Russia will soon have another liberal ex-president. Twenty years ago this December, Mikhail Gorbachev stood in the Kremlin as the Soviet flag was lowered and replaced with the Russian tricolor. He sat down in the back seat of his limousine and was driven out the Borovitskaya gate, no longer president of the Soviet Union but instead a private citizen of the newly independent Russian Federation.

In March, Dmitry Medvedev, who has been president of Russia since 2008, will have a similar experience. He will surrender his office to his prime minister, predecessor and political patron Vladimir Putin, who after months of speculation has at last confirmed his intention to run for president on the ruling United Russia party's ticket. When Medvedev leaves office in March, he like Gorbachev will face the question of what role to play in his country's future. What becomes of a liberal ex-president in a decidedly illiberal state like Russia?

One thing is certain—Medvedev's welfare and personal security are assured as long as Putin remains in control. Medvedev has long been a close ally of Putin, and the latter is thought to have chosen him to become president in 2008 because of his unswerving loyalty. Thus, unlike former leaders in some other authoritarian states, Medvedev need not seek asylum abroad.

In fact, Medvedev has already telegraphed one likely possibility, namely that Putin's faith in him remains so great that he will continue to serve in the government, perhaps as prime minister. Putin may also define a new position for his protégé within the Russian government—for example, as chief justice of the constitutional court or in some high-profile international position, such as an ambassador at large for global security.

In any event, Medvedev's role in a future Putin-dominated government is likely to remain functionally similar to what it is today: evangelist in chief for Russia's modernization efforts, including the Skolkovo "city of innovation." Medvedev's voice could also continue to serve Putin's need for a popular lightning rod against corruption or in foreign policy as a spokesman and manager of the U.S.-Russia "reset."

If Medvedev is not given a formal appointment by his successor, he has another set of options altogether.

He can choose to follow the precedent set by Gorbachev, who also left office at a young age and well known for his liberal views—by participating selectively in political debates, possibly creating and leading a new political party or perhaps standing for office again in the next election, as Gorbachev did in 1996. Putin's predecessor and patron, Boris Yeltsin, was already in poor health when he left office in 1999, but even he spoke out occasionally on political and foreign-policy matters until his death in 2007.

Even without holding a formal office, Medvedev's voice will be influential. He could reach out to current and former political and business leaders and raise funds for favored causes. He could choose a signature initiative—most likely modernization—and create a nongovernmental organization to advance it, on the model of Gorbachev's Green Cross International or the Clinton Global Initiative. Other worthwhile causes might include combating corruption, environmental degradation, and drug and alcohol abuse, all of which cast a shadow over Russia's future.

Because he owes so much to Putin personally, Medvedev is unlikely to speak out as frankly or critically to Russian audiences about the Putin system as either Gorbachev or Yeltsin did. But he may have the opportunity to rise to a greater and more revered status internationally than he enjoyed as president if he chooses the path of ex-leaders like Vaclav Havel or Jimmy Carter, concerning himself with democratic development and human rights around the world. Even though he did not deliver perfect democracy and rule of law in his own country, the international community will surely welcome a prominent Russian voice to advocate these values.

Many outgoing presidents become obsessed with "legacy" to the point of wasting resources and political capital pursuing unrealistic or impossible goals during their last months in office. Thus far, Medvedev seems to have avoided chasing political rainbows. If anything he has refined his focus on concrete initiatives like Skolkovo and new campaigns against alcohol and tobacco use.

Perhaps Medvedev is keeping his head down, hoping that if he does not appear to threaten the system's stability, Putin will agree to keep him at the center of power, or perhaps even restore him to the presidency in 2018. Then again, maybe Medvedev has already defined his legacy and post-presidential role: offering Russians a bright vision of their country's future but accepting that the road to get there will be long and winding and that he may not himself be in the driver's seat.

Matthew Rojansky is the deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Russia watchers in the West cannot be surprised that Vladimir Putin is on his way back to the Russian presidency. Dmitri Medvedev was always his protégé, and there was no doubt that major decisions could not be made without his approval. This includes signing the New START arms control treaty, cooperating with NATO in Afghanistan and supporting U.N. sanctions on Iran — all of which should provide reassurance that Putin’s return won’t undo the most important accomplishments of the U.S.-Russia “reset.”

Yet the relationship with the West will inevitably change. For one thing, Putin can have nothing like the rapport his protégé developed with President Obama, which was built upon the two leaders’ shared backgrounds as lawyers, their easy adoption of new technologies, and their fundamentally modern worldviews.

The Bilateral Presidential Commission which Obama and Medvedev created and charged with advancing U.S.-Russia cooperation on everything from counterterrorism to health care may suffer. The relationship as a whole is not adequately institutionalized, and depends on the personal attention of Russian officials who will likely avoid taking action without clear direction from Putin, or who may be removed altogether during the transition.

Putin’s return to the presidency will also provide fodder for Western critics bent on portraying Obama and the reset as a failure, or dismissing Putin’s Russia as merely a retread of the Soviet Union.

These critics are wrong — today’s Russia bears little resemblance to what Ronald Reagan dubbed an “evil empire” — but Putin has been far more tolerant of Soviet nostalgia than his junior partner, and his next term will surely bring a new litany of quotations about Soviet accomplishments and Russia’s glorious destiny that will turn stomachs in the West.

Although he has spent his entire career within the apparatus of state power, including two decades in the state security services, Putin is at heart a C.E.O., with a businessman’s appreciation for the bottom line. Western companies already doing business in Russia can expect continuity in their dealings with the state, and it will remain in Russia’s interest to open doors to new business with Europe and the United States. The next key milestone for expanding commercial ties will be Russia’s planned accession to the World Trade Organization, which could come as soon as December.

At home, Putin faces a looming budget crisis. As the population ages and oil and gas output plateaus the government will be unable to continue paying pensions, meeting the growing demand for medical care, or investing in dilapidated infrastructure throughout the country’s increasingly depopulated regions.

This means that while Putin will seek to preserve Russia’s current economic model, which is based on resource extraction and export, he will be forced to assimilate many of his protégé’s ideas for modernizing Russia’s research and manufacturing sectors. Medvedev’s signature initiative, the Skolkovo “city of innovation,” will likely receive continuing support from the Kremlin, although it will have little long-term impact without a thorough nationwide crackdown on corruption and red tape.

Putin’s restored power will be strongly felt in Russia’s immediate neighborhood, which he has called Moscow’s “sphere of privileged interests.” Even though Kiev has renewed Russia’s lease on the Black Sea Fleet’s Sevastopol base through 2042 and reversed nearly all of the previous government’s anti-Russian language and culture policies, Ukraine is unlikely to win a reprieve from high Russian gas prices. Putin will also continue to press Ukraine to join the Russia-dominated customs union in which Kazakhstan and Belarus already participate. He may also take advantage of Belarus’s deepening economic isolation and unrest to oust President Aleksandr Lukashenko in favor of a more reliable Kremlin ally.

Putin and Medvedev have been equally uncompromising toward Georgia. Both are openly contemptuous of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and it is unlikely that any progress on relations can occur until Georgia’s presidential transition in 2013.

Putin has good reason to continue backing NATO operations in Afghanistan to help stem the flow of drugs, weapons and Islamism into Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia itself. Moreover, as China extends its economic hegemony into Central Asia, he may find America to be a welcome ally.

Putin appreciates the advantages of pragmatic partnerships and will seek to preserve the influence of traditional groupings like the U.N. Security Council and the G-8 while at the same time promoting alternatives like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Brics.

The succession from Putin to Medvedev and back again was decided behind closed doors, and the formal transition of power is likely to take place with similar discipline. This should offer the West and the wider world some reassurance. Putin’s return to the presidency is far from the democratic ideal, but it is not the end of “reset.” Many ordinary Russians support him because he represents stability and continuity of the status quo and, for now, that is mostly good for Russia’s relations with the West.

After 9/11, the administration of US President George W Bush initiated the era of the global war on terror. For many, this was a misguided response to terror attacks. But before the decade was over, US forces invaded two countries and are now fighting shadow wars in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, while an air war continues in Libya. Pentagon commands cover the entire planet, and US military assistance programmes are active in almost every country.

 Wars reorder politics and values. They remake that which is taken to be true and right. They render the world unrecognisable from what it was when the balloon went up. That is why epochs of world history are so often marked off by the dates of wars. How should we understand the era of 9/11? In what historical timeline does it belong?

It is useful to begin by recalling some of what seemed true on September 10, 2001. The US enjoyed the unquestioned global supremacy of the "unipolar moment". The "end of history" beckoned, in which liberal democracy and free markets promised peace and prosperity everywhere for all time. The West and its international organisations managed the world, ultimately for the general good. Globalisation was bringing people closer together.

Today, each of these verities lies broken. The failure to understand the 1990s and the significance of the end of the Cold War has left us unable to understand what has been happening in the decade since 9/11.

Renewed global military commitments have hastened an inevitable US decline. The unrestrained power of finance capital is wrecking economies and societies across the Western world. Europe lies prostrate, bereft of anything approaching serious leadership, mired in the divisive politics of austerity and racist, anti-immigrant populism. The great international institutions have sat on the sidelines of the crises roiling the world. The communications technologies that were supposed to lead to mutual understanding instead assist revolts and terrorism, rioters and financial speculators, when they are not being used by states to spy on their own citizens, or by corporations to increase the number of consumer products people desire.

How is it that the received wisdom about the nature of world politics was so badly wrong? What did we fail to see and why?

The great conceit that blinds us is the idea that the powerful make history just as they please. We are particularly prone to this error when thinking about international politics. Assisted by opinion columnists and think tank gurus, we tend to view the world from the perspective of decision makers in the great powers. What should the West do about Libya? How should the US respond to state failure in Yemen or the Iranian bomb? What should the G-20 do about the debt crisis?

'Like cowboys at the rodeo'

In the domestic politics of our own countries, it is easy for us to see that politicians are like cowboys at the rodeo: hanging on for dear life before a force of nature tramples them underfoot. The "bull" that throws them could be a long-simmering social crisis, a downturn of the business cycle, or some series of events over which no one exercises control. The skill of the politician determines how long they can hang on, but we are left in little doubt as to where the real power lies.

We are forced to confront the underlying social structures, historical legacies, and economic relations that determine our fates. Human agency, too, has its say, but it is not only that of the great leaders that matter. Ordinary people and the social and political movements they create can drive events and force the "policymakers" to respond. But fate usually works against human purposes. Rarely do either the powerful or those who resist them achieve quite what they intended.

A wonderful example of the impoverished vocabulary with which we think about international politics is the idea that "Reagan won the Cold War". The vast apparatus that is a modern state is reduced to its leader - "Thatcher", "Gorbachev". Agency, the power to shape events, rests firmly in the hands of this leader, who is located in the global North. A range of violent struggles, fought almost entirely in the global South, are subsumed under one term which denies there was even a war at all. Most of all, a tidy end - 1989 - is imagined in which, needless to say, the good guys won.

Epoch-defining dates like 1989 or 9/11 invoke various imagined histories and geographies. But too often the dates with which we order world politics are curiously Eurocentric. It is European exploration, the French revolution, a Congress in Vienna, and German invasions, for example, which mark out the globe's historical eras: 1492, 1789, 1815, 1914, 1939.

We are thus singularly unable to grasp the global histories and social relations that delivered us to 9/11. Within the conventional terms of analysis of international relations, it is almost impossible to see the great social, political and economic struggles between the global North and South that have driven modern world politics. European imperialism and the prodigious efforts to incorporate ever more peoples and places, ever more domains of life, into the capitalist world system lie at the origins of these global histories.

It is crucial to underscore that imperialism, capitalism and the modern world they together did not simply emanate from Europe. They were joint productions with the non-European world, albeit amid unequal power relations. Imperialism requires collaborators, while capital needs labour. The first factories were not built in England, but in the Caribbean, producing sugar with African slaves.

The World Wars gutted European imperial power and unleashed struggles for independence across the global South, led almost everywhere by the anti-imperialist left. For over forty years revolutionaries and insurgents, death squads and soldiers, carried on a deadly combat.

The fall of the left

The global significance of 1989, broadly speaking, was the defeat in both the North and the South of the political left, of those political movements that sought to replace, contain, or redirect the expansive energies of capital in accordance with humane values.

During the Cold War, Western powers had to maintain social welfare systems at home lest communism begin to look attractive. The Soviets, meanwhile, tried and failed to demonstrate that they too could produce washing machines, refrigerators and other consumer items. With the collapse of the USSR, neoliberalism was unleashed and could begin in earnest to do away with welfare states in the West. "Shock therapy" was delivered to the former Soviet bloc countries, while the debt crisis was used to control many economies in the global South. No longer did the West have to secure Third World allies with lavish aid.

The defeat of the left produced two outcomes which have defined the last twenty years and will continue to make history over the next twenty.

The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of the dire social consequences of unrestrained capitalism. The grievances, the injustices, the poverty, the anger, the continued reduction of everything human to the bottom line, to something that can be bought or sold, all this remained, even intensified. But now it was not the left that would make political lemonade out of these lemons, but the right; not communists, but religious fundamentalists, both Christian and Islamic. This is where the Tea Party belongs, feeding on the misdirected resentments of those devastated by unregulated capitalism.

The second outcome of 1989 is a dramatic increase in the political power of capital. Across the Western world, but most especially in the US, politicians are in hock to Big Money, while corporate media fundamentally shapes political debate.

Blinkered worldview

The problem with this, as Karl Marx would have told us, is that while capitalists know what is in the interest of their specific business, they are unable to cooperate for the good of the system as a whole. To maintain a capitalist society of a kind anyone would want to live in requires tremendous public investment and infrastructure; a neutral, professional and active civil service; and a strong framework of effective, lawful regulation.

Few capitalists want to pay taxes for all this, or subject their industries to significant regulation. Give capitalists as a class too much political power, and they will enfeeble government with their special interests, lobbyists, and kept politicians. The consequence is the drama currently on display: the self-destruction of the West and its economies. It is plainly obvious that Western societies are in dire need of modernisation, investment, and strategies for growth and employment. But the political forces that might fight for these have long since been vanquished. Anguished experts like Paul Krugman are left accurately to foretell a doom that the political systems of the West willfully do nothing to avoid.

It is this self-inflicted crisis that drives the timing of the scale-down of the global war on terror currently underway. After all, nation-building at home or abroad requires taxes. Rather than occupying countries in a "forward strategy for freedom", as Bush termed the invasion of Iraq, the war on terror will transform into the police, spy and special operations war Western liberals had originally called for in 2001.

Unifying the eras of the Cold War, the 1990s, and the decade following 9/11, are reinvigorated efforts to control the politics, economies and populations of the global South in the wake of the collapse of formal empire in 1945. Wars of tremendous folly and human cost have marked this entire period, in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique, and across Central and Latin America, among others. Bush's travesties in Iraq and Afghanistan will likely bring this series to an historical close. The tentative approach to Libya is a transition to a future of reduced Western ambition in the global South.

The retreat of the West from extensive and effective political and military efforts to control the global South - a history which began in the 16th century - rings the death knell of Western world power. The decade since 9/11 is the penultimate chapter in this history.

Tarak Barkawi is a senior lecturer in War Studies at the Centre of International Studies in the University of Cambridge. He also authored the book Globalization and War (Rowman and Littlefield). He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University; the Department of War Studies, King’s College London; the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University; and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University. 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. 

An excerpt from "Spytainment: The Real Influence of Fake Spies" (pp. 599-600):

For avid fans of the now-departed television show 24, a visit to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters will be disappointing. The visitors’ center looks nothing like the ultra high-tech rooms of CTU, Jack Bauer’s fictitious counterterrorist agency.

Instead, the entry to America’s best-known intelligence outfit has more of a shabby, post office feel. There are soda vending machines and an old pay phone against the back wall, with customer service–like teller windows in front. Once cleared by security, visitors can walk ten minutes down a winding road or take a rambling shuttle bus to the old Headquarters building. The lobby has no retina scans or fancy fingerprint devices, just a few turnstiles and a kind, elderly security guard who takes cell phones and hands out claim checks. Even the suite of executive offices where the CIA director sits seems strangely ordinary. The only clue that this is not a typical government building is the desks. They are all bare. Not a visible paper in sight. Documents are either locked away or burned at the end of each day.

Most people know deep down that real spying is different than what is portrayed on television and in the movies. But how different? And how much does it matter?

Today, the facts and fiction of the spy business are blurring, with important consequences for intelligence policy. In the past two decades, the Spytainment industry has skyrocketed. Government over-classification has continued to keep vital and timely public information about U.S. intelligence agencies out of the public domain. And Political Science professors have been busy researching and teaching about seemingly everything except intelligence. The results are serious. As the nonpartisan, expert Intelligence Science Board concluded in a 2006 report, spy-themed entertainment has become adult education. American citizens are steeped in misperceptions about what intelligence agencies actually do, and misplaced expectations about how well they can do it. Perhaps even more disturbing, evidence suggests that policymakers—from cadets at West Point to senators on the Intelligence Committee to Supreme Court Justices—are referencing fake spies to formulate and implement real intelligence policies.