In the last two issues of inFocus, we looked athow China is engaging in both near-term and long-term strategies to address its problems and eventually fulfi ll what Beijing’s leaders call the China Dream. A large focus of those strategies involves Beijing increasing its engagement overseas to create geo-political and geoeconomic influence for China in the world. Russia, another country helmed by one of the New Autocrat leaders, is similarly engaged in pursuing what Moscow might aptly call a Russia Dream. That dream would include restoring Russia’s sphere of infl uence in the world, particularly over countries of the former USSR, but also having a hand in events from the Middle East to Africa to Latin America, as it once did as the leader of the so-called “Second World,” before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Moscow, with Putin as its undisputed leader, also envisions reducing the cohesion of the West, and the hegemony of the U.S. in particular, in what would become a more multipolar world, with Moscow as a key pole.