In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise. In Russia’s experience of history, restraints on power spelled catastrophe: Russia’s failure to dominate its surroundings, in this view, had exposed it to the Mongol invasions and plunged it into its nightmarish “Time of Troubles” (a fifteen-year dynastic interregnum before the founding of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613,
