Sergei A. KaraganovNational Research University–Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia Faculty of World Economics and International Affairs Academic Supervisor;Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Russia Honorary Chairman of the Presidium
During this year’s meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, I was asked to speak at a session called “The World That Crumbled: Lessons for the Future from the 2022 Military-Political Crisis.” Valdai leads the international intellectual community in discussing the agenda of the present and future world. But the name of the session raised, if not a protest, then certainly my doubts.
The current crisis did not start in 2022; it began in the mid-1990s just as the Second World War actually began with the Treaty of Versailles, which was unfair and definitely laid the foundation for it. Twenty-five or twenty-seven years ago, the West refused to conclude a just peace with Russia. And many thought at that time that it had created a new system of its dominance based on “rules.” Later, others found a more appropriate name for it―global liberal imperialism. But the system was built on sand and laid a mine of a third world war, which sooner or later could go off. Veterans like me tend to share memories, often invented ones.
But I have been saying and writing since 1996-1997, and this is documented, that a world based on NATO’s expansion and Western dominance would lead to war.
The West’s hegemony began to crumble in 1999, when, having gone wild from its own impunity, it raped Yugoslavia. This crumbling continued when, swept away by euphoria, it invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq and lost, devaluing its military superiority and moral leadership. Two even more important processes were taking place at the same time. Convinced by the events in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty that it was impossible to build a just and lasting peace with the West, Russia began to restore its military capabilities. And like in the 1960s and the 1970s, by so doing it was knocking the props from under the West’s dominance in the world economy, politics and culture, which was based on military superiority. This dominance had lasted for five hundred years and began to crumble in the 1960s. The West seemed to have regained it in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Russia is now knocking out this foundation once again.
The West also missed China’s rise and, on top of it all, made an even more incredible mistake. Having suddenly realized that, in the late 2000s, the West embarked on a path of containing both China and Russia at the same time, pushing them towards a political-military bloc that was in their interests anyway.
The 2008 crisis, which took place amid the aforementioned processes and which undermined confidence in the West’s moral, economic and intellectual leadership, was a sign of its massive decline.
In the late 2000s, the West started masterminding a new Cold War. But there was also a window of opportunity to negotiate new conditions for a new world with Russia and China. That chance existed approximately from 2008 to 2013, but it was not used. In 2014, the West stepped up its policy of containing China and Russia, including through a coup in Kiev, in order to prepare attack forces in an attempt to regain hegemony by undermining Russia.
While losing its military, political and moral positions, even its moral core (in fact, EU officially abandoned Christianity in 2002), the West launched a hysterical counterattack. War became inevitable. The question was where and when it would start.
At the same time, global problems facing humanity were not addressed, but, on the contrary, were aggravated―climate, energy, water and food shortages, an explosion of inequality in the West itself, and the erosion of the middle class.As problems remained unresolved, it was necessary to distract public attention from them. This was a powerful factor for moving towards war. The COVID-19 pandemic became a substitute for war for two years. But after its effect wore off, a collision became inevitable. Russia understood this and decided to strike first.This war has several goals. The first one is to prevent the West from creating its military offensive bridgehead, which was quickly emerging on the Russian borders; and preparing Russia for a long existence in a world of conflicts and rapid change, which required a different model of society and economy―a mobilization one.
The next goal is to cleanse the elites of pro-Western and Comprador elements.
But perhaps the main purpose of this war, or operation from the point of view of world history, and not just Russian history, is to fight for the final liberation of the world from the five-hundred-year-old Western yoke, which suppressed countries and civilizations and imposed unequal terms of interaction on them by robbing them through colonialism at first, then neocolonialism, and eventually through globalist imperialism of the last thirty years.
The war in Ukraine, like many events of the last decade, is not only, and not so much, about demolishing the old world, as it is about building a new, freer and fairer world, which would be more pluralistic politically and culturally and more multicolored.
The global purpose of the battle in Ukraine is to give the non-West (and I suggest calling it the World Majority), which was previously suppressed, robbed, and culturally humiliated―back its freedoms, dignity, independence, and, of course, a fair share in global wealth.
Russia cannot but win in this war, although it will be a hard fight. Many of us did not expect that the West would be so eager to fight militarily, or some Ukrainians, who were turned into a semblance of German Nazis set against the USSR, would fight so desperately and be so well armed. Given the general trends in global development and the global balance of power, we should probably have struck earlier.
But I do not know how prepared our armed forces were. Yet I do think that we should have acted more decisively in 2014, giving up all hopes to come to an agreement with the West. We live in a dangerous period, on the verge of a full-fledged Third world war, which can bring the existence of humankind to an end. But if Russia wins, and this is more than likely, and the conflict does not escalate into a full-fledged nuclear war, we should not look at the coming decades as a time of dangerous chaos (as the majority in the West insist). We have been living in such a period for a long time. It will be―if we decide so―a world of constructive creation, where peoples and countries regain freedom, justice, and dignity.
The old system of institutions and regimes either has already been destroyed (freedom of trade, respect for private property)―institutions like the WTO, the World Bank or the IMF, the OSCE, and I am afraid the EU―or are living out their last days. New institutions are emerging, and the future belongs to them. These are the SCO, ASEAN+, the Organization of African Unity, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The Asian Development Bank already lends many times more than the World Bank. Not all new institutions will survive. Let’s hope that a number of old ones will remain, primarily in the UN system, which urgently needs reorganization, primarily by giving the World Majority, not the West, fair representation in the UN Secretariat.It is important not to let the losing West slow down history or derail it through a world war.
Not only the World Majority countries, but also Western countries can live quite well in this world, to which the latter have contributed so much through their scientists and writers such as Cervantes, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Hemingway, and outstanding Russian minds. The West will simply no longer be able to rob the rest of the world, it will have to tighten its belt and live within its means.
I am afraid this new emerging world will be created beyond my intellectual or physical life. But my young colleges and certainly their children will be able to see it.
We must fight for this beautiful world, primarily by preventing a third world war, because of the West’s attempts to take revanche. Let me to remind: it was in Europe that the first two world wars were started. Russia is now fighting to make sure, among other things, that conditions for a third one never get ripe. But conflicts are unavoidable in an era of rapid change. This is why the struggle for peace should top the agenda for the intellectual community worldwide, and probably become a key area of the Valdai Discussion Club’s efforts.