President Biden has announced a "new world order" that will emerge as a result of the current Ukrainian epic. It seems that there is a sudden agreement between Moscow and Washington, but only on this single point. In Moscow, after all, they also talk about an "epoch-making battle" for a new world order. However, Biden is clearly lying, because he only dreams of restoring the old way of life – with the leadership of the United States. What will the new world really be like?
The world has found itself at a "tipping point" that repeats every three to four generations, US President Joe Biden said, speaking at a meeting of the Business Roundtable lobbyists organization on Tuesday. According to the owner of the White House, the last time humanity passed such a bifurcation point was in 1946 – then, Biden believes, following the results of World War II, "the United States established a liberal world order." Now Washington must also determine the outcome of world processes, the president expressed hope. "There will be a new world order, and we must lead it, we must unite the rest of the free world," the US president said.
However, Moscow even partially agrees with the owner of the White House. Of course, not in the forecasts about the return of the global dominance of the United States – but in the fact that a new alignment of forces will develop in the world as a result of the Ukrainian conflict. "This is a fateful moment, this is an epochal moment in modern history, because it reflects the "battle", in the broadest sense of the word, for what the world order will look like," said Sergey Lavrov, the head of Russian diplomacy, last week.
We should add that Russia's eastern neighbor, with whom our relations are rapidly deteriorating, is also expecting the onset of a certain world order in its own way. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida insists on the reform of the UN Security Council. We are not talking about expanding the composition of the Security Council – such proposals have been made before, in quieter times. In fact, Japan calls for the abolition of the UN Security Council, where Russia and China have the right of veto. In the view of Tokyo politicians, it is the neutralization of Chinese and Russian influence that should become the key to global security. The prospect of remaining in the position of the junior partner of the global hegemon - the United States, it seems, does not cause objections from the Japanese leader.
By the way, the historical digression of the current US president about the post-war "liberal world order" looks rather strange – after all, from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, the geopolitical alignment was bipolar and was determined by the confrontation of the liberal American and communist Soviet models. The current way of life in the world was formed not in 1946, as Biden claims, but much later - conditionally by 1991, that is, following the results of the Cold War, not the Second World War, explained Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the HSE Center for European and International Studies, an expert of the Valdai Club, to the newspaper VIEW.
When, in the current situation, Biden talks about a "new world order", but which is still dominated by the United States, he "probably hopes for the restoration of the old one, but without the participation of Russia or even on the ruins of our homeland," said Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the Russian Council for International Affairs. "Biden believes that such a system can still be recreated," the expert added.
"America is striving for a unipolar world–" Minister Lavrov stated in an interview with RT last Friday. – It will not be a "global village" at all, it will be an "American village", maybe an American saloon, where everyone dances to the tune of the strongest."
A little later, the head of our diplomacy pointed out some signs of a change in the world balance of power - noting that not all serious powers agreed to participate in the sanctions attack on Russia. "There are players who will never agree with the existence of a "global village" under the leadership of a "sheriff" from America - these are China, India, Brazil, Mexico. I think these are the countries that will not take a salute at all if Uncle Sam tells them to do something," TASS reported the words of the Russian Foreign Minister.
The fact that the development of the situation in Ukraine will greatly change the relationship between the countries – and will not change for the better for the Americans, the top officials of the United States themselves openly say.
Among other things, we are talking about the fact that the dollar may lose its status as a global unit of account and means of saving.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell acknowledged that the war in Ukraine could accelerate China's steps to develop alternatives to the current dollar-dominated international payments infrastructure, Bloomberg reported in early March. European financiers give similar estimates. Since Russia was deprived of access to foreign currency reserves as a punishment, all world players received an extremely important signal – you cannot count on the security of your reserves if they are stored in dollars. This opinion was expressed by the same Bloomberg investment analyst at Credit Suisse bank Zoltan Pozhar.
"It is no coincidence that Biden said this at a meeting with representatives of the business community who do not understand what to do next. Here, American businessmen are explained how to behave and what to do. In any case, it is clear that a lot will change," said the expert-Americanist Dmitry Drobnitsky. But, he added, it is obvious that "the era of globalization and the role of the dollar as the only world currency is over. Therefore, the global Western-centric world will be replaced by local centers of power, Drobnitsky predicts.
It can be assumed that
the contours of these new geopolitical "big spaces" are already being defined.
"As for China, Beijing will try to draw at least a significant part of the Pacific region into its zone of influence," the source predicts. It is logical to assume that Beijing uses economic instruments to consolidate its influence – from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (whose partners include such US allies as South Korea, the Philippines and even Australia) to various Silk Road projects.
Russia, according to Drobnitsky, is trying to build its own sphere of interests. "The Ukrainian special operation is a demonstration that in its zone of influence Moscow will not tolerate rules established not by Russia and even more so hostile to it. We do not yet know what the configuration of this region will be," Drobnitsky said. We should add that earlier experts assessed Moscow's role in stopping the Armenian-Azerbaijani war and the CSTO operation to pacify Kazakhstan as one of the manifestations of Russia's bid for the role of a leading geopolitical player in Northern Eurasia.
According to Drobnitsky, the future geopolitical pole of the US allies can be most clearly imagined. "The Americans themselves outlined it," the expert explained. "This is some part of Western Europe, Canada and Australia. The Americans would very much like to see Japan there and build some kind of relations with India, which, apparently, will not work. South Korea is a big question. But a significant part of Europe is not included there," the expert noted, adding that it is not yet clear what will happen to the remnants of Europe, India, Latin America and the richest countries of the Middle East.
Drobnitsky recalled the works of the American political scientist Ian Bremmer, who wrote that large organizations like the G20 and G7 no longer play any role, and instead there will be a "big zero" – some other forms of organization of society. In one of the likely scenarios, the United States and China break off relations, after which the "world of regions" begins. "We are now witnessing the emergence of the classical world of the Bremmer region. There will be large regional agglomerations that will have their own currency, internal trading rules," the interlocutor is sure.
At the same time, it is quite obvious which areas of the world will be zones of confrontation, experts say. First, the Russian leadership in late 2021 - early 2022 clearly indicated that it would not tolerate the presence of the United States and its satellites in the post-Soviet space, including in its European part. Secondly, both the United States and China equally claim dominance in the Asia-Pacific region.
"The Ukrainian conflict will become a catalyst for many global trends. On the one hand, the formation of a multipolar world, on the other - the struggle of the United States to preserve the remnants of the former hegemony. Now these two trends are colliding. They have come into open conflict not only in Ukraine, although the Ukrainian steppes have become the main theater of the clash. It is possible that new fronts of this clash will open soon, for example, in Southeast Asia - around the island of Taiwan. This will be the result of the US-Chinese contradictions," Dmitry Suslov predicts.
The contours of the future world are not yet clear, but what can be said for sure is the collapse of the unipolar world order, which the United States has been trying to build since the late 1980s, experts believe. In this sense, the current events in Ukraine are not so much a "turning point" as the most vivid manifestation of far-reaching processes.
"What is happening now in Ukraine is the result of systemic contradictions that have been growing over the past 30 years, the result of the categorical refusal of the United States to integrate Russia into the European security system, a kind of indirect effect of NATO expansion", –
Suslov noted. The West was creating a "nation-centric" security system in Europe, while pushing Russia out of it and dragging Ukraine into it, the expert added. "This happened despite warnings that this is an existential threat for Russia. If the problem were in Ukraine alone, there would be no special operation. But we are not dealing with local, intra-Ukrainian processes, but with pan-European and global ones. The conflict has moved into an open phase," Suslov explained.
At the same time, Kortunov stressed, the hierarchy that existed in the world is clearly being eroded. "Even traditional American allies, for example, from the Persian Gulf countries, are no longer so disciplined about Washington's requests. More importantly, changes in the global financial system and de-dollarization will accelerate now. The Ukrainian crisis will accelerate the departure from what can be considered the rudiments of a unipolar world. And it is unlikely that Biden or any other American leader will be able to stop it," Kortunov summed up.
Andrey Rezchikov, Andrey Rechmensky
