There are three questions in one here, I think.
In terms of bipolarity, I would say that Russia needs the United States because it needs the North Pole, right? When it talks, it talks about multi-polarity, but China is a component here; Europe, maybe, is a component here. In its ideal universe, you're back to the Cold War. It's the United States and Russia. If the United States is less active and you do have the emergence of a true multi-polarity, I don't know that Russia has a clear sense of what it would do, and I don't know if it's going to develop one.
There has long been tension between co-operating with the United States and standing up to the United States. I think what's dangerous, over the last three years, is how much of a benefit it feels it's gained from standing up and not co-operating. When we talk about co-operating in Syria, I mean, we're talking mostly about joining together to bomb the same people. It doesn't actually stabilize Syria, and it doesn't make any progress towards solving that fundamental problem. It's an interesting kind of co-operation. I suppose it gives everybody, then, the opportunity to blame the other guy for the failure later, but again, Russia's agenda in Syria is a positive one: keeping the Syrian government in power. It's probably a more clear agenda than that of the United States, to be honest. What it does from there it doesn't have a plan for, and neither does anybody else. This idea that it'll co-operate by continuing to bomb is a bit incomplete.
In terms of Russia's economy, don't underestimate Russia's capacity to punch above its economic weight. It does that by drawing on its population's willingness to deal with hardship and accept it, and its willingness to put more money into defence when the economy goes down, which is what it's done. As Russian growth started to drop in 2009, that's when the defence budget, as a share of GDP, started to go up. Until then it had been pretty stable as a share of GDP. If you listen to Russians in how they defend Putin, you hear a lot of “He is the only one under whom we've experienced growth. He's the only one under whom we've experienced prosperity.”
Prosperity is not normal to the average Russian. Hardship and difficulties are. Putin is the only guy who's ever made it better. That it's back to normal isn't necessarily a failure of Putin. It's still his success that after the 1990s Russia was better. Russia's capacity to spend less on infrastructure, health care, and education and to continue to spend more on defence is higher than that of a lot of other countries for these historical reasons. That's not to say that there isn't a breaking point, but I don't think the breaking point is economic. I think overreach in Ukraine, if the Ukraine crisis gets worse and the Russians become more militarily involved and get bogged down, that sort of thing, is where I see the fault lines and the failures—maybe the north Caucasus also.
China is interesting because I think the Russians have always been nervous about China, but it's not polite to say so these days. China is the alternative to Europe, though it hasn't proven to be as economically feasible a one as had been hoped. China is also Russia's gateway to Asia in terms of being an Asian power. However, as Russia's ambitions in Asia develop, Russia will start to think about how a real great power doesn't follow in somebody else's footsteps. As it thinks about rapprochement with Japan and as it reaches out to southeast Asian countries, you very easily see areas where its relationship with China could break down—not immediately, though I would argue that real rapprochement with Japan would certainly give China pause.
Over time, I think this is going to be a real point of tension in that relationship. When you hear Vladimir Putin talk about the INF treaty, while he says that Russia is not violating it, he also points out that other countries on its borders have similar capabilities and that Russia doesn't develop them because of the treaty. I don't think it's just Europe he's talking about.