to avoid undue risks.” 9/
Rumer also focuses on the limits of Russian hard power and hybrid warfare. The Kremlin can’t impose its preferred version of peace on Syria. It simply doesn’t have the heft to replace the U.S. a hegemon in the Middle East. 10/
The key unanswered question is whether Putin’s successors will now "push for greater capabilities & take additional risks in pursuit of Russia's global aspirations. Or will they continue to follow the Primakov doctrine and its careful practice of calculating risks/benefits?" END
