This is a particularly timely and significant collection of essays, intervening at a critical crossroads in relations across Eurasia. The three powers - the USA, Russia, and the EU - lack a common geopolitical vision that can transform the shared ambition for a 'strategic partnership' into effective strategies for engagement and cooperation. Instead, what we are witnessing is an increasing divergence - with the EU becoming increasingly insular, the USA shifting its focus to the Pacific and Asia, and Russia turning towards Central Eurasia and the Far East.

While it is still early to speak of a decisive and irreversible shift in the global distribution of power from West to East, it is nevertheless clear that the former is experiencing a period of relative decline compared to the emerging empires of China and India or the favorable markets in Latin America and Asia. Having become deeply divided and lacking common ideas, the wider West - of which Russia has always been an integral part - seems to be slowly unraveling.

Of course, the issue of 'decline' is as old as Western civilization itself, traceable back to Hesiod's Works and Days and characteristic of the intellectual and political history of the West. Twenty years ago, transatlantic West reacted to Mikhail Gorbachev's behavior by signing the 1990 Paris Charter of the OECD aimed at creating a common security framework. President Medvedev's proposals for a new security treaty perhaps represent the last chance for a peaceful integration of Russia into a pan-Eurasian framework from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Including Russia and agreeing on a new set of rules and principles, such a Eurasian-Atlantic framework could solidify the 'reset' in US-Russia relations and offer greater global geopolitical power to wider Europe.

(Adrian Pabst) [Excerpt from a text by the publisher]