Multipolarity and diversity are no longer distant aspirations but the realities of the emerging world order. If the Eurasian Charter is to reflect them, it must engage the states absent at its launch on 25 September 2026, above all India. 

On 25 September 2026 in New York, at the negotiations held on Belarus and Russia’s initiative during the high-level week of the 81st UNGA session, nine states signed a Joint Statement on the Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. The signatories include Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Russia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. India is not in the list. India did not sign. This does not mean India does not share the ideas of the Eurasian Charter. It means that India maintains a careful position.

The Joint Statement by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin following the 23rd Summit in New Delhi in December 2025, includes the partners’ commitment to a multipolar world, recognition of Eurasia’s strategic significance, the creation of a new security architecture. Both leaders called India-Russia relationship an “anchor of peace and stability,” one that will be kept in place through equal and indivisible security. The last part of the Joint Statement highlights that both countries will remain committed to a multipolar world and multipolar Asia. It also welcomes India’s idea to create an SCO Civilizational Dialogue Forum. Indivisible security, multipolarity, dialogue among civilizations—these are the main ideas of the Eurasian Charter and India has already supported them.

So, the real question for New Delhi is whether the vocabulary that works for the two long-standing partners can be made to work across the continent. Moscow faces a mirror question: Will the Eurasian Charter carry the whole of the vocabulary, including the parts that protect India’s freedom to choose friends and keep Asia from tilting towards any single power? I argue that India-Russia partnership, more than any relationship, is a working model that the Eurasian Charter’s drafters can use to scale it up.

A Continent Without an “Umbrella” Structure

Africa and Latin America have numerous sub-regional organizations, and they also have pan-continental ones. In Eurasia, the SCO, the EAEU, ASEAN, the SCTO… each operates within its own framework, but with no common platform where all the continent’s countries and organizations, without exception, could regularly exchange views. The Eurasian Charter is meant to overcome this shortfall.

Its main ideas were articulated during the Eurasian Security Conference held in October 2023 in Minsk, Belarus. In November 2024, Moscow and Minsk agreed on a Joint Vision of the Eurasian Charter’s content, and in New York the founding states agreed on the main terms: decisions are taken by consensus, the working language is English, and the aim is to adopt the Charter at a summit of Eurasian leaders, which would presumably take place before the end of 2027, with the drafting to begin in Minsk in November during the annual Minsk Security Conference.

One provision is worthy of special note. The document does not prejudice the rights and obligations of participating states arising from the UN Charter or other international agreements and arrangements to which they are party.

No commitment is required from participating states to sign the final text, and any state can withdraw at any time. This means that New Delhi would not have to go down on any of its promises in other platforms, such as the Quad, or its engagements with the U.S., Europe, or Japan.

Yet the project has also a sensitive side. The nine founding states include several countries under heavy Western sanctions, and amid the war in Ukraine most Western capitals will likely interpret any text co-authored by Moscow as a confrontation move. India has experienced this pressure first-hand. In August 2025, Washington doubled its tariffs on Indian goods as a penalty for buying Russian oil. Russia should not expect New Delhi to accept any further pressures easily.

Friendship Without a Treaty of Alliance

The Indo-Russian relationship is useful as a model for handling disagreements. Its warmth is real but easy to overstate. The two countries have no mutual defense agreement and have never needed one. According to the October 2000 Declaration of Strategic Partnership, their relationship is built on annual summits, defense-industrial ties, nuclear energy cooperation, and consulting before acting. Neither has asked the other to choose sides.

However, the balance has not always been easy to maintain. Moscow has openly criticized the Quad. During his April 2021 visit to New Delhi, Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described it as an “Asian NATO,” to which his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar noted that no country should have a veto over India‘s partnerships. India maintains the Quad’s membership, and Russia continues to deepen its ties with India. In Samarkand in September 2022, Narendra Modi told Vladimir Putin, in front of the cameras, that “today’s era is not an era of war.” Putin said he understood India’s concerns. Since then, annual summits have continued, and trade in oil, fertilizers, and arms has expanded.

Russia, for its part, has kept close ties with China through every phase of India’s border tensions with Beijing, and India has not demanded that it stop. What Moscow has offered instead is support on matters it cares about most. The December 2025 Joint Statement repeats Russia‘s backing for India’s permanent seat in a reformed UN Security Council and membership in the Nuclear Supplier Group. It also “condemns the April 2025 terrorists and their safe havens”—a language India has not always secured in multilateral settings.

This is the kind of understanding the Eurasian Charter needs: partners who can disagree openly, maintain other relationships, and still respect one another’s core interests. This is a more pragmatic basis for a Eurasian order than any bloc arrangement, because no states will share exactly the same views on their security. 

What Moscow Should Bring into the Charter

If Russia wants India at the negotiation table, it should bring the entire December 2025 Joint Statement’s vocabulary into the Eurasian Charter, including parts that may be less comfortable.

First is the Multipolar Asia clause. For India, commitment to a multipolar Asia means that there must be no single regional power setting the terms. A Eurasian Charter that speaks warmly of multipolarity in the world while staying silent about the balance of power inside Eurasia would be perceived by Indians as written for one great neighbor—China. Russia itself has reasons to be wary about it. Russian foreign-policy experts have voiced concerns that Beijing might increasingly dictate Russia’s Asia policy. A Eurasian order with India’s strong position in it is the best insurance against such an outcome for Russia. 

Second is the link between indivisible security and counterterrorism. The New Delhi Joint Statement places these two ideas together deliberately. For India, security is not an abstract principle: when a state provides shelter to armed groups that operate across borders, its neighbors are inevitably put at risk, regardless of formal alliances or treaties. A Eurasian Charter that limits its security agenda to military blocs and foreign bases will be a simple recast of the European security concerns. A commitment to deny safe heaven to cross-border terrorist organizations would give it a much broader meaning, including for Central Asia which faces the same the threats emerging from Afghanistan.

Third is the restraint in naming enemies. Sergei Lavrov has described the Eurasian Charter as a platform free from external interference. Read narrowly, this means Eurasians settling Eurasian questions among themselves, which India supports. Read broadly, it implies a demand that its members loosen ties with powers outside the continent, which India will refuse, as S. Jaishankar made quite clear speaking about its membership in the Quad.

The Charter’s drafters should choose the narrow reading and specify it in the text. A Eurasian Charter that defines itself by what it opposes will gather only the states that already agree with Moscow. A Eurasian Charter that defines itself by rules of conduct can gather the entire continent.

What New Delhi Should Weigh Up

India has good reasons to be cautious, but remaining outside the negotiation process indefinitely would not serve its interests.

At the BRICS summit hosted by New Delhi last month, Modi urged the Global South to become a “rule-shaper” rather than simply accept rules set elsewhere. The Eurasian Charter is a good rulemaking exercise for India. It would be odd to call for a larger voice in global rulemaking, while leaving the work on the first draft of the code concerning India’s home continent to others.

The practical risks of staying away are obvious. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan are already in the room, and India has courted the region seriously since the first India-Central Asia Summit held in January 2022, with connectivity at the top of the agenda. If China joins later, as it well may, the text will carry Beijing’s preferences more strongly than India’s. A country that arrives in the fourth round can only propose amendment to the document with the structure already set by others.

Furthermore, the terms make a low-cost entry possible. Each state decides the level and composition of its delegation. India could send experts from its Ministry of External Affairs and research institutions rather than a ministerial team, take part in drafting, and keep its decision on the final document entirely open. By doing so, New Delhi would show Washington, Brussels and Tokyo that it is in the room to keep the text inclusive and that its participation binds it to nothing.

Another reason concerns India’s diplomacy. The December 2025 Joint Statement includes New Delhi’s proposal on holding the first session of a SCO Civilizational Dialogue Forum in India this year. The Eurasian Charter, which sees dialogue among civilizations as one of its pillars, would put India’s idea at a far wider stage than any single regional body.

An Agenda for Minsk

If both capitals accept this view, they could take two steps before the first-round meets.

The first step is a joint non-paper. Indian and Russian diplomats could set out, in a few pages, the principles both governments have already signed: indivisible security tied to a duty to deny haven to terrorists, a multipolar world that includes a multipolar Asia, respect for each state’s existing partnerships, and dialogue among civilizations. Submitted to the Chair between rounds, as the terms allow, it would show the other participants that the Eurasian Charter’s vocabulary can unite states with very different alignments.

The second step concerns the Chair. Under the terms, Belarus chairs alone if no other Eurasian state is willing to co-chair. Russia, as the Charter’s co-initiator, could encourage Minsk to offer co-chairmanship to a state from outside the founding nine. India is the natural candidate, although New Delhi may well refuse at this stage. Anyway, such an offer would signify that the process is open—on paper and in practice.

The third step is connectivity, where interests are concrete and politics are unaffected. In September, India and the Eurasian Economic Union agreed to hold a third round of free trade talks in November. Earlier in January, the Indian government had concluded a trade agreement with the European Union. This pairing shows India’s approach in miniature, and the Eurasian Charter should welcome it. A Chapter that commits signatories to keep trade corridors open in times of political tensions, covering the North-South Transport Corridor, the Chennai-Vladivostok Maritime Corridor, and the Northern Sea Route that the December 2025 Joint Statement names, would matter more to Indian and Russian businesses than any declaration about a multipolar world order.

The fourth step is the expert track. The December 2025 Joint Statement welcomes the growing exchanges between Indian and Russian think tanks. In both countries, expert institutions could run a parallel dialogue on the Eurasian Charter’s text and invite scholars from the absent states, including China, Uzbekistan, and Türkiye. A text tested by experts before it reaches ministers is a stronger text.

Beyond the Three Seas

In 1468, a Russia merchant Afanasy Nikitin sailed down the Volga, crossed the Caspian, travelled through Persia, and took a ship for India’s western coast. He spent about three years in the country and left one of the earliest Russian descriptions of India, valued for a realistic view, not a repetition of fantastical legends about India. Incidentally his route runs close to the line of the North-South Transport Corridor.

Nikitin travelled as a trader curious about India, and he recounted life in the country without any ideas to remake it. India-Russia relations have kept that spirit: two societies interested in each other, each content to let the other remain itself.

The Eurasian Charter will succeed only if it carries the same spirit across the continent. India and Russia have, in effect, already written the first draft between themselves. The task now is to make room in it for everyone else.

The latest turn in Russia-US relations has shocked Kiev, outraged the EU, provoked discontent among a considerable number of politicians in the US, and left many observers around the world perplexed.

The Trump administration’s sudden decision to suspend sanctions on Russian diesel supplies appears to contradict its recent actions, including the adoption of tough new sanctions legislation intended to increase pressure on Moscow, and while some attribute the reversal to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, others see the beginnings of a new policy, or evidence of a fundamental change in the administration’s approach to Ukraine.

To understand what’s happening, however, we must look beyond the peculiarities of the US president’s public behavior. Trump’s extravagance, which frequently borders on the absurd, often conceals a relatively clear set of objectives, but whether those objectives are sensible is another question.

The most likely explanation for his latest reversal lies in domestic American politics, as the congressional midterm elections are less than a month away, and the Republican Party faces difficult prospects. Trump maintains an air of indifference, but losing control of both houses of Congress would condemn him to two years of political confrontation and considerable frustration.

He probably understands that there’s little prospect of fundamentally improving the economic situation, particularly consumer prices, before voters go to the polls, so for now, the emphasis is on psychological impact.

Russia isn’t the first country Washington has approached about increasing fuel supplies to international markets, and the more agreements Trump can announce, the more opportunities he has to proclaim that the White House is working tirelessly to protect ordinary Americans from rising prices.

The expectation, presumably, is that voters will forget how much of the present difficulty stems from Trump’s own actions in the Persian Gulf.

We shall soon discover whether this approach works, but there’s nothing particularly irrational about it, and Trump is pursuing a deliberate political objective. The fact that his latest decision contradicts previous statements doesn’t trouble him because he’s long operated on the assumption that words have value at the moment they’re spoken, but impose few obligations thereafter.

What does this mean for Russia, beyond the welcome prospect of additional budget revenues?

Colleagues from the Vatfor project have identified an important development, in that for the first time since the beginning of the conflict, the US president has made a significant decision regarding Russia without making Ukraine the determining consideration.

Until now, the Ukrainian question has been inseparable from virtually every aspect of Washington’s policy towards Moscow, but this time, not only has it been set aside, the decision directly contradicts Kiev’s interests at a particularly difficult moment.

Hence the indignation of the Ukrainian leadership, as from its perspective, the Americans have behaved unfairly.

There are probably several reasons for this change, but the principal one appears to be Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s unwillingness to accommodate Washington’s demands that Ukraine stop attacking Russian energy infrastructure.

The strikes have become one of Kiev’s principal instruments of warfare, and American requests to curtail them have largely gone unanswered.

Trump, meanwhile, has become fixated on Russian oil supplies as a means of addressing rising fuel prices, and their importance shouldn’t be exaggerated, even if additional Russian supplies alone are unlikely to transform the global market. Nevertheless, Trump has evidently decided that Zelensky bears responsibility for aggravating the situation.

Once the US president reaches this conclusion, persuading him otherwise becomes extremely difficult. Therefore, for the moment, Kiev’s objections have simply been disregarded.

The more consequential question concerns American intelligence assistance, because to stop, or at least substantially reduce, Ukrainian attacks on Russian targets, Washington would have to restrict the intelligence it provides to Kiev, and much of this information amounts, in practical terms, to targeting assistance.

Trump already demonstrated willingness to use this instrument when around a year and a half ago, he temporarily suspended intelligence cooperation for several days to put pressure on the Ukrainian leadership.

A longer interruption would be a different matter and it would represent a genuine change in Washington’s approach to the conflict, effectively distancing the US from its Ukrainian partner, but whether Trump is prepared to take this step is uncertain.

There is, after all, an extensive informal coalition interested in maintaining the present course, and it includes the US defense industry, increasingly influential technology companies, European governments, and their political allies in Washington. Trump encountered these forces during his previous attempt to advance his preferred settlement following the Anchorage summit, and that initiative ultimately produced little, so it remains to be seen whether the present effort will fare any better.

If Washington proves unwilling to exert sustained pressure on Kiev, the latest initiative could gradually lose momentum, and this is especially likely after the congressional elections, when the immediate political value of announcing presidential achievements will diminish.

The decisive question, therefore, is whether the US leadership can compel its partners to move in the direction it considers necessary, and if it can, an opportunity for further negotiations on a settlement could emerge.

There’s also a second conclusion which is particularly important for Russia, because Washington’s latest actions offer a glimpse of how Russia-US relations could develop after the military phase of the conflict ends.

The enormous collection of sanctions imposed on Russia is unlikely to disappear, and removing them would be exceptionally difficult, both procedurally and politically, given too many restrictions have become embedded in law and institutional practice.

Instead, the sanctions will probably remain formally in place, while decisions about their enforcement are taken according to circumstances; thus, when a particular restriction conflicts with US interests, Washington could suspend its application, but when the circumstances change, it can be restored.

In other words, sanctions will become instruments to be activated or deactivated according to immediate political and economic requirements, rather than permanent expressions of an immutable policy, and this is an important distinction between the American and European approaches.

The Americans generally display a greater degree of pragmatism as they are perfectly capable of proclaiming principles with great conviction, abandoning them when circumstances demand it, and returning to the same principles when doing so becomes convenient. European governments, by contrast, have increasingly bound themselves to political commitments from which retreat is both institutionally complicated and publicly embarrassing.

For Moscow, understanding this difference will be essential when constructing its future relationship with Washington now that the confrontation over Ukraine has reached a stage at which its consequences extend far beyond the immediate military and territorial questions.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it will help determine the structure of future political relations between Russia and the various components of the Western world, and while that structure is already beginning to emerge, its geometry remains unsettled, and the lines are still moving.

RT

The world stands at a critical turning point and, as President Xi Jinping has noted, “changes unseen in a century are accelerating.” After it was confirmed that U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend the APEC Summit in Shenzhen, China, scheduled for 18-19 November 2026, expectations have grown that a trilateral meeting of the three most powerful heads of state may mark a proactive strategic recalibration required by the exigencies of the current international situation.

This meeting may come as a historic adjustment of the global structural transformation and the upgrading of the major powers’ relations eighty years after the formation of the Yalta system. Hopefully, the interaction between the presidents of the three major powers will not be the “G3 joint management of the world” as hyped by Western media, but emerge as a new ‘Shenzhen International System’, a model that will operate in parallel with the UN-centered multilateral system and inject certainty into the turbulent world.

The Shenzhen Trilateral Meeting as a Product of Thorough Preparation and an Urgent Imperative of the Times

Face-to-face meetings between presidents of major powers are never spur-of-the-moment events; they are the cumulative product of intensive diplomatic efforts, Track II dialogues, and successive bilateral exchanges. Over the past year or so, bilateral communication among China, the U.S., and Russia—including various dialogues, shuttle diplomacy by special envoys, and telephone conversations—has steadily advanced, with the parties repeatedly sounding out each other’s bottom lines and exchanging views on global pressing issues.

Visits and statements made by top-level officials in 2026 point to the high probability of a trilateral meeting of the Chinese, U.S., and Russian heads of state. On 4 February—the day marking the start of spring in the Chinese lunar calendar—President Xi Jinping held separate telephone conversations with President Putin and President Trump. During the third week of May, President Trump and President Putin visited Beijing in succession to meet with President Xi Jinping. On 23-25 September, President Xi visited the United States. On 1 October, President Putin publicly stated at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club that a trilateral summit was possible, provided the agenda was right.

The think tank I am affiliated with has frequently organized trilateral dialogues among scholars and former officials from China, the U.S., and Russia in recent years. Multiple rounds of exchanges yielded a clear consensus that if major powers engage in a spiraling vicious rivalry, no single party will remain unscathed. This realization has laid a solid conceptual foundation for the leaders’ meeting during the APEC Summit in Shenzhen.

There is also a distinct sense of urgency. The current global order is in a state of a severe ‘entropy increase.’ The protracted Russia-Ukraine conflict is draining the resources and fracturing Eurasia’s security architecture. The Middle East remains volatile, with the risk of regional conflicts spilling over their boundaries. Global inflation, supply chain fragmentation, and debt crises are spreading across the Global South. Global problems—such as climate change, AI governance, and nuclear non-proliferation—are not resolved, lacking deep involvement of China, the U.S., and Russia. Bilateral diplomacy is no longer sufficient to address complex cross-regional global challenges.

The intensifying domestic political polarization in the U.S., with partisan wrangling over foreign policy, is draining the nation’s strategic energy; Russia, struggling with geopolitical security pressures, urgently needs stable relations with major powers; and China, currently undergoing a phase of high-quality development, needs a generally stable international environment. While each of these three major powers has its own practical domestic and foreign policy imperatives, they also share a collective responsibility for maintaining global strategic stability.

The Global South hopes that the major powers will manage their differences, halt confrontation, and jointly address existential challenges such as food, energy, and debt security. The world can no longer afford the catastrophic chain reactions resulting from miscalculations by major powers. It is this shared sense of global crisis that urges the need for a summit of the leaders of China, the U.S., and Russia.

The APEC multilateral framework provides a fitting diplomatic setting for the three leaders’ communication: trilateral talks in a multilateral context are generally inapt for striking secret deals or carving out spheres of influence, but instead help focus on the regional and global agenda.

The ‘Shenzhen International System’—a New Paradigm, Eight Decades after Yalta?

The 1945 Yalta Conference laid the groundwork of the post-World War II global order—a system that has endured for over eight decades. Born from the ruins of war, the Yalta international system, rooted in the major powers’ logic of delineating spheres of influence, ultimately created a postwar landscape marked by bipolar confrontation.

While this system maintained peace for a time, it was inherently characterized by power politics, bloc-based antagonism, and the carving up of spheres of influence. After the Cold War, attempts were made to replace the bipolar structure with U.S. unipolar hegemony; however, this experiment in unipolarity ultimately resulted in increased conflict, inequality, and failures in global governance. Over the past eight decades, the underlying logic of the Yalta system has become increasingly ill-suited to today’s multipolar reality.

The historical value of the potential trilateral meeting of China, U.S., and Russia’s leaders—held within the framework of the Shenzhen APEC summit—is that these powers have begun to jointly explore a new order that transcends the outdated mindset of the Yalta system; this marks the starting point for what might be called the ‘Shenzhen International System.’

This system is by no means intended to replace the United Nations or to abandon existing international mechanisms in favor of a new setup. Rather, it would indicate the major powers’ joint intention to reshape the principles of their coexistence and correct the entrenched mindsets inherited from the Yalta era—bloc confrontation and contest for spheres of influence.

Under the Yalta system, the underlying logic of major-power interaction was zero-sum games, alliance-building, and territorial division. By contrast, the Shenzhen trilateral summit may draw a new direction of controllable competition, conflict prevention, policy coordination, and mutual respect for nations’ core interests. The primary value of such a trilateral summit lies in managing the strategic risks associated with major powers, establishing guardrails for crisis communication, and preventing local conflicts from escalating into direct confrontation between major powers.

Furthermore, in the provision of global public goods, the three nations can coordinate their efforts in addressing food security, energy stability, and climate governance. Most importantly, the meeting may acknowledge the objective reality of a multipolar world and diversity of civilizations and development paths; it may move away from drawing lines based on ideology and compelling nations to take sides. The Yalta system was an order born of war, bearing the imprint of power politics; by contrast, the Shenzhen trilateral summit may initiate a reshaping of international order—conducted in a peaceful environment—where major powers voluntarily exercise self-restraint and seek coexistence. This will mark a significant endeavor in international relations history.

It will also signify that the world’s major powers are no longer retracing the historical path of the “WWII victors redrawing the global map,” but intend to jointly maintain fundamental global stability based on the premise of coexistence. The historical significance of this shift will become increasingly apparent to the international community over time. Of course, building a new order paradigm is a long-term process and a trilateral summit is merely the starting point of a long journey that is far from its final destination.

Not a G3, but a New Model of Major-Power Interaction Compatible with Multilateralism

Some Western media outlets and public opinion circles using outdated geopolitical concepts to hype up a so-called ‘G3 bloc’ claim that China, the U.S., and Russia intend to monopolize global affairs. This is a classic Eurocentric understanding of major-power interaction rooted in the old logic of 19th-century alliances and the secret division of spoils. It must be made clear: the trilateral summit of Chinese, U.S., and Russian presidents is not a ‘G3.’

The ‘G3’ concept is essentially a closed clique of a few major powers monopolizing global decision-making, dictating the terms to the rest of the world, demarcating spheres of influence, and compelling other nations to submit. By contrast, the trilateral interaction of China, the U.S., and Russia is presumed to be an open, issue-oriented communication mechanism focused on crisis management.

The primary goal of such communication is to manage mutual conflicts and prevent clashes between major powers, rather than to form an exclusive bloc for joint opposition to other nations. The consensus reached through trilateral interaction will neither supersede the UN Charter nor replace existing multilateral mechanisms such as the G20 or APEC.

While there is room for cooperation, significant competition and differences between the three nations also exist. They will not form a monolithic alliance. China and Russia characterize their relationship as a comprehensive strategic partnership embracing coordination in the new era, not a formal alliance. China and the U.S. seek a constructive, strategically stable relationship based on mutual respect, fairness, and reciprocity. While the U.S. and Russia harbor deep-seated conflicts, they maintain a baseline for crisis management. Thus, the trilateral relationship is a dynamic balance, not a rigid bloc.

The new model of major-power interaction is entirely compatible with multilateralism; the two models are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Multilateralism involves all sovereign states; it is anchored in the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, which respects the sovereign equality of nations and addresses the aspirations of the vast number of developing countries in the Global South.

Stable communication among China, the U.S., and Russia as permanent members of the UN Security Council helps it overcome the current state of paralysis and dysfunction of its multilateral mechanisms. Only by effectively managing the most dangerous bilateral and trilateral risks can major powers hear the voices of small and middle states and respond to the concerns of the Global South.

Trilateral communication among major powers serves as a stabilizer for the multilateral system, not a substitute for it. The outcome of trilateral talks must ultimately be implemented within a global multilateral framework, incorporating the participation of more nations. Crucially, rather than engaging in mere bargaining at the negotiating table, the three major powers must consider the development aspirations of the Global South countries.

*   *   *

Amidst the current profound global changes, the potential trilateral meeting of the Chinese, U.S., and Russian leaders—held on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in Shenzhen—could be a pivotal moment in the history of diplomatic practice. It could remind the world that confrontation, war, and bloc rivalry are not the only historical paths available to major powers. Managing differences, peaceful coexistence, and limited coordination are viable choices.

Of course, we should not be overly optimistic about the prospects. Deep-seated mistrust, ideological biass, and conflicts of interest will continue to test the three nations’ strategic resolve. However, if China, the U.S., and Russia maintain the communication channels established through head-of-state diplomacy, uphold mutual respect, and avoid direct conflict, the new paradigm of major-power relations initiated by the Shenzhen trilateral meeting will take root and grow—offering a rare opportunity for injecting strategic certainty into the turbulent world.

On October 1, 2026, Russian President Vladimir Putin participated in the plenary session of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, held under the theme “Responsibility for the Future: Limits of the Possible, or Limitless Possibilities?” The session was moderated by Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs and Research Director of the Foundation for Development and Support of the Valdai Discussion Club.

 

Read the transcript of the plenary session of the Valdai Annual Meeting here.

The Club’s flagship conference brought together 120 participants from 40 countries, including Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Participants addressed a wide range of issues, including the transformation of the world order, states’ responsibility for the future, prospects for international dialogue, nuclear deterrence, and the militarisation of public consciousness. Discussions also focused on the ethical implications of using artificial intelligence and unmanned systems in armed conflicts, as well as the resilience of the global economy amid military and political upheaval. Particular attention was paid to Asia’s growing role, the outlook for the Middle East, and Europe’s future.

The annual Valdai report, “Keep Calm: The State and Responsibility for the Future”, was presented on the opening day of the meeting.

Details about the Valdai Club’s Annual Meeting can be found here.

For citation, please use:
Yenikeyeff, Sh.M., 2026. The Global Energy Order – 2040: Contours of an Emerging System. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 10–41. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-10-41

Will the new energy order emerge from a managed reconfiguration or a systemic rupture? The answer will be determined largely by three powers: the U.S., China, and Russia. Their decisions over the coming years—reactive and structurally formative—will define the framework within which every other actor in the world system will operate by 2040.

Introduction: The Structural Conditions of Transformation

“If a single flap of a butterfly’s wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado,  so also can all the previous and subsequent flaps of its wings…”

Edward Lorenz, Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas? 1972

By 2040, the world’s energy system will have undergone changes comparable in depth only to the post-war reordering of the mid-20th century. The present transformation, however, is fundamentally different: it cannot be reduced to a single technological transition or a single geopolitical shift. We are witnessing several distinct yet interconnected processes, and it is precisely their interaction that may produce a non-linear outcome. 

The first process is the transition to a low-carbon economy, proceeding unevenly and marked by reversals: the phase-out of coal has slowed, while nuclear power is experiencing a renaissance. The second is the securitization of energy flows: wars and trade conflicts are turning supplies of energy and raw materials into instruments of strategic coercion, making price a secondary consideration. The third is the fragmentation of the international monetary and financial architecture, which is driving the first significant shift of energy trade away from the dollar. The fourth, marginal until recently, is the ‘last wave of decolonization’: demands by Global South states for reparations, greater retention of value added from raw-material extraction, revised resource rights, and redistribution of climate finance. All four processes interact, alternately reinforcing and constraining one another.

The escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022 catalyzed but did not cause them. The breakdown of the ‘unipolar energy order of 1991–2014’ was driven in part by the U.S.’s use of the dollar as an instrument of pressure, including its mounting technological rivalry with Beijing.

The Ukraine conflict laid bare the accumulated contradictions and made them undeniable. The 2026 escalation in the Persian Gulf accelerated processes that had been developing since the mid-2010s.

According to Gopinath et al. (2024), the world economy is dividing into a U.S.-leaning bloc, a China-leaning bloc, and nonaligned connector countries that preserve ties with both. The notion of a ‘new energy order’—one in which governments, rather than markets alone, actively reshape energy flows—was articulated by Bordoff and O’Sullivan (2022) in their essay of that name. The present analysis extends that framework into 2040. Within this framework, energy ceases to be a neutral commodity: it becomes, simultaneously, an arena of rivalry, its instrument, and its prize.

Logistics Hubs as an Arena of Competition

For half a century, the strategic importance of maritime chokepoints appeared to recede as free trade expanded. They have now re-emerged as instruments of strategic coercion. Roughly 20% of global oil flows pass through the Strait of Hormuz (EIA, 2026a), while roughly two-thirds of China’s oil imports transit through the Strait of Malacca (Ovannisyan, 2019; Collins, 2018). The ability to disrupt these routes confers leverage not only over prices, but also over the political alignment of importers and producers, adversaries and allies. Political constraints on whom states may buy from can become as binding as a physical blockade.

The U.S.–Iran escalation, which began in late February 2026 and soon left the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to commercial shipping, has exceeded the 1970s oil shocks in the scale of its disruption to supply chains (IEA, 2026e). Around 1.5 million tons of LNG per week—19% of global exports—were removed from the market (Petroleum Australia, 2026). Spot prices in Asia rose above US$20 per MMBtu, reversing their discount to European benchmarks (Wood Mackenzie, 2026a). Infrastructure vulnerability was stark: the inventories of Japan’s major power utilities amounted to roughly 22 days of supply (Petroleum Australia, 2026). South Korea, with more than 20% spot-market exposure, moved to increase coal and nuclear generation (Seoul Economic Daily, 2026).

The logical response to this ‘southern vulnerability’ has been a reorientation towards northern routes. The strategic potential of the Northern Sea Route—its capacity to cut distances between Northern Europe and Northeast Asia by up to 40%, and to open Arctic hydrocarbons to world markets—was already set out nearly two decades ago (Yenikeyeff and Krysiek, 2007). What was then a forecast for 2025–2030 is now being realized: the route is becoming a strategic hedging instrument (Mishchenko, 2026; Reilly, Yenikeyeff and Paik, 2026). For China, it offers a way out of the ‘Malacca dilemma’—Beijing’s long-standing strategic vulnerability arising from the concentration of its seaborne oil imports through a single chokepoint exposed to potential U.S. naval interdiction (Ovannisyan, 2019). For Japan and South Korea, it could offer access to Russian Arctic LNG that bypasses Middle Eastern instability. Yet the Northern Sea Route is largely controlled by Russia, amid a growing Chinese presence: in April 2023, the two countries’ coast guards signed a memorandum of cooperation against the backdrop of NATO enlargement and the breakdown of wider Arctic cooperation (Nilsen, 2023; Reilly, Yenikeyeff and Paik, 2026).

The Arctic has thus become a new arena of geo-economic competition with a fundamentally different geometry, in which icebreaker technologies, navigational systems, and control over ports of refuge matter alongside naval power.

The present phase differs from the oil crises of the 1970s less in the scale of price increases than in the mechanisms of coercion: power now operates through control over energy corridors and chokepoints, not only through restrictions on commodity supply.

Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Transformation of Energy

AI and energy have become interdependent, and neither can be optimized in isolation.

AI sharply improves the efficiency of energy systems: it forecasts demand more accurately, balances load more effectively, and integrates intermittent renewable generation. Yet it also creates new vulnerabilities: attacks on algorithms could trigger cascading outages impossible in classical infrastructure. This is not a side-effect but a structural feature of the ‘smart grid’: every increment of efficiency comes at the cost of systemic fragility.

At the same time, global electricity consumption by data centers—driven increasingly by AI workloads—has grown by roughly 12% a year since 2017. In 2025 alone, it rose by 17%, compared with about 3% growth in total global electricity demand (IEA, 2025c; IEA, 2026d). In the United States, flexible gas-fired generation currently plays a central role in balancing the power system, ramping up when wind and solar output falls and helping to meet data centers’ demand for reliable, round-the-clock electricity. U.S. gas is now pulled in three competing directions: towards European importers replacing Russian supply, towards Asian buyers competing for flexible cargoes, and towards a fast-growing domestic technology sector, exemplified by the Stargate AI-infrastructure program. Where a given export shipment goes is determined not by a White House directive, but by private companies holding the cargo, whose destination-flexible contracts let them redirect volumes between markets on the basis of price arbitrage rather than state policy (Bordoff, 2025).

The emergence of the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek-R1 raised the possibility that algorithmic and architectural improvements could reduce the energy intensity of some AI workloads. Yet lower unit costs may stimulate greater use, leaving total AI electricity demand uncertain.

The AI boom’s most significant effect on the energy order, however, has been felt in a different domain altogether: it has driven the largest technology corporations towards nuclear generation. 2024 marked a turning point that some analysts already rank in importance alongside the energy-policy decisions of the 1970s. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta (recognized as extremist and banned in Russia), and Oracle signed or announced agreements with nuclear energy companies—from the planned restart of Three Mile Island to small modular reactors—together supporting several gigawatts of low-carbon capacity for their data centers (Mitchell, 2026; DOE, 2025). According to IEA estimates cited by Pew, nuclear power accounted for roughly 20% of the electricity consumed by U.S. data centers in 2024 (Leppert, 2025), a share that could grow.

The logic here turns on a single fundamental constraint: solar and wind generation are, for physical reasons, unable on their own to provide the continuous baseload required by hyperscalers; gas-fired generation is vulnerable to market volatility and competes with export demand. Nuclear power, whether in the form of large plants or small modular reactors, is one of the few sources combining continuity, a low carbon footprint, and the potential for predictable costs over a horizon of decades (DOE, 2025).

Russia, too, has entered the race: in November 2025, President Vladimir Putin presented the country’s small modular reactors as a potential solution for powering data centers (Putin, 2025). This broader approach is already being realized on the ground: one of Russia’s largest data centers has operated alongside the Kalinin nuclear plant at Udomlya since 2019.

By 2040, several competing digital-energy systems for AI are likely to emerge—Western, Chinese, and possibly Indian—each with its own configuration of generation, hardware, AI models, efficiency rules, and power-price benchmarks. The advantage will go to whoever can generate electricity, direct it into computation, and convert computational capacity into economic and political influence.

This implies a structural shift to a new era in which the kilowatt-hour becomes the fundamental unit of value, and the petrodollar may give way to the electrodollar, as discussed below.

The AI boom has reinforced nuclear generation’s status as a strategic resource. Access to reliable low-carbon electricity near data centers is becoming one of the determining factors in the pace of technological development.

Nuclear Power’s Quiet Return

The AI-driven demand described above is the latest and most visible catalyst of the nuclear renaissance, but the renaissance itself has deeper roots. Three pressures are converging: the Hormuz crisis exposed the limits of relying on variable renewable generation alone; energy imports remain vulnerable; and digital infrastructure demands unprecedented amounts of power. Nuclear power addresses all three at once; it is one of the few sources that combine stability, scalability, low carbon intensity, and relative insulation from fuel-imported disruptions.

One caveat, however, is decisive: many advanced reactor designs require high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU): uranium with U-235 content of 5–20%, well above the 3–5% used in conventional reactor fuel (World Nuclear Association, 2026; Atomnaya energiya 2.0, 2026). At-scale HALEU production infrastructure exists today only in Russia and China, while Russia remains the only commercial supplier. The U.S. began demonstration-scale production only in late 2023. Until Centrus and other producers reach industrial scale, Western reactor programs requiring HALEU remain constrained by the lack of a viable non-Russian source.

According to the IAEA high-case projection, global nuclear capacity could more than double by 2050; in 2024–2025 new units were commissioned in the UAE, France, the U.S., India, and China, and by mid-2026, 72 reactors were under construction worldwide (IAEA, 2026; Atomnaya energiya 2.0, 2026).

China has become the leader of the nuclear renaissance. By April 2025, China had 102 reactors in operation, under construction, or approved, with a combined 113 GW (CNEA, 2025), while its nuclear capacity under construction had ranked first globally for eighteen consecutive years. Yet nuclear power accounted for only 4.72% of its electricity generation in 2024—leaving considerable room for further growth. The strategic rationale is straightforward: in a maritime-blockade scenario, nuclear power and domestically supplied coal would provide firm generation relatively insulated from short-term disruptions in seaborne fuel imports (Reilly, Yenikeyeff and Paik, 2026). For China, the nuclear renaissance supports industrial modernization and strategic autonomy.

Russia retains its position as the world’s leading exporter of nuclear power plant technology.

Rosatom holds the industry’s largest foreign nuclear order book in the industry, comprising 39 units in ten countries, 22 of them under construction in seven (Chaban, 2025); various estimates place its share of the global reactor export market at roughly 70–80% (Siddi and Silvan, 2024; Rosatom, n.d.). The Build-Own-Operate model is especially significant here: where it is used, as at Türkiye’s Akkuyu plant, the state corporation does not merely build a plant but retains ownership, operates it, and supplies its fuel. Such arrangements can turn an export project into an instrument of long-term geopolitical influence, binding the host state to Russian fuel supplies, servicing, and technical expertise for decades.

Alongside this, small modular reactors—compact units that can serve small grids and, in some designs, operate off-grid—are advancing quickly. Their capabilities make them attractive to two very different markets: hyperscalers in the developed world (DOE, 2025) and Global South states with underdeveloped electricity infrastructure. Rosatom poured first concrete for its inaugural overseas small reactor project—a RITM-200N in Uzbekistan—in June 2026 (Rosatom, 2026). The U.S., Canada, South Korea, China, and the UK (with Rolls-Royce SMR) are developing their own competitors (World Nuclear Association, 2026). As noted above, such choices can bind the client to a supplier for the plant’s decades-long lifetime; the decisive contest of 2030–2040 will thus be for the Global South’s emerging nuclear markets.

Renewable Energy: The Limits of the Current Phase

Over two decades, renewable energy has become one of the central stories of global transformation. However, solar and wind power have now encountered two structural constraints that investment alone has yet to overcome at scale: low power density and the lack of economically viable long-duration storage. Lithium-ion batteries are designed primarily for hours, not days; pumped-storage plants and hydrogen remain geographically and economically constrained. Bridging this storage gap would require a leap akin to that from an early-1990s floppy disk to a modern flash drive—reflecting decades of advances in architecture, materials, and manufacturing. No equivalent leap has yet occurred in electricity storage.

The energy transition rests on a tacit assumption that fluctuations in solar and wind generation can be reliably balanced. In practice this remains difficult during prolonged periods of low output. Germany and California, with some of the world’s highest shares of renewable generation, already experience multi-day stretches of very low solar and wind output. The Germans call this Dunkelflaute, the “dark doldrums.” In November–December 2024, such episodes drove German wholesale electricity prices to an 18-year high, peaking above €900 per megawatt-hour (Fortune, 2024). Under such conditions, backup gas- and coal-fired capacity appears not merely as a temporary transitional measure, but as a persistent component of the system where sufficient storage or other dispatchable capacity is unavailable. This sustains long-term demand for fossil fuels (IEA, 2025a). The Hormuz crisis of 2026 confirmed this logic: Japan and South Korea temporarily subordinated their decarbonization commitments to immediate security-of-supply concerns (Seoul Economic Daily, 2026).

By the mid-2020s, no breakthrough had yet delivered a widely deployable, affordable, and scalable means of storing energy over long periods—whether through solid-state batteries, flow batteries, or superconducting magnetic systems. This is a techno-economic constraint, not an ideological verdict on renewables. Long-duration storage (LDES) accounted for only about 6% of global energy-storage installations in 2025, while global venture-capital investment in LDES fell by 72%—a sign that, despite expanding deployment, many of these technologies remained far from broad commercial maturity (Wood Mackenzie, 2026). The decline does not prove technological impossibility—markets respond to capital costs, regulation, and payback horizons—but it does mark a gap between early-2020s expectations and the actual pace of commercialization.

Whether the breakthrough comes by 2040 belongs as much to technological forecasting as to strategic planning. Until it does, the transition will remain slow and uneven, while gas and, in some markets, coal will continue to provide backup for decades.

A principal obstacle to the energy transition is therefore technological, not merely political. Until scalable long-duration storage becomes widely available, demand for dispatchable hydrocarbons will remain structurally embedded—regardless of political declarations.

The Last Wave of Decolonization and Resource redistribution

What a decade ago was largely an academic and activist argument—compensation for the colonial extraction of resources—had acquired a practical dimension by the mid-2020s. Developing countries—above all in Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania—are increasingly conditioning their participation in the climate agenda, and access to their critical minerals, on concrete concessions: direct payments, debt forgiveness, technology transfer, a greater share of the value generated by resource extraction and processing, and revised rights over natural resources (UNCTAD, 2023). The shift reflects resource geography: many key inputs of the energy transition—including cobalt, lithium, graphite, rare-earth elements—are found in developing countries, many of them former colonies (UNCTAD, 2023; USGS, 2025a). The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) supplies roughly 70% of the world’s mined cobalt; Jamaica and Guinea hold some of the world’s largest bauxite reserves. In the absence of systematic Western engagement with demands for reparations, resource-rich states have the alternative of turning towards China or, potentially, Russia. China is already building a ‘resource network’ in the DRC, Chinese-owned or controlled companies account for most of the country’s cobalt production, while ‘infrastructure-for-resources’ agreements have further strengthened Beijing’s position (USGS, 2025a; IMF, 2024).

If several large reparations agreements were nonetheless reached—through, say, an international fund financed by a levy on ‘carbon-intensive jurisdictions’—climate-finance payments could flow directly to former colonies rather than through Western corporate intermediaries.

The energy transition is thus, paradoxically, becoming a catalyst of economic decolonization: by increasing the strategic importance of critical minerals, many of which are found in the Global South, it is strengthening producer states’ bargaining power and reshaping established channels of Western influence—two effects that strategic analysis often treats separately.

Old Institutions, New Alignments

By 2040, the 20th-century energy institutions will have been recast.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), created after the 1973 oil shock to coordinate cooperation among consuming countries, was built around oil security. Most recently, it coordinated the largest release of emergency oil stocks in its history: 400 million barrels during the Hormuz crisis, with the U.S. contributing 172 million (IEA, 2026f). Separately, its mandate has expanded beyond oil security to gas, electricity, the energy transition, and critical minerals (Hart, 2025). As its mandate has widened, so has criticism—from U.S. Republican lawmakers and the fossil fuel interests—of the IEA as an ‘advocate for the energy transition.’ The organization remains limited by the fact that the largest developing consumers—China and India as Association countries and Brazil as an accession country—do not have votes on its Governing Board.

OPEC+ faces slowing oil-demand growth and a widening divergence among its members’ interests: the Gulf states, with production costs in some fields below five dollars per barrel, have greater scope to compete for market share, whereas producers with higher costs or greater fiscal constraints, including Russia, Nigeria rely more heavily on quotas to sustain acceptable prices. Production agreements are becoming increasingly fragile as their economic basis weakens.

The most striking confirmation of this trend was the UAE’s decision of 28 April 2026 to leave OPEC and OPEC+ on 1 May 2026 (Al Jazeera, 2026a), which Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei described as a “sovereign national decision” (Al Jazeera, 2026b). This move has several dimensions. Materially, the UAE is OPEC’s third-largest producer, with stated capacity of 4.85 million barrels a day against a production quota of roughly 3.5 million, and plans to reach 5 million by 2027 (Al Jazeera, 2026b). Institutionally, the departure of a member since 1967, without prior consultation with Riyadh (Reuters, 2026a), breaks the unwritten rule that OPEC’s most important decisions are settled by agreement among its leading members. Politically, the move may indirectly align with U.S. interests, since additional Emirati production after Hormuz reopens would lower world oil prices and directly serve the Trump administration’s aims. The UAE’s exit came as the seven remaining participants in the voluntary production cuts agreed in early May 2026 to unwind them by a further 188,000 barrels a day (OPEC, 2026). A key member’s unilateral departure nevertheless risks eroding the organization, especially if others conclude that Abu Dhabi can benefit from their efforts to prop up prices without accepting comparable constraints.

In the short term, the decision’s market impact is limited. The UAE’s export capacity is currently physically constrained: most of its export terminals lie inside the blocked Strait of Hormuz, while the bypass pipeline to Fujairah is already operating at its limit. In the medium term, however, the result may be a “structurally weakened OPEC” (Reuters, 2026a). The main risk lies not in the UAE’s immediate volumes, but in the precedent: if a major member leaves, persistent overproducers may eventually reconsider their participation—Iraq within OPEC, Kazakhstan within OPEC+. Collective management of supply, backed by formal monitoring but ultimately dependent on reputational and diplomatic pressure, risks being eroded.

For Russia, the immediate physical consequences are limited by the closure of Hormuz, but additional Emirati supply, no longer constrained by quotas, may reach the market just as regional flows normalize. Discounts on Russian crude could swiftly revert towards pre-crisis as it competes more intensely with Emirati grades for Asian buyers. This would weaken Moscow’s pricing leverage, currently bolstered by the Hormuz-driven oil-price rally.

The SCO and BRICS+ may evolve into alternative platforms of coordination—not yet as counterweights to Western institutions, but as parallel mechanisms for settlements in national currencies, commodity pricing, and development finance. According to the IMF, the world economy is showing signs of fragmenting into U.S.- and China-aligned blocs, with a special role for non-aligned ‘connector’ countries (Gopinath et al., 2024). In energy, India is the paradigmatic case: it increased imports of Russian oil 22-fold in 2022, to 41 million tons (RBC, 2023) while emerging as a major exporter to Europe of petroleum products from refineries processing Russian crude (Reilly, Yenikeyeff, and Paik, 2026).

It acts as a safety valve, helping to prevent fragmentation from causing a full rupture; in doing so, it captures substantial commercial gains.

By 2040, the Western bloc may be shaped by IEA norms and coordination, the EU emissions-trading system, the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism, and broader climate standards. A looser Eurasian–Global South bloc may coalesce around BRICS, the SCO, bilateral settlements in national currencies, and competing technological standards. Neither bloc would necessarily be internally cohesive: the Gulf Arab monarchies, for instance, might form a pole of their own. Between the two blocs, a buffer of intermediary states may gain economic and political weight as fragmentation deepens.

The two blocs securitize energy according to fundamentally different logics.

In Europe, securitization is built on the perception of Russia as an existential threat, which makes the severing of energy ties an end in itself: the REPowerEU initiative, launched by Brussels in May 2022, and followed by the Commission’s 2025 roadmap, envisaged a complete phase-out of Russian hydrocarbons by 2027 (European Commission, 2022; European Commission, 2025). In effect, price and technology cease to be the deciding criteria: Brussels will accept more expensive and riskier supply, so long as it is politically homogeneous.

China’s energy strategy is built on supply diversification. In 2023, Xue Li of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences proposed capping each country’s share of Chinese oil imports at 20%, with a lower ceiling of 5% for the United States and each of its allies or close partners, while keeping Russia’s combined share of China’s pipeline-gas and LNG imports below one-third (Xue Li, 2023). Though never adopted as official policy, these thresholds capture the logic underlying Beijing’s negotiations over the Power of Siberia 2 project: no single supplier, however close, should become indispensable.

 By 2024, Russia already accounted for roughly 20% of China’s oil imports—the very ceiling Xue Li had prescribed. The same diversification principle explains Beijing’s caution towards Russian pipeline gas, and its markedly different posture on liquefied natural gas (LNG). Xue Li’s framework specified no comparable caps on LNG imports from the U.S. or Australia; indeed, it recommended increasing them. The logic is structural rather than political: a wider supplier network and larger traded volumes reinforce China’s bargaining position in the Asian gas market, giving Beijing leverage over regional pricing and a broader base for yuan-denominated settlements (Shi, 2024).

By 2040, Europe’s push for ‘geopolitically acceptable’ supply, and China’s model of ‘diversified leverage,’ may redefine the global gas market.

In the energy sector, global fragmentation is unfolding along two parallel tracks: the securitization of supply, where geopolitical acceptability takes priority over price, as in Europe; and an intensifying contest for low-cost resources as a source of competitive advantage, as in the U.S., China, and India.

From the Petrodollar to the Kilowatt-Hour

The linkage of oil to the dollar—the ‘petrodollar’ system, reinforced by U.S.–Saudi financial and security arrangements of the 1970s—underpinned demand for the American currency for nearly half a century. But the mechanism is now being progressively eroded. Some Gulf states have begun accepting yuan and rupees in payment for oil, and central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) may accelerate the trend. Their momentum, however, slowed in 2025–2026, partly under competitive pressure from dollar-linked stablecoins: in 2025, the U.S. opted against a state CBDC, and instead promoted privately issued digital tokens backed by the dollar (White House, 2025).

The petroyuan has a genuine chance of becoming a partial alternative: China is the world’s largest oil importer, and yuan-denominated oil transactions involving Russia, Iran, and Venezuela as well as LNG deals, already occur. The institutional groundwork is already in place: yuan-denominated crude-oil futures have traded on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange since March 2018 (INE, n.d.). Should Beijing succeed in creating a Northeast Asian gas hub with yuan-denominated pricing, the dollar’s dominance in energy trading would be substantially undermined.

Behind the CBDC and the petroyuan, however, lies what several analysts already call the transition from the petrodollar to the electrodollar (Jakati, 2025; Kim, 2026). This transition reflects a deeper structural change in the global economy: in an increasingly electric, AI-driven system, the kilowatt-hour is becoming a fundamental measure of productive capacity, displacing the barrel of oil from its former central position. Every computation, performed by a neural network, has an energy cost. Unlike fiat money, which can be issued at will, and unlike cryptocurrencies, which are detached from the real economy, the kilowatt-hour is tied directly to productivity—measurable, divisible, universal, and resistant to politically-driven inflation: its value is set by physics, not politics (Kim, 2026).

The electrodollar does not require the wholesale electrification of transport and industry, where hydrocarbons will play a supporting role for decades. Rather, it relies on powering the ‘compute economy’ with electricity from stable nuclear, gas, hydrological, and geothermal sources, and thus does not hinge on breakthroughs in renewables or battery storage.

China was the first to begin building the state architecture of this system (Jakati, 2025; Girishankar, 2025). The average industrial power price in China is about $0.09 per kilowatt-hour—lower than in most major economies (China Briefing, 2025). Yet Beijing’s real advantage lies not in absolute price, but in differentiated pricing and subsidies that make electricity an instrument of industrial policy. Some energy-intensive, low-technology industries pay elevated rates, while data centers running domestic AI chips (Huawei, Cambricon) receive electricity-cost subsidies of up to 50%. In late 2025, these subsidies were expanded to help technology giants, such as Alibaba and Tencent, offset the higher power draw of still-less-efficient domestic accelerators (Wu, 2025). In effect, China spends its ‘electro-currency’ to fund its own AI industry and cut its dependence on foreign technology. By end-2025, China’s installed wind and solar capacity had reached 1.84 TW (NEA, 2026). It has created the infrastructure for an ‘electro-currency mint’ at an unprecedented pace.

The emerging Compute-Energy Standard is the AI era’s functional counterpart to Bretton Woods (Kim, 2026). In this scheme, the strategic reserves of states will be measured not in gold and Treasury bonds, but in gigawatts of constant, dispatchable-at-will generating capacity. The next step could be energy-backed stablecoins, in which the tokenized kilowatt-hour—produced by small reactors sited next to data centers—replaces Treasury bonds as the low-risk anchor of digital liquidity. McKinsey puts investment in data centers at $6.7 trillion by 2030, $5.2 trillion for capacity supporting AI workloads (McKinsey, 2025). This is no longer infrastructure spending in the classical sense but the construction of new electricity-intensive computational infrastructure as the material basis of economic power.

The geopolitical consequences invert those of the petrodollar. Petro-states exported dependence on the U.S.: to pay for oil, importers had to accumulate dollars. Electro-states offer the opposite: China already exports solar panels and wind turbines that turn buyers into ‘mini electro-states,’ reducing their dependence on imported fuels. The result is a contest among three models: an Atlantic ‘electrodollar,’ built on AI infrastructure and the prospective deployment of American SMRs; a Eurasian system coalescing around Russian nuclear projects, pipeline supply, and the Chinese market; and a Chinese model of ‘electro-states’ that exports above all the technological capacity to generate power. Which prevails remains open.

Global energy flows will follow this new monetary geography, reinforcing the fragmentation of the international financial system.

This is not a rhetorical flourish but a structural shift: in the AI economy, the kilowatt-hour becomes the real base currency, because it is a measurable input directly underpinning productivity. Whoever shapes the cost of electricity for global computation will hold leverage comparable to OPEC’s in the oil era. States that control cheap, reliable electricity gain monetary sovereignty of a new kind, whether or not they possess hydrocarbon resources.

Control over Critical Minerals

By 2040, the geopolitics of the energy transition will be determined primarily by access to lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and rare-earth elements. Such access is already highly concentrated. China dominates the global supply chain, controlling roughly 60% of rare-earth mining and 91% of the processing of magnet-grade rare earths—essential for EVs, wind turbines, and precision weapons. It also leads the processing of nineteen of the twenty critical minerals (IEA, 2026a; 2025b; USGS, 2025b). While the DRC supplies roughly 70% of global cobalt (USGS, 2025a), most of it is still processed in China (Kholodov, 2025). The West, in other words, has steadily exchanged oil dependence on OPEC for mineral dependence on Beijing; the new dependence is concentrated in a single power and spans the entire value chain, not merely the raw-material segment.

Arctic Gas and the Northern Sea Route

A new resource frontier is also opening: Arctic natural gas. Russia produced roughly 33 million tons of LNG in 2022 (OSW, 2023); a 2021 target had envisaged up to 140 million tons by 2035 (PortNews, 2021), but the Energy Strategy to 2050, approved in April 2025, revised the target down to a range of 110–130 million tons by 2036 (Interfax, 2025). The EU’s twentieth sanctions package went further than any one before it: for the first time, it barred the servicing of LNG tankers and icebreakers, targeting the existing fleet rather than merely future construction (Gijs, 2026). This compounded existing constraints. The South Korean shipyard Hanwha Ocean (formerly DSME) canceled its ice-class carrier contract for ‘Arctic LNG 2’, and fleet construction at the Zvezda shipyard has stalled due to shortages of key components (Reilly, Yenikeyeff and Paik, 2026). By mid-2026, sanctions and technical problems kept Arctic LNG 2’s annualized commercial deliveries near one-sixth of its full 19.8 mtpa design capacity; two trains had been completed, while the third was on hold (IEA, 2026b; Reuters, 2026b).

Russian Arctic LNG continues to flow to China, which is investing in Northern Sea Route infrastructure and seeking access to icebreaker technologies and Arctic navigation expertise as part of an emerging Russia–China Arctic axis. The White House’s high-profile 2025 effort to acquire Greenland attests to Washington’s understanding of the strategic value of Arctic positions.

Greater American control over Greenland would strengthen Washington’s position along emerging Arctic shipping routes and its ability to counter China’s growing role as Russia’s principal Arctic partner.

Taken together, these trends point to a broader American effort to shape China’s access to energy along key overland and maritime routes through pressure applied across multiple theatres below the threshold of open conflict—an effort visible less in public declarations than in force posture and defense planning (The White House, 2025; DoD, 2026). The underlying blockade scenario remains contested in American strategic literature: Collins argues that such an operation would have to be sustained for at least a year, while disruption to world trade and pressure from allies and neutrals would force Washington to lift it long before then (Collins, 2018).

With a comprehensive blockade difficult to sustain, pressure shifts to specific corridors.

The first corridor is the Northern Sea Route (Mishchenko, 2026; Reilly, Yenikeyeff and Paik, 2026). Following the 2014 sanctions, ExxonMobil suspended its Arctic offshore cooperation with Rosneft and withdrew from the joint projects in 2018, depriving the United States of a channel for applying its engineering expertise and influencing shelf-development standards. Although Beijing did not automatically fill the vacuum, the Western withdrawal made China a more important source of financing and equipment for Russian Arctic projects, as well as a market for their oil and gas; in 2018, Beijing also incorporated Arctic routes into its ‘Polar Silk Road’ concept. The second node is the Kuril Islands: an escalation of the dispute over them would threaten access routes from the Sea of Okhotsk. The third is the Baltic region, whose ports provide an alternative maritime route for trade with China, easing pressure on the overburdened Far Eastern railways. The fourth is Central Asia, where vulnerability lies less in infrastructure than in the stability of the transit states: destabilization in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, or Uzbekistan could severely disrupt pipelines flows to China without a direct blockade.

In response to such distributed pressure, Beijing and Moscow are already expanding their maritime security cooperation in the Arctic and their joint naval activity in the western Pacific. Should the Northern Sea Route become the principal corridor of the Sino-Russian energy axis, the U.S. would likely extend its strategic focus to the Russian Arctic theatre—a direction in which NATO is already moving by strengthening its presence in the High North.

Paradoxically, pressure meant to restrict China’s energy access may instead accelerate the militarization of the Arctic and the securitization of Central Asian routes. These routes are critical to the contest for the Northeast Asian gas market.

The Battle for the Northeast Asian Gas Market

The Northeast Asian gas market illustrates all the trends described above. Here four leading suppliers—the U.S., Qatar, Australia, and Russia—compete for sales to Japan, China, and South Korea, which together account for almost half of the world’s LNG (Petroleum Australia, 2026; Reilly, Yenikeyeff and Paik, 2026). The market is large enough to support a regional gas hub of a new type, with pricing decoupled from oil and some settlements conducted in yuan. Whoever establishes leadership in this market will acquire energy leverage over the world’s largest manufacturing economies, as well as substantial regional influence.

China’s position is twofold. On the one hand, Beijing is seeking to reduce its dependence on seaborne supplies through Malacca and Hormuz, to which end it needs gas from Central Asia, Russian pipeline gas, and Arctic LNG. On the other hand, China views Russian and Central Asian gas both as a benchmark for LNG contract negotiations and as a basis for establishing itself as a regional pricing and trading hub, potentially intermediating LNG sales to Japan and South Korea. For Moscow, such intermediation may weaken its direct access to these markets and risk relegating it to second-tier supplier status.

Despite the memorandum signed by Gazprom and CNPC in September 2025, the key commercial parameters of Power of Siberia 2, above all, the pricing formula, remain unsettled (Wong, 2026). Having lost most of its European market, Gazprom can no longer leverage competition between European and Asian buyers, sharply weakening its negotiating position. Even so, in March 2026, the draft of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) called for “preparatory work” on the central route of the China–Russian pipeline—widely interpreted as Power of Siberia 2—signaling political will to move forward, but not to pay any price.

Since the start of the Hormuz crisis, Japan and South Korea, key U.S. allies in urgent need of cheap gas, have faced a choice between alternative LNG at substantially higher prices and arrangements involving Russian Arctic LNG supplied via the Northern Sea Route, potentially through Chinese intermediaries. Despite pressure from Washington, Tokyo retains the Mitsui and Mitsubishi stakes in Sakhalin-2 and continues to import its LNG under a U.S. sanctions waiver that the Treasury renews every six months (The Japan Times, 2025). The situation exposes a genuine conflict of interests and could strain U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea and complicate their cooperation with the Quad and AUKUS (Reilly, Yenikeyeff and Paik, 2026).

As recently as early 2025, the market outlook to 2040 appeared benign: a wave of new U.S. and Qatari liquefaction capacity by 2030 suggested moderate oversupply, lower prices, and a gradual globalization of gas trade following the oil-market model, with regional price indices converging (IEA, 2026g; PwC, 2025).

Two events of 2025–2026 radically altered that trajectory. First, sanctions led the IEA to exclude Arctic LNG 2’s 27 bcm of annual capacity from its baseline global supply forecast (IEA, 2026c).

Second, Iran’s 2 March 2026 attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan terminal prompted QatarEnergy to declare force majeure and suspend loadings. Further strikes on 18–19 March seriously damaged two of its fourteen liquefaction trains, with a combined annual capacity of 12.8 million tons, or 17.4 bcm. Repairs may take three to five years, while the North Field East expansion is expected to be delayed by more than a year (IEA, 2026c). The IEA now puts Middle East crisis-related supply losses in 2026–2030 at roughly 140 bcm—excluding constrained Arctic LNG 2 volumes and with the estimate still being revised upward. Together, these shocks have delayed the global LNG supply wave by at least two years.

The shift has structural geo-economic consequences. As of 12 June 2026, all LNG liquefaction FIDs taken that year were for U.S. projects (IEA, 2026b). The U.S. is moving from supplier of last resort to systemically important exporter, with all the political leverage that entails. Constraints on Russian and Qatari supply create a window of opportunity for producers in Canada, Mozambique, and Australia, yet none can compensate for the shortfall in the foreseeable future. American dominance brings its own tension: Henry Hub prices rose by more than half in a single year, to $3.52 per MMBtu in 2025, and the EIA expects a further rise from 2027 as domestic demand for data-center power climbs (EIA, 2026b).

Following the post-2022 pivot to Europe, 2026 brought Europe and Asia into direct competition for flexible U.S. cargoes.

However, U.S. energy-intensive industries and consumer groups are pressuring the White House to limit exports—through supply restrictions, political conditions on buyers, or direct quotas. In January 2024, the Biden Administration suspended decisions on new licenses for LNG export authorizations to countries lacking free-trade agreements with the U.S., citing climate and economic concerns. Trump rescinded the pause in January 2025, but the precedent showed how swiftly politics can redirect the export model. Such intervention risks undermining the American market model—and the buyer trust on which U.S. energy dominance rests. For Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan the emerging outcome is not a ‘surplus of cheap LNG’ but ‘expensive, predominantly U.S.-origin LNG,’ with Washington’s bargaining power over all three buyers sharply increased.

It is in this context that China’s strategy of establishing its own gas hub in Northeast Asia takes on particular weight. The contest is already intense: after China imposed a 15% tariff in February 2025, U.S. LNG deliveries to China fell to zero in March; the tariff rose to 125% in April (Bloomberg, 2025).

If the global supply architecture shifts decisively towards American dominance by 2030 while the Russian and Qatari alternatives remain constrained, a regional hub with yuan-denominated pricing could become increasingly important. It would serve not merely as a means of currency diversification, but as a channel through which Asian consumers could preserve some market autonomy from a U.S.-centered Henry Hub system.

By 2040, competition in Northeast Asia will therefore be not only among suppliers, but also between pricing models: the American ‘globalized’ model and the Chinese ‘regionally yuanized’ one.

On balance, the market may split into an Atlantic basin centered on Henry Hub and Europe, and a China-centered Asian bloc combining Russian pipeline gas, Arctic LNG, and settlements in yuan.

Scenarios for the Energy Order of 2040

“If you can look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow and which will not,

Speak then to me.”

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1605

Based on the trends set out above, four scenarios for 2040 may be distinguished, using the established two-axis tradition of energy-order scenario analysis: the degree of international cooperation and the role of the state in markets (Andrews-Speed, van der Linde and Keramidas, 2014). The axes derive from the POLINARES model; the names and content of the scenarios, and the probability estimates, are the author’s own. The four quadrants are recast here in the terms of the 2020s—the electrodollar, AI, the nuclear renaissance, critical minerals—and each is assigned a probability of becoming the dominant configuration as of early August 2026 (Table 1). Elements of the scenarios are not mutually exclusive: reality will likely combine features of several.

Scenario 1: Managed Renewal. The major powers agree on a new architecture encompassing standards for critical minerals, climate finance, rules for trade in clean-energy technologies. Its probability of becoming dominant is low, around 10–15%, given U.S.–China mistrust and persistent hybrid pressure; only repeated large-scale crises might bring the major powers back to the negotiating table.

Scenario 2: A Chinese Energy Order. China consolidates its dominance in critical-mineral processing and the manufacture of clean-energy technologies, including nuclear reactors, while most developing countries become dependent on Chinese standards and finance. Unlike Scenario 3, this is a single, China-centered order rather than a balance among competing blocs. Western countermeasures reduce its probability of becoming dominant, but China’s structural advantage in key value chains keeps it significant, at around 25-30%.

Scenario 3: Fragmentation into Regional Blocs. The world fragments into competing energy blocs—a Western bloc comprising the U.S., Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and an Eastern one comprising Russia, China, Iran, and parts of Central Asia—with the transitions proceeding at different paces and by different rules. Between them lies a buffer perimeter of India, Türkiye, the Gulf states, and others that retain ties with both sides and extract rent by mediating between them, distinguishing this order from a bipolar ‘Cold War 2.0’. This currently appears the most probable outcome, with a 35–40% probability of becoming dominant: it requires neither a grand compromise nor systemic rupture, but represents the inertial continuation of current trends. India exports to Europe petroleum products refined from Russian crude; Türkiye buys Russian gas and nuclear technology alongside American LNG.

Scenario 4: Systemic Rupture. Overlapping crises—the closure of Hormuz, a clash over Taiwan, sabotage on the Northern Sea Route, destabilization in Central Asia, the cascading disintegration of both OPEC and OPEC+ after the UAE’s departure—fracture global energy supply chains. The low-carbon transition initially slows, even as highly exposed fossil-fuel importers gain a strong incentive to accelerate it later, and the international system enters a period of extreme uncertainty. The scenario’s probability of becoming dominant—around 25–30%, significantly higher than in early 2025—will rise further if hybrid pressure persists: each individual crisis may remain below the threshold of rupture, their cumulative effect may cross it. So far, however, the Gulf conflict has done more to accelerate fragmentation than to bring systemic rupture closer.

Which of the four prevails will depend less on technology, markets, or climate than on a handful of decisions made in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington over the next three to five years—above all, the pricing formula agreed for Power of Siberia 2, how assertively Beijing uses its critical-minerals leverage, and whether Washington politicizes its LNG exports.

Conclusion: An Order in the Making

Technology alone will not determine the global energy order of 2040: many of the necessary technologies already exist, while others may emerge in the foreseeable future. The order will be shaped by political decisions made today. Which states will be able to build an icebreaker fleet; through which straits tankers will pass; whether a gas hub with settlements in non-Western currencies can be launched; which nuclear platform will assume a dominant position in the Global South; whether an industrially scalable solution for long-duration energy storage will be found—these questions will be decided not only in technological laboratories but also in the offices of policymakers. The key question is how far the parties are prepared to go: whether they will use blockades of energy routes as an instrument of coercion or refrain from such escalation.

Energy has become one of the central arenas of strategic rivalry. Each principal player now operates under a constraint examined by this article. Russia, having lost Europe, relies on Asian markets even as the UAE’s exit from OPEC and OPEC+ threatens direct competition for the same buyers by 2027–2030. The U.S. must balance LNG exports against its own compute economy, as no previous administration has had to. China remains dependent on seaborne imports through Malacca despite gains in Arctic infrastructure, mineral processing, and nuclear construction. Japan and South Korea balance their alliance commitments and energy security. Africa and Latin America wield their resource leverage as the last wave of decolonization gathers force.

Restricting China’s access to energy resources may backfire, prompting Beijing to securitize its energy routes: expand its icebreaker fleet, strengthen its security presence in Central Asia, increase joint patrols with Russia in the Arctic, and deepen strategic ties with countries purchasing nuclear technology from Rosatom. This will not immediately terminate globalization, but it may consolidate a new Cold War with potential flashpoints in the Arctic, the Baltic, and Central Asia.

Ultimately, the outcome of this confrontation will be determined not by military force or volume of resources alone, but by countries’ capacity to build durable institutions, alliances, technological systems, and, above all, trust.

Today, trust is becoming scarcer than any mineral or energy source.

Every major player must find points of accommodation that make the new energy order viable rather than allow it to be fractured by conflict. The contours of this order are already emerging—unevenly and in fragments, but clearly enough to reveal the principal fault lines.

This article presents the main arguments of the author’s book, Глобальный энергетический порядок — 2040, forthcoming in December 2026.

For citation, please use:
Safranchuk, I.A., 2026. Diplomacy of Inequality and Imbalance. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 62–71. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-62-71

War and diplomacy are often contrasted as mutually exclusive alternatives, implying that military force’s growing importance presumes diplomacy’s systemic failure. This is hardly what we see today, when military force does not disrupt international communication, but rather triggers the explosive growth thereof, involving a wide range of parties. Recent events point to a collapse of the traditional model of diplomacy and—more broadly—to a transformation of the intellectual framework of military and diplomatic actions in international relations.

The End of Globalization-Era Diplomacy

By the end of the 20th century, the long-standing historical trend towards a common world system had gained incredible momentum. For several centuries, the most significant political, economic, and social phenomena—colonialism, major wars, even the post-1945 inter-bloc confrontation—led to a more intertwined world. Throughout the 20th century, the international environment grew richer and more complex. Various professional spheres were internationalized: ever more spheres of life acquired an international dimension. Interaction with the external environment (the international system) became a crucial task for all states.

Diplomats, as professionals in international communication, thus began to focus on shaping common norms and institutions so as to maximize practical benefits. Diplomats effectively found themselves in the same company as transnational businesses and NGOs, which might remain closely linked to certain jurisdictions, but whose interests were no longer determined by those of individual states.

The diplomacy of globalization focused on the international order’s normative and institutional codification.

Historically, this approach was contrasted with diplomacy pursuant of the balance of power or situational advantage. It existed among the ancient Greeks, who “recognized that the relations between states could not be managed merely by ruse and violence, and that there was some implicit ‘law’ which was superior to immediate national interests or momentary expediency” (Nicolson, 1941, p. 23). Yet its formation is attributed more to the Romans.

Today, the world order tradition is associated with the neo-liberal school of IR, which holds that the order should be based on widely accepted norms that reduce chaos and make interstate competition nonviolent. Although military force remains sometimes needed to maintain the order and impose it upon revisionists.

In recent years, the states, once regarded as guarantors of the world order, have come to be seen as its main revisionists. The crumbling of the international order has been widely discussed (see, e.g., Barabanov et al., 2018), but even though the world order’s recovery appeared unlikely, its degradation was expected to be gradual, as many of its elements were still observed, at least ritually.

Rules were increasingly manipulated to justify actions, and competition over ‘compromise’ wordings in international documents became a major sphere of ​​diplomacy. The question became: which is better—hypocrisy regarding norms, or their open rejection. The latter predominated by 2026, when taboos ceased to be observed even formally (Lukyanov, 2026), marking the collapse of the diplomatic paradigm that had prevailed for decades.

A New Version of Balance-of-Power Diplomacy

Despite states’ increasingly opportunistic behavior,[1] globalization- and order-based diplomacy is actually receding in favor of another historical model: the balance of power, characteristic of Medieval and modern Europe, where it was “aimed at preventing any single state from dominating others, influencing alliances and conflicts throughout history” (Debidour, 1891).

About a century ago, this diplomacy was considered discredited. Intellectuals perceived the First World War as a failure of the balance-of-power doctrine and the diplomatic maneuvering inherent to it. But there was a second argument for replacing balance with order: “there is no power which threatens Europe with domination… Russian communist domination… ended, I believe, when the Bolshevik hordes were defeated before the gates of Warsaw in August 1920” (Hoard, 1925, p. 264).

The balance-of-power doctrine gave rise to the realist school of IR, and neorealism developed intensively in 1975-2000, in deep opposition to ascendant neoliberalism. From the ‘opposition’, neorealists criticized the liberal order and predicted its failure. Now the time has come to test their own proposals.

Balance-of-power’s proponents have developed two main approaches. Kenneth Waltz’s defensive neorealism posits that most states seek a status quo and limit themselves to maintaining the balance of power. John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism asserts that nations seek regional hegemony. They share a disagreement with the neoliberal view of interdependence.

Neoliberalism’s founders initially drew attention to the conflictual elements of interdependence, but by the 21st century the paradigm saw it as facilitating cooperation.

Neorealists, in contrast, insist that interdependence exacerbates competition. Material interconnectedness obscures the balance of power, which must be understood similarly by all parties in order to reach agreement. The internationalization of many spheres of life makes them vulnerable to adversaries’ influence.

Defensive neorealism echoes Kant’s maxim on freedom: one state’s security ends where another’s begins. Implementing this maxim in a materially globalized world, where all interconnections can be drawn into a competitive struggle, is likely to yield a protracted and violent competition, not a balance.

Interest in securing stability within regional spaces may be growing in reaction to lengthy uncertainty. Offensive realism prescribes that a major power maximize power in its vicinity. This becomes only more pressing when a balance with other major powers cannot be struck. For their part, small and middle states may seek to mitigate risk by accepting a greater power’s patronage.

Such theoretical expectations appear logical, but are contradicted by recent events. Extensive international cooperation has granted small and middle states significant opportunities, which they are reluctant to give up, despite mounting risks.

In various parts of the world, large powers, economically and militarily dominant in their regions, are seeking regional hegemony (Safranchuk et al., 2025), but their striving for regional hegemony may be actively or latently disputed by smaller neighbors. Such neighbors fear that the more powerful states could use hegemony, if attained, to impose resolutions on various local disputes. Most small and middle states thus fear a regional hegemon more than a global one. For them, engaging with an extra-regional player is rational, as they can use its economic and military power to balance the regional hegemon. In exchange, small and middles states may be drawn into supporting the extra-regional power.

Forming regional systems, on the basis of something other than confrontation, may be slow, complex, and costly for the regional leader. It can be sped up by force, but this often enflames areas bordering the major power, worsening its position in the context of confrontation with other major powers.

The world’s still materially globalized nature also intensifies competition, making it more complex and multilayered, and obscuring the balance of power. Yet it also limits the use of force, making it impossible to achieve maximalist goals solely by military means. Both large-scale conflicts and prolonged limited-scale conflicts become too costly. Therefore, despite the growing role of military force, states’ default objective is still agreement, rather than a victory parade in the defeated enemy’s capital.

Today, agreement based on the balance of power is rarer than it was in previous periods when the balance of power dominated, since the balance has become more difficult to identify.

This means the likelihood of a protracted confrontation with the use of military force, sometimes fading, sometimes flaring up, but never completely stopping, as well as constant negotiations without achieving major agreements. A state’s mobilization potential (broadly defined) is still important in the event of an escalation, but its resilience is even more important, as the confrontation may drag on without any decisive battle demanding the short-term concentration of all resources.

The Nexus of International and Domestic Transformations

The international environment’s fundamental changes are intersecting with those underway in all large societies.

First. The balance between the internal and external is shifting. As the external environment’s importance for many years only grew, exploiting and reshaping it required maximal engagement with it. Now, the task is enhancing resilience to it (without isolating from it). The shift is from maximizing one’s influence on it to minimizing its impact on oneself. Whereas internal affairs were greatly influenced by the external, now foreign policy is becoming a natural extension of domestic affairs.

More fundamentally, in major powers, tension is growing between contemporary internal identities (which, if not abandoning traditional values, are significantly transforming them to meet the demands of modernity) and traditional geopolitical attitudes (fundamentally unchanged for centuries). This tension is heightened when states search for public support in lengthy standoffs that may look fruitless to nonprofessionals. Winning such support may prove to be a great challenge for major powers’ elite.

Second. Inequality and anarchy are more intractable internationally than domestically, as they are the default form of interaction between materially variegated actors. The doctrine of international order explicitly seeks to overcome inequality through collective work in the common rational interest. The balance-of-power doctrine is less explicit, but similarly seeks countries’ coexistence under conditions where they cannot force anything upon one another, and must respect each other’s treaties, borders, and interests (rights).

For more than two centuries since the French Revolution, democratization has proceeded both domestically and internationally. With it, inequality, of course, was not completely overcome, but equality became the indisputable benchmark. Societies built on codified inequality (the U.S. with racial segregation, South Africa with apartheid, and more) came to be seen as anomalies.

The liberal world order failed to achieve equality and stability as intended. Violent rivalry (now effectively permanent), without a fixed balance of power, can generate inequality and normalize its open manifestation: an actor’s acquisition and demonstration of superiority over others.

Domestically, inequality has long been associated with authoritarianism and been opposed by the human-rights movement (with its bias towards political rights and individual self-expression). However, technological developments are transforming issues of (in)equality and raising their importance in ostensibly democratic countries. Tech visionaries are trying to impose moral standards that normalize inequality, and are building technological-economic models to facilitate this (Varoufakis, 2023a, 2023b).

Perceptions of equality as the norm called for an order mandating it. Moreover, it was thought that equality begets stability. But the triumph (in principle) of equality not only reduced dissatisfaction and resistance, but also increased diversity (heterogeneity) as the circle of actors expanded. (Domestically, with the abolition of property, race, education, and other qualifications. Internationally, with decolonization and the growing ambitions of small and middle states.) As (domestic and international) society became both more equal and more heterogeneous, friction increased.

Limiting diversity is one way of establishing and maintaining order. It is not openly acceptable, but has nevertheless been employed, and not only by illiberal autocratic systems. At the turn of the 21st century, even the liberal thinker Fareed Zakaria noted that liberalism and democracy no longer go hand in hand, and that, if forced to choose, liberals would have to abandon democracy.

“Techno-feudal lords” now pose the question more directly, able to revive practices—at a new level of technological development—previously considered unacceptably unequal.

Equality as a basic value is deeply rooted in contemporary minds, and codified inequality seems downright archaic. But equality, originally an unconditional and permanent right, is evolving into a privilege to be acquired and maintained through interaction with others in the domestic and international systems.

This promises increasing differentiation of diplomatic practices depending on actors’ size and resources. Bilateral and multilateral agreements will also be more diversified, relying less on international law’s common denominator, but not rejecting it entirely. Modern diplomacy within international institutions (particularly the UN Security Council), where one must remain within the dogma of international law, is becoming formalistic and hollow, like the medieval practice of buying and selling indulgences.

Third. The international sphere is traditionally viewed as a battlefield of competition for relative advantages. But these are difficult to maintain in an unstable and unpredictable environment of confrontation, unclear balance of power, and powerless norms and institutions. Thus, to have a clear advantage on the international arena, states may need to obtain absolute advantages based on solid internal foundations: resources, technologies, ideologies, intellectual potential, and other assets that are completely controlled and that ensure greater efficiency compared to rivals.

These advantages must be kept under control, including through their basic physical protection from destruction or theft. Then one can decide whether they are better kept for oneself, or shared with the international community on one’s own terms.

 Currently, the latter seems to be the obvious choice, but is it not a relic of the diplomacy and mindset formed under globalization (seeking comparative international advantages, not absolute advantages for one’s own development)?

Paradoxically, the new version of balance-based diplomacy—historically and theoretically focused on the struggle for comparative international advantage—may now push (sufficiently large, populous, and advanced) countries to rely more on domestic development based on fundamentally new absolute advantages.

*  *  *

Structurally, the modern world is characterized by a combination of high-level material globalization (interconnectedness) and growing ideological disunity. Efforts to universalize liberal dogma, and thereby base material interconnectedness on ideological homogeneity, have proven futile. But the neorealist approach can work only given material deglobalization, which would ease rivalries, clarify balances of power, and delineate where the security sphere of one actor ends and that of another begins. While the world is moving in this direction of deglobalization, many countries are strongly resisting it.

Theories analyze and interpret history, but history does not repeat itself. As humanity develops, the solutions to its problems do as well.

Reality does not adapt to theories. And the new version of balance-of-power diplomacy will not be a replica of the past one, just as globalization was not a copy of previous attempts to normatively formalize and maintain order. The world must learn to function with dissonance between material connectedness and ideological disunity; there are no ready-made theoretical solutions for this.

With the crisis of the globalist model that dominated over the past decades, the nexus between the internal and external is not disappearing, but changing, becoming more complex, and shaping the profound transformations of modern society as it seeks to balance security, freedom, and development. Both internal and external factors are currently pointing towards more security agenda, less equality, and more non-inclusive development. Hence, the ideological-intellectual framework for action may change radically.

For citation, please use:
Kaspe, S.I., 2026. Why China Frightens: Beyond the Realm of Western Political Forms. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 138–167. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-138-167

“Through me, like Chinese torture,

a visceral fear took root”

Andrey Tourkine

(transl. by Stanislav Lvovsky)

“Do not fear’’

The New Testament

Disclaimer I[1]. This article is not about China. I am not a sinologist, and I would never dare write about China per se. This article deals exclusively with stereotypical perceptions of China prevailing in the West and Russia; and with what they convey not about China but about the West (and Russia) itself. This article criticizes these views from the Western (and Russian) perspective itself—for my lack of any other. It is not about what makes China so frightening (whether this is true is a big question); rather, it is about whom it frightens and why. I realize that the Chinese historical, linguistic, and political realities I touch upon are far more complex and ambiguous. I offer my deepest apologies in advance for possibly angering genuine connoisseurs of China. The risk is quite high. But I believe that even a superficial and amateurish approach can raise reasonable doubts about the validity of the prevalent stereotypes. So, I think it is worth trying.

China is perceived either as one of the biggest strategic challenges or the biggest strategic threats. About a decade ago, such views—explicit or only implied, having emerged earlier and causing controversy for a long time—became commonplace in the Western (primarily American) public discourse, including official documents, politicians’ speeches, expert discussions, media, and blogs. Assessments of the intensity and severity of the China challenge and/or threat may change both ways. For example, they were somewhat toned down in the latest U.S. National Defense Strategy (The 2026 National Defense Strategy), especially compared to its earlier versions adopted under Joe Biden and during the first presidency of Donald Trump. However, one should not overestimate the significance of such fluctuations or the instructive power and predictive value of strategies and concepts. Firstly, because the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on China’s military capabilities and security policy (Annual Report to Congress 2025) presented just a month earlier, had had an opposite, rather nervous tone. Secondly, the 2026 Strategy firmly stated the U.S.’s intention to focus on protecting Homeland and Hemisphere.

The Iran problem was declared largely solved, to be further settled by regional allies, primarily Israel and the Gulf states. And what of it? A month later, Operation Epic Fury began.

Occasional attempts have been made to summarize ideas about the China challenge and the China threat, sometimes for making them more convincing (Gertz, 2013; Glenn, 2017; Han and Thayer, 2023) and sometimes to dismiss them as unfounded (Broomfield, 2003; Yee and Storey, 2004; Christensen, 2015; Gezgin, 2023; Zheng, Du and Xu, 2025). Clearly, the latter position is strongly backed by China itself, which only increases the suspicions of those who advocate for the former one.

Both positions—apprehensions about China and debunking skepticism—can also be found in Russia (see Blyakher, 2004; Blyakher and Grigorichev, 2015; Gelbras, 2011; Chikhichin, 2014; Pomozova, 2020; Kulintsev et al., 2020, pp. 139-142).[2] Since its very inception, then under the name of Rus, Russia has been part of Western civilization—as a unique, yet undeniable branch of the Christian religious and imperial (i.e., Roman) political and European cultural traditions. Russia is the West (albeit the ‘eastern West’), if only because it is not the East (not even the ‘western East’). No matter how broadly this category may be used, if anyone has peremptorily included Russia in it, he clearly did so out of sheer ignorance. In fact, even Eurasianists of all times and stripes cannot do without the root ‘Eur-.’ After all, for some time now, the collective West has been poised to incorporate not only quite Christian—but Orthodox—countries like Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Romania, but also Japan and South Korea—which is utterly bizarre, but nonetheless true.

After 2014, and especially after 2022, when China became Russia’s main ‘window on the world’ (or even ‘the only light in the window’), the fear of China subsided—at least it hardly appears in the Russian public realm (or it is not allowed there, including by those frightened, because it would be out of line at the moment). However, this does not mean that it cannot revive if the situation changes, and even with renewed vigor—if only because China’s presence in the Russian economy and everyday life has increased significantly over these years. Hence my further reasoning, which concerns not only global politics as such but also Russia’s role in global politics. It should show that although the alarmist point of view may not be entirely unfounded, it still is—in a very specific sense—beyond the bounds of rationality. This is precisely why both the rational arguments of its opponents and the contemptuous ridicule by alarmists miss the point and fail to produce the soothing effect. This is because the entire discussion, from both positions, indicates that there is some real difficulty, but it lies in a different realm.

Disclaimer II. Much of what is written below is about political languages, i.e., about the complex relationship and incomplete similarity between Western and Chinese concepts and terms. Not speaking Chinese myself, in treating the latter I have to deal solely with translations from Chinese. All the more reason to take most seriously Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper’s warnings about the danger of “uncritically adopting categories of practice as categories of analysis” (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, p. 5). Yet many analytical categories are the products of practical categories’ rationalization; they continue to exist in parallel, and this makes drawing a strict and reflexive distinction between them in each case still more important. As for categories of practice, especially those that have also become categories of analysis, I follow the principles of the Cambridge school of the history of concepts (John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, John Dunn et al.), placing them in the methodological optics of comparative politics. Words matter. Words mean something. What exactly they mean is determined by the cultural, historical, and semantic context of their emergence and subsequent transformation. Cross-temporal and especially cross-cultural comparisons disregarding these contexts are incorrect and only complicate things. One can draw analogies between categories from different contexts or seek equivalents in one context for categories from another. But there can be no complete matches, even if some practitioners or analysts think otherwise. It is even worse if they do not think about this at all.

The first category (both practical and analytical), whose applicability to modern China is discussed—and questioned—below, is the category of empire.

Not an Empire

The fear of China would be more understandable, and the discussion about it more rational, if it were about another empire looming ominously over the world. This is how, at different times and in different parts in the West, the Ottoman Empire, the Romanov Empire with its ferocious Cossacks, the Third Reich, and the Soviet ‘evil empire’ (and in the Soviet Union, ‘American imperialism’) were perceived. The latter confrontation, or at least opposition, is reproduced mutatis mutandis even today, with roughly the same quality of argumentation.

But modern China is not an empire.

That is, some people proclaim it an empire (see, e.g., Terrill, 2003; Chua, 2009; Ford, 2010; Keane and He, 2024), directly or indirectly, referring to the centuries and millennia of its history and claiming that China has always been an empire and cannot be anything else. Indeed, Europeans (and, with more than a hundred-year delay, Russians) began to refer to China as an ‘empire’ shortly after they became acquainted with it—at the beginning of the modern era, thanks to Maximilianus Transylvanus (secretary to Charles V, the head of the Holy Roman Empire) who retold and published his conversations with members of Magellan’s expedition (Maximiliani, 1523), which had neither reached China nor even come close to it.

Gradually (not right away), this definition became firmly established. As far as I can judge, by reconstructing the logic behind the naming, there were three reasons for this.

First, the size of China somehow made it difficult to call it simply a kingdom, although Europeans did so for quite a long time.

Second, they were strongly impressed by the worldview that was completely different from their own—not Western- but China-centered. The political implication was that other authorities and people (and not only contiguous ones) were—if not practically, then potentially—subordinate (albeit not without exceptions, such as for the most hopeless barbarians) to varying degrees to the Middle Country’s (中國) supreme ruler, even if they were not yet aware of this because of their regrettable ignorance, or were already resisting it because of their regrettable wickedness.[3] This obviously evoked associations with Christian empires: the Holy Roman Empire (Pennington, 1993, pp. 8-37; Monateri, 2018, pp. 39-49), the Byzantine, but also Roman, Empire (Bréhier, 1970, p. 230ff), and the Third Rome (Medvedev, 1972; Sakharov, 1995; Kaspe, 2001, pp. 86-104). They all had more or less similar intentions and ambitions, and the actual state of affairs in all of them was never ideal.

Third, the legitimacy of the ruler of China, according to the titulature, was clearly sacred—not only was it 皇帝 (Huángdì) (where the second character 帝 means ‘heavenliness and divinity,’ which Europeans might not have known at first), but it was also 天子 (Tiānzǐ) meaning ‘Son of Heaven.’ This brought the same associations.

However, finding more or less suitable analogues (later presented as equivalents) to foreign-language self-designation and self-perception is a shaky foundation for substantive conclusions and qualifications. In practical policy, referring to China as an empire did not prevent the West, including Russia, from humiliating, offending, and exploiting it in every possible way.

‘Empire’ is not just a convenient word for criticism or praise (both uses are so effective, rhetorically and polemically, that it is impossible to purge them from the public language). And it is not just a label that can be attached to anything you like (fighting this bad habit is also hopeless). Within the bounds of science and sober analysis, ‘empire’ is a term—no more and no less. And terms should be used correctly.

Empire as a category of analysis, denoting a certain nature of politically relevant values (not their specific composition, but their scope, scale, and ambition) and a fairly defined (again, not in specific details but in the most general way) structure of a domination-subordination relationship in a large (sic!) space, legitimized primarily by imperial values of interaction between centers and peripheries. Whether China has ever been an empire in this sense is a historical question, and it should be left to historians. Scholars, including Chinese ones, answer it in different ways, either with extreme caution or outright negation (Nylan, 2007; Qin, 2007; Zhu, 2008; Han, 2025). But modern China (and this article is about it, not about the “good old times”) does not meet the analytical criteria of empire, except one: Chinese space is still large (a small empire is an oxymoron or a parody). Size matters, but still there is more to it than just size.

Imperial values are, firstly, sacred—in Durkheim’s interpretation: they are not necessarily religious in the strict sense (even the most secular ideologies can function similarly to religions, and the more radically they reject God, the more sacred they appear). Secondly, they are universal, i.e., they are openly offered and sometimes imposed on all possible recipients, transcending almost any local, linguistic, cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, and other similar barriers, without eliminating or destroying them, but rather integrating them into a broader framework. Thirdly, their own structure includes the imperative of creating a relevant universal order for “the shaping and sharing of power” (Lasswell and Kaplan, 1950, p. XIV) and not just the imperative of meditation, prayer, individual or communal piety, etc.

Chinese value system is definitely not a religion: China is the least religious country in the world (Hackett et al., 2025).[4] And it is definitely not an ideology:[5] for some time (short by Chinese standards) that was the case, but now there is almost nothing left of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, and even Maoism in Chinese ‘communism,’ except for the word itself. Whether Chinese values are sacred is harder to say because it is difficult to understand what they are actually about.

For the outside world, China projects a set of ‘all the good things’ with captivating and disarming consistency: peace, friendship, cooperation, prosperity, and things like that. Are Xi Jinping’s four Global Initiatives, along with his concept of a Community of Common Destiny for Mankind, anything more than that?

But values are not just ‘all the good things.’

Values are “various recipes or rules… which may help the actor make his choice” between different concepts of the good “either by narrowing the range of acceptable alternatives, or by helping the actor foresee the long-run consequences of the various alternatives” (Parsons and Shils, 1951, p. 71). This choice “always involves at least an implicit sacrifice, in that an actor cannot have all of what are in one sense potential gratifications, and choosing one involves a ‘cost’ in that it excludes alternatives. The payment of this cost is the disciplinary element” (Ibid, p. 73). So, for a value-based choice to be rational (which is not the same as the costs/benefits balance: after all, it also includes moral reason and value-rational action), it is necessary to clearly articulate and present alternatives that are more specific than ‘everything good’ versus ‘everything bad,’ recommended societal solutions, and the cost of following or disregarding these recommendations. Western societies address the dilemmas of freedom versus equality, freedom versus security, human rights versus state interests, individualism versus collectivism, justice versus mercy, tradition versus progress, and so on, in different ways; but they address precisely these dilemmas. There are of course original Chinese values and value alternatives—as ‘things in themselves,’ rather than ‘things for us.’ However, they can hardly be translated, if at all, into the languages of other cultures, especially Western ones.

Chinese values are to some extent intelligible for external viewers, as they are not entirely hermetic. Moreover, in the distant past, Chinese cultural models had a significant influence on many East and Southeast Asian countries (primarily those which widely used the Chinese system of writing), especially on their elite groups and upper classes. However, they never became universal. Therefore, China’s potential for inclusion, and even more so for assimilation, has always been limited to the same geographical area. Now, however, this potential is virtually exhausted (there is little progress even with the Tibetans and Uyghurs).

It is precisely these specific features of China that severely limit the possibility of its geographical, cultural, and political expansion. This is particularly true of imperial expansion, which does not eliminate cultural diversity but, on the contrary, preserves it (and sometimes even promotes it, divide et impera): within a general, umbrella framework of unconditional demand for loyalty to the empire, the combination of imperial and local identities, and participation in the imperial turnover of resources of all kinds—coercive, material, symbolic, and communicative (Lagroye, 1987; Burbank and Cooper, 2010; Kumar, 2017; Heijmans and Rose, 2023). Virtually anyone could become and becomes a Roman, a Byzantine, a Russian, a Soviet, an American, a European, etc., by meeting certain conditions and undergoing certain personal, ancestral, or group transformation. Moreover, virtually anyone could and can, albeit with greater effort, become a functionary in any of these empires, reaching the highest levels of status and power. But one cannot become a Chinese, no matter how hard one may try (and few wish to do so). Some people do make their way into the elite without being Chinese, but only for a few symbolic, propaganda-oriented, show-case positions (the current the CCP Central Committee purposely includes 10 representatives of national minorities, the CPSU Central Committee had a similar practice). But it is simply impossible to acquire real significant power this way.

Structurally, the modern Chinese political order is not imperial, either. According to Charles Tilly, an empire implies ‘indirect rule’, including: “1) retention or establishment of particular, distinct compacts for the government of each segment; 2) exercise of power through intermediaries who enjoy considerable autonomy within their own domains in return for compliance, tribute, and military collaboration with the center” (Tilly, 1997, p. 3). Moreover, the very possibility of creating and effectively operating such a system of domination and subordination on a large territory is ensured precisely by the empire’s value universality and cultural inclusiveness. The rule of the Chinese Communist Party does not meet any of Tilly’s criteria—it is as direct as it can be.

What is a Threat?

Naturally, there is no need to be an empire in order to pose a direct and explicit threat—it can be just a state. But in this case, a threat must be convincingly demonstrated and proven. What threat does China pose? True, it has significant military potential, including nuclear missile capabilities (it would be surprising if it were otherwise). But all data concerning its actual size, as well as talks about its rapid buildup in recent years, are purely speculative. Even if they are accurate (although even the most optimistic estimates suggest that China’s nuclear arsenal is 8-9 times smaller than the U.S.’s), China’s defense doctrine categorically rules out “first use of nuclear weapons at any time and under any circumstances” (China’s National Defense, 2019). (It is worth noting that only India has a similar unconditional self-imposed ban).

Why, against whom, and under what circumstances can a country use its nuclear arsenal? In the case of the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea, the answer is obvious. In the case of China, this question goes unanswered. China is not a member of any military-political blocs, whether global or regional, and is not trying to create them. As for its territorial claims, they are limited to Taiwan (which is only natural), the waters around several uninhabited islands in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, as well as a few insignificant, sparsely populated patches of lands on the borders with Bhutan and India, disputes over which have been frozen. China has no colonies, dominions, or protectorates, and it does not seek to possess any (Laos and Cambodia’s pro-Chinese orientation is a qualitatively different, much milder type of relationship).

The risk of China seizing technological leadership and, consequently, of all other countries falling irreversibly behind it, is also non-existent. True, the Chinese ability to adopt Western technologies, improve and replicate them on a colossal scale is impressive. But China has not given the world anything revolutionary new since the time of the Four Great Inventions (the compass, papermaking, printing, and gunpowder; let’s not forget the pressure cooker), i.e., since the Middle Ages. The most advanced chips are still created by American fabless firms with production facilities located anywhere, including China (mainly in Taiwan). However, these are no longer cutting-edge innovations but mass production. And the development and production of machines for manufacturing such chips (extreme ultraviolet photolithographs, EUV) have long been monopolized by Dutch ASML, not even an American company; and its monopoly will definitely hold in the foreseeable future. The situation is similar in Big Pharma, other high-tech industries, and aircraft building. China has no full technological sovereignty, and the West is doing its best to prevent Beijing from gaining it. As a matter of fact, no country, including the U.S, has such sovereignty, which is by no means equal to leadership.

China’s religious or religiously-motivated expansion, unlike Islam and radical Islamism, is impossible because of the complete absence of inclusive and proselytizing religiosity. Massive projection of soft power through everyday practices is also impossible. Unlike the Greco-Roman, European, or American way of life, Chinese lifestyle does not exist as a single attractive whole and is not borrowed by anyone. Chinese food is popular in the Western world, but this is it (one can hardly say the same about alcohol). Chinese cinema is a niche product; music (unlike South Korean K-pop) is not in demand at all.

As for clothing, ordinary Chinese wear jeans and sneakers, and the most impressive parades of classic European suits and ties are not in Europe but at Chinese Communist Party congresses.

What remains? Only quantitative parameters: territory (fourth place, after Russia, Canada, and the U.S.), population (second in the world after India), GDP (also second in the world, a third smaller than that of the U.S.), industrial output (first place), share in global trade (third place after the European Union and the U.S.), and trade balance surplus (first place, far ahead of Germany and Russia). The figures are impressive, of course; and they clearly worry some people. However, there are still no objective grounds for panic or existential fear. Global capitalism can deal with such competitive challenges, which lie exclusively in the economic sphere, in its own way. In the 1970s and 1980s, during a period of its rapid growth, Japan also raised similar concerns in the West (manifest in mass culture of that time, particularly in cyberpunk), but they quickly died down.

The Problem of Form

So, is the irrational fear of China an inexplicable, phantasmatic delusion, or a perfectly explainable manipulative intent, a dishonest tool of global competition? Would it be more reasonable to dismiss it scornfully? Hardly so. On the contrary, it would be more reasonable to treat it with utmost attention.

Irrational fear cannot be dismissed because it always signals some deep-seated problem within the frightened person. If there is smoke outside, then something is surely burning inside. Naturally, the frightening object needs attention not only when the fear it evokes is exaggerated or has a traumatic origin, but also when it is impossible to explain why it becomes a trigger—as in the case of trypophobia (fear of any cluster of small holes) or lachanophobia (fear of any vegetables). Fortunately, this is not the case with China, and one can hypothesize about the causes of the fear of China. In fact, something prevents the West, despite all the simple observations above, from recognizing China as an ordinary state among other states, from calming down, relaxing, and possibly even enjoying interaction with it.

So, let us take a break from China and turn our attention to the West. The political history of the West is the history of political forms. It is hard to say definitively what a political form is—explicit definitions are rare.[6] However, if such different authors as Carl Schmitt (1923; 1928), Sheldon Wolin (2004 (1960)), Claude Lefort (1986), Étienne Balibar (1997; 2002), and Pierre Manent (2001) (and their numerous followers and interpreters) built their most important intellectual constructs around the concept of political form, then they surely did it for a reason. Without delving into irrelevant details and discussions, we can say that political form is an analytical category that permits working with broad ideal types, each pointing to “a particular way of being in the world expressed in corresponding cultural values and practices,” as well as a derivative “distinctive and pervasive way of life” (Wolin, 2004, p. 557). This refers, of course, to modes of political existence and images of political life. Importantly, these modes and images are believed to be essentially differentiated, i.e., having, on the analytical level, distinct shapes and clear contours.

Those who use the category of political form deal with it in different ways. Some deal with ideal types, which most often include: a tribe (with reservations, as only a proto-political proto-form), a city (polis), an empire, and a state (not always but most often equated with a nation). Others explore their numerous subvarieties, classified according to as different bases and criteria as possible: ‘forms of government’ (a concept narrower than ‘political form’), political systems, political regimes, types of legitimation of power, variations in territorial organization, the degree of homogeneity/heterogeneity, the degree of subordination/autonomy/sovereignty in relation to other polities, etc. Still others consider the outstanding ability of all these forms and sub-forms to combine, recombine and hybridize: elements of tribalism and leaderism can easily be found in the most modernized polities; sometimes states mature inside empires and then blow up the imperial shell, and “modern state … appears then to be a city that is deliberately and artificially spread out and diluted” (Manent, 2001, p. 77); sometimes empires themselves create states, both in their core and on their periphery; sometimes states build their own empires (Martin, 2001; Kaspe, 2007; Miller and Berger, 2014; Osterhammel, 2014; pp. 403-418). Some even speak of the global capitalist Empire, whose insatiable tentacles have ensnared and subjugated all states and nations around the world (Hardt and Negri, 2000, as well as their numerous epigones).

All of this is extremely important and useful. Moreover, this essentially constitutes the only way available to the West (because, this is precisely what makes it the West) for interpreting the political world and taking political action in it—a modus intelligendi, a modus operandi, and ultimately a modus vivendi.[7] Moreover, in the course of Westernization (which is just another but less correct name for modernization and globalization), all non-Western polities, which underwent a deep internal transformation in the process, were placed in the same categorial framework, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes forcibly, but always painfully. It is quite telling that the most representative global organization, conceived as an unquestionable supreme authority for resolving any disputes (what has become of it is another question) is called the United Nations, not any other way. This means that, to be its member, one must be a nation or at least present oneself as such. A nation (equated with a state) is—genetically and exclusively—Western political form. This process has produced countless and most bizarre artifacts and mutations.

Not a State?

China has also gone through several dramatic waves of Westernization. However, attempts to define the political form of modern China by fitting it into the generally accepted categorial framework have proved futile. Well, since almost anything can be called a ‘state,’ then let China be one, too. After all, in European languages, the words state, государство, държава, państwo, stato, Etat, Staat, állam, valtio, etc., acquired their current meaning only after long semantic adventures (Skinner, 1989; Harding, 1994; Kharkhordin, 2002). Against this backdrop, the history of the Chinese 國 (guó) is no less, but also no more, surprising. But what kind of state is this? The simple answer is a republic, of course—the People’s Republic of China. But what about the fact that the literal translation (which comes with its own flaws but is nonetheless not entirely useless) of “中华人民共和国 (Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó)” is “Central Splendid People’s Shared Harmony Country”?[8] Is this really a res publica?

Modern China is not a democracy, no matter how one tries to fit it into this category, interpreting in the minimalist or the broadest way. And it is not a dictatorship or totalitarianism—let bygones be bygones. It is neither a monarchy, nor a tyranny, nor an aristocracy, nor an oligarchy, nor a polity (stricto sensu, as an ideal of balance and moderation achieved through the rule of the middle strata and classes, and not as a receptacle of all possible political forms), and it does not fit into the Aristotelian matrix. The ideal of a ‘mixed government,’ which inspired Polybius, Cicero, and Niccolò Machiavelli, does not apply to it either.

One may probably say that the Chinese regime is authoritarian (out of desperation and simply because all other options have proved wrong). But that would mean saying nothing—the concept of authoritarianism is so broad that in addition to the classic, more or less obvious monarchies, tyrannies, dictatorships, and totalitarian regimes, it can also encompass the Roman principate, Bonapartism, Kemalism, Peronism, Chavismo, Orbanism, Erdoganism, and whatever else one might name. Moreover, modern China cannot be classified as a personalist regime either. Xi Jinping’s heading China for the third time (in 2022-2023), despite the supposedly traditional limitation of two five-year terms, gives no reason for such conclusions. This is not a tradition; on the contrary, it is a novelty and an incipient trend: such a limit existed de jure only from 1982 to 2018 (and even then only for the post of President of the PRC, not for the position of General Secretary of the CCP), and de facto it was observed only twice by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, in 1993 and 2003, respectively. The ‘hybridity’ label is also unsuitable: it is completely meaningless unless it is shown and proven what exactly has been crossed with what (which has already been identified and classified) and in what proportion in a particular regime. This will not work for China.

Turning to typologies based on other criteria is of little help, too. China is clearly not a confederation or a federation. But it cannot be unequivocally called a unitary state either, as 47% of its territory is occupied by five autonomous, albeit mostly nominally, regions (Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang Uyghur, Guangxi Zhuang, and Ningxia Hui). And there are also the special administrative regions of Hong Kong (Xiānggǎng) and Macau (Àomén), which have a special status.

Perhaps China is simply a nation-state? Well, if a ‘nation’ and a ‘state,’ as has already been noted above, have become almost synonymous, let it be so. But even if this is the case, it is no less strange as a nation than it is as a state. “Nation-states, by their very nature, strive for the ideal of cultural and linguistic homogeneity” (Kende, 1991, p. 24). In other words, in order to be considered nation-states, they must approximate (quite closely, in fact) this ideal. The ideal of homogeneity is a product of modernization, for which the necessary condition is “sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers involving a sharing of explicit meaning, transmitted in a standard idiom and in writing when required” (Gellner, 1983, p. 34). However, there is no need to reduce modernization to the formation of industrial society, as Ernest Gellner did, since its non-economic motives can—and often are—no less significant. Incidentally, nationalism, as “a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (Ibid, p. 1), is certainly not justified solely by economic considerations. Sometimes there is no industrial society yet, but nationalism is already there. However, the mere statement of undeniably observed facts is important.

At first glance, China matches this ideal almost completely: the Han people make up over 91% of the population, while the other 55 officially recognized ethnic groups account for less than 9%. It would take Taiwan, with its approximately 23 million inhabitants (which would add less than 2% to the total Han population) for the political and national borders (i.e., the area dominated by Han culture) to match each other. However, upon closer examination, the picture does not appear so simple.

Omitting many details and oversimplifying things: the Han language is a collective term for ten main dialects, which in turn are further divided into approximately two hundred varieties. They share a common written, hieroglyphic basis, but their phonetics, vocabulary, and in some cases even grammar are so different that verbal communication (i.e., Gellner’s “sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers”) between residents of northern and southern regions, as well as between southerners from different areas, is often a problem. The official language is pǔtōnghuà, also known as Standard Mandarin, based on the Beijing version of the North Chinese language and classical literature and created only in 1911, after ‘the Xinhai Revolution, under the name of guoyu, literally meaning ‘state language” and renamed pǔtōnghuà (literally meaning ‘common tongue’) in 1949, after the establishment of the PRC. Pǔtōnghuà reigns supreme in the public sphere (and even beyond in the North), but in everyday life, only about 80% of Chinese on average speak it across the country, and only half of that in some rural areas in the South. The political goal of “promoting the common language—Pǔtōnghuà—used nationwide” is stated in the 1982 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (while also stipulating that “all ethnic groups shall have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages”). The Law “On Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress,” adopted in March 2026 by the National People’s Congress, adds little to the long-established approach, mainly systematizing previously introduced measures and staying in line with one of Xi Jinping’s favorite metaphors: the peoples of China should be “packed tightly together like pomegranate seeds.”

The pomegranate seeds are enclosed in a strong shell and uniformly colored red; but grinding them into homogeneous puree is neither proposed nor implied here. Therefore, the Chinese approach to the unity-plurality dilemma differs markedly from that which was practiced in most European and Europeanized nation-states.

As a rule, the latter was eliminated, while the former was imposed by all possible means, ranging from mild to quite repressive (this topic has been researched so thoroughly that, for the sake of space, let me omit references to specific studies).

Modern nation-building cases are structured in a similar way. The Chinese authorities would probably like to do something of the kind at the “software” level; one can harbor any suspicions and make any assumptions on that score. But the “hardware” does not permit it. Pǔtōnghuà functions more as an oral extension of the traditionally written lingua franca, which Chinese characters have always been since ancient times: today, its role is comparable to that of Latin, Greek, Russian, English, and to some extent Spanish and French (in certain ways Arabic) in some empires. And at the same time, as shown above, modern China is not an empire.

There are, however, more nuanced ideas about the nation and the nation-state. For example, Alfred Stepan proposed distinguishing between a ‘state-nation’ and a ‘nation-state.’ He uses the term ‘nation-state’ for what Paul Kende and other representatives of the French tradition refer to as ‘état-nations’—it is not hard to get used to it, especially since he defines this political sub-form strictly in line with Gellner. Per Stepan, a ‘state-nation’ is a combination of “attachment to more than one cultural civilizational tradition within the existing boundaries,” “recognition and support of more than one cultural identity, even more than one cultural nation,” “two or more official languages are allowed,” “federal system… de jure, or de facto, asymmetrical,” “salient and are recognized and democratically managed ethno-cultural-territorial cleavages,” “autonomist parties [that] can govern in federal units and are ‘coalitionable’ at the center. Non-violent secessionist parties can sometimes participate in democratic politics,” “multiple but complementary (political) identities,” “obedience to the state and identification with institutions, neither based on a single national identity” (Stepan, 2008, p. 4). Obviously, this model is irrelevant to Chinese realities. And it is clear why: Stepan associates it exclusively with democracies, classifying India, Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, and Spain as ‘state-nations.’ However, he does the same with ‘nation-states’ (Brazil, Austria, U.S., Germany, Australia, Argentina) (Ibid, p. 13). There are no non-democracies in his sample, simply because he did not deal with them. So, China does not fit this category, either.

The last attempt. China undoubtedly belongs to the category of one-party systems. The fact that, in addition to the Communist Party of China, there are officially eight other parties (and Hong Kong has its own party subsystem) should not mislead anyone: this well-known tactic has been used more than once by other one-party regimes, and the leading role of the CCP has been repeatedly declared in the Constitution. But what kind of party is this—中国共产党 (Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng)? Resorting once again to a literal translation and keeping in mind its flaws, it is the Party of the Common Property/Joint Production of the Middle Country.[9] ‘Dǎng’ can be considered a fairly accurate equivalent of the word ‘party’—in ancient China this term was used for court political factions vying for influence and power. The history of many European political parties and those shaped along European lines also began with various factions, groups, and cliques, and it took time for them to turn from partes (Lat.) of the elite into parts of a politically organized society in toto and per se. But is ‘common property/joint production’ really the same kind of communism that was visualized in its birthplace, i.e., in the West, by its apologists, adherents, and advocates? Or was it, and still is, a “dream of something greater” which is not reducible solely to the ownership-production relationship? And, most importantly, what kind of state does this party rule? Under Mao, the answer was clear—totalitarian, of course. Now, there is no totalitarianism in China.[10] Incidentally, there is no common property/joint production either. Once again, this makes it obscure for us.

The Problem of the Formless

Hence the first part of the hypothesis.

In fog, as we know, all objects lose the clarity of their outlines and the discernibility of their size; they become shapeless and unrecognizable. This is what makes fog frightening—we cannot understand what is happening around us, properly determine the nature of an object, the distance to it, or the nature and scale of a potential threat. This is why the formless frightens us.

The formless rarely becomes a subject of individual reflections. And it is easy to understand why: How can it be an object, and how can one think about it separately from other objects? This question puzzled even Plato: “And would you feel… about… such things as hair, mud, dirt, or anything else which is vile and paltry; would you suppose that each of these has an idea…? Certainly not, said Socrates; …I am afraid that there would be an absurdity in assuming any idea of them, although I sometimes get disturbed, and begin to think that there is nothing without an idea; but then again, when I have taken up this position, I run away, because I am afraid that I may fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish” (Παρµενίδης 130c, 130d).

Aristotle simply dismissed this question, thinking that (to put it bluntly) everything has a form, and formlessness is nothing more than an abstraction. So, Georges Bataille’s diagnosis is quite accurate: “Formless is… a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit” (Bataille, 1929, p. 382).

It is noteworthy that both Plato and Bataille, as well as the authors inspired by Bataille, describe the formless as something repulsive, dirty, and vile (see Bois and Krauss, 1996; Woodard, 2011; Alliez and Gordon, 2016). The dirty and vile, in turn, not only repel but can also frighten: “There are evil and impure powers, productive of disorders, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege. The only sentiments which men have for them are a fear into which horror generally enters” (Durkheim, 1964, p. 409; see also Caillois, 1988 and many other studies). The opposite is also possible—something that for some reason is frightening is also believed to be inherently repulsive, which further legitimizes its isolation, sanitation, and elimination. In any case, there is a connection between disgust and fear, whatever its direction may be. After all, it is no coincidence that the Abrahamic tradition says so much about the “unclean, or impure spirit,” one of whose favorite tactics is to poison and weaken the souls of the tempted with fear.

Statements about the formless are, to put it mildly, interdisciplinary in nature. Again, this is not surprising: it is formless precisely because it does not fit into any disciplinary framework, not even a psychological one. Psychologists do not analyze the fear of formlessness, but it is treated as a symptom of generalized anxiety disorder (van Hoyer, der Heiden and Portman 2011). This kind of fear is irrational, structureless, and absurd; it is not caused by any specific object. It is something else. However, it seems reasonable to assume that anxiety and horror instilled by the formless may themselves turn out to be formless.

Wolin is perhaps the only one who tried to talk about the formless in the language of political theory. Unfortunately, his attempt can hardly be considered satisfactory. Some twenty years ago he made vague (and it is precisely this vagueness that is most frightening) warnings about the threat of “formless forms” looming over the world (Wolin, 2004, p. 559). But he never explained what this oxymoron means and what the formless is in his examples—the American superpower and Islamic terrorism. And that is a pity. Because the second part of the hypothesis suggests that China is frightening not so much because it cannot be fitted into any of the known political forms, but because the West itself is becoming increasingly formless.

For several decades now, the West has been experiencing a growing sense of uncertainty about itself, about the stability and legitimacy of its political forms, about its own right to not just impose something on anyone but even to have any kind of political form, let alone defend it, about its own right to be the West, and ultimately, about its own right to be. It was the Left who spread this uncertainty, which is now turning into a sense of guilt. The Right seek to bring the West back to its roots, but they do so, firstly, rather clumsily, and secondly, instead of treating the disorder they demand a crude, unanesthetized amputation of the affected organs and tissues, often failing to notice that by doing so they call for cutting away what was generated by the West itself in the course of its own natural and legitimate evolution, rather by an exogenous infection.

Russia, despite its specific situation, is faced with similar predicaments. It is impossible to restore the communist regime (in any form, from extremely harsh to a more moderate one). It is impossible to restore the Orthodox monarchy. It is impossible to call itself an empire for a multitude of domestic and foreign policy reasons, and also because it would simply be counterfactual. It is also impossible to position itself as an ordinary, unremarkable state ‘like all the others’ for roughly the same reasons (but also because it would be very undesirable). The centauric notion of ‘state-civilization,’ much trumpeted lately, does not solve the problem. Firstly, it is hardly suitable for external use, as it will only baffle friends and anger enemies. Secondly, it combines the incompatible: unlike ‘state,’ ‘civilization’ is not a political form, but a notion from a different realm.

It is sometimes claimed that this two-part definition was coined by Lucian Pye, and specifically in relation to China. The truth is that Pye, who was born in China, worked there, and studied it closely, did indeed write something similar. But, in fact, he wrote the following: “China is not just another nation-state in the family of nations. China is a civilization pretending to be a state. The story of modern China could be described as the effort by both Chinese and foreigners to squeeze a civilization into the arbitrary, constraining framework of the modern state, an institutional invention that came out of the fragmentation of the West’s own civilization” (Pye, 1990, p. 58). The very title of his article—China: Erratic State, Frustrated Society—makes one doubt that being a ‘state-civilization’ is such a good thing. Moreover, now, three and a half decades later, it would be wrong to describe the Chinese political order as unstable, and there is no reliable information about the actual degree of frustration in Chinese society. The term ‘civilization-state” (precisely this way, not in reversed order; recalling Stepan’s logic, we can assume that substantively these are not the same things) was popularized by Martin Jacques, the author of the ground-breaking alarmist bestseller When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (Jacques, 2009), which was met with controversy in academic circles, including Chinese ones. Unreliable ground, undesirable analogy.

China is undoubtedly exotic and enigmatic. But it is by no means marginal. In any configuration of a multipolar world, whether desirable or undesirable, regardless of how many centers it will have (in fact, it would be very useful to at least try to estimate their number in advance, even if only roughly), China will be one of them.

It cannot be ignored, and there is no point in even hoping to crush it—it is far from being a spider or a worm. The fear is rooted not in specific inconveniences caused by China, such as its economic expansion being relatively more effective than the Western one (because it lacks the value component, i.e., does not require its partners to meet additional value-based (political, humanitarian, environmental) conditions. After all, capitalism must be capable of competing even under less-than-favorable conditions, and the West has long been quite good at turning a blind eye to the antics of “its own sons of a bitch.” The fear is rooted in China’s sheer existence that defies the very notion of political form and all its variations. But from the Western perspective, only the form—and nothing but the form—can withstand the offensive of the formless.

No, China is not destroying Western political forms by exerting direct pressure from above—it lacks resources for that, and this course of action is not characteristic of it. China is sort of seeping into them from below, eroding their foundations (causing the supporting structures to shift, sway, and crack), while at the same time reconnecting their life-support systems to itself—the “Made in China” label keeps spreading around the entire material world. However, there is a limit to how long a metaphor can work, and in China’s case that limit seems to have been reached. It has played its part by indicating that it is precisely the obscurity and indeterminacy of the danger emanating from China—in the West’s political language—that makes it ontological and existential.

Mutatis mutandis draws this feeling from the well-known Yellow Peril mythologeme of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which, however, hostility, rejection and aggressive xenophobia were directed not only at the Chinese but also at the entire ‘yellow Mongoloid race,’ including the Japanese, Tibetans, Koreans, Vietnamese, the half-forgotten Mongols themselves, the hallucinatory Huns, etc., in general, any ‘slant-eyed’ people (see the multifaceted review by Kuo Wei Tchen and Yeats, 2014). The difference is that back then, the Yellow Peril, at least when associated specifically with China, was not linked to the Chinese political order at all: “The classical version of the ‘Yellow Peril’ concept viewed Chinese migration as a kind of natural disaster, a tsunami sweeping over Russian territory. The point of origin (the Qing Empire) was merely a sea—an incomprehensible, threatening, but by no means organized force” (Blyakher and Grigorichev, 2026, p. 133).[11]

Intriguing and convincing are the parallels drawn between Sinophobia and anti‑Semitism of that time, often depicted as interacting in a mutually cumulative way. Such descriptions even include the conspiracy theory claiming that Jews and Chinese “play the same game” (see Dyatlov, 2012; Renshaw, 2016). After the nearly simultaneous establishment of the State of Israel (1948) and the People’s Republic of China (1949), both anti‑Semitism and Sinophobia became largely focused on them. As for Israel, illustrative examples would be superfluous. As for China, in the early 2000s, many in Russia believed that every Chinese “is part of a single, organized, and externally controlled mechanism of secret takeover” and that a “conscious political process is unfolding, directed by forces hostile to Russia” (Blyakher and Grigorichev, 2026, p. 135).

The tall tales about countless hordes of Chinese, who had allegedly already flooded all Russian lands east of Lake Baikal and were just waiting for a signal from the center, are similar to Trump’s delusions about Chinese submarines purportedly cruising around Greenland and waiting for a signal from the center—the same center. Little has changed. Both Jews and Chinese, even not suspected of being Israel and China’s sleeper agents and fervently denying it, frighten the West by their omnipresence and ability to creep into all cracks of Western societies, economies, and political forms.

What’s Next?

Theoretically, there are several options for overcoming the fear of China (which, in fact, is coming from China at a superficial glance only).

Firstly, China might suddenly adopt a political form that the West would see as distinct. However, it is completely unclear what form exactly that would be, why China would do this, and under what circumstances anything like this might happen. Most importantly, this would in no way resolve the crisis and stop the weakening of the West’s political form (but certainly not China’s). In fact, this would make things even worse. Secondly, the West might suddenly improve and expand its own(!) political language, understand and accept China as it is, i.e., “stop worrying and start living.” But this would be very hard to do, and nothing suggests that. Thirdly, the West may suddenly perk up, regain faith in itself and its political forms, strengthen them, and prepare to repel the looming threat of the formless. This is possible but highly doubtful—what is lost is lost; you cannot put toothpaste back into the tube. Fourthly, the West may develop an entirely new political form, more resilient to challenges. It seems that present-day ‘techno-fascists’ (or rather, those accused of ‘techno-fascism’), such as Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp, and a few other lesser-known figures, are dreaming of something like that. However, there is no solid reason to expect them to be anything more than yet another sect of dreamers and eccentrics, of whom the West has already seen quite a few. And for whom, apart from freaks (and not even all of them), can this dystopia be attractive? Is there anything else on the menu? Fifthly, the degradation of Western political forms may become irreversible. This will not turn the West into China, of course, but it will no longer be the West as we know it, and there will be nothing left to talk about.

Under all scenarios, we will have to live with the fear of the formless (except for the last one, because it is not about life but about death). In the foreseeable future, this fear will remain a constant cause of stress for both the ruling elites and ordinary people in the West. The types of stress reaction are well known: “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” (Walker, 2013). The choice is limited and not a pleasant one. Yet the heroes of bygone times, who made the West as we know it, were smart and agile enough not to get stuck in such reactions (any of them taken separately is a sure path to defeat), but to masterfully combine and alternate them. Reason, skill, and faith—has there ever been any hope for anything else? Besides, it is said: “Do not fear.”

For citation, please use:
Shlykov, P.V., 2026. Trump and Erdoğan: Pragmatic Partnership and a New Architecture of Türkiye-U.S. Relations. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 72–95. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-72-95

By the mid-2020s, Türkiye-U.S. relations had slid into a state of “chronic instability” (Taşpınar, 2024). The traditional model of strategic alliance within NATO, based on shared values and mutual obligations, had given way to a purely pragmatic, transactional model, based on personal agreements and selective cooperation. This led to the fragmentation of the bilateral agenda and the erosion of institutional trust.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 increased the importance of the leaders’ personal relationship for U.S.-Türkiye relations. Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership styles appear similar in many respects, including a preference for personal diplomacy and a distrust of the traditional foreign policy bureaucracy. The Turkish authorities have even coined the concept of ‘leader diplomacy’ (lider diplomasisi) as a tool for overcoming international isolation and advancing national interests (T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Iletişim Başkanlığı, 2023). This approach has produced tactical flexibility and quick agreements, but the exclusion of the foreign policy bureaucracy has made relations highly volatile (Ovalı, 2020, pp. 23-45).

The “bromance” between Erdoğan and Trump, based on their perceptions of each other as strong leaders, had a direct impact even during Trump’s first term. Trump often publicly spoke warmly of Erdoğan, kindling Ankara’s hopes that personal agreement could lead to breakthroughs like the termination of U.S. support for the Kurdish YPG in Syria and the return of Türkiye to the F-35 program (from which it was excluded after purchasing Russian S-400 air defense systems (Atlantic Council, 2025)). However, such things often ran up against consensus, laws, and policies in the U.S. Congress and military (Tan, 2025), and personal affections did not prevent harsh U.S. sanctions after Türkiye’s detention of American Pastor Andrew Brunson.

Türkiye’s status of an “indispensable but difficult” ally (Michalski, 2026) has kept Türkiye-U.S. relations in a state of ‘managed instability’. Aware of their mutual strategic dependence, the two countries pragmatically managed their often divergent interests (Ülgül, 2019). Türkiye has NATO’s second largest army, retains critical importance on NATO’s southern flank, and is an important hub for operations in the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, and Middle East.

Yet Ankara, capitalizing on its strategic position, seeks to establish itself as an autonomous regional center of power. Its influence has increased significantly after the latest developments in Syria and the South Caucasus. Türkiye positions itself as an independent mediator (e.g., in the Ukraine conflict) and strives to become an energy and logistics bridge between East and West.

Ankara has used its autonomy and diversified external relations (in-deepening cooperation with Russia, application for BRICS membership) to win maximum preferences from Washington (Gisclon, 2025). Türkiye is not giving up on the alliance, but using it to ensure the country’s foreign-policy and economic interests, which often diverge from those of the U.S.

To understand the volatile relations between Türkiye and the U.S. over the past decade, it is useful to combine role theory and the concept of asymmetric alliance. These highlight the crisis’s ideological and structural causes.

The extensive literature on Türkiye-U.S. relations is dominated by chronological narratives (Oğuzlu, 2011, pp. 981-998), and by structural descriptions highlighting the allies’ unequal power and deprivation of a common (Soviet) threat (Güvenç and Özel, 2020, pp. 523-544). Constructivist studies, on the contrary, are few: works applying role theory to Türkiye and the U.S. mostly analyze individual cases and leadership styles (Çuhadar et al., 2021, pp. 1-27; Özdamar, 2024, pp. 41-59), or focus on Ankara’s role identity without comparing it to the U.S.’s (Bozdaglioglu, 2003). But it is precisely role theory that helps capture the deep ideological and identity-based factors of discord.

Role theory contends that a state’s behavior is largely determined by the role that its elite believes it plays (Holsti, 1970, pp. 233-309), its ‘appropriate’ functions and responsibilities in the international system (Breuning, 2024, pp. 233-252). The Arab Spring and especially the Syrian conflict led to the U.S. and Türkiye developing fundamentally incongruent roles.

Based on Holsti’s terminology, this article examines national role concepts (elite discourse within a state about its ‘appropriate’ functions and status), actual role performance, and role prescriptions (the expectations of allies, great powers, and regional players). Incongruity between the three leads to ‘role conflict’ and ‘altercasting’—attempts to impose a desired role upon a partner (Çuhadar et al., pp. 1-27; Valockova, 2026, pp. 1-30; Malici, 2006, pp. 127-149). This framework eschews simplistic explanations that attribute turbulence in bilateral relations solely to structural asymmetry or leaders’ ‘chemistry’, and helps avoid confusing role with function or observed behavior, as is typical in empirical research.

National role concept is not merely a state’s objective position in an international structure (e.g., Türkiye’s status as ‘NATO’s southern flank’), or the sum of its foreign policy actions; it also includes the subjective meanings ascribed by the elite to its country’s activities. Role performance, in turn, is not equated with a role as such, but is viewed as one of its manifestations, along with the elites’ discourse and external prescriptions. This paper aims not to assign a particular role to Ankara or Washington based on their behavior, but to identify discrepancies between what the elites declare, what they do, and what significant ‘Others’ expect from them—discrepancies that generate conflict.

The Barack Obama administration built its foreign policy discourse around the idea of “renewing American leadership” (Obama, 2007, pp. 2-16), intended to restore the moral authority and strategic efficiency of the U.S. after its interventions in the 2000s. In practice, this turned into selective engagement: while proclaiming its readiness to lead, the U.S. simultaneously sought to minimize its direct military presence in the Middle East, delegating regional stabilization to its allies. In terms of role theory, it would be appropriate to describe this as the position of a ‘reserved leader’ or ‘leader-manager’, diverging from the original concept of ‘energetic leadership’ due to domestic fatigue from wars. This strategy vividly manifested itself in Obama’s 2013 decision not to launch strikes punishing Assad for using chemical weapons, but instead to implement a Russia-brokered compromise by which Syria would sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy its stocks. This approach, which Obama called a triumph of common sense over political pressure, but his critics blasted as indecision, allowed the U.S. administration to use Syria’s Kurdish forces as the main proxy for fighting ISIS, thus making tactical successes without using its own troops on the ground.

At the same time, the Turkish elite, inspired by Ahmet Davutoğlu’s ‘strategic depth’ doctrine, began to define the country’s role as ‘regional leader’ and ‘defender of the region’s oppressed Muslim communities’. Ankara sought an active, leading role in the reconstruction of the Middle East, viewing the fall of the Assad regime as an opportunity to increase its influence and form a friendly government. Ankara’s proactive foreign policy stood in stark contrast to Washington’s cautious and restrained strategy (Shlykov, 2023, p. 142).

The role conflict between Türkiye and the U.S. was aggravated by the failure of ‘altercasting’. In Syria, Washington persistently guided Ankara to act as a disciplined ally, supporting the U.S.’s anti-ISIS strategy despite its use of YPG proxies. Ankara, in turn, expected its senior partner to militarily depose Assad. In defense procurement, Washington required Türkiye to act as a loyal NATO member, buying only NATO-compatible weapons. By purchasing Russia’s S-400, Türkiye instead sought to establish itself as a sovereign player, free to choose military-technical partners.

In each case, the sides’ incompatible roles and expectations deepened mutual misunderstanding.

The asymmetric alliance concept complements the analysis of the role dissonances between Türkiye and the U.S., highlighting the structural imbalance in their relationship. Historically, the alliance was based on the U.S.’s protection of Türkiye from the Soviet threat, in exchange for Ankara’s provision to Washington of its crucial strategic position (Morrow, 1991, pp. 904-933). However, after the end of the Cold War, the common threat weakened, revealing power-asymmetry and interest-divergence (Güvenç and Özel, 2020, pp. 523-544).

The bilateral alliance has undergone several phases: the classic ‘asymmetric model’ (1947-2000); a brief period of ‘exemplary partnership’ when Obama acclaimed Türkiye as a successful synthesis of Islam and democracy (2009-2012) (Shlykov, 2018, pp. 34-59); transactionalism and crisis (present day). Under Trump, relations have been reduced to one-off deals and ultimatums (Pastor Brunson, S-400), exposing the erosion of the alliance’s regulatory framework (Gürsoy, 2021, pp. 139-142).

The proposed synthesis requires a preliminary reconstruction of the roles that the parties applied to themselves and each other at different stages of interaction. For the U.S., the role concepts in the 2000s-2020s changed from a ‘global liberal leader’ (with its characteristic willingness to intervene and democratize) to a ‘reserved leader’ embodied by the Obama administration, which oscillated between ‘renewed leadership’ rhetoric and a pragmatic desire to shift the burden of regional stabilization onto allies. This eventually gave way to Trump’s blatant role of a dealer in ‘transactional nationalism’, which reduces allied commitments to one-off deals.

Türkiye’s own role conception has evolved from that of a loyal ally and a bridge between the West and Islam (early 2000s) to a much more ambitious self-identity. The doctrine of ‘strategic depth’ formalized Ankara’s claim to the status of a ‘regional leader’ and ‘defender of the oppressed’, which, along with the ideological framework of neo-Ottomanism and pan-Turkism, contributed to the adoption of the concept of a ‘strategically autonomous central power’ with its own civilizational mission.

This evolution was marked not only by rhetoric, but also by tangible steps such as the diversification of arms purchases, independent military interventions, and the institutionalization of ‘leader diplomacy’.

The crises of recent years—from the Syrian conflict and U.S. support for the YPG, to Türkiye’s acquisition of the S-400 and exclusion from the F-35 program—are symptoms, not causes, of the discord. The root causes lie in a role conflict and the asymmetry of the alliance that has lost its consolidating common threat (Özdamar, 2024, pp. 56-57). The foreign policy behavior of the two countries is largely a derivative of their elites’ new national role concepts being shaped by the changing balance of power and the regional agenda.

Türkiye-U.S. Relations in the New Millennium

The traditional foundation of Türkiye-U.S. relations, laid during the Cold War, is their military-political alliance and relatively consistent distribution of roles. The U.S. acted as a ‘leader of the free world’ guaranteeing the security of the entire Western camp, while Türkiye accepted and generally shared the role of a ‘loyal ally on NATO’s southern flank’, whose key function was to contain the USSR (Atmaca, 2014, pp. 19-34; Oğuzlu, 2025, pp. 736-752).

However, in the early 2000s, this model began to falter. In 2003, Türkiye refused to provide its territory for the invasion of Iraq, violating Washington’s role prescription (Çelikaslan, 2021, pp. 670-678) and exposing the countries’ diverging interests in the post-bipolar world.

Simultaneously, Türkiye’s foreign policy paradigm was undergoing a conceptual transformation. When Ahmet Davutoğlu took office as foreign minister in 2009, his concept of ‘strategic depth’ was formalized as a doctrine. Neo-Ottomanism—responsibility for the former Ottoman territories, with which a historical and civilizational legacy is shared (Mehdiev, 2016, pp. 32-39; Druzhilovskii and Avatkov, 2013, pp. 73-88)—and pan-Turkism became increasingly apparent in Ankara’s foreign policy discourse. Türkiye’s role was transforming from a ‘bridge’ between East and West, and junior partner in the global system, into an active independent ‘central power’ and ‘regional leader’ with its own civilizational mission and multi-vector foreign policy (Shlykov, 2023, pp. 140-141). Initially, this shift did not antagonize the U.S.: President Barack Obama’s 2009 visit to Ankara and rhetoric of ‘exemplary partnership’ (The White House, 2009) reflected Washington’s hopes that Türkiye’s combination of Islamic identity, democracy, and market economy could make it a ‘bridge’ and a positive example for its neighbors (Shlykov, 2018, pp. 34-59). Nevertheless, the unconditional alliance, based on a common Cold War threat, was over.

The Arab Spring and especially the Syrian Civil War widened the Washington-Ankara divide. The U.S., ‘leading from behind,’ sought to combat ISIS and avoid a large-scale military intervention (Shlykov, 2019a, pp. 184-229). Washington thus allied with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), made up mainly of YPG (Gürçay, 2019), regarded by Türkiye as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Türkiye, in contrast, sought to overthrow Assad, prevent the strengthening of Kurdish autonomous entities near its borders, and support Sunni rebel groups (Eksi & Erol, 2018, pp. 15-45). The year 2014 became the tipping point, following the start of the U.S.’s open military cooperation with the YPG, which Ankara considered a direct threat and a betrayal of allied obligations. Mutual trust had been undermined earlier—by the Obama administration’s abandonment of its own ‘red lines’ after the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack, which Ankara viewed as weakness and indecision (Anadolu Ajansı, 2017).

The domestic political situation in Türkiye also added to rising tensions. Official Ankara blamed Fethullah Gülen’s movement for a coup attempt in July 2016, and persistently demanded his extradition from the U.S.. Washington’s refusal, and support for Kurdish forces, sparked strong anti-American sentiment in Turkish society and elites.

Another factor contributing to the crisis was the arrest of American pastor Andrew Brunson on charges of espionage, links to the Gülenist movement, and participation in plotting the failed 2016 coup (Anadolu Ajansı, 2018). The U.S. viewed this as hostage-taking for the purpose of political bargaining. Despite Washington’s diplomatic demarches, the Turkish authorities were in no hurry to release him. In August 2018, Trump admitted the failure of diplomatic efforts, imposed tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum to 50% and 20%, respectively, and threatened to “destroy” the Turkish economy if the U.S. demands were not met. Within a day, the Turkish lira lost 20% of its value (The Financial Times, 2018), and Ankara was forced to give in. On 12 October 2018, the Izmir High Criminal Court released Brunson. Although the conflict was formally resolved, it had profound and long-lasting consequences. Türkiye faced severe economic problems. Inflation, which had already been quite high, exceeded 20% by the end of 2018, and continued to rise in subsequent years, reaching its peak in the fall of 2022: over 85.5% per official data (TÜİK, 2022), and over 185% per independent expert estimates (DİKEN, 2022). The lira’s collapse triggered a recession, devalued citizens’ savings, and ushered in economic instability that has persisted throughout the 2020s.

But the most significant transformations were geopolitical. Despite Washington’s warnings and threats of sanctions, Ankara held to its decision to buy the S-400, the first batch of which was delivered in July 2019, and thus proved willing to bear significant material and strategic costs for the sake of independence in security matters (Shlykov, 2023, pp. 134-158). Washington viewed this as a threat to NATO’s security, expelling Türkiye from the F-35 program and imposing CAATSA sanctions against it in 2020. This was the prologue to Türkiye’s shift towards an increasingly multi-vector policy featuring rapprochement with Russia and the pursuit of strategic autonomy. It also exposed accumulated grievances and discordant priorities.

Sanctioning a NATO ally achieved its immediate goal but had a strategic cost, eroding the bilateral alliance and pushing Türkiye towards alternative partners, thus radically changing the balance of power in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean.

The fragility and volatility of Türkiye-U.S. relations were also vividly highlighted by Türkiye’s autumn 2019 Operation Peace Spring in northern Syria, aimed at creating a “safe zone” and neutralizing the YPG threat (Akturk, 2020). This was made possible by Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria’s border areas, made after a 6 October conversation with Erdoğan (T24, 2019). The American troops deployed in the region together with the Syrian Kurdish forces as part of the fight against ISIS actually served as a deterrent. Ankara interpreted their withdrawal as the removal of a key obstacle to its planned military operation. For the Turkish leadership the designation of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (in their eyes synonymous with YPG) as a terrorist organization by both the U.S. and the EU created specific role expectations of the U.S. (Aktürk, 2020). However, in the U.S., this was criticized as a strategic mistake and a moral betrayal: the YPG had been the Pentagon’s main ally on the ground in the lengthy, successful campaign against ISIS. Under criticism from influential Congressmen of both parties, diplomats, military experts, and key European allies, the Trump administration named the Turkish operation a “bad idea” that Washington “does not support” (AP News, 2019). On 14 October 2019, Trump imposed “targeted sanctions” (USDT, 2019a) against Türkiye’s Ministry of National Defense and Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, and against Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu, and Energy Minister Fatih Dönmez. Trump also (again) raised tariffs on Turkish steel to 50%, threatening to “swiftly destroy” Türkiye’s economy if it continued its fighting in Syria (Hürriyet, 2019b).

The sanctions proved to be short-lived. On 17 October 2019, a U.S. delegation, led by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, secured Turkish agreement to a 120-hour pause in hostilities, allowing Kurdish forces to withdraw from a 30-km strip along the Turkish-Syrian border (TRT Haber, 2019). Once Ankara confirmed a “permanent ceasefire,” the 2019 sanctions were lifted almost instantly. Speaking at the White House on 23 October 2019, Donald Trump lauded the Turks for their efforts and “instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to lift all sanctions imposed” on Türkiye (Hürriyet, 2019a). On the same day, the U.S. Treasury officially removed the agencies and ministers from the sanctions list (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2019b). Such a rapid removal of sanctions, accompanied by Trump’s public thanks to Erdoğan and even SDF Commander Mazloum Kobani highlighted the pragmatic underlying motives for the American actions: the strategic goal was not to punish Türkiye but to achieve a quick, media-acceptable settlement that would allow the U.S. administration to proclaim its mission to “end the endless wars” successful.

Per role theory, such dynamics was not just a manifestation of pragmatism but a natural result of interaction between two incompatible national role concepts. The Trump administration, acting within the framework of ‘transactional nationalism’, was not interested in altercasting Türkiye and returning it to the role of ‘disciplined ally.’ Rather, Washington permitted a one-off exchange: regional autonomy for Türkiye in exchange for Trump’s proclaiming a quick victory and putting an “end to the endless wars.” This confirmed the bilateral relationship’s normative erosion, and revealed that when the roles of ‘transactional nationalism’ and ‘autonomous central power’ conceptually collide, interaction degenerates into a series of ad hoc agreements that defer the crisis but do not resolve the fundamental role conflict.

All this led Ankara to realize, by the end of the 2010s, that its choice of strategic autonomy was correct. This manifested itself not only in rapprochement with Russia (S-400, cooperation within the Astana format on Syria), but also in independent military and diplomatic interventions in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh (Shlykov, 2023, pp. 134-158). The good personal relationship between Erdoğan and Trump could not overcome structural contradictions. Their relationship was clearly transactional and inconsistent: short-term detente (as in Syria in 2019) was followed by new sanctions and mutual recriminations.

Biden’s administration marked a new period of disaffection. Washington returned to value-oriented rhetoric, criticizing democratic regression and human rights violations in Türkiye. The U.S. officially recognized the Armenian Genocide and barred Ankara from the Summit for Democracy (Kirişçi, 2021). Bilateral relations hit the lowest point in decades, with disagreements over Syria and the S-400 remaining unresolved.

Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine provided a new context for the deterioration of Türkiye-U.S. relations. Despite its NATO membership, Türkiye assumed a position of non-binary balancing: it rendered military assistance to Kiev (supplying Bayraktar combat drones), mediated a grain deal and POW exchanges, but refused to join Western sanctions against Moscow, maintaining important economic ties with Russia. The role of direct intermediary increased Türkiye’s strategic importance to the West’s eyes and paved the way for selective pragmatic cooperation.

In the early 2020s, Türkiye pursued rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, indirectly aligning itself with U.S. interests in regional stability (İnat & Duran, 2023, pp. 79-101). And it pragmatically used Sweden’s application for NATO membership to force the U.S. Congress to approve the sale of modernized F-16s.

The evolution of Türkiye-U.S. relations over the past two decades has been determined by a set of interconnected factors: fundamentally changed role concepts, a new balance of power in the Middle East, authoritarian trends in Türkiye, and the shifting alignment of non-regional actors. The main cause of disagreements was the changing perception of the two countries’ elites about the role of their countries in the international system.

Türkiye evolved from a ‘loyal ally’ within the transatlantic system to a ‘strategically autonomous regional power’ pursuing an independent policy and seeking a leadership position in its neighborhood. The U.S. moved towards ‘selective engagement’ after the interventions of the 2000s, seeking to minimize direct military commitments in the Middle East and refocus on strategic rivalry with China.

The weakening of direct American influence in the Middle East after 2011 created a vacuum into which regional powers, including Türkiye, eagerly plunged. Using its military and diplomacy, Ankara became a key player in Syria, Libya, and the South Caucasus. This new position clashed with Washington’s traditional model of relations, in which Türkiye was subordinate.

Türkiye’s post-2016 authoritarian drift provoked systemic criticism by the American establishment, especially Congress, which made bilateral relations hostage to the domestic human rights agenda (Cumhuriyet, 2021). On the other hand, growing polarization in the U.S. led to inconsistent foreign policy: the Trump and Biden administrations often steered opposite courses. Türkiye thus turned towards non-Western partners. Russia became Ankara’s alternative partner in security and energy, and co-guarantor in the Syrian settlement (The “Asian Turn”, 2024). Türkiye began to view China as an important source of investment and a potential partner in multilateral formats (Koldunova et al., 2023), raising concern in Washington (Süsler, 2025, pp. 175-196; Öğütçü, 2025). The European Union, despite Türkiye’s frozen accession process, continued to be its key economic partner (Bashirov, 2020, pp. 165-184), creating a complex system of checks and balances in Turkish foreign policy.

Trump’s Second Term

Trump’s 2024 reelection led to a radical revision of Türkiye-U.S. relations. The return of Trump’s ‘America First’ pragmatism coincided with fundamental changes in the Middle East, primarily the fall of Assad. This combination allowed Ankara and Washington to restart their dialogue, moving from confrontation on many key issues to a pragmatic, if complex, partnership. In 2025-2026, their relations transformed along four main vectors: Syria, defense cooperation, Türkiye’s strategic mediation in regional conflicts, and economic ties.

The key factor that determined the new dynamics was the completely new situation in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime at the end of 2024. Türkiye had established itself as the dominant power, exercising control over key territories through loyal Syrian armed groups (Strategic Comments, 2025). The Trump administration, seeking to further reduce its direct involvement in the region, by mid-2025, had almost completely ended its support for the SDF, and instead begun mediating the SDF’s integration into the Turkish-influenced Syrian state structures (Lister, 2026), along with the militant prisons that had been under SDF control (FDD, 2026).  In northern Syria, the Turkish army and Ankara-influenced local administrations were left in charge of security and the fight against ISIS. The focus of U.S.-Türkiye cooperation shifted to humanitarian aid, return of refugees, and post-war reconstruction, with Türkiye playing a leading role. Washington de facto recognized Ankara’s sphere of influence in exchange for Ankara taking full responsible for stabilizing.

Türkiye showed flexibility on the most difficult and symbolic issue—the S-400s. Ankara jumped at the American idea that the S-400 systems were “inoperable.” The main option, discussed since September 2024, was the systems’ non-operational storage under joint control, presumably at the Incirlik airbase (Gazete Duvar, 2024). (In December 2025, Erdoğan even offered Putin the S-400s’ return in exchange for compensation (Bloomberg, 2025b).) Washington showed readiness to make a deal: U.S. envoy Tom Barrack said that “Trump and Erdogan’s close relationship has led to the most fruitful conversations on this topic in nearly a decade” (Bloomberg, 2025a). Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said that Trump had already ordered the lifting of the CAATSA sanctions (Haberturk, 2025). And yet, in the summer of 2026, the U.S. Congress cast this gambit into doubt, insisting on the S-400s’ total removal from Turkish territory. Ankara then began seeking to resell the S-400s to a third party: either the UAE or Qatar, as obliquely confirmed by Russian and U.S. officials (Kommersant, 2026). But Moscow’s ability to veto any resale, and the risk of secondary sanctions for any third-party buyer, have seemingly derailed this option, too. Now Türkiye has hired a U.S. consulting firm for $2.4 million to lobby for its readmission to the F-35 program (Sözcü, 2026).        

Trump’s second term has been marked by even greater U.S. recognition of Türkiye’s unique mediating role, transforming it from a problematic ally into an indispensable partner.Trump publicly commended Erdoğan as one of the few leaders capable of constructive dialogue with both Moscow and Kiev (Yeni Şafak, 2025). Türkiye brokered a new round of direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul in 2025, leading to a large POW exchange and lay the groundwork for ceasefire discussions. Türkiye proposed an ‘Istanbul 2.0’ format, coordinated with Washington (Özdemir, 2024).

Even more revealing was the invitation of Türkiye to join Trump’s Board of Peace (Anadolu Ajansı, 2026), which has a UN mandate to manage Gaza after the war. Türkiye joined as a founding member with a seat on the Executive Board, and views the BoP as a chance to end the humanitarian catastrophe and strengthen its own influence (Yeni Şafak, 2026).

This symbolized Washington’s willingness to include Türkiye among the key architects of the Middle East’s new order, despite Ankara’s historically strained relations with Israel.

Economic issues also underlie the new stage of Türkiye-U.S. relations. At their meetings in 2025, Trump and Erdoğan repeated an ambitious goal of bringing bilateral trade to $100 billion (Anadolu Ajansı, 2025b). Its actual volume reached $35 billion in 2024 and continues to grow. Turkish Trade Minister Ömer Bolat, in December 2025, noted that the two countries are working on a roadmap to achieve the $100 billion goal, focusing on energy and defense (Anadolu Ajansı, 2025a). Türkiye’s accession to the Minerals Security Partnership (aimed at diversifying critical mineral supplies away from China) further integrates Ankara into Western economic alliances. And the U.S.’s increased LNG exports to Türkiye have improved the latter’s energy security by diversifying its supplies and suppliers (Dost, 2025).

Yet enhanced cooperation in some areas has not ended structural competition in all others, producing ‘competitive cooperation’. In post-Assad Syria, despite Washington’s recognition of Ankara’s leading role, the two sides continue indirect struggle over the configuration of new institutions. Türkiye seeks to ensure the dominance of loyal forces, while the U.S. is trying to retain some of its influence through the Arab tribes and NGOs that formerly comprised the SDF, pushing for the transition to be more inclusive.

The U.S. remains skeptical of Türkiye’s strategic autonomy vis-à-vis non-Western countries. Although Ankara does not view BRICS+ or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an alternative to the U.S., Washington views Turkish cooperation with such organizations through the lens of its global rivalry with China and Russia. Türkiye’s application to become a BRICS+ Partner, its conduct of settlements in national currencies, and its expansion of energy cooperation with Moscow (including in its role as a gas hub) have repeatedly raised concern in the U.S. Congress and various agencies, notwithstanding Trump’s personal attitude.

A latent conflict has also emerged over Türkiye’s position in parallel imports and financial transactions that circumvent U.S. sanctions against Russia. The U.S. Treasury’s institutional logic has sometimes clashed with Trump’s pragmatism and personal promises. This has not upset the overall rapprochement, but has limited it to a situational partnership.

In general, Trump’s second term has seen a reset of Türkiye-U.S. relations, driven by Trump’s pragmatism and Türkiye’s increased regional weight. Their ties have evolved from a transactional relationship and crisis management to more complex cooperation. Seeking to minimize its own obligations and costs, Washington delegated key powers to Ankara to stabilize the situation in Syria, and recognized Türkiye’s indispensable role as a mediator in conflict resolution. Türkiye demonstrated flexibility in solving the S-400 problem and joined U.S. economic initiatives. This pragmatic personal partnership has allowed the two countries to resolve numerous institutional and ideological contradictions, leading to a more sustainable dialogue between the two NATO members.

*  *  *

The analysis of Türkiye-U.S. relations during Donald Trump’s presidency permits drawing a number of conclusions that are important both for understanding the current state of relations between Ankara and Washington, and for conceptualizing the transformation of allied ties in a polycentric world.

The transformation of Türkiye‑U.S. relations over the past decade can be described as a change in the nature of interaction within an increasingly fragmented asymmetric alliance. A key factor in this transformation was the change in the parties’ role prescriptions and corresponding expectations regarding the ally’s permissible behavior. Türkiye moved away from a predominantly instrumental role in the U.S.‑centric security system and consistently asserted itself as an autonomous regional actor capable of utilizing its position within the alliance to pursue its own interests. The U.S., while continuing to view Türkiye as a strategically important partner, demanded allied solidarity from Ankara and urged it to limit its autonomous behavior whenever it ran counter to American strategic objectives.

During Trump’s first and second terms, the sets of mechanisms used by Washington in relations with Türkiye differed: in 2017–2021, personal partnership went along with U.S. Congress’s attempts to block agreements and the imposition of sanctions on Ankara, whereas after 2025, Washington partially recognized Türkiye’s regional autonomy and the need to redistribute responsibilities, primarily on the Syrian and mediation tracks.

Trump’s first term demonstrated the dual nature of personal partnership: it simultaneously enhances the parties’ ability to reach short‑term agreements and increases the dependence of bilateral relations on the political will of the leaders. During Trump’s second term, Türkiye’s increased regional autonomy and role in regional processes forced Washington to take Ankara’s position into account when determining its policy in the Middle East and in other regions. However, there was no complete alignment of the two countries’ strategic objectives.

By the mid‑2020s, the U.S.-Türkiye interaction has developed into a competitive cooperation, where structural and role‑based contradictions combine with expanded situational cooperation. Its key features are:

• Increased role of direct agreements between the top leaders in resolving bilateral disputes, with institutional mechanisms remaining important. This ensures tactical flexibility but makes relations more volatile.
• The U.S.’s partial and situational recognition of Türkiye’s increased regional autonomy and its significance in addressing regional security issues and in mediation, including in Syria, Ukraine, and the post‑conflict settlement in Gaza;
• The parties’ preparedness to seek situational compromise on contentious issues on the bilateral agenda and reduce the role of rigid ideological and institutional constraints in order to achieve a practical result;
• Managing the persisting role conflict in new ways. This helps keep the alliance afloat, but does not eliminate the fundamental contradictions.

The current phase of competitive cooperation is characterized by disagreements over regional security, relations with Russia, the U.S.’s role in Middle Eastern processes, and the international order. Partnership on specific issues coexists with competition for influence, diverging role expectations, and each country’s desire to retain the ability to independently chart its foreign policy course.

Current contradictions can be described as managed instability, in which personal partnership serves as one of the main mechanisms for solutions. Direct contacts between Trump and Erdoğan expedited political decisions, reduced the severity of certain crises, and reached situational compromises, notwithstanding significant differences in the positions of the states’ institutions. But personal partnership could not replace the institutional mechanisms of allied interaction, and thus should be viewed only as a compensatory mechanism that helps to temporarily overcome the consequences of institutional disfunction, but does not eliminate its structural causes.

Moreover, agreements reached between the leaders remain dependent on a broader institutional and political context. Syria, sanctions pressure, Türkiye’s purchase of Russian S‑400 systems, and the ensuing restrictions on military‑technical cooperation showed that personal partnership can ease a conflict but does not eliminate differences in role prescriptions and interests.

While participating in Euro‑Atlantic institutions, Türkiye at the same time expands room for foreign policy maneuvering, viewing relations with the U.S as an important, but not the only, direction of its foreign policy. This policy does not fundamentally change the asymmetric nature of bilateral relations; rather, it reveals the adaptation of interaction to the changed roles, capabilities, and expectations of the parties.

Viewing relations solely through the lens of material asymmetry or mismatching interests is insufficient. The asymmetry of opportunities imposes structural constraints on interaction; as a result, political behavior depends on the roles that the parties prescribe to themselves and to each other. As Türkiye’s role prescriptions changed, its autonomy increased, while the American expectations of its ally’s behavior continued to be guided by the previous hierarchical logic.

Personal partnership, situational agreements, and pragmatic cooperation enable the parties to maintain interaction despite remaining contradictions, but they do not make them more stable or predictable. The further evolution of Türkiye‑U.S. relations will depend on Washington and Ankara’s ability to reconcile their changed role prescriptions with their alliance’s institutional mechanisms and to consolidate political agreements.

Further research may show whether the experience of Türkiye-U.S. relations can be used for studying the transformation of other asymmetric alliances.

For citation, please use:
Frolov, A.L., 2026. Russian Arms Exports Before and After the Special Military Operation. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 120–132. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-120-132

On 4 November and 1 December 2025, Rosoboronexport and the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSVTS) marked their 25-year anniversaries, offering a good opportunity to assess Russian arms exports’ past, present, and post-SMO future.

The Overall Situation

The SMO has strengthened many of the external and internal factors influencing Russian arms exports. Sanctions pressure on Russian exports began well before 24 February 2022. During the 1990s and 2000s, U.S. sanctions were primarily aimed at preventing the export of Russian military technologies to countries seen as threating U.S. interests. After 2014, European countries joined these restrictive measures, which led to the loss of the small European market that remained as a legacy of the USSR, largely as a means for Russia to repay Soviet debts to former Warsaw Pact allies. By 2022, Russian supplies to Europe were reduced to sporadic, targeted cooperation with companies repairing Soviet-era military equipment under license.

Despite Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s ban on military and dual-use exports to Russia, some continued, albeit at much lower levels. Furthermore, despite France’s high-profile refusal to transfer two already-built Mistral-class universal landing ships (the Vladivostok and the Sevastopol), it continued to supply military equipment to Russia, worth about €152 million in 2015-2019 (Rapport, 2025). At the end of 2014, Greece signed a contract with Russia for the purchase of spare parts for the Tor-M1 and Osa-AKM air defense systems, acquired in the 1990s from Russia and in the 2000s from Germany (RIA Novosti, 2014). However, as early as 2023, the Greeks announced plans to terminate the contract (TASS, 2023a).

Yet Russian export’s main problem was not the decline in its relationship with Europe—that was in any case doomed as Soviet equipment aged and the Soviet debt was paid off. Rather, Russian export was seriously challenged by Trump’s August 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).

The law targeted Russia with sanctions, including entry bans, property and asset freezes, restrictions on “special crude oil development projects,” and restrictions on doing business with companies on the sectoral sanctions list. Of relevance here, CAATSA authorizes the President to impose sanctions on entities (in the U.S. or anywhere else) conducting “significant” transactions with the Russian defense sector. This immediately affected existing contracts (e.g., S-400 air defense systems to Türkiye) and planned ones (e.g., S-400 systems to India or Su-35 fighter jets to Indonesia).

Payments were made difficult, forcing a transition to payments in national currencies that was completed in late 2021. As Rosoboronexport head Alexander Mikheyev noted at the time, “traditionally, we denominate all transactions in dollars for ease of calculation. In actual operations, Rosoboronexport has moved almost 100% away from settlements in U.S. dollars” (Kommersant, 2021). He cited deals with India, settled in rubles and rupees. “Furthermore, we are actively making use of offset agreements today. This is a normal practice now, a global market trend,” he added (Ibid).

Thus, although CAATSA created obstacles for Russian exports, it provided time to prepare for the unprecedented sanctions that followed the start of the SMO.

New difficulties emerged immediately after the start of the SMO. In February 2025, Rosoboronexport head Alexander Mikheev acknowledged that several unnamed customers had been forced to “make a pause” (Vesti, 2025).

The SMO also affected internal factors. In the 1990s, exports significantly exceeded state defense orders, effectively keeping the defense industry afloat. This began to change with the 2011-2020 State Armament Program, although exports continued to support the defense industry’s modernization in this period. And 2022 saw a sharp increase in government procurement.

In the summer of 2022, Deputy PM Yuri Borisov stated that 74% of defense output was planned for domestic needs, with only 26% for export (TASS, 2022). Statistics on state defense procurement are no longer public, but official statements indicate that it is growing. On 19 December 2023, President Putin stated that production of armored vehicles, other vehicles, basic weapons, and critically important weapons had multiplied in 2023 by factors of 3, 4.5, 2.7, and 7 (Natsionalnaya oborona, 2024).

This growth was achieved due to both production optimization and a reduction in exports: in 2023, arms exports amounted to only $6 billion, compared to $14-15 billion typical of the late 2010s (1TV, 2024).

Exports were also rendered more opaque. This trend began in the late 2010s, but since 2022, virtually all information on new contracts and deliveries (including absolute figures) has been classified. Individual transfers become known thanks to the information released by foreign partners. And this, too, is increasingly scarce, as countries importing Russian weapons and military equipment are keen to avoid EU and especially U.S. sanctions. Some key foreign customers have tightened their security. Publications have become scarce, making assessment of current Russian arms exports extremely difficult for independent experts.

Institutional and Personnel Changes

However, Russia’s arms export system has not fundamentally changed in 2022-2026. CSTO members can still buy directly (not through Rosoboronexport) and at domestic prices, while all other countries must turn to Rosoboronexport for everything other than spare parts for already delivered equipment. There has been no return to the multi-exporter system of the 1990s. Rosoboronexport’s role as an intermediary has only strengthened as the Ministry of Defense reduces its supplies to Syria, certain African countries, and Central Asia (where some countries received equipment for free).

The most significant development was the issuance of new regulations, on 11 May 2024, transferring the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation from the MoD to the Presidential Administration. (Notably, Sergei Shoigu resigned as Minister of Defense the following day.) Yet this had no apparent impact on the Service’s operations, or the career of its director, Dmitry Shugayev, who remains at the helm, having replaced Alexander Fomin in 2017. (Fomin himself was Deputy Defense Minister from then until mid-October 2025 (Vedomosti, 2025), overseeing issues of military-technical cooperation.)

The Value of Orders, Contracts, and Deliveries

One of the only things that remains publicly, albeit irregularly, available is the order book of Rosoboronexport and Russia in total (including service contracts and supplies to CSTO members). New contracts are also summarized sporadically, often for a six-month period.

As of mid-2024, Russia’s order book amounted to $60 billion (of which Rosoboronexport accounted for $55 billion). As this was stated to be a 10% increase over 2022, the figure for 2022 would have been $54 billion. By mid-February 2025, Rosoboronexport had signed additional contracts worth $4.5 billion with 15 countries, and this figure increased to $7 billion by May. For comparison, in 2023 Rosoboronexport signed contracts worth $12 billion, below the previous decade’s annual average of $13-14 billion.

Less is known about deliveries. Rosoboronexport’s deliveries equaled $5.4 billion in the first half of 2022, and were expected to reach $11 billion by the end of the year, but probably did not do so. In 2026, after a rather long period of official silence, President Putin announced that 2025 had seen the delivery of arms sold for $15 billion (Kremlin.ru, 2026) (and likely worth even more).

a https://www.vedomosti.ru/business/news/2024/08/12/1055189-portfel-eksportnih-zakazov

b https://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/6a15611f9a79475d3d15e2a7

c https://www.interfax.ru/russia/856687

d https://www.interfax.ru/business/944500

e https://tass.ru/ekonomika/22794221

f https://tass.ru/armiya-i-opk/26302697

g https://www.interfax.ru/business/944500

h https://www.interfax.ru/russia/1071438

i https://www.interfax.ru/russia/856687

j https://www.interfax.ru/russia/994478

k https://www.alta.ru/external_news/127469/

Thus, the order book has been growing steadily, potentially due to both the signing of new contracts and the delayed fulfilment of earlier ones. The order book’s rapid growth in 2025-2026, combined with deliveries in 2025 worth at least $15 billion, indicate new contracts worth $25 billion in the last eighteen months—a near-record for Russia.

Additional information is available on miscellaneous aspects. As of November 2023, aircraft sales accounted for just over $22 billion, slightly less than half of Rosoboronexport’s total order book, including combat helicopters at approximately $5 billion (TASS, 2024). In 2023, 30% of deliveries went to Africa, with which $5.2 billion in new contracts were signed (Interfax, 2023). Pending orders from India reached $10 billion in February 2023 (TASS, 2023b).

Russia and Its Competitors

The above figures allow comparison of Russia’s arms exports with those of its competitors. The world’s traditional leading exporters are the U.S., Russia, France, Germany, and China. (South Korea and Türkiye have recently joined them, but are excluded from this analysis as their sudden growth is likely situational and will take time to consolidate.)

The U.S. is essentially unrivaled in the global arms market. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, it signed a record $331.2 billion in sales, directly and through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program—a 3.9% increase over the 2023-2024 fiscal year (US DoS, 2026).

There has been no official report on French arms exports for 2025, but 2024 saw new contracts at €21.6 billion and deliveries at €8.2 billion (Rapport, 2025). In 2025, new contracts decreased slightly, with Defense Minister Catherine Vautrin estimating them at around €20 billion (20minutes, 2026).

According to official British data, in 2025, the British defense industry signed the largest volume of new contracts in almost 40 years: £20 billion, half from a contract with Norway for five Type 26 frigates (Gov.UK, 2025).

China does not release official export data, but SIPRI (2026) estimates Chinese exports in fifth place (SIPRI, 2026).

Thus, Russia is in fourth place  for new contracts in 2025, but second in deliveries, notwithstanding all the difficulties of recent years.

The Content of Exports

Even less is known about what is actually being exported. Open sources report:

• the transfer of two Project 11356 frigates to India (Bmpd, 2025a);
• the beginning of deliveries of Yak-130 training fighters to Iran (Irinin, 2025), and possibly of Su-35 fighters (Kommersant, 2025a) and Mi-28NE attack helicopters (LiveJournal, 2026), too;
• the beginning of deliveries of Yak-130 training fighters and Su-57E fighters to Algeria (Topwar, 2025; Valagin, 2026);
• continuing deliveries of Su-30SM/SM2 fighters (Bmpd, 2025b) and Mi-35M attack helicopters (TASS, 2025) to Belarus;
• completed deliveries of Su-30SME fighters to Myanmar (Armiya.az, 2025).

In 2022, Rosoboronexport unveiled plans to export approximately 200 helicopters. New electronic warfare and air defense systems, as well as ground forces equipment, have also turned up in foreign militaries. For example, Saudi Arabia received 39 Pantsir-S1M anti-air missile systems worth $2.3 billion under a 2021 contract (Bmpd, 2025c), and Ethiopia acquired Linza armored ambulances (Tekhnosfera Rossiya, 2026).

Information on new contracts derives mainly from publications based on leaked corporate documents of uncertain authenticity. If these documents are to be believed, a large package of contracts was concluded for the supply of aircraft to Algeria (14 Su-34E and 12 Su-57E), Iran (48 Su-35), and Ethiopia (six Su-35) (InoSMI, 2025).  A contract was signed with China for 20 Il-78MK-90A tanker aircraft (Global Defense News, 2025), and with India for 12 additional Su-30MKI fighters (Overclockers.ru, 2023). And after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran in 2026, Iran ordered 21 Mi-171 helicopters (Vedomosti, 2026).

In 2025, media reported on India’s negotiations with Russia on the purchase and localized production of S-400 missiles worth $1.2 billion (Kommersant, 2025c). And in 2026, Vietnam ordered BrahMos missiles from India; though the missiles are manufactured in India, they are Russian-engineered, and most of their components are supplied to India by Russia (Interfax, 2026).

Thus, even relying exclusively on public information, it is clear that the sharp increase in domestic demand has not undermined Russia’s exports, and it has started selling new-generation equipment that was not available to foreign customers before 2022.

Paradigm Shift

By the early 2000s, Russia had established a cautious approach to arms exports, in which it carefully avoided the sharp edges of global politics, complied with disadvantageous international regimes like the Missile Technology Control Regime, and voluntarily refrained from exporting platforms that might spark undesirable concern in the West or elsewhere. For instance, sales of S-300PMU-1 air defense systems to Iran, and of Iskander-E tactical missiles and MiG-31E fighters to Syria, were canceled, as they might have provoked a negative reaction from Israel.

Exports were also limited by domestic production capacity and by the exclusion of innovative products from sale. For instance, Russia was long absent, for various reasons, from the drone market.

Since 2022, the situation has changed significantly. On the one hand, arms exporters, especially in the early years of the SMO, had to compete with state procurement and grapple with ever-growing sanctions. On the other hand, military cooperation with Iran and North Korea has sharply increased, with the former’s imports from Russia growing qualitatively and quantitatively, apparently due to the use of various payment arrangements. Additionally, Russia has become a world leader in aerial, ground, and sea-based drones. Some of these, like the Lancet loitering munition, have received export certification and are already being marketed globally.

The Missile Technology Control Regime may continue to seriously deteriorate in the future, especially given its de facto violation by Western countries’ transfer of equipment and technologies to Ukraine.

Future Prospects

The future of Russian arms exports hinges on the SMO’s course and conclusion. Clearly, the end of hostilities will lead to a reduction in state defense procurement, at least in certain sectors. This will return the defense industry to the position it held in the 1990s, when it was forced to drastically reduce capacity utilization relative to the Cold War. Exports will again become the main source of profit, especially given their typically larger profit margins. Conveniently, many delayed export orders are available to pick up capacity to be freed by reduced MoD orders.

Rosoboronexport’s unique experience in operating under severe sanctions will also be beneficial. If Western publications are to be believed, in 2025 more Russian aircraft were ordered than in any previous year—including (more expensive) next-generation aircraft. Significantly, China has returned as a major customer.

Russia’s leadership is counting on foreign customers noticing the effectiveness with which virtually all of Russia’s modern weapons are being used in the SMO. In March 2025, Sergei Shoigu, Secretary of the Security Council, stated: “After the completion of the Special Military Operation, believe me, there will be many queuing up for our weapons. They have proven reliable in combat and have been perfected.” Foreign buyers will be “interested in air defense systems, attack drones, and modernized armored vehicles, such as the S-400, S-500, and Pantsir” (Kommersant, 2025b).

Yet regaining ground in the global arms market will be difficult, given the heavy presence of traditional Russian competitors, primarily France, and the emergence of new ones like South Korea and Türkiye. China, too, will certainly increase its role in sectors traditionally filled by Russia, raising the bar which Rosobonexport and defense manufacturers will have to cross.

Nevertheless, the trends of 2022-2025 and the stability of Russia’s order book suggest that Russian exports after the SMO may reach a comfortable $13-15 billion annually, and $20 billion in the medium term. Russian exports will be supported by the obsolescence of old Soviet and NATO arms, by rising prices for Western weapons, by Ukraine’s exit from the group of significant military-industrial powers, by increased military budgets (including among Russia’s traditional partners), and especially by Russia’s unique offerings of drones, protective gear, medical equipment, electronic warfare and other systems.

For citation, please use:
Lukyanov, F.A., 2026. An Exception, Not the Rule. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 5–8. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-5-8

Thirty-five years ago, in autumn 1991, the Soviet Union was living out its final months. Its all-consuming crisis was obvious. An attempted coup in Auguast had accelerated its downward spiral. Yet its disappearance from the map, at the end of the year, was still unimaginable.

The Soviet Union was one of the two pillars of the post-1945 world order; its dissolution triggered a global restructuring that is still underway. The United States’ attempt to govern the world through de facto hegemony has failed. The transformation of the world order continues, and nobody can say what model will emerge or whether a stable balance will ever be established.

For the Russian Federation, as for all former Soviet republics, the USSR’s collapse called for forming a new political consciousness. This process turned out to be much more complex and painful than it seemed at the outset, when people thought that everything would sort itself out anew, once statehood was declared. The situation in Ukraine is another manifestation of self‑determination, including for Russia, which is using the Special Military Operation to determine its borders beyond the (very specific) logic of Soviet territorial divisions, and to take a place on the regional and global stage that is different from that of the ideological, authoritarian Soviet superpower.

Russia rightfully takes pride in its centuries-old unbroken statehood, which has taken various forms (including the unusual Soviet one) and overcome all sorts of hardships. Each stage was not an automatic continuation of the previous one, but an adaptation to domestic and international changes. All countries combine continuity and innovation in different ratios over time, but this is especially sensitive and complex in a country as large and heterogeneous as Russia.

The historical journey of Russia’s ever-changing statehood continues, with the next destination not yet in sight.

One enduring consequence of the USSR’s disintegration is the unwillingness of Western (primarily European) states to seriously discuss issues of mutual interest (above all, security) with Russia. This attitude grows out of the precedent from 35 years ago, when it turned out that a dangerous and powerful adversary can simply give up and dissolve.

Nowadays, the West claims that the Cold War could not have ended any other way. The Soviets had lost the strategic competition to the “free world” and were doomed to leave the historical stage. However, at the time, until almost the very last moment, no one expected the end to be so swift and radical. Naturally, the Western community, which had been opposing the Kremlin for decades and saw it as an existential threat, did not object. Even the most ardent anti‑Soviet activists could hardly believe in such a happy ending.

The crisis of the Soviet system had begun a couple of decades before its collapse, and it increasingly fell behind as the Soviet leadership failed to grasp the changes in global trends. But the USSR’s death was probably not inevitable, and it certainly could at least have been delayed. It is impossible to say for sure that the Soviet Union would have survived under a different policy, but, in hindsight, it is clear that the late Soviet leadership’s efforts to stop the decline only accelerated it as their impulsive reforms deepened internal contradictions and triggered a historical rupture that even their opponents had never dreamed of.  

Was this malice or error? The anniversary will prompt a new round of disputes. I share the view that the tragedy was caused by the Soviet leadership’s unfounded idealism, incompetence, and ignorance—not by its enemies’ guile. But those enemies eagerly claimed credit, and became full of themselves.

Today, when Western capitals reject compromise with Moscow and call for inflicting a strategic defeat upon it, they clearly expect history to repeat. Believing that Reagan’s early-1980s escalation of the Cold War set in motion the USSR’s eventual collapse, they now hold that further escalation will overstrain Russia, aggravate its internal situation, and initiate its collapse like forty years ago. The main thing is to drive hard and force Russia to accept Western terms. And that is exactly what they are trying to do.

One could explain at length how things are different: in Russia, in the economic system, and around the world. But all of this is secondary.

Above all else, the West must be made to understand that the Soviet collapse was a tragic but isolated and unique episode. Russia’s adversaries will not receive any gifts like they did in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Both the Russian leadership and society must learn the lessons of the collapse. The leadership must understand the danger of taking ill‑considered action and ignoring challenges, and Russia’s society must understand that internal conflict never leads to common success. Then Russia’s foes will have to admit that 1991 was an exception, not the rule—and that Russia is not going anywhere.

For citation, please use:
Timofeev, I.N., 2026. The Persian Gulf: Seven More Lessons. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 133–136. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-133-136

At the outset of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, I identified seven key lessons from the new conflict: sanctions tend to be followed by military force; pressure on Iran will be prolonged; concessions to the attacker are ineffective; the leaders of an attacked country are primary targets; internal unrest encourages external intervention; support from friendly countries is important for the attacked nation but does not resolve its fundamental problems; and the balance of power ultimately remains the primary means of resolving security issues—meeting force with force is a crude but effective way to halt escalation. The conflict’s low-level prolongation now permits seven more lessons to be drawn.

Lesson 1: Major powers may retreat.

Recent history offers numerous examples of this: the USSR and then the U.S. retreated from Afghanistan; earlier, the U.S. had retreated from Vietnam. In the recent Gulf crisis, the U.S. and Israel inflicted serious damage on Iran but failed to crush it, and further escalation through a ground operation was apparently deemed too risky. The result was a retreat from the goal of total victory and a shift towards diplomacy—which brings us to the second lesson.

Lesson 2: Diplomacy works, and compromises are possible.

The 20th century was filled with wars ending in crushing defeats. World War I ended with the collapse of at least four empires. World War II resulted in the complete defeat of the Axis powers, whose sovereignty remains constrained to this day. The Cold War ended with the USSR’s political defeat and collapse. Various subsequent military operations led to disintegration or regime change in attacked countries like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Cases in which conflicts are resolved through diplomatic compromise, in the spirit of the 18th or the 19th centuries, have become quite rare. The confrontation with Iran, however, is restoring the old school of diplomacy. Clearly, the conflict’s underlying causes remain unresolved. Nevertheless, the parties have reached at least a temporary solution through negotiations and concrete concessions [as of 29 June —Ed.]. They were forced to view each other as legitimate and fundamentally equal negotiators despite their vastly different capabilities.

Lesson 3: Loss of tolerance determines outcomes.

The level of losses and the willingness to absorb them are among the most important factors in a conflict. Here again, the 20th century features two extremes: the world wars, with massive losses on both sides, and local conflicts (e.g., Vietnam), where the weaker side has greater resolve, and even the relatively light losses suffered by the stronger side press it to terminate the war.  The present Gulf crisis reflects the latter model. The U.S. and Israel are unwilling to accept increased losses—such as those that would result from a ground operation—without sufficient confidence in success.

Iran, by contrast, has demonstrated a firm determination to absorb losses.

Neither civilian casualties, nor the assassination of several dozen senior officials, have shaken Iran’s resolve to defend itself.

Lesson 4: Margin of safety matters.

Consider the 20th century once more. The great powers entered the First World War with low margins of safety, unready for the hardships and costs ahead. The Second World War began between mobilized military camps, expecting and prepared for war. In the Cold War, both sides gradually accumulated margins of safety, until détente made the Soviet economy’s war-readiness unnecessary, and it fell as if through an open door. After the Cold War, the military machines of former adversaries shrank significantly. Even the U.S.—the largest military power to emerge victorious from the Cold War—has been unable to quickly restore previous military production levels.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, has been preparing for war since 1979. Its survival in the current conflict is due in no small part to the specific organization of its armed forces, security services, and economy. In ‘normal’ peacetime, such a system may seem excessively costly, unbalanced, and cumbersome; but under extreme conditions, it proved functional. It should be noted that Israel, too, lives in a state of constant military mobilization, having built its own militarized economy—albeit on different principles. Armed-camp states are re-entering world politics. China is working to improve its resilience. Western countries are gradually moving in this direction as well. Russia and Ukraine have been forced to become armed camps, given their conflict; Ukraine has seemingly already reached the peak of its militarization, while Russia’s reserve for further growth remains considerable.

Lesson 5: Nuclear weapons have many effects but provide no guarantees.

The fear of Iran becoming a nuclear power is one significant and long-standing reason for its containment by the U.S. and Israel. If Iran already possessed nuclear weapons, as North Korea does, such a bold attack on it would hardly have been possible.

And the attack has, at least, probably delayed Tehran’s transformation into a nuclear power.

Yet neither the U.S. nor Israel has considered using their own nuclear weapons—tactical or strategic—to escalate or to defeat Iran. Such a step would not only provoke international condemnation, but might not even lead to victory. Iran might very well remain resilient and governable even after several nuclear strikes destroying cities and infrastructure. Indeed, its resolve might reach a qualitatively new and unpredictable level.

Thus, nuclear weapons can theoretically be used, but even if they cause enormous damage, they will not necessarily defeat the adversary—especially if it has spent decades preparing to repel an attack. This creates uncertainty. On the one hand, the political significance of nuclear arsenals is devalued in some (but not all) types of conflicts. On the other hand, the temptation to use them simply to inflict damage increases. The very design of nuclear deterrence may change, given the revolution in military affairs.

Lesson 6: information war has a large scale but limited results.

Modern information technologies provide enormous opportunities for propaganda and moral-psychological influence on the enemy. The conflict in the Persian Gulf was clearly asymmetrical—the U.S. possesses greater informational capabilities, given its control over global media and technological leadership. This may have helped undermine the situation in Iran on the eve of the war, but it still did not play a critical role. Numerous images of attacks on Iran failed to break the will to resist. Conversely, Iran’s informational impact on the enemy was also limited.

The effectiveness of AI-generated fabrications is so far limited by their low quality. Nevertheless, propaganda is becoming increasingly important in other conflicts, particularly the Ukrainian one.

Lesson 7: Exit strategies are not as simple as entry strategies.

A military campaign is easy to start; it is much more difficult to end—especially when initial goals remain unachieved. This is precisely the situation in which the U.S. found itself after it had failed to crush Iran with bombing. Retreat and compromise have a high price and entail domestic political risks. The public and political opposition may see negotiations (let alone actual concessions) as a sign of weakness. The U.S. has shown that it may back down if the cost of escalation proves excessive—but with the matter left open, and potentially subject to violent revision at an opportune moment. Exit from the conflict has become a formidable diplomatic and technical challenge. The U.S. and Israel did not crush Iran and are now seeking a timely exit from the war. Iran has survived and is trying to avoid the war’s disastrous prolongation. Time will tell how successful they will be.

This article is an edited version of the paper written for the Valdai Discussion Club, https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/the-persian-gulf-seven-more-lessons

For citation, please use:
Malkov, A.Ye., 2026. Nuclear Weapons + AI: The Mathematics of Fatal Inevitability. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 104–119. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-104-119

“…the only thing worth discussing, on the threshold of imminent catastrophe, is how to avoid it.”

Stanisław Lem, Science Fiction and Futurology. 1970

In modern geopolitics, Chekhov’s gun is nuclear-armed, and AI increasingly threatens to pull its trigger. We are entering the zone of mathematical fatality, where an encounter between a self-teaching algorithm and a world-destroying system becomes not just probable, but inevitable.

Classical Cold War strategic deterrence depends on actors’ unconditional rationality and on mutual assured destruction (Schelling, 2007, pp. 305-306). Its stability has traditionally derived from there being enough time to verify a threat and make a considered political decision. The resilience of automated systems, and the risk of accidentally destabilizing nuclear parity, were considered in detail in the first decade of this century (Arbatov et al., 2010; Kokoshin, 2003, p. 36). These studies showed that the rigid determinism and predictability of control algorithms are the core of nuclear deterrence. Today, however, international relations are marked by a different sort of determinism: the flood of AI systems into the major powers’ defense industries (Atabekov, 2023).

This article assesses the systemic risk arising at the junction of two very different realms: the absolutely determined architecture of nuclear parity, and the stochastic (probabilistic) nature of modern neural networks. Most contemporary studies focus on tactics—the details of drone or cyber attacks. This paper considers the critical vulnerability of top-level strategic decision-making. The problem is not just the shortage of time for a human to think, but also the conceptual incompatibility of nuclear parity’s rigid logic versus neural networks’ stochasticity, opacity, and propensity to hallucinate. Integrating a probabilistic algorithm into a system in which an error can threaten civilization is systemic nonsense.

Murphy’s Law in the Age of Algorithms

The world’s two largest nuclear powers, Russia and the U.S.,[1] have entered a new round of the arms race, with the military application of AI.

Russia’s 2025-2034 armament program is its first with a separate section on AI. First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov explained that: “The Special Military Operation shows that decisions to use new armaments and…equipment must be taken within not just minutes, but seconds. Ensuring such efficiency is impossible without transferring some functions from military personnel to the machine” (Vedomosti, 2023). President Vladimir Putin has outlined the main guidelines for AI development in the military-industrial complex: “It is necessary to produce and use secure domestic AI…in complex automated military control systems… Countries that quickly put these technologies into operation, particularly in the military domain, will have huge advantages on the battlefield” (Interfax, 2025).

A U.S. Department of War memorandum, issued on 9 January 2026 (Secretary of War, 2026), lists the following guiding principles of the AI-first strategy:

• Speed Wins. The risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment.
• AI Model Parity. The latest civilian AI models must be deployed in the military within 30 days of public release.
• Wartime Approach to Blockers. The U.S. will establish a monthly “Barrier Removal Board” with authority to waive non-statutory requirements and move obstacles up the chain of command for immediate resolution.
• Out with Utopian Idealism, In with Hard-Nosed Realism. AI models which incorporate ideological “tuning” (diversity, equity, inclusion, and social ideology) are not to be employed in the DoW. The Department must not use models with policies that may limit lawful military applications.

AI’s integration into control of the strategic forces is presented as a panacea for the ‘human factor’—slowness, emotions, and fatigue. However, in the context of the nuclear triad, Murphy’s Law—anything that can go wrong eventually will—makes an ‘impossible’ event just a matter of time and the system’s accumulated entropy.

For decades, classical nuclear deterrence has rested upon political actors’ unconditional rationality and their possession of time sufficient to assess a threat and make (or not make) a fateful decision. But these assumptions are now being undermined by a dangerous technological symbiosis.

Firstly, the world’s leading powers are adopting AI—increasing public and private budgets, and promoting ‘sovereign AI’ (Stanford HAI, 2025)—not because it has proven reliable, but out of fear of losing the race. Accidents are seen as less dangerous than falling behind.

Secondly, hypersonic weapons (due not to their speed, but to their late detection and low interceptability) have cut decision-making time to a few minutes, squeezing out the slow ‘biological mind.’ Under time pressure, humans turn from agents into bottlenecks, whose elimination is necessary for military planners to maintain parity (Secretary of War, 2026). Humans thus voluntarily delegate the final decision to a machine whose logic they do not fully control.

Thus, in trying to eliminate human errors, we are creating systems whose errors are inherently unpredictable and potentially terminal.

The Architecture of Hallucinations—The ‘Black Box’ On Combat Duty

The greatest cognitive trap at present is the perception of AI as a digital analogue of the human mind. In politics, this is a critical mistake. A neural network does not understand the context of world politics, it operates with mathematical weights and correlations that have nothing to do with cause-and-effect relationships.

While the human mind tries to understand why something happens, deep learning tries to identify what it usually coincides with (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville, 2018). In the nuclear context, this creates the risk of false patterns, of sunlight’s refraction or birds’ migration matching the parameters of a ballistic missile’s thermal footprint.

The advantages of human engagement in decision-making can best be illustrated by the story of Stanislav Petrov, who recognized an attack warning as mistaken. AI, devoid of intuition and optimized to minimize misses, is likely to classify such an anomaly as a confirmed launch.

Algorithmic logic versus human doubt
(two cases from the past)

Stanislav Petrov’s right to doubt

In September 1983, the Soviet early warning system, including Oko satellites and Dniester over-the-horizon radar stations, detected the launch of five American Minuteman intercontinental missiles. Any algorithm would take this as an unambiguous signal to retaliate (Dvorkin, 2019). But Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov decided to classify the signal as false, relying not on sensors but on the intuition that “a few missiles is not a full-scale attack” (The Man Who Saved the World, 2014).

A neural network trained to minimize misses would have given 100-percent confirmation. Only the human ability to ignore protocol and consider the geopolitical context (Why did they launch only five missiles?) prevented a nuclear apocalypse. AI is incapable of questioning its own input data.

Chesley Sullenberger’s Miracle on the Hudson 

In 2009, after losing both engines due to a bird strike, Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger glided his Airbus A320 with 150 passengers onto the Hudson River. During the subsequent investigation, computer simulations showed that, theoretically, the aircraft could have reached the three nearest airports: LaGuardia, Newark, and Teterboro (NTSB, 2016). However, the simulations did not consider the time needed to evaluate the situation, or human stress. If Sully had tried for one of the airports, but hesitated for even a moment, the plane would have crashed in New York’s densely populated neighborhoods. Sullenberger chose a less efficient option and proved to be right. Though, if the plane had been under full AI control, it would perhaps have successfully landed at the airport.

The term ‘black box’ (UM-Dearborn, 2023) refers to the opacity of the process by which neural networks reach a specific decision: the input data and final answer are visible, but the ‘logic’ is hidden inside billions of mathematical weights and complex relationships. Decisions in politics, and especially defense, normally have to be based on a clear (if perhaps cognitively or emotionally distorted) rationale. But if, for instance, AI recommends raising the readiness level to DEFCON 2 (the U.S.’s second-highest alert level, preceding a nuclear strike), there will be no real understanding of why it has done so.

The term ‘hallucination’ describes AI generation of false, factually incorrect, or absurd but statistically convincing results, driven by a search for patterns where there are none. AI does not understand the physical essence of a missile launch, it only compares incoming signals with learned patterns. If it detects ‘noise’ (e.g., abnormal reflection of sunlight by high-altitude clouds), it may interpret this as a 100-percent match to a ballistic missile’s thermal footprint, requiring more serious action than an unusual chatbot message.

Moreover, such errors are made with utmost confidence, as AI lacks mechanisms for intuitive doubt. For instance, the Pentagon’s tests of Project Maven (a target recognition AI) have demonstrated 60 percent accuracy (versus 84 percent for human operators). AI is highly sensitive to landscape and weather conditions, and systemically reported false positives with absolute certainty (Deeplearing.AI, 2024; Scharre, 2023). In a nuclear deterrence system, AI hallucinations could trigger cascading escalation.

Particularly dangerous is algorithms’ vulnerability to adversarial manipulation (SciForce, 2020). Unlike a human, who sees the big picture, AI analyzes the world through microscopic mathematical indicators. Thus, ‘adversarial attacks’ can manipulate AI using subtle changes to data inputs (e.g., satellite images or radar signals) that are invisible to the human eye but fatal to the machine. Imagine digital noise that a human operator would identify as radar clutter, but that—for AI—transforms a civilian airliner into a cruise missile. Even more insidious is ‘data poisoning’: imperceptible patterns fed into AI during training, which will cause it to err at the crucial moment (Shafahi et al., 2018).

Thus, an AI-based nuclear defense system becomes a tool of manipulation: an adversary can dictate a false reality to the algorithm, forcing it to see a threat where there is none, or blinding it to a real one.

Time Pressure in Arms Race 2.0

While Cold War strategic deterrence relied on ‘long minutes’ (an ICBM’s flight time was 25-30 minutes), today’s maneuverable hypersonic systems reduce decision time to 5-12 minutes. Data verification takes more time than a missile needs to hit a command post.

For clarity, let us compare classic ICBMs (Smirnov, 2002; Ruzhany Strategic, 2025) (as exemplified by the Russian heavy missile Voevoda (although Voevoda, to be replaced with Sarmat, falls behind Yars systems by the number of deployed carriers and the total number of warheads, this heavy ICBM—due to its colossal mass and destructive power—remains the classic core and main power component of a hypothetical retaliatory strike) and the American Minuteman III missile (which make up the basis of the two countries’ ground forces), SLBMs (Bulava and Trident II, as the main covert strike capabilities), and guided hypersonic units (Avangard and the American Dark Eagle systems) as the latest nuclear delivery vehicles.

There is also an important conceptual difference: while Russia’s triad remains focused on classic kinetic-energy weapons, the U.S.’s ‘integrated deterrence’ doctrine aims to combine nuclear forces with non-kinetic components like cyber operations and space-based electronic warfare (Ves Mir, 2023). In reality, such convergence only blurs the nuclear threshold and complicates algorithmic threat analysis, increasing the U.S. system’s risk of false alarms.

Thus, states are faced with a fatal choice: accepting the risk of a decapitation strike, or delegating retaliation to algorithms capable of responding within milliseconds. To keep up with their opponents, countries rush to integrate insufficiently tested AI into their strategic analysis and early warning systems. Beta versions are good for testing arcade games, not for planning missile attacks. In the nuclear realm, Silicon Valley’s motto—move fast and break things—acquires a literal and apocalyptic meaning.

In a bid to maintain parity, countries introduce AI at all control levels. We are witnessing a transition from ‘human-in-the-loop’ (humans remain directly involved in decision-making) to ‘human-on-the-loop’ (humans do nothing more than formally approve  AI’s decisions). However, this threatens to generate psychological inertia, when “humans overtrust the system, and don’t intervene when they should” (Ghai, 2023). Such ‘automation bias’ means that an operator, with mere seconds to make a decision, may defer to a machine that he sees as smarter than himself and is more likely to press the ‘start button’ as suggested by the AI since the fear of giving a belated response outweighs doubts about the data’s accuracy (Cummings, 2004).

AI also creates the risk of a ‘flash war.’ Like stock-trading bots triggering a ‘flash crash’ (Canonico and McNeese, 2019), two early warning system AIs may launch a self-sustaining escalation cycle.

If one AI interprets the other’s actions as preparation for an attack, and increases its own level of readiness, the other AI will take measures of its own. This cascading feedback could reach the point of no return faster than the heads of state can pick up the hotline telephones.

One more challenge is the growing gap between new technology’s complexity and the degree to which it is understood in the top echelons of government. Political leadership and military command often see AI as a highly efficient but linear tool—a kind of computer that simply processes data faster than a human. They are unaware of the systems’ nonlinearity, hallucinations, opacity, and lack of ethical filters. Such ‘delegation without understanding’ is only aggravated by the ‘asymmetry of competencies’ that exists between developers and the government (Unal and Richard, 2024) and may turn technological modernization into an unpredictable process where political will becomes hostage to algorithms.

From the Clear Algorithms of Perimeter to the Black Box of Neural Networks

Nuclear deterrence was automated as protection against a decapitation strike, but rigid Cold-War-era procedures and opaque AI algorithms create qualitatively different risks. The risk of automation is well-illustrated by the 26 September 1983 incident, when Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov classified an attack warning as false, displaying the sort of ‘creative insubordination’ that a machine cannot.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union did create an automated system called Perimeter (known in the West as the ‘Dead Hand’) (Thompson, 2009), which guaranteed a retaliatory strike (Arbatov et al., 2010) in the event of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. But Perimeter had nothing to do with AI. It was the pinnacle of deterministic programming: detection of nuclear explosions by pressure and radiation sensors, the loss of communication with the General Staff, and a preliminary command to activate the retaliation regime—if all jointly present—would prompt the launch of a command ballistic missile (15A11) that would in turn activate the entire surviving nuclear arsenal (Missilery.info). It was an absolutely transparent ‘if/then’ approach, with no room for interpretation of data, in stark contrast to modern AI (Esin, 2017).

AI will not wait for physical confirmation of an explosion. Its predictive analytics process huge amounts of data: satellite movements, activity at air bases, the tone of media statements, cyberspace operations, etc. Even if its response criteria are strictly limited, generative analysis can independently form a false causal relationship. The rigid ‘if/then’ is replaced with a flexible ‘this probably is.’

In 1983, Stanislav Petrov could classify the alarm as false because its claim—a launch of several missiles (not a massive attack)—was legible. But the logic behind AI’s warning may be opaque, and the data upon which it is based will be too voluminous to be analyzed by a human operator.

AI’s ability to ‘learn’ makes it unpredictable.

While Perimeter could not be deceived—there either is or is not an explosion—a neural network can be misled by specific input data, whether to make it hallucinate the outbreak of war, or conversely to disguise real aggression as civilian activities or natural phenomena.

With the advent of AI in the nuclear arms sphere, the vulnerability of the system is changing fundamentally, and new gaps are appearing. Additionally, while analog systems have a physical gap separating them from the outside world, modern AI needs to be constantly fed extensive data, making it vulnerable to cyberattacks and interference with the data.

Apocalypse Probability Approaching 1

While earlier we considered technical failures and drawbacks, here we will turn to systems and probability theories. The main argument against integrating AI into nuclear arms is not that a machine can make a mistake, but that such a mistake becomes mathematically inevitable over a sufficiently long period of time—and that the ‘sufficient’ amount falls as computing speed rises.

Complex-systems theory has a concept of ‘normal accidents’ (Perrow, 1984). In ultrasophisticated and closely integrated systems, such as the global nuclear deterrence network, disaster is embedded in the design itself. AI only makes things worse. One country’s AI reactions to the actions of another country’s AI may trigger a cascade of automatic reactions, cause a nonlinear exponential escalation, and leave no time for de-escalation.

Any non-zero probability of a false positive (e.g., 0.01% per year), when extrapolated to a period of several decades, inexorably tends to 1. The risk seems manageable over a 10-year stretch, but when it extends to 50 or 100 years, the probability that a chain of random factors (a solar flare, a specific bug in the code, political tension) will come together in one point becomes frighteningly high.

Unlike humans, who are capable of ‘creative insubordination’ (Petrov in 1983; Arkhipov in 1962 (Babakin, 2002)), AI is deprived of free will, a biological survival instinct, or inherent ethical constraints. It is a hostage to its optimization function. If mathematics dictate a strike, it will be delivered.

The main danger of AI is that it creates the illusion of control. Politicians and generals may believe that the ‘smart system’ has calculated all the risks. However, history shows that disasters occur precisely when thought to be least likely (Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 in the U.S.) (Taleb, 2015).

AI In the Military Sphere: Has the Point of No Return Been Passed?

AI’s possible integration into the nuclear arms sphere is not just another technical modernization but a fundamental challenge to the entire classical theory of deterrence. Previously, stability was based on reasonable actors’ fear of mutual destruction, but now we may entrust the fate of civilization to “digital roulette.”

Several recent examples confirm the danger of AI’s military use:

1. In a test that was increasingly presented as a mere ‘thought experiment’ as attention to it mounted, a U.S. Air Force AI-controlled drone decided to eliminate its own operator, who was restricting its behavior in ways that the AI saw as obstructing the achievement of its objectives (U.S. Air Force, 2023). This incident illustrates that AI is constrained by nothing but its input objectives. For AI, task completion will always be above human security because the algorithm is devoid of basic human moral principles and is unable to grasp the unacceptability of destroying allies.
2. The U.S. fed outdated intelligence data to a target-selection AI, which failed to consider changes in the landscape (the construction of a dividing wall between a military base and a school), and whose output was not double-checked by humans. Deprived of the ability to doubt, the U.S. military killed about 180 people at an Iranian girls’ school (Barnes et al., 2026).
3. Israel’s Lavender AI generated targets lists during the Gaza conflict with little or no human involvement (Abraham, 2024). The system analyzed the data profiles of millions of people, assigning them a militant-proximity rating based on indirect indicators. Operators had about 20 seconds to verify each target, which was just enough to formally approve the machine’s choice. As a result, in pursuit of quantitative indicators, the algorithm began to pass death sentences with a 10% error rate.

These examples can be extrapolated to the Russia–U.S.–China nuclear triangle. The theory of strategic stability has traditionally assumed that only Moscow and Washington have automated control systems, global early warning systems, and massive retaliatory capabilities (Arbatov et al., 2010). But this dualism is deteriorating. China’s military doctrine declares a transition from ‘informatized’ to ‘intellectual’ warfare (Kocherov, 2024), and Beijing is rapidly building its own strategic-level AI.

In a real crisis, if American algorithms interpret Chinese naval maneuvers as preparation for a strike, all three powers’ early warning systems will inevitably lock up in a single feedback loop, producing a ‘flash war’, i.e., almost instantly dragging a conventional conflict across the nuclear threshold, with no time for leaders to use classical diplomatic channels.

These examples prove that when algorithms get a chance (albeit indirectly) to affect the lives of real people, any mathematical error turns into a humanitarian disaster. In the nuclear context, the price of such an ‘error’ is the end of history.

What Is to Be Done? Conclusions and Suggestions

Calls are growing to limit AI in WMD control systems, implement emergency shutdown methods (ELN, 2024), keep humans in the loop (Klare, 2024), and otherwise use AI responsibly (UNIDIR, 2025).

Risk can be reduced in the following ways:

1. START-analogous controls on nuclear AI. However, lines of code are much harder to verify than physical systems are. And controls might create a dangerous temptation to covertly implement autonomous systems in the pursuit of a first-strike advantage.
2. Keep humans in the loop. The only real safeguard today is a ‘physical gap’ and the unconditional presence of humans in decision-making. Humans should always have the last word. AI-issued recommendations should never automatically lead to a missile launch. However, as noted above, such measures may not be sufficient, as a person may trust AI in a stressful situation, capitulating to the authority of the machine and turning the final check into a formality.
3. Hotlines 2.0. Communication channels are needed not only between presidents, but between technical specialists who can quickly identify an algorithmic error and stop a cascading escalation.

However, all of these measures have limitations, and the high stakes call for the strictest of mutual control mechanisms.

1. Total algorithmic transparency. States must come to a firm agreement that using opaque (AI) algorithms in critical nodes of the early warning and control systems is tantamount to preparing a surprise attack. Any code in these loops must be testable, linear, and rigidly deterministic.
2. Conscious technological conservatism. The only reliable shield against uncontrolled escalation is physically isolated control and verification loops. The modernization of automated command and control systems, and their full digitalization by the leading powers, should not automatically allow probabilistic algorithms to make strategic decisions. Today, technological conservatism in control systems is not a sign of backwardness, but a conscious choice for reliability and survival.
3. Institutional taboo. An international regime is needed that bans ‘combat AI’ in strategic forces, just as biological weapons are forbidden. This is not just a matter of ethics, but a matter of human survival.

The mathematics of fatal inevitability warn us that, if we completely entrust the protection of humanity to algorithms, the world will cease to be human even before the first missile hits. We should return the ‘right to doubt’ into a world that is too quickly accustoming itself to digital infallibility.

For citation, please use:
Tsygankov, A.P., 2026. Russia’s Identity Formation in the Mirror of Trump’s America. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 194–205. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-194-205

The U.S. has traditionally held a prominent role in Russian IR discussions. Some even see this role as excessive: the Cold War ended 35 years ago, the world has ceased to be bipolar or Western-centric, and its decentralization is only accelerating despite the West’s best efforts to reverse it.

And yet, despite the civilizational distinctiveness of the U.S. and the broader West, they remain the ‘significant Others’ in relation to which Russia defines its values and development path. Lingering expectations of a new partnership with Donald Trump, and practical steps to end the conflict in Ukraine attest to this continued importance. (In the recent past, such expectations were linked to the “spirit of Anchorage,” although the “spirit” turned out to be yet another promise that Trump will not or cannot keep.)

Russia’s persistent hopes of getting along with the U.S. are not surprising, given their deep historical roots. Such hopes were expressed in the correspondence between Alexander II and Abraham Lincoln. They were pursued throughout the Cold War by Stalin and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Khrushchev, Nixon and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev. The post-Soviet period also saw numerous attempts by the Russian leadership to establish cooperation with the U.S. For Russians, the U.S. is significant because it has often been a role model in technology, music, cinema, domestic and international politics, and other spheres. Russians are well aware that the U.S. differs in national character, development path, goals, and historical destiny—differences that in some cases can generate rivalry and even military conflict. But Russians also sense a similarity and even kinship between Russia and the U.S.: two great peoples with the same Euro-Christian roots and—as Alexis de Tocqueville observed—the ability to determine world history.

The crisis of Russians’ search for identity (and the variety of positions on the matter) is illustrated by their extraordinary focus on (and varying attitudes towards) the U.S. and Trump in particular.

Hopes for building a partnership with the U.S. are high, emanating partly from within the Kremlin itself. They are opposed by calls to contain the U.S.’s global ambitions, pursue a Eurasian alternative to the West, and reduce Russia’s intellectual dependence on the U.S. This article discusses Russian experts’ arguments, Russia’s intellectual dependence on the U.S. (and vice versa), its possible evolution, and ways to overcome it.

RUSSIAN DEBATES IN THE AMERICAN MIRROR

The search for national identity is complex and unceasing, a “daily plebiscite” (Renan) that pits different positions against one another and generates images of the future. But each country’s history contains periods of crisis when these debates intensify, revealing disagreement on crucial issues.

Attitude towards the U.S. is one such issue, regarding which the differences among Russian experts are deep and sometimes irreconcilable. This may signal a national identity crisis. After the USSR’s collapse, such crises transformed the value system: first from communism to liberal democracy, then to the integration of statism and civilizational independence. Each time that Russia sought outside support, it looked primarily to the U.S. Its turn to democracy in the 1990s was praised there, but statism, civilizational independence, and foreign policy autonomy met with hostility in the U.S. liberal establishment. Following ‘regime change’ in liberal America (Haberman and Swan, 2026), the perception of Russia in U.S. political circles is also changing; by recognizing or rejecting Russian values, the U.S. participates in Russia’s quest for identity.

Russian values are the subject of constant debate in Russia itself. Its status as a unique civilization is rejected by some, and is interpreted in various ways, depending (inter alia) on the apparent prospects of reestablishing cooperation with the West. The over-four-year conflict in Ukraine has contributed to a new identity crisis in Russia, which itself will affect relations with the West (of which those with the U.S. are incomparably more important, partly because of the U.S.’s own major influence on the European countries).

States are seeking strategies to navigate the ongoing transformation of the global order, and Russian discussions about the U.S.’s international role are part of that search. 

Various studies have examined Russia’s desire for U.S. approval (Radchenko, 2024; Foglesong, Kurilla, and Zhuravleva, 2026).

Many Imperial and Soviet politicians advocated for partnership with the U.S., insofar as this served Russian interests. Equality in relations became a particularly sensitive issue during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union needed recognition as a responsible superpower safeguarding international security. Almost all Soviet leaders, including Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, initially sought cooperation with the West but failed, leading to the Cold War (Stalin), the Cuban Missile Crisis (Khrushchev), and a new eruption of the Cold War (Brezhnev). Vladimir Putin similarly sought to build cooperation with the U.S. on the basis of anti-terrorism, but eventually realized the need to contain and resist the West’s global expansion, as he declared at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.

Russian schools of thought regarding the U.S. reflect various understandings of Russia’s own national identity, which is a complex system of historically-established values.[1] The first such school, to which many experts on IR and the U.S. adhere, asserts the possibility of cooperating with the U.S., despite its differences with Russia. Second, since Soviet times, there has been an influential school advocating broad opposition to the U.S. on everything ranging from arms control to regional conflicts to political systems. Third, there has always been a smaller camp in favor of moderate isolation from the West, alongside situational, tactical, short-term cooperation with it.

Analysis of these three positions, since the Soviet collapse, shows the possibilities and limits of Russia-U.S. cooperation.

PARTNERS AND TRUMPISTS

Supporters of partnership believed that, despite the U.S.’s liberalism and rhetoric of ‘rules-based order,’ cooperation with it was necessitated by the U.S.’s international weight and Russia’s international vulnerability. Some claimed that the liberal world order has no viable alternatives (Kortunov, 2019), and that globalization would survive Trump’s 2016 election. They positioned Russia not only as a great power, but also as a natural part of the (Western) civilization that initiated globalization. Russia’s future depended on establishing partnership with the (rest of the) West.

Traditionally, this school had emphasized adapting, wherever possible, to the U.S.’s rhetoric of liberal values and globalization. Trump’s election made this unnecessary because of his extremely critical view of liberalism and global openness. The supporters of reliance on mutual interests in solving security problems were joined by those who strongly believed that the liberal world order was falling apart and called for cooperation based on shared values: Trump’s harsh criticism of liberal values and populist-nationalist ideas were close to Russian civilizational values. Some even suggested forming a global conservative alliance against liberalism (Drobnitsky, 2017).

Trump’s 2024 reelection reignited Russian hopes for cooperation. Although such hopes had been crushed during Trump’s first term, some Russian politicians and experts took heart from Trump’s increased independence from mainstream politicians and officials. By 2024, many bilateral issues had piled up and needed resolution: the Ukraine conflict, nuclear arms control, Russian diplomatic property, airspace restrictions, sanctions, joint development of energy and mineral resources, the space program, etc.

Trump was seen as providing an opportunity to resolve the conflict in Ukraine almost on Russia’s terms, and more broadly to rebuild the entire international system based on a Russia-U.S. partnership. Trump still arouses considerable interest and positive emotions.

His ‘supporters’ in Russia place their hopes not so much in leaders’ personalities, as in the fundamental alignment of the geopolitical interests and conservative values of Russia and the U.S.. Part of Russia’s governing elite believes that the high stakes demand at least attempting to build a relationship with Trump, regardless of the complexities of his character. Hence officials like Kirill Dmitriev (2026), head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, speak of seemingly fantastical multi-trillion-dollar cooperation projects.

The partnership and restructured international order would make Russia a key member of the transatlantic community, alongside the U.S. and Europe. But its partnership with the U.S. would be particularly close, cemented by conservative values (Ioffe, 2025). Even before Trump’s reelection, such projections were made by Vladislav Surkov, former deputy head of the Presidential Administration. In the article The Birth of the North, he portrayed Russia as the Third Rome, capable of uniting the other two—the U.S. and Europe (Surkov, 2023).

Irreconcilable critics of the liberal West, like Alexander Dugin, remain committed to the normative commonality between Russian civilization and the American Right of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. In a conversation with the latter during his April 2024 visit to Moscow, Dugin spoke, in particular, about the lack of value differences between Russian and American conservatives (Balasyan, 2025; Dugin, 2025). This view took hold in the Russian foreign policy community due to the conflict with the Biden-led U.S. and its liberal European allies. Proponents of value-based convergence believed that criticism of liberalism would make Russia attractive to influential forces in the West and beyond. They argued that the values of traditional America were bringing it closer to Russia, and that partnership with the West could be enhanced through strengthened ties with conservatives and the Alt-Right—Russia’s “natural allies” (Moiseev et al., 2023).

CRITICS’ ARGUMENTS

As hopes for each of Trump’s terms were dashed, arguments for cooperation lost their appeal. Meanwhile, its opponents are diverse, variously favoring global containment of the U.S., Eurasianist isolation, and pragmatism.

Opponents of U.S. hegemony and liberal world order formulated their main arguments in opposition to the Yeltsin-Kozyrev policy of strategic partnership with the West. Yevgeny Primakov (1996) criticized their Westernizing, U.S.-centric approach, explaining that “a multipolar world is approaching” and Russia’s interests require containing the U.S.’s global ambitions in alliance with China and India. His followers insist that the liberal order disregards Russia’s interests and is in terminal decline. Therefore, Russia should do everything possible to accelerate the transition to a new world order that will grant it a place worthy of a great power, on a par with the others, as in the post-Napoleonic Vienna system (Nikonov, 2019). This means decisively defeating Ukraine and strengthening ties with the rising powers of the Global South.

In this view, Trump seeks not partnership with Russia, but the preservation and strengthening of U.S. global hegemony. The U.S. is not approaching Russian values; rather, it and the other Anglo-Saxons are defined by individualism and the colonial exploitation of other nations (Karaganov, 2026).

Indeed, after Trump’s attack on Venezuela, his war with Iran, and his rift with Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megyn Kelly, and other representatives of the Alt-Right, the idea of a Russo-American unity of values has lost its appeal.

Trump increasingly appears to have launched a world war for global domination against all those who dare form an international or regional order challenging U.S. hegemony.

According to Dmitry Trenin (2026), such a war “is already underway: ‘hot’ in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and ‘cold’ in the Asia-Pacific region. It is also being fought—through special operations and economic blockades—in Latin America. This war is echoing in Africa and the Arctic. The nature of this new world war is determined by the U.S.’s desire to contain, by way of a large-scale global counteroffensive, the growing influence of China, Russia, and the World Majority countries, and to regain its position, if not as a global hegemon, then as the main power in the world.”

The isolationist-Eurasianist position is different. It supports the American conservatives’ orientation towards traditional values and doubts that Trump will succeed in his hegemonic pursuits. Yet it remains unclear whether conservative values will prevail in traditionally liberal America. Regardless, according to these views—greatly influenced by Samuel Huntington and Vadim Tsymbursky—the future belongs to regional civilizations with clearly-defined borders: Eurasia, liberal Europe, Asia, and others (Mezhuev, 2022). Russia, as Eurasia’s representative, needs to draw a clear civilizational and geographical boundary with Europe and start building its own world, while maintaining dialogue with the isolationist Right in the U.S..

Finally, the pragmatist skeptics of cooperation with the U.S., aware of Russia’s vulnerabilities and possible Western pressure, are focused on searching for internal and regional resources for the country’s development. In this respect, they are close to the Eurasianists, who also want Russia to rely more on its own resources. But the pragmatists do not seek the isolationist regional civilization favored by the Eurasianists (and in some sense analogous to the project of American isolationists). Rather, the pragmatists see the international system’s transformation as a lengthy and open-ended process in which Russia should maintain significant foreign policy flexibility.

Some of the pragmatists call for drawing lessons not from the Congress of Vienna, but from the great power rivalries in the late 19th century (Bordachev, 2017). Pragmatists’ reports are distinguished by their pessimism, describing a world that is disintegrating, and whose rules of behavior are being deliberately destroyed in the absence of any suitable replacement (Valdai Club, 2019). Given this, Russia should try to enhance its own capabilities in order to protect itself from international instability. Notably, until the conflict with Ukraine, this focus on internal resources was considered by pragmatists a priority for Russia.

THE FUTURE OF RUSSIAN (AND AMERICAN) IDENTITY

Russia’s interest in the U.S. is the result of a long history of relations, and is bound to persist even in an increasingly decentralized world. It is surprising not that Russians wish to understand the development of the U.S. as one of the modern world’s leading powers, but that they placed so many hopes in Trump, viewed by some as almost the last chance to solve Russia’s problems.

Such significant Russian support for Trump, especially in the early days of his presidency in 2016 and 2024, raises questions: he has never appeared capable of thinking systematically or fulfilling commitments, and his pursuit of immediate financial and other benefits (through the application of however much pressure is necessary) makes him appear more like a character from The Inspector General or Dead Souls. The hopes placed in Trump deserve separate study, all the more so because recent historical experience would seemingly caution against them. Russia remembers that other post-Cold-War attempts to cooperate with the U.S. ended in disappointment. The Yeltsin-Clinton, Putin-Bush, and Medvedev-Obama ‘resets’ all ended in failure, leading not to serious dialogue based on mutual respect for each other’s positions, but to attempts by the stronger party to impose its interests, culminating in international crises in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

The renewed placement of hope in the U.S. indicates a new stage in Russia’s self-identification, which may end in a new deep disappointment. To avoid this, Russia’s national interests should be its experts’ priority, and natural curiosity regarding the U.S. must not give way to chasing after its approval or recognition.

While on the subject of the U.S., it is worth noting that the U.S., too, has experienced featured tension between the pursuit of national interests and the pursuit of international status. In particular, after WWII, the U.S. opted for a policy regarding the USSR that prioritized the containment of global communism over the pursuit of national interests.

Both sides of the debate, headed by George Kennan and Paul Nitze, called for containing the USSR.

Kennan advocated political deterrence, featuring both negative and positive stimulants (the latter requiring gestures of reconciliation and a certain level of trust between the countries). He held that the U.S. should focus more on itself, husbanding its political system, industry, and military. He opposed the militarization of relations and anything that might provoke the USSR, such as intelligence operations or attempts to force Soviet troops out of Europe. In his view, this category included all of Truman’s major policies from 1948 onward: the establishment of NATO and an independent West Germany, the deployment of U.S. troops in post-war Japan, and the creation of a hydrogen bomb (Gaddis, 2005, 70). Kennan held that attempts to politically benefit from nuclear weapons would only lead to an arms race. These positions changed little in the following years. After the Cold War, Kennan was one of the first to warn that NATO’s eastward expansion would lead to a crisis in relations with Russia.

Such thinking proved too complicated for Nitze, who replaced Kennan as Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department, as well as for Truman and Secretary of State John Dulles. They made military deterrence and the internal undermining of the Soviet Union into the core of U.S. containment. Running contrary to Kennan’s empathy, such positions intensified the Cold War, leading the U.S. to automatically interfere in Europe beyond preventing communism’s spread. The confrontation between ‘democracy’ and ‘totalitarianism’ became central to the U.S.’s agenda, helping, in Dulles’s view, to reinvigorate U.S. foreign policy and restore its sense of mission in the world (Foglesong, 2007, p. 125). Even on nuclear issues, Dulles was more radical, supporting preparation for their offensive use.

Despite Kennan’s efforts to convince the Truman administration to define U.S. global interests independently, the opposite approach prevailed. Known as the Truman Doctrine, this approach postulated the priority of countering communism worldwide by all available means, while Kennan upheld a concept based on self-reliance through an advanced political system, industrial capabilities, and a strong army.

Needless to say, such Trumanite thinking still exists in the U.S.. The country has become unmoored, intellectually dependent on its international status and on the struggle against external enemies, foremost China and Russia. The U.S. and the broader West still largely define themselves through opposition to Russia (Tsygankov, 2019; Slezkine, 2025). This will take years, perhaps decades, to change.

Russia, too, likely faces many years ahead of pondering over its national interests and values, of efforts to overcome its intellectual dependence on international status. Status does open the way to various political, economic, and other projects, but obsession with it can generate fundamentally irrational zigzags in relations, bringing ‘distant friends’ and ‘close enemies’ into reality (Foglesong, Kurilla, and Zhuravleva, 2026). Such zigzags include Russia’s attempts to rapidly join the West, followed by its turn towards irreconcilable confrontation with it.

Russia has a future without Trump and strategic partnership with the U.S.. Recognition of this could become a basis for reflecting on Russia’s national interests and values. Russian interests will be determined by the Russians themselves, based on long-term goals and without regard for other powers.

As for pursuit of external recognition of Russia’s identity, psychological literature confirms its importance, but it should not substitute for identity-formation itself. Russia may need to abandon Western centrism that cannot account for Russia’s own interests. As international relations become increasingly decentralized, the search for international recognition of identity and status should be decentralized, as well. Many countries have a similar vision of the global future, growing influence, and the ability to support Russia in its effort to build a new world order.

For citation, please use:
Toloraya, G.D., 2026. What the Iturup Shock Means for Asia. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 96–102. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-96-102

The Russian President’s visit on 13 August to Iturup Island, which Japan regards as one of its Northern Territories, marked more than just a bifurcation point in Russia’s relations with Japan. It is entirely possible that future historians will date the emergence of a new geopolitical configuration in Asia from this very event.

Until now, Russia has not been directly involved in the growing confrontation in the Asia-Pacific region, which at the start of the 21st century was primarily shaped by the standoff between the two ‘architects’ of the world order—China and the United States. The U.S.’s bloc (the principal force in the region) and relatively neutral Asian states all regarded Russia as a static factor in the Pacific, lacking any real independence, only seeking to carefully support China.

That may now change. If Washington interprets Russia’s shifted approach to Japan not as an isolated episode, but as evidence of Moscow’s intent to assert its status as a great Pacific power, the U.S. may well respond to the challenge in precisely that theater. In that case, the consequences of Putin’s visit to Iturup would extend far beyond the Russo-Japanese territorial dispute.

Possible Bilateral, Regional, and Transregional Effects

Russo-Japanese relations are not the subject of this article. Suffice it to say that they have entered a new era. The old strategy of both sides—one that left room for negotiations on a peace treaty—has ended. Japan’s last illusions about a diplomatic resolution of the territorial dispute have now been shattered. Russia’s move was evidently intended to punish Japan for its anti-Russian policy and also to demonstratively close the territorial question forever. Russia has, in a sense, borrowed a page from North Korea’s diplomatic playbook: its hardline statements about the impossibility of denuclearization were initially rejected categorically, but have since gained ever-wider acceptance and become an established reality.

The grounds for Russia’s symbolic move were actually provided by Tokyo itself, which has escalated its anti-Russian policy regardless of its own limited capacity to inflict meaningful damage on Russia. Beyond sanctions and bilateral restrictions, Tokyo has been further integrating itself into U.S. and allied plans for the Asia-Pacific region, where new military-political blocs and potential threats to Russia’s east are forming. At the same time, Tokyo’s confidence in U.S. support, should tensions with Russia escalate, has diminished, leaving its position even more exposed. Russia’s ‘punishment’ of Japan also makes an example of it for other Asian states trying to play both sides with respect to Russia, underscoring Russia’s resolve to take measures that would prove painful for them.

Our short-term goals regarding Japan have been achieved, the lesson has been successfully taught. But if even the minimal potential for normalizing relations with Japan is lost, this is unlikely to help Russia in the Asia-Pacific or advance its ‘Turn to the East’ in the long run. It is also unclear whether Japanese policy and diplomacy—distinguished by a particular stubbornness, even to a fault—will ever, even in the distant future, be able to abandon the territorial claims. Will there ever be a possibility of relations free of that shadow?

Today, Japan is not merely intensifying its rhetoric about Russia’s “illegal occupation,” but coming to see Russia as a military adversary.

After all, for the Japanese, the Northern Territories are not merely a historical issue, but part of their country’s present and future national security. The perception of Russia as a direct threat on the northern axis has become firmly entrenched.

Japan’s response may entail the (gradual, long-term) buildup of military pressure, reversing its previous ‘southwest shift’ towards China. Japan will probably station additional forces (including anti-air and anti-ship formations) on Hokkaido, increase the number and scale of exercises in the north, intensify radar and satellite surveillance of the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin, and increase aircraft patrols and monitoring of Russian aviation activity. In other words, Japan may increase the density of reconnaissance and strike capability on its northern axis, though without shifting to an offensive configuration. And it will do so alongside its allies. This will degrade the security of Russia’s Far East and require a response.

A more dangerous step towards escalation would be Japan’s development of long-range missiles (formally justified, of course, as defense against North Korea and China). The future could see a broader deployment of cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, other long-range strike assets, and unmanned reconnaissance-strike systems.

Questions of Transregional Military Balance

Even before Putin’s visit, earlier in August, Russia had conducted major Pacific Fleet exercises. And the visit was followed by missile drills involving surface ships, a submarine, and coastal batteries.

This predictably provoked Japanese protests, but the U.S. might actually be the intended audience. Moscow certainly benefits if the situation is not ‘Russia against Japan,’ but rather ‘Russia consolidating its position in the Northwestern Pacific in the context of the U.S. military presence.’ But where might this lead?

Deeper U.S. involvement in confronting Russia in the Pacific could have far-reaching geopolitical consequences. Obviously, the U.S. is presently occupied elsewhere. But if ‘appeasing’ Russia in Europe fails, or after the next administration takes  power, the U.S. might station more ships in the Sea of Japan and the northern Pacific; it might increase exercises, reconnaissance flights, and other cooperation with Japanese aircraft and vessels; it might demonstrate its ability to operate (especially in the form of antisubmarine reconnaissance) in the immediate vicinity of Russia’s Far Eastern defense zone, thereby threating Russia’s strategic deterrent forces.

Thus, quashing the territorial dispute and consolidating the Kurils’ status may ultimately increase Russia’s military burden across the entire Northwestern Pacific.

We must also be prepared for a spiral of regional tension. If Tokyo were to demonstrate the ability to militarily resolve the territorial dispute (practicing deployments to Hokkaido, defending remote islands, countering an amphibious landing, etc.), Russia will strengthen its forces not only on the islands but across the Far East as a whole, which will itself trigger a response, including from the U.S.. And that response might include the deployment of U.S. missiles, which would qualitatively change the situation by directly threatening Russia’s Far East, and which would require a substantial response. In sum, Japan and the U.S. might escalate as follows: (1) diplomatic protests; (2) new sanctions; (3) intensified reconnaissance around the Kurils; (4) Japanese military exercises on Hokkaido; (5) U.S.-Japanese exercises; (6) increased American naval presence; (7) deployment of new long-range Japanese missiles; (8) temporary deployment of U.S. strike systems; (9) a permanent U.S. missile presence.

It is also notable that, amid doubts about the U.S. nuclear umbrella’s reliability, speculation has arisen regarding Japan’s possible hosting of others’ nuclear weapons or development of its own.  Russian officials have warned of the catastrophic consequences of moving in this direction.

Regional Consequences and Conclusions for Russia

Russia’s old multivector policy in the Asia-Pacific—in which Russia could offset dependence on China through relations with other powers like Japan and South Korea—has been definitively destroyed. In the medium term, this will lead the developed states of East Asia to perceive Russia as a tough and independent power, but an unpredictable partner.

Current events could accelerate bloc-building and the consolidation of Western influence in the Asia-Pacific region. In Japan, the current discourse increasingly links the Russian threat with the Chinese and North Korean ones.

Washington may try to use Russia’s rapprochement with North Korea to bring Tokyo and Seoul closer together.

Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington have already begun trilateral policy coordination. In July 2026, the three states’ foreign ministers met twice within a fortnight—first on the margins of the NATO summit in Ankara, and then on the margins of the ASEAN meetings in Manila. Cooperation now extends beyond countering North Korea. Discussions cover economic security, critical mineral supply chains, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and nuclear energy. The alliance is being reshaped into a “highly practical union focused on advanced technologies and economic security.”

Russia’s reaction to the strengthening of the trilateral alliance has been sharply critical. Sergei Lavrov called U.S. actions in Asia “destructive,” accusing Washington of militarizing Japan and attempting to turn other countries against Russia and China. Russia has warned against drawing the EU and NATO into Asian affairs, or creating an Indo-Pacific analog to NATO.

A more active role for Japan, in the collective West’s military-political structures in the Asia-Pacific region, will almost certainly provoke a response from China and North Korea. Moscow will then be faced with the need to strengthen strategic cooperation with them. This will allow our opponents to again drag out the tired old idea of ‘two geopolitical triangles’ in Northeast Asia.

Russia’s hardline stance on the Kurils is generally convenient for China. China itself has territorial disputes with Japan, and takes an extremely negative view of any attempt to revise WWII’s outcome in Japan’s favor. But the deterioration of our relations with Tokyo restricts our room for maneuver and ties us even more closely to China.

On the whole, South Korea and other U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region will read what has happened in Russo-Japanese relations as a negative signal. Seoul is watching Russian military activity in the Far East closely, especially as it coincides with deepening cooperation between Russia and North Korea. While South Korea is not obliged to take Japan’s side, the North Korea factor will make it sympathetic.

In Southeast Asia, the reaction is likely to be more pragmatic. For Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and other states, Russia has traditionally held appeal precisely as an alternative center of power. They are therefore unlikely to automatically endorse Japan’s interpretation of the territorial dispute.

Yet Russia’s demonstrated willingness to resolve territorial and military-political issues by force could lead some Asian states—especially those that have territorial disputes with China—to perceive Russia as a less predictable partner.

In short, while Russia has gained strategic weight in the Asia-Pacific, it may have lost space for diplomatic maneuver. At the present stage of the global conflict, such a tradeoff would appear justified, but Asian diplomacy is accustomed to thinking in much longer stretches of time. Russia must not give the impression that its range of options is shrinking, but rather bolster its reputation as a reliable and predictable long-term partner.

This article is an edited version of the paper written for the Valdai Discussion Club, https://valdaiclub.com/about/experts/georgy_toloraya

For citation, please use:
Gabroussenko, T.V., 2026. The Disaster of Abandoning Socialism: North Korean Discourse on Perestroika and Post-Soviet Reform. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 168–193. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-168-193

THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE ON PERESTROIKA

In 1991–1994, Perestroika emerged as the central motif of the speeches and discussions of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. (In North Korea’s unique political landscape, leaders’ speeches serve as authoritative narratives that can be taken as indicative of scholarly discourse nationwide.) Both leaders viewed the Soviet Union’s collapse as a man-made catastrophe—an entirely avoidable event caused solely by the Soviet elite’s shortsighted and treacherous actions in the course of Perestroika. (Called Kaep’yǒn (개편), meaning ‘reorganization/restructuring’, and always accompanied by quotation marks with a negative connotation.) But the father and son focused their criticism on different aspects of Gorbachev’s sweeping reforms.

Kim Il Sung’s Retrospective Assessment

Kim Il Sung—then retired from active governing and mainly busy with writing memoirs and corresponding with friends and former colleagues—saw Perestroika through the lens of longstanding disagreements with the Soviet leadership.

Kim Il Sung was quite negatively disposed towards Mikhail Gorbachev, but did not blame him exclusively for the USSR’s downfall, which he attributed to the protracted erosion of its foundational principles since the post-Stalin thaw.

Kim Il Sung saw Stalin’s successors as ideologically deviant, personally degenerate, and self-interested, and the Soviet people as their confused and disoriented victims—who, without a worthy leader, were disheartened in the face of danger and failed to save their country. Yet he was sure that one day they would restore their Soviet motherland.

Throughout his later years, Kim Il Sung consistently reiterated these arguments in numerous writings and speeches, although not all of them were explicitly dedicated to this topic. Clearly, the old leader felt a need to share his ideas with the world. In a conversation with the performers after a Four Seasons concert on 7 February 1993, Kim Il Sung discussed the fall of the USSR. He blamed Khrushchev for revisionism and ideological laxity, “after which the USSR’s collapse became a matter of time.” He argued that Khrushchev’s actions had strengthened the influence of the U.S.’s hostile bourgeois ideology and culture, that “people remained interested only in money, cars, and dachas” (Kim Il Sung, 2011a, p. 23).

For Kim Il Sung, Gorbachev continued Khrushchev’s destructive policies that disarmed the people with false principles of ‘democratization,’ ‘openness,’ and ‘new thinking.’ Gorbachev’s abolishment of the CPSU’s leading role dismantled the very foundation of the country.

Kim Il Sung even suggested that Gorbachev “had likely received a lot of money” for destroying the USSR and the global socialist system. Kim Il Sung believed that while Gorbachev did not formally renounce socialism, he ideologically degenerated (Ibid, pp. 24-25). Kim Il Sung also accused Gorbachev of betraying his ally in the GDR, Erich Honecker, “selling him out to the imperialists” (Kim Il Sung, 2011b, p. 376).

During this meeting, Kim Il Sung also expressed the belief that “the Russian people most likely already regret the destruction of their country; many wish to restore everything, but they have no leader” (Kim Il Sung, 2011a, p. 25). He recalled conversing with a visiting Russian singer, who had promised to attend the Friendship Festival and perform his favorite song, Longing for the Homeland (사향가 sahyangga). She assured him that none of the CPSU members among her colleagues had betrayed the Party, and all were keeping their membership cards (Kim Il Sung, 2011a, pp. 22-23).

During a meeting with the leader of the Belgian Workers’ Party on 30 June 1994, Kim Il Sung deplored the USSR’s collapse, saying: “the country lost everything in an instant” (Kim Il Sung, 2011c, p. 408). He contrasted the “traitors,” Khrushchev and Gorbachev, with the exemplary and personally decent Stalin, a great leader whose resolve was pivotal in the war against Germany: “I still watch Soviet films about Stalin and see how he behaved during the war. He did not leave Moscow, even when the Germans were just 40 kilometers away.” “People really respected Stalin, going into battle ‘For the Motherland, for Stalin!’” (Ibid, p. 409). Stalin’s praiseworthy initiatives included his “fight against cosmopolitanism, i.e., globalism.” Under Stalin, there was no greed: “If someone received a pen as a gift from a capitalist country, he would give it to the state.”

Kim Il Sung claimed that Khrushchev used the fight against the personality cult to undermine Stalin’s posthumous authority, betraying and “selling the USSR to imperialists” (Ibid, p. 409). The USSR’s ideological decline began precisely under Khrushchev, when people lost their socialist and communist ideals and became preoccupied with material pursuits. This spiritual and ideological decay made them unable to recognize the reactionary nature of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ (Ibid, p. 409).

In a conversation with Chinese participants in the anti-Japanese liberation movement on 7 May 1994, Kim Il Sung emphasized the paramount importance of the communist parties in socialist states. He referenced the Chinese song “Without the Communist Party, There Will Be No New China” (Kim Il Sung, 2011d, p. 349) and expressed confidence that China would never abandon its Communist Party.

During this conversation, Kim Il Sung fondly recalled meeting Soviet hero Nikolai Lyashchenko, who had commanded the 10th Motorized Rifle Division of the 25th Army in Korea. They discussed how “the traitor Gorbachev” destroyed the 18-million-member CPSU by leaving it ideologically adrift. Kim noted that “Nikolai, like many former CPSU members, still keeps his membership card” (Ibid, p. 350).

During a meeting with foreign delegations on 16 April 1994, Kim Il Sung attributed the ruin of socialism in the USSR and East Europe to their communist parties’ bureaucratic complacency, inability to hear the people, and loss of popular support (Kim Il Sung, 2011e, p. 281). He also criticized Eastern Europeans for overly aligning with Moscow: “When it rained in Moscow, people in Berlin would open an umbrella” (Ibid, p. 281). Whereas the DPRK acts independently.

Kim Jong Il: Practical Lessons of Perestroika

As the de facto leader of the nation, Kim Jong Il called for drawing practical lessons from socialism’s collapse in the USSR so as to avoid a similar catastrophe in the DPRK. In his article Historical Lessons of Building Socialism and Our Party Line, he acknowledged that the USSR’s collapse had given rise to a narrative of capitalism’s victory and socialism’s defeat, one that many confused people accepted as true. “However, this is not so. We will learn these lessons and rebuild socialism,” Kim Jong Il wrote (Kim Jong Il, 2012a, p. 58).

Kim Jong Il held that one of the disaster’s most important lessons is the importance of maintaining national independence and resisting sadaejui (사대주의), or “serving the great,” subservience to powerful nations. Such independence underpins the DPRK’s resilience, distinguishing it from the Eastern European countries that unconditionally followed the USSR’s lead. “The USSR boasted of being a mighty power, yet now it has become a nonentity. The Eastern European nations, like blind following the blind, have also dissolved” (Kim Jong Il, 2012b, p. 420).

Kim Jong Il was confident that capitalism offers nothing truly attractive: despite its rhetoric of freedom and democracy, it fails to deliver genuine liberty. “The poor have only the freedom to seek a place to make money. People in the former USSR are now living through unemployment that never existed under socialism, and through declining living standards. They remember how things were under socialism, and so they protest against the government” (Ibid, p. 419). He also condemned the corruption in the USSR, noting that “traitors even stole the party’s finances” (Ibid, p. 420).

Kim Jong Il blamed the USSR’s collapse mainly on the over-bureaucratization of the CPSU’s formulation and propagation of ideology and on its disconnection from the masses. He stressed the importance of combating officials’ privileges, corruption, and arbitrary power, which undermine faith in the government. In his article Strengthen Party Work, Strengthen Socialism of Our Style, he wrote: “I have long said that developing the bureaucracy is like drinking poison” (Kim Jong Il, 2012d, p. 41).

Kim Jong Il underscored the importance of revitalizing party cadres: “When cadres degenerate under the influence of bad ideas, the party itself degenerates, becoming incapable of defending the gains of the revolution. The fall of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe offers a stark lesson in this regard” (Kim Jong Il, 2012e, p. 481).

In his article On Strengthening Revolutionary Principles, Kim Jong Il also attributed the socialist camp’s downfall to the diminished role of the leader. The Soviets and Eastern Europeans did not understand the necessity of the people’s loyalty to the leader, and “without the leader, there can be no independence; without the leader, it is impossible to fulfill historical tasks and safeguard the gains of the revolution,” he emphasized (Kim Jong Il, 2012f, p. 61).

To avert similar tendencies in the DPRK, Kim Jong Il called for closer work with the intelligentsia. He believed that “in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it was precisely the intelligentsia that—having encountered temporary difficulties—turned away from the party and destroyed socialism” (Ibid, p. 65).

He stressed that revolutionaries must trust the leader unconditionally—“without personal interest or pretense”—and “love the leader sincerely, without cries of ‘hooray’.”

As an example of insincere attitudes towards the leader, he pointed to Khrushchev, who praised Stalin while Stalin lived, and then dragged him posthumously through the dirt under the pretense of countering the cult of personality (Kim Jong Il, 2013, p. 72).

Kim Jong Il repeatedly affirmed that the DPRK would never follow the path of Perestroika. Even during the severe economic hardships of the late 1990s, known as the ‘Arduous March’, he firmly rejected any link between the country’s difficulties and its socialist system. In a speech to the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea on 27 September 1997, he attributed the crisis to the “disappearance of the common socialist market after the collapse of the USSR and the European socialist countries, and the economic blockade imposed by [North Korea’s] enemies” (Kim Jong Il, 2013a, p. 209).

Kim Jong Il also criticized party cadres for their inadequate response to the crisis, emphasizing that the DPRK must steadfastly uphold its socialist system. He warned cadres against being deceived by the imperialist and reactionary attempts to lead the country towards ‘reform’ and ‘openness’: “All this serves only to restore capitalism and undo the achievements of Kim Il Sung and the Korean people’s fifty years of effort…. Our principle is to live according to our system, defending our socialism without concession. I will not permit any ‘reforms’ or ‘openness’—this is my unwavering decision” (Ibid, pp. 209, 210).

To bolster his arguments, Kim Jong Il quoted some senior Soviet official, who had visited the DPRK, saw the good and the bad, and warned that the Koreans “should under no circumstances abandon socialism, since once capitalism arrives, nothing will be left of the good” (Ibid, p. 213).

Kim Jong Il underscored the vital role of art in stabilizing the nation and reinforcing statehood. He regarded Juche art, especially “revolutionary operas,” as politically impeccable, placing them above classical operas. He claimed: “although the USSR was always proud of the patriotic opera Ivan Susanin, it does not even compare to our patriotic revolutionary opera Loyal Daughter of the Party, created in the 1970s” (Kim Jong Il, 2012g, p. 116).

Notably, lamenting the DPRK’s shortage of popular songs imbued with “ideological artistry” (사상예술성; sasangyesulsǒng), Kim Jong Il pointed to the USSR during WWII (Kim Jong Il, 2012g, p. 191) and recalled the exemplary work of Soviet radio broadcasters like Yuri Levitan (Ibid, p. 190).

This illustrates North Korean leaders’ profound connection to the Soviet experience and their perception of the Stalin era as a benchmark and a normative standard.

In discussing the role of art in building up the nation’s morale, Kim Jong Il cited the song Holy War, written just three days after Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR (Kim Jong Il, 2013b, p. 84). Emphasizing the importance of promoting ideology, he recalls the character of Commissar Dmitry Furmanov in the film Chapayev (1934) (Kim Jong Il, 2013c, p. 308). And discussing the need to popularize the heroes of the Korean People’s Army, he cites Andrei Zhdanov (a Soviet politician responsible for developing the Soviet cultural policy) as an ideal party activist who “was respected by everyone, although he had few awards” (Kim Jong Il, 2013d, p. 375). He compared North Korea’s post-1991 blockade to that of Soviet Russia after the 1917 October Revolution (Kim Jong Il, 2012i, p. 269).

Thus, based on the USSR’s history, Kim Jong Il saw a need to strengthen the DPRK’s traditions, which were largely linked to those of the USSR under Stalin. He believed that North Korean society should become even more closed and militarized, with even stronger positions for its leader and the state. (Which actually means less ‘bureaucratization’, i.e., officials’ passivity, arrogance, disconnection from the people, and prioritization of formality over ideology.)

This meant abandoning the tentative attempts to open the country that Kim Jong Il had undertaken in the second half of the 1980s. And, although Kim Jong Il emphasized North Korea’s independence from great powers, he consistently turned to Stalin’s USSR, its national heroes and myths, as a point of reference.

Notably, while criticizing Perestroika, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il maintained respect and empathy for the Soviet people, seen as the victims rather than perpetrators of the catastrophe. A similar ideological narrative was established with regard to South Korea. In the 2000s, North Korean art and media began to portray South Koreans not as accomplices in Korea’s ongoing division, but as powerless victims of their reactionary government (Gabroussenko, 2011b). In both Russia and South Korea, this was blamed on a lack of worthy leaders, concordant with the masses’ infantilization in North Korean propaganda and ideology (Myers, 2010).

The emergence of Vladimir Putin changed North Korea’s rhetoric about Russia. In an interview to TASS on 24 July 2001, Kim Jong Il spoke of “friendly Korea-Russia relations” and noted that “his meeting with Putin in Moscow was a joyful event” and “meetings with the friendly people of Russia awaken happy memories” (Kim Jong Il, 2013e, p. 21). He evidently saw Putin’s ascent as an opportunity to revive friendly and cooperative relations with Russia.

THE FORMATION OF THE PERESTROIKA DISCOURSE IN CULTURE

North Korean leaders’ fundamental narrative of Soviet Perestroika was developed in detail in journalism and fiction.

In keeping with traditions of North Korean propaganda, the first response to the new political requirements was a song that briefly outlined the party’s strategy.

In 1991, Let Us Defend Socialism (DPRK Music, 2021), a song with lyrics by Sin Unmo and music by Hwang Chinyǒng, was released. Performed by the Pochonbo pop ensemble with an upbeat melody, it was reminiscent of the popular song Chollima Rushing (1966)—the unofficial anthem of the Chollima mobilization era (Sam Il, 2024).

Let Us Defend Socialism urged listeners to “hold the red flag high” “despite dark clouds and winds of temptation.” The refrain proclaimed that “our Party” and “our Socialism” were the finest in the world. The video clip reinforced this message by the images of socialism: bustling industrial facilities, free educational institutions, and maternity hospitals. Vulnerable social groups—children, the elderly, women, and young families—were depicted as living proof of socialism’s protective embrace.

The song boldly asserted that “success in defending socialism will be our victory, while its loss would spell the death of the country.” This dichotomy laid the groundwork for contrasting Perestroika with ‘Socialism of Our Style.’

The red flag emerged here as a potent symbol. Until the 1990s, flag symbolism mainly featured in historical narratives of Kim Il Sung’s anti-Japanese resistance. However, beginning in the 1990s, the red flag became part of a new epic narrative extolling North Korea’s Red Banner philosophy and unwavering loyalty to the Red Banner of Revolution (Kim Kich’ǒl, 1996). In Kim Myŏngik’s poem The Koreans (2000), “traitor” Gorbachev, against the will of the people, replaces Lenin’s red banner, over the Kremlin and the Russian Embassy in Pyongyang, with the “tricolor banner of tsarism.” This tragic image starkly contrasts with the resilience of the Korean red banner, which continues to wave proudly over the DPRK.

Contrasting Perestroika with ‘Socialism of Our Style’ became central to the stories published in the journal Ch’ŏngnyŏn munhak (Youth Literature). In the essay The Great Leader’s Order, renowned writer Hong Sŏkjin laments that “the USSR, once the giant of socialism, destroyed decades of socialist accomplishments. The whirlpools of ethnic conflicts produced tens of thousands of beggars and homeless people. The country was plunged into the cruel reality of capitalism’s sewers.” The people of the USSR and Eastern Europe “shed bitter tears of remorse, yearning for socialism in which they once found happiness.” Meanwhile, North Koreans, under their own leader, continue to defend socialist ideals, remaining “a happy and proud people” (Hong, 1996, p. 25).

Cho Ch’angju’s essay Heirs! (1996), draws a stark contrast between post-Soviet and North Korean youth. The former, with Perestroika, ceased to be the ideological heirs of their fathers. In the former socialist countries, “a girl joins the mafia for a handful of dollars and stabs her own father to death,” “young people indulge in depravity in neon-lit brothels,” “under the influence of drugs and alcohol, are photographed naked in dirty poses,” and “are mired in gluttony, debauchery, luxury, and entertainment.” Conversely, in the DPRK, young people “hold high the red banner of socialism,” resisting the winds of liberalism and remaining faithful to the ideals of their fathers, preserving the legacy of socialism.

The essay The Strength of Korea (Chosǒnǔi him, 2000) notes how the USSR—despite the formidable army and advanced weaponry with which it defeated Hitler, and which far surpassed the DPRK’s own military resources—collapsed without a single shot fired, because it had no leader. In contrast, the DPRK is led by Kim Jong Il, who unites his people and makes the world envy and admire North Korea’s strength.

Notably, North Korean media frequently cite laudatory statements by former Soviet citizens as evidence of Kim Jong Il’s greatness. In the anonymous article Analysis of Great Words (Myǒngǒnhaesǒl, 2000), Kim Jong Il is extolled by an unnamed Soviet military specialist, who describes the leader as “unique,” “capable of capturing the entire Earth with a single glance,” “unprecedented in history,” and “resembling a mythical giant who lifts the Earth with one hand and spins it.” The Russian specialist assures that “Kim Jong Il is infinitely brave, and although the world seems to be dominated by imperialism today, the Earth will soon be transformed according to Kim Jong Il’s plan.” This statement implies that the Russian specialist resents the current domination of imperialism in the world affairs. He sees protection solely in the Korean leader and pins his hopes for the future on Kim Jong Il.

Thus, North Korean propaganda employs (post-)Soviet figures as ostensibly objective mirrors reflecting the leader’s greatness. However, such statements have greater credibility when they come from more specific sources—and yet declining contact between post-Soviet Russia and North Korea was making it increasingly difficult to find reputable admirers of North Korea. Consequently, growing reliance was placed on fiction.

POST-SOVIET RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS IN LITERATURE

In the DPRK, the primary task of fiction has traditionally been social programming based on Stalinist principles of Socialist Realism (Gabroussenko, 2010, pp. 13-45). North Korean intellectuals have consistently expressed indignation over Russian authors’ rejection of Socialist Realism. They lament that, “after socialism was subjected to reform and capitalism returned, the literature of the former USSR and Eastern Europe began to corrupt workers and the youth, encouraging crime, bourgeois morality and degeneracy. It has thus lost its supreme value as the science of the human being” (Chwadamhoe, 1993). Meanwhile, North Korean writers reaffirmed their commitment to addressing contemporary challenges through appropriate works. Writer Paek Ǔnp’al, for instance, noted that the collapse of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe motivated him to write a new story about the leader’s greatness, and the novella Secretary of the Party Cell (Paek, 1994).

Yet it took North Korean authors nearly a decade to respond to Perestroika. One of the earliest works was Paek Pohǔm’s story Separation and Meeting, which depicts Kim Il Sung’s conversations with Soviet Koreans—descendants of Korea’s liberation fighters who visited the DPRK. The story features Kim Il Sung’s reflections on the disintegration of world socialism. Condemning his interlocutors’ political apathy—one woman is preoccupied with personal affairs, uninterested in politics and unaware of socialism’s collapse—Kim Il Sung remarks: “Why did the Soviet Union collapse? It’s perfectly clear. People were excluded from political life, their ideological education was disrupted. If people are made politically illiterate, how can socialism be maintained? After all, you are not the only one like this” (Paek, 1996, p. 14). This statement echoes Kim Il Sung’s actual comments on Perestroika, which he blamed mostly on the masses’ insufficient ideological engagement. Notably, Separation and Meeting contains no description of post-Soviet realities or realistic portrayals of Russians, focusing instead on Kim Il Sung himself.

It was only around 2000 that images of Russians and modern Russia began to appear in North Korean literature, largely in one of the contexts: 1) the DPRK as a positive contrast to Russia; 2) the DPRK as Russia’s hope and savior.

North Korea as a Positive Contrast to Russia

Ryang Ch’angjo, The Second Briefing (2000).

The story juxtaposes post-Soviet Russia and North Korea through the perspective of Shimada, a Japanese Marxist scholar who comes to Russia to understand the causes behind the USSR’s collapse and to meet his colleague, Svidriy Ruzhanskiy (sic.).

Shimada is frustrated to see the country’s profound transformation: the once-dominant state ideology has vanished, and the people are preoccupied with material pursuits. The Leninist red banner over the Kremlin has been replaced by the tricolor of the “Tsar’s dead spirit.” The Institute of Marxism-Leninism, once a model of the austere style with a golden sign and military-uniformed guards, is now dilapidated and guarded by an old porter in shabby clothes. Inside, books are strewn carelessly on the floor.  When Shimada inquires about their fate, the indifferent porter says they will likely be recycled. Shimada is appalled at such sacrilege.

Ruzhansky, a staff member at the institute, is in despair. His son Glakov (sic.) was killed by a “democrat” during the October siege of parliament, trying to defend the country from capitalism’s resurgence. Shimada recalls Ruzhansky’s son as a “handsome, optimistic young student,” who “sang patriotic songs with heartfelt emotion, with his mother accompanying him at the piano” (Ibid, p. 58).

From the gloomy Moscow torn by Perestroika, Shimada goes to Pyongyang. The North Korean capital appears as a “garden city,” its streets lined with slogans lauding the Leader. Seeing Kim Jong Il’s warm smile during a public ceremony, Shimada understands that “this great man is Korea’s strength, the symbol of its independence, and the defender of socialism” (Ibid, p. 63).

The story offers no concrete details about everyday life in Russia, except for the changes in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the new flag over the Kremlin. Its author is clearly unfamiliar with the Russian language and contemporary society: the names Svidry and Glakov are artificial, the characters of Ruzhansky and his wife are schematic.

Rim Hwawǒn, The Fifth Photograph (2001).

This is a family saga about the Soviet victims of Perestroika.

Young beauty Katya Sintsova comes from a respectable family of Communist Party functionaries. Katya’s great-grandfather, a Red Army soldier, perished in the Civil War, and her grandfather died defending the homeland from the Nazis in 1941. Her father, a high-ranking official in a regional Communist Party committee, is a selfless and honest man, and so is her brother Sergei, secretary of the Komsomol’s Moscow Municipal Committee. Katya’s mother died when she was a child, so she became the center of attention for her father and brother. Katya was a hardworking and easygoing child, loved to draw, and cared for her family. But after finishing school and beginning study at an arts university, she changes. She falls under the influence of Westernized students who skip lectures, find Komsomol meetings boring, and spend their lives dancing and buying fashionable clothes. Her father and brother try to get Katya back on the right track, but fail.

To the family’s horror, Katya begins meeting with foreigners. A young American, McConnolly, seduces Katya. He promises to marry her, but disappears after learning that she is pregnant. Katya has an abortion and sinks into depression.

Katya’s personal tragedy, coupled with the country’s decline under Perestroika, kill her father. His last words are: “Long live the Communist Party!” Katya mourns her father’s death, but considers him a “foolish idealist.”

Katya tries to sell four old photographs of her high-profile Communist ancestors on a boulevard, where Chinok, a North Korean translator, catches her in the midst of this shameful trade. Despite Katya’s cynicism and brazen manner, she cannot bear Chinok’s reproachful gaze, like “the voices of her conscience.” She “senses an incomprehensible light coming from Chinok.”

Katya travels abroad in search of her lover and discovers that her seduction was carefully orchestrated. It turns out that McConnolly is descended from a Russian émigré whose land was nationalized by Katya’s great-grandfather during the Revolution, and the McConnollys have sworn revenge on her family.

From abroad, Katya writes a letter to her brother, admitting that he and their father were right about everything, and that she, not her father, was a “fool.” However, she feels she has no choice but go to a brothel, “like Katya in Tolstoy’s Resurrection.” One day Katya suffers an accident, loses her leg, and becomes a one-legged prostitute in Munich attracting perverts.

A booklet from a Munich brothel containing Katya’s photograph falls into Sergei’s hands. This is the last, fifth photograph of a member of the Sintsov dynasty.

The Sintsovs are contrasted to the family of Chinok, a pure and beautiful forty-year-old woman, married to an officer and mother of three children. Chinok happens to witness a road accident in which Sergei, drunk, is hit by a car. The driver does not stop to help the injured man, and Chinok takes Sergei to hospital. Visiting Sergei later in the hospital, Chinok learns about his family’s tragic story, which caused his drinking habit. Sergei gives Katya’s photograph to Chinok as a reminder to the Korean people that socialism must be defended. Sergei compares the great leader of the DPRK with the traitorous Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Back home, Chinok shows Katya’s photograph to her daughter. A high school graduate and talented violinist, the girl relinquishes the honor of entering a conservatory, where fame and fortune await, and follows her father and twin brothers—who were honored by a personal meeting with Kim Jong Il—into the army. Mother and daughter mourn Katya’s unfortunate fate.

Rim Hwawǒn’s story contains more details and Russian cultural allusions than Ryang Changjo’s text, but not always ones that are applicable to contemporary Russia. For example, it is clearly a strained parallel that has been drawn between Tolstoy’s Katya (a disenfranchised peasant girl forced into prostitution after being seduced by a young landowner) and the novel’s Katya (a young Muscovite artist, from a prominent family, living in sexually frivolous Russia of the 1990s). McConnolly’s motive and means of revenge are even less plausible. But it is telling that the post-Soviet heroine is juxtaposed to (unequivocally positive) conservative traditional morality.

Just like Ryang Changjo’s story, The Fifth Photograph is built on a sharp ideological contrast between hellish post-Perestroika Russia and blissful North Korea, repentant Russian “sinners” and North Korean “saints.” All the characters in the story are infantilized and deprived of agency. Their fates are either punishments for disobeying the ruling party (Katya) and failing to uphold socialist values ​​(the older generation of the Sintsov family), or rewards for loyalty to the Communist leader (Chinok’s family).

Characteristic of the story is Chinok’s salvation of Sergei, run over by an expensive car whose chauffeur (Sergei’s own compatriot) kept driving. The Korean saint (accentuated by her “inner light,” purity, and unfading beauty) saves the Russian sinner, drunk and depressed. Yet both sinners—Sergei and Katya—are portrayed with sympathy.

Later texts further develop the motif of North Koreans saving Russians.

North Korea as Russia’s Hope and Savior

Chung Yong Jong, Dawn (2001).

Communist Simkov is upset by a conflict with his family. His son-in-law Boris, who works for a large trading company, and his daughter Olga, a beautiful actress, beg him to quit his long-held job as custodian of Yaroslavsky Station’s ideological heritage. For years, this job was considered honorable, but now it is barely different from a cleaner, and moreover one who is not even equipped to carry out his duties. The famous monument to Lenin, with his arm pointing eastward to the “path of Yermak,” is weather-beaten and dirty, as no funds are allocated for its preservation.

Furthermore, in the new political situation, Simkov’s job is considered socially compromised. Boris, who had previously treated his father-in-law with respect at work, now openly calls Simkov “Lenin’s ghost” and a “Don Quixote” who does not understand the changing times, and calls his work “pathetic” (Ibid, p. 48). Olga apologizes to her father for this rudeness but asks him to resign so as not to create problems for his beloved granddaughter Tonechka, whose birthday is soon.

Simkov submits a letter of resignation, but feels as if he “has signed an abdication from his own life” (Ibid, p. 49). However, he is urgently summoned back to work. It turns out that Kim Jong Il’s train will be arriving at Yaroslavsky Station, and the authorities have decided to urgently refurbish the monument to Lenin. Simkov is to oversee this work.

Simkov recalls how his daughter, who performed at the April Friendship Festival in Pyongyang last year, spoke of the “inner light” coming from Kim Jong Il. Telling his daughter that he cannot come home for his granddaughter’s birthday because he is too busy readying the monument for the Korean leader’s arrival, Simkov says about Kim Jong Il: “Even if I am unable to see this man, I will see his light” (Ibid, p. 51).

Olga and Tonechka come to the train station with flowers for Kim Jong Il.

As Kim Jong Il’s train approaches the station, Simkov looks at the renovated Lenin, whose eyes seem to “blaze with a special light.”

After meeting the leader, Olga enthusiastically exclaims: “It’s impossible to look directly at Kim Jong Il’s smile. It’s warm, dazzling, and full of a charming gleam that literally draws you in. In his smile lies the soul of an eastern saint” (Ibid, p. 53).

Although the author employs certain realistic details of Russia (descriptions of Moscow and actual Russian names), the story is a mere projection of North Korea. Soviet/Russian railway stations have never employed ‘ideological supervisors,’ and the Russian characters describe Kim Jong Il with mystical metaphors common to North Korean political vocabulary.

The story underscores that socialist Korea is becoming a guiding star for Russia. Lenin’s Mausoleum, visited by crowds of people in the Soviet Union, yet nearly abandoned in post-Soviet Russia, is treasured anew after Kim Jong Il visits.

Simkov attributes some positive changes in the country—the introduction of benefits for veterans, recognition of Russia’s historical achievements, and respect for national traditions—to Putin’s visit to the DPRK and the impression made upon him by Kim Jong Il’s three-year mourning for his father. “And this is right. Today cannot exist in isolation from yesterday. We cannot be Yermak’s heirs if we forget Lenin, who united peoples. Why not think well of Communist ideology? Isn’t this what the leader of socialist Korea, Kim Jong Il, teaches us?” Simkov says (Ibid, p. 52).

The story ends with the exclamation: “The dawn of a new social teaching has come from the East, from the DPRK! Forward, follow this dawn!” (Ibid, p. 53).

Ri Kǔmch’ǒl. Change Course! (2004) (Ri Kǔmch’ǒl, 2004).

Perestroika also features in North Korea’s favorite genre of realistic science fiction, also common in Stalin’s USSR (Ivanov, 1950; Arbitman, 2021). Perestroika underlies the conflict in Ri Kǔmch’ǒl’s story.

Kim Sǒkjin, a young North Korean diplomat, is returning home from an overseas assignment on an American airliner with 250 passengers. He befriends two Russian passengers, astrophysics professor Vassily Ivanovich and his beautiful daughter Nina. The professor explains that after Perestroika, he immigrated to the United States, lured by the false rhetoric of freedom and democracy, but soon regretted his decision. The Americans engaged him in a project ostensibly related to a space program, but actually developing space weapons. Vassily refused to cooperate with the “merchants of war” and is now returning home, with an urn containing the ashes of his wife, who died in a suspicious road accident in New York.

Shortly after takeoff, it turns out that the plane is carrying a time bomb, set to detonate once it reaches an altitude of 3,000 meters. This is the American intelligence agencies’ revenge on the Russian professor for refusing to cooperate. The previous attempt to kill him, in a car crash, succeeded only in killing his wife.

Kim Sǒkjin remains the only person on board who maintains his composure and presence of mind. He quickly becomes the informal leader of panic-stricken passengers. Kim advises the professor to publicly announce his refusal to cooperate with the American space weapons program, and Vassily Ivanovich readily agrees. The Korean diplomat demands the crew change course and fly to North Korea, where military specialists use unique antigravity technology to stop the plane in mid-air and deactivate the bomb.

The rescued passengers rush to Kim Sǒkjin, offering him money and gifts for their rescue. Kim declines the gifts, declaring that their rescue is not his personal achievement, but that of his socialist homeland.

In this story, a North Korean rises above foreigners with his fortitude, willpower, quick reflexes, and exemplary moral character. He is also physically stronger than the others. When Nina is attacked by two American drug-addicted rapists armed with guns, Kim disarms both with his bare hands. Kim Sǒkjin is indifferent to material benefits. He refuses to accept the gifts—just like in the story recounted by Kim Il Sung mentioned above, when Soviets declined even foreigners’ gifts of pens.

The North Korean superman-diplomat derives his strength from his home country. Kim believes that “the socialist motherland will never betray its children.”

Kim Sǒkjin’s bravery and confidence are contrasted with the childish helplessness of the Russian characters. In the situation of general confusion, the Korean diplomat holds his Russian friends’ hands, reassuring them. Nina is portrayed as particularly childish. Even after learning about her father’s conflict with the American military, she cannot understand why these “bad people” tried to kill her father. Her father simplifies the story for her, saying: “It’s all about money, dear. They’re afraid they’ll lose it if I open my mouth.”

The Russian heroine’s childishness is offset by her tenderness and beauty. The Russian professor’s daughter provides a pleasant contrast to the vulgar Western passengers.

The story ascribes the same contrasting qualities to the countries its characters come from, comparing Russia’s credulity with North Korea’s foresight. While Russia disarmed itself in relations with the West, trusting in the latter’s deceitful calls for peace, far-sighted North Korea continued to develop its military technology, ultimately saving the innocent passengers, including the Russians.

The DPRK’s prudent international behavior wins its admirers among the Russians. In his interview with foreign correspondents, Vassily Ivanovich supports North Korea’s military program, emphasizing its defensive nature. He believes that the antigravity technology will help create an “iron shield” over North Korea.

*  *  *

Perestroika was long a key topic in North Korean leaders’ speeches. Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il both saw it as a catastrophe caused by the treachery of part of the Soviet elite, but Kim Il Sung saw it mainly through the lens of the Khrushchev era, while Kim Jong Il focused on averting something similar in the DPRK. Specifically, he called for rejecting formalistic and bureaucratic attitudes in the party, which lead to losing touch with the masses and control over public sentiment. He also emphasized the need for party cadres’ loyalty to the leader, warned against trusting “imperialists” and “reactionaries,” and proclaimed that he would not permit liberal reforms. To counter liberal sentiments, the traditions of the Juche state would have to be strengthened. Culture should promote socialist ideology, buildup of the country’s defenses, and the strong position of the leader and the state.

Both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il often illustrated their positions regarding Perestroika by pointing to the policies and culture of Stalin’s USSR. Stalin and his comrades remained examples of true Russian leaders.

Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il believed that Perestroika brought no benefit to the masses in the former socialist countries, and that sooner or later those countries would see a socialist revival. They found support for these conclusions in personal conversations with Russian citizens visiting the DPRK.

Following Kim Jong Il’s directives, North Korean journalism and fiction began to shape the cultural discourse on Perestroika. Not all texts adequately understood Russian realities; depiction of Russia was often schematic and primitive. But conceptually, they were unified in the description of Perestroika as a “wind of temptation” for the DPRK, which would bring only grief to the people and ruin to the state.

The literary portrayal of Perestroika is characterized by a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians, who are described as an intelligent, educated, and beautiful people suffering from the destruction of socialism. Russians during Perestroika are depicted in a manner following the colonial-era Korean literary canon—authors like Ri Kiyǒng, Chae Mansik, Yi Kwangsu, Hyǒn Chin’gǒn, and others, who described victims of social injustice in the 1920s and 1930s. Such motifs abound in The Fifth Photograph, where a young man drinks himself into despair and is hit by a car, and a young girl is disgraced and forced into prostitution. The Russian characters’ attempts to fight Perestroika alone, without the support of a leader, are doomed to fail (in The Second Briefing, Ruzhansky’s son dies during the assault of the White House in Moscow in 1993).

In general, the victimized Russian characters are unable to resist the temptations into which the country’s “criminal leadership” (plunges them: young people lose faith in Сommunist ideals (Katya Sintsova and her classmates in The Fifth Photograph), middle-aged people turn into ideological conformists (Olga and Boris in Dawn), and the older generation succumbs to the onslaught of new materialism (Ruzhansky in The Second Briefing, Simkov in Dawn, the elder Sintsovs in The Fifth Photograph, Vassily Ivanovich in Change Course!). Their weakness is a consequence of the lack of a worthy leader.

The DPRK is presented as Russians’ only hope and savior. In contrast to the depressed and weak Russian characters, Koreans appear as steadfast, cheerful, and energetic people who come to the Russians’ aid in emergencies.

Unlike gullible Russians, Koreans do not follow the West’s lead and develop their own military technology, which helps them not only survive, but also defend their friends.

The source of Koreans’ strength is the Leader, whose various virtues are described in hyperbolic terms reminiscent of a deity. It is Kim Jong Il who inspires Russian leader Putin to restore Russia’s national traditions and symbols.

The contrast between traitorous Perestroika and steadfast ‘Socialism of Our Style’ is symbolized by flags—the proud red banner of the DPRK and the restored tricolor of the Russian Empire—the embodiment of the “spirit of the dead tsar.”

The North Korean narrative of Perestroika, based on a dichotomy of leaders-as-traitors and people-as-victims, has had far-reaching consequences for Russia-DPRK relations. First, the North Korean cultural space preserved Soviet culture as the product of an “ideologically correct” people. Later, it incorporated some ideologically neutral post-Soviet works. This resulted in the popularity of some modern Russian TV series and of concerts by Yaroslav Dronov (Shaman), and the inclusion of Russian and Soviet songs in the repertoire of popular North Korean singers—Kim Okju, Ch’ǒe Sǒlhǔi, Ch’a Yunmi, and others.

In North Korea under Kim Jong Un, the topic of Perestroika has disappeared from the media. Presumably, the country has gone a long way from the Arduous March and the economic crisis associated with the collapse of the international socialist bloc, which is now a distant memory. Also, in contrast to his father and grandfather, young Kim Jong Un does not see Perestroika as an emotionally charged phenomenon. The country has entered a new period of development, where the absence of a global socialist system is perceived as the default international situation rather than an unfortunate aberration resulting from someone’s missteps.

Over these years, no new works of culture addressing Perestroika have been created, and those made earlier are seldom broadcast. Exceptions are quite rare.

On 9 September 2021, during the celebrations of the Republic’s 73rd anniversary, the song Socialism Is Ours, composed in 1992 as a reaction to the collapse of global socialism, was performed (Meari, 2022). In its content, this song was out of place: it promises loyalty to the red flag, despite its rejection by other unnamed countries: “We will not follow foreign customs and foreign trends. Though the winds are strong, we will endure.” The song was probably selected for its well-known rhythmic melody, good for mass dancing.

In mid-2025, the April 25th Film Studio released the film Days and Nights of Confrontation, a reference to Perestroika (Taegyǒrǔi nat kwa pam, 2025). This political thriller, telling the story of a conspiracy against Kim Jong Il in the mid-1990s, features Perestroika as an opportune moment to activate sleeper agents in North Korea. In his confession to an investigator, the film’s antagonist says that Perestroika had weakened North Korea’s international and domestic position and signaled to him that overthrowing the country’s leadership was possible. However, eventually, the enemy’s hopes are dashed, and North Korea and its people prove stronger.

The narrative of the DPRK as a savior of the Russian people, created in North Korean culture in the early 2000s, miraculously became reality in 2025, when North Korean forces participated in liberating and demining parts of Russia’s Kursk Oblast. The narrative played a certain role in legitimizing this involvement in the Special Military Operation.

The currently evolving discourse regarding these events deserves a separate extensive study. Here it is worth noting that, in current North Korean literature on the SMO, the Russian tricolor is viewed as a symbol of modern friendly Russia and its army.

Importantly, in North Korean culture, the rhetoric of support for socialism and opposition to Perestroika is free of reference to economic issues. The Arduous March triggered the spontaneous development of the private market and entrepreneurship, which the Juche state effectively tolerates, but which find no reflection in the state ideology that continues to proclaim an invariable socialist course based on national unity and loyalty to the motherland and its Leader.

This article elaborates on the premises of the earlier publication: see Gabroussenko, 2011a in the References list.

For citation, please use:
Yefremenko, D.V., 2026. A New European Order, or Progressive Eurosclerosis? Russia in Global Affairs, 24(4), pp. 42–60. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-4-42-60

The European order was long equivalent to, or at least the main pillar of, the global order. But, within the last generation, this has ceased to be the case. The global order is undergoing a protracted and increasingly dangerous transformation, and considerations of the European order have been reduced to discussions about the EU’s future.

Conflating the European order with the EU is inherently incorrect, and also reinforces the illusion that Europe’s future is now in the hands of the Europeans (even as it remains unclear which nations are European). Since 2022, it has become entirely clear that the EU and the UK cannot independently shape the European order.

International order is here construed as a stable system of interactions between state and non-state actors, secured by a corpus of treaties and a balance of power that compels compliance with those treaties in practice. However, such a system may exhaust itself if it stops satisfying many of the actors needed to maintain it. The actual distribution of power, influence, and resources may come into conflict with the order’s formal rules and procedures, which are eventually recognized by many as unfair. Yet this alone is not enough to establish a new order. In prolonged transitions—Gramscian ‘interregnum’—the lack of factors establishing a new order may be taken as proof of the inviolability of the old, no matter how dysfunctional it may be. This is exactly the case with the current European order that emerged after the USSR’s collapse.

This order can be interpreted in two ways: as an era when the geopolitical vacuum was filled by NATO and the EU; and as an attempt to establish a subcontinental order through the diffusion of EU norms under U.S. protection (until Trump’s return). The EU’s expansion created the illusion of progressive and irreversible changes in Europe. Even when the EU shrank after the UK’s withdrawal, this did not really shatter the illusion that there is no alternative to European integration. This illusion itself was based on two assumptions regarding the future European order.

First, several waves of post-1991 NATO/EU expansion, carried out over Russian objections, produced the strong conviction that still more of the eastern periphery could be taken under control. The EU and NATO believed that, by cultivating pro-Western elites and gradually enmeshing new territories in obligations and rules, these territories would be irreversibly tethered to European institutions and structures. Russia’s intensifying objection to this expansion was seen as eventually surmountable, if only because Moscow would have to swallow each fait accompli to maintain economic cooperation with the West. After 2014, the EU imposed intensifying sanctions, expecting that the Russian government would be unable to cope and would eventually embark on a self-destructive path, at which point Russia—or the parts of it that escaped central control—would themselves become a new zone for EU absorption.

In 2022, when the West seized the chance for a proxy war against Russia, this scenario was radicalized.

In fact, the political mainstream in European countries remains confident that Russia’s current vulnerabilities will eliminate it as a subcontinental and global player before the EU is critically weakened by its own vulnerabilities.

Second, the EU was confident in the U.S.’s indefinite patronage, allowing the EU to fill the geopolitical vacuum in eastern Europe without exposing itself to the normally attendant security risks. Rhetoric of a security community based on shared liberal values, within which the use or even threat of force is virtually impossible, dates back to Karl Deutsch (Deutsch et al., 1957). It served as cover for a situation in which the U.S.’s military power not only ensured its political hegemony but also supported the European integration project by creating an external security belt. The U.S.’s huge preponderance within NATO stymied any aspirations of other members for geopolitical autonomy, encouraging their egalitarian cooperation in the course of integration. However, as a trade and economic bloc, the EU was a competitor to the U.S.. The EU also claimed leadership in some areas of international regulation, namely on climate change. Eventually, when the West’s ideological monolith cracked, the Eurocrats and most European countries’ political mainstreams turned out to be citadels of the ideology that is seen by the Trump administration as its principal opponent.

Who and What Can Change the European Order?

The fallacy of these assumptions suggests that the European geopolitical order has lost its foundation. But then who and what can transform it?

In most cases, the European order has changed due to wars that radically shifted the balance of power between their direct participants and other international actors. These changes, and the resultant new rules of the game, were formalized in multilateral peace treaties. But transformations in the European order can also take place without the “Estates General of Europe” (Bonald, 1815, p. 5). The most recent, caused by the Soviet Union’s breakup, was never formalized by an international congress. Instead, various bilateral and multilateral agreements were adopted on the basis of that breakup, ratifying Russia’s losses and further degrading its position.

Hypothetically, the Special Military Operation’s completion may provide grounds for establishing a new European order. But the military and political conditions, necessary for one side’s unconditional victory, remain absent.

More likely is a prolonged suspension of hostilities and the belligerents’ de facto recognition of territorial changes. An international congress or conference would not be the best format for formalizing this outcome, and would be of no interest to Russia.

However, there remains the possibility of a radical transformation, precipitated by a significant shift in the balance of power between the key actors in Europe. Brexit has increased Britain’s freedom of maneuver, but it essentially must still choose between Brussels and Washington. The U.S., regardless of its Euroskepticism, will retain strong and multifarious influence over the European order. China will also retain significant economic leverage there, as it becomes a center of global technological development. Türkiye, which formally continues to seek full EU membership, will obviously remain an external player, with its own agenda for Europe (especially those parts once held by the Ottoman Empire), while serving as a conduit between Europe and the Middle East.

Russia’s marginalization continued throughout the post-bipolar world order period. This process was limited by Russia’s geography, resources, military, and culture (part of European civilization despite persistent efforts to ‘cancel’ it). By 2014, Russia’s opinion on European security issues was no longer considered eligible for consideration in interstate dialogue. But Russia—pushed to Europe’s sidelines, yet free to act more decisively and independently in its own interest—began to exercise more influence over Europe as an external (Eurasian) actor. This status, though forced by confrontation, now seems optimal: Russia is not and should not be inside the European order, but it will exert influence on that order from outside, as befits its own security and interests.

The nature and scale of the European order’s transformation will significantly depend on Ukraine’s future and the outcome of the conflict there. If it escalates into a full-scale European war, the European order and European civilization may collapse. If there is a long-term ceasefire, Ukraine will remain a problematic area, whose integration into the new European order would be destabilizing (including due to Kiev’s claims to special status), but Ukraine’s prolonged status as a limitrophe would also be risky.

Below, we will take a closer look at non-military scenarios for the transformation of the European order and their relevance for Russia.

A Neo-Medieval Empire on the European Subcontinent

Many political observers, analysts, and policy-makers in the EU—including some incumbent leaders—realize that the EU is heading for a deep crisis, the avoidance of which requires transforming the EU’s current model of supranational integration.

However, such claims have been made for decades, and anti-alarmists often argue that crises are inherent to interstate integration (Monnet, 1978, p. 432) or have become the “new normal” (Haughton, 2016, p. 5). Descriptions of the EU as a “successful failing organization” (Beck and Grande, 2007, p. 70), only emphasize how it survives and even thrives as an institution despite constantly failing to achieve its strategic goals.

Aside from the philosophically sophisticated project of cosmopolitan Europe, debates about Europe-building ultimately reduce the choice between (1) united nation-states that have delegated measured amounts of their sovereignty to the supranational level (a ‘Europe of the Fatherlands’), and (2) a wholesale transposition of the nation-state model to the pan-European level.

Attempts to create a European federation have been unable to secure a mandate to dilute member-states’ sovereignty. Instead, since the European Constitution referenda failed in France and the Netherlands in 2005, and the Lisbon Treaty came into force in 2009, national regulation in various important spheres has been increasingly replaced by EU regulations and legal harmonization advanced by supranational institutions (Dawson and de Witte, 2013; Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2014; Majone, 2014; Schmidt, 2020). This has intensified the degradation of national political elites, which are becoming little more than a reserve for Eurocrats. Rhetoric of pan-European values and responsibilities has thus increasingly displaced national elites’ genuine connection with their voters’ interests and aspirations (Hobolt and Tilley, 2014; Hinterleitner, 2020).

Tellingly, there are problems with human capital at the pan-European level. Those delegated to Brussels are not the best and most efficient, but the most skilled in parochial political survival.

Top Eurocrats are chosen so as to balance between numerous diverse interests—not for professionalism and strategic thinking.

Most of the EU’s decisions are not expressions of unified political will, but compromises reached through tedious multilateral negotiation. These compromises create an array of contradictory regulations, often containing exceptions to previously agreed rules. This is especially the case in the spheres of trade, agriculture, migration, and the digital transition. Internal heterogeneity casts doubt on the EU’s long-term effectiveness; the iron tread of a ‘normative empire’ may belie its lack of genuine agency. Having pursued territorial expansion after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR, the EU long ago passed the last point where it could have turned towards becoming a Westphalian state. Even twenty years ago, it was already the case that the EU resembles a kind of neo-medieval empire with a polycentric system of government, multiple and overlapping jurisdictions, striking cultural and economic heterogeneity, fuzzy borders, and divided sovereignty (Zielonka, 2006, p. 167).

The longevity of the European integration project is due to its benefits still outweighing its costs. No other association of sovereign states in human history has progressed so far in terms of integration. Thanks to inertia in the distribution of roles, benefits, and influence between countries with very different socioeconomic situations, the leading powers benefit from dominance in such a vast market, and the laggards receive subsidies and other support mechanisms (albeit at the expense of additional political concessions to Brussels and the European heavyweights). Notably, Brexit, the only example of a break with Brussels so far, has quickly lost its power to inspire. Now it serves more to frighten Euroskeptics in countries that are less able to cope with exit than the UK is.

The entire EU is also falling behind its main competitors—China and the U.S.—in investment, economic innovation, and labor productivity (Draghi, 2024). This is compounded by the population’s aging and by the apparently irreversible loss of cheap Russian energy and the post-Soviet peace dividend. And yet, despite the EU’s mounting problems, leaving it is likely to set a country back, depriving it of membership in the largest economic bloc. (Unless Brussels significantly softens the conditions of secession.)

Finally, one cannot ignore the effect of long-term systematic efforts to create a positive image of Europe and Europeanness, although it was Europe that has unleashed the bloodiest wars, committed monstrous crimes against humanity, and spread oppression and exploitation across the world during the era of imperialism.

The EU’s critics, who are incorrectly labeled as ‘populists’ or non-systemic forces, remain largely pro-European. While prioritizing the nation-state, they nevertheless declare commitment to a ‘Europe of the Fatherlands.’ Interestingly, many national-sovereigntists draw inspiration for a European confederation from the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Friesen, 2026). In such a neo-medieval empire, tendencies towards centralization and rigid hierarchy would be replaced by internal diversity and respect for particular (national) interests. National-sovereigntists value their states’ geopolitical agency, and oppose federalist tendencies that they see as projections of economic determinism into the political sphere, to the detriment of individual countries’ traditions and interests.

Does this mean that the likely electoral successes of national-sovereigntists, in leading European countries in the next five to ten years, will transform the European order?

Russia still has high hopes for national-sovereigntists, although there is no reason to expect ‘Orban’ rather than ‘Meloni’ in any particular country. Not all national-sovereigntists are conciliatory or even neutral towards Russia, and ideological proximity does not guarantee political rapprochement—at best, it creates a favorable background for dialogue. It is unlikely that national-sovereigntists will simultaneously rule several major EU members and agree to overhaul the integration model, or at least to reduce confrontation with Russia. Once in power (likely in coalition), national-sovereigntists will have to subordinate their ideas regarding European integration and cooperation with Russia (no matter how sound and pragmatic they might be) to domestic and international compromise.

National-sovereigntist forces may play a more significant role in a different, politico-procedural, way. In pursuit of political gains, and facing increasingly desperate efforts by their opponents to marginalize them, national-sovereigntists raise the most sensitive and often nearly-taboo topics, including the unfair distribution of powers and resources between the EU and a particular nation-state. This further erodes the pro-European consensus in a particular country, prompting the local political elites (even those demanding the national-sovereigntists’ isolation) to partially adopt Euroskeptic attitudes and (at the EU level) policies (Vollaard, 2014). If such changes occur in several countries, the possibility of deeper fragmentation will increase tangibly across the EU, trapping it for a long time in a state of semi-disintegration.

As Stefano Bartolini has shown, the greatest danger of destabilization is posed by conflicts over resources and influence in a political system with supranational and national levels of government. In the EU, the supranational center has gained significant decision-making powers, but is not supported by pan-European identity, as that is held by pan-European—but not national—parties, interest groups, and social movements. This clouds the prospects for further European integration, which could be disrupted by mass political mobilization or democratization (Bartolini, 2005, pp. 386-387).

Political mobilization is increasingly triggered not by questions of how to divide the social pie, but by issues of identity, and the traditional left-right political mainstream is not effectively coping with these changes.

The supranational center has little influence at the national level, where domestic interests and preferences prevail, constraining national governments in multilateral negotiations (Hooghe and Marks, 2008) and prompting them to seek exceptions to the EU’s ‘common policy’ in certain sensitive areas. Recalling the epithet for an earlier period of economic stagnation and decelerated integration (Giersch, 1985), this trend can be defined as ‘Eurosclerosis 2.0.’

Eurosclerotic trends should be assessed realistically. The EU remains an arena of multiple contradictions and struggle between diverse forces guided by different interests, values, and logic (Foster and Grzymski, 2022, pp. 116-131). In general, the potential for fragmentation is gradually building up, but steps to strengthen integration and partially streamline it organizationally are quite possible. In this context, well-timed and -targeted outside influence on intra-European processes may at some point be quite effective, especially if accompanied by other influences.

European Geopolitical Ambitions and Realities

Is the EU capable of defying these trends, to become not only the master of its own destiny, but the demiurge of a new European order?

One long-developing school of thought responds to every crisis with the mantra “More Europe!” It is heard today regarding the crisis of Atlantic solidarity, triggered by changes in the U.S. position on the Ukraine conflict and by Donald Trump’s anti-NATO invectives. In the Euro-optimistic version of the ‘post-American’ world, the EU will be the leader of a renewed rules-based international order (McNamara and Steinberg, 2026).

It is assumed that the EU will not only determine geopolitics on the European continent, but will also build a global coalition of like-minded countries interested in an open and predictable global economy. Obstacles can be overcome by deepening European integration, endowing the EU with strategic autonomy, centralized finances, and the world’s reserve currency. External threats—like ‘Russian expansionism’ and the second Trump administration’s destructive behavior—can supply member-states with (otherwise sparse) incentives to embark on this project.

One serious flaw in this logic is its treatment of political externalities as crucial for European integration and the reversal of Eurosclerosis. The crisis in NATO, and war in Eastern Europe, are expected to force governments and peoples to undertake extraordinary efforts, for which they were unready both organizationally and psychologically.

If the EU’s members really do agree to fiscal centralization and a binding military alliance, entrusting their citizens’ wallets and very life to the supranational center of power, then the EU will indeed establish a new European order. But is this likely?

Famously outspoken Croatian President Zoran Milanović has called European leaders “a pack of house cats” who will scatter as soon as matters come to the EU’s transformation into a defense union. Regarding leaders’ quality, behavior, and solidarity, Milanović’s assessment might be endorsed by most Europeans. But Europe’s genuine strategic autonomy would face other serious limitations outside the U.S. security cocoon.

Historically, European citizens have differed significantly in their perception of threats, and this ‘strategic cacophony’ (Meijer and Brooks, 2021) remains even after four years of rampantly demonizing Russia. Perceptions of Russia as the main adversary dominate in most EU countries, but the Russia-Ukraine conflict’s partial routinization has led to the reemergence of traditional historical-cultural threat perceptions or to attention shifting to emergent issues. For example, a July 2025 Pew survey of ten European countries found that the plurality of Spaniards (31%) named the U.S. as the greatest threat to their country, and 74% of Greeks named Türkiye, despite the Kyriakos Mitsotakis government’s consistent anti-Russian policy. Russia was named by a considerable number of Hungarians (33%) and Italians (32%), but Ukraine was not far behind in Hungary (27%), and in both cases the anti-Russian numbers were far short of a majority. Russia was named as the main threat by an overwhelming number of Swedes (77%) and Poles (81%) (Fetterolf, Clancy and Lippert, 2025).

There is no consensus among EU countries on how strategic autonomy should be understood.

It is generally defined as the ability to chart a political course, free from external influence and supported by the power and resources necessary to resist possible interference. But, more concretely, this might mean the ability to independently deter/repel an attack, or the strength and will to conduct limited operations without the support of the U.S., or industrial/technological independence (Posen, 2025), etc. Each definition requires its own priorities and investments.

Finally, NATO’s European members suffer from numerous, and in some cases critical, gaps in their military capabilities, which will take time and money to fill. But is Donald Trump’s mockery of NATO enough for the EU countries to start massively investing in ‘post-American’ strategic autonomy? In a sense, EU countries find themselves in the position of Buridan’s ass, unable to choose between minimizing the damage of Trump’s final years, or, instead, transforming the EU into a military alliance capable of acting independently of Washington or even contrary to it.

Trump will have neither the political window nor the legal authority to formally withdraw the U.S. from NATO, even if he wants to. His aggression against Iran has increased the chances of a major Republican defeat in the November 2026 midterm elections, and Trump’s career will end in a series of epic failures. But Trump can still further undermine NATO and the European elite. By 2029, Atlantic unity may be little more than a husk of contractual obligations and military infrastructure, surrounding deep mutual estrangement.

But if the U.S. leaves a vacuum of military and political leadership in Europe, and the EU is not made into a substitute for NATO, then the Franco-German tandem will end up leading the accumulation of military power (Simón and Fiott, 2025, p. 798). Despite France’s nuclear weapons, Germany’s role would be primary. No matter how much politicians in Berlin assure everyone and themselves of their commitment to pan-European values and the rules-based liberal order, the Zeitenwende announced by Olaf Scholz in 2022 will mean Germany’s return to European geopolitics.

Germany’s strong military-industrial potential has historically worried other European countries (Lukyanov and Prokopchuk, 2026), but until recently this concern was carefully suppressed. German remilitarization may prompt internal regrouping within the EU, including the formation of a group wishing to counterbalance Berlin. In search of a new balance, different players or groups within the EU will seek to strengthen their positions, including through the development of special relations with external actors capable of influencing the European order.

Europe’s accelerated militarization seriously threatens Russia, and must be addressed immediately. Current Russo-European relations amount to a state of deep hostility, in which each side seeks to identify and exploit the other’s vulnerabilities, while keeping away from brink of open war.

But, paradoxically, a new arms race, and the uneven burden of military expenditures, may ultimately increase Europe’s geopolitical fragmentation. Economically, the arms industry’s growth will clearly benefit Germany and a few other countries, with all the rest subsidizing the process. This alone will increase distrust and antagonism within Europe. In the absence of a clear vision for the future of NATO and the EU, nation-states like Germany, France, the UK, and Poland—as well as informal groups, such as the Balto-Scandinavian one—will again become actors in European geopolitics (Kapstein and Caverley, 2026). This aligns well with national-sovereigntists’ aspirations for strong security policies. Meanwhile, much of the left (e.g., the Sanchez government in Spain) will advocate for a strong European army, while parts of the mainstream (e.g., the center-right government of Portugal) keep clinging to NATO and American leadership.

Outside Influences

Despite the calls for its strategic autonomy, Europe is not only a player, but also the platform for a geopolitical game. The most powerful external players—the U.S. and Russia—tend for various reasons to distance themselves from European political actors, but are still present. Even half-turned from Europe, they still hold strong sway over it. But are external actors capable of reaching mutual understanding and dictating the European order’s transformation? For now, there remains the possibility of Washington and Moscow reaching an agreement leading to the cessation of hostilities between Russia and the Kiev regime. This would ratify a new balance of power in Eastern Europe, but not a change of the geopolitical order. Under this scenario, Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, the Donbass, and Kherson and Zaporozhye Oblasts would not be legally recognized by Kiev or the European countries, and even the U.S. would likely just acknowledge Moscow’s actual control over these territories.

Trump’s America is not interested in establishing a long-term stable order anywhere, nor is it interested in uncontrolled destabilization. The U.S. National Security Strategy 2025, which has caused such a stir, calls for establishing a more stable confrontation between Russia and Europe, controlled and when necessary manipulated by Washington as the supreme arbiter (National Security Strategy, 2025). Obviously, this is not the kind of stability that is characteristic of the established geopolitical order.

Recent developments, following the publication of the ‘Donroe’ Doctrine, confirm that Trump will always act as he sees fit at the moment, even when this contradicts the doctrines signed by him. NSS 2025 is not very complimentary towards NATO, but does not signify any critical reduction in U.S. participation in the alliance. The Europeans (including the UK) are trying to develop responses to Trump’s extreme frustration with his European allies during the second U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, but most European governments will likely freeze in a kind of stupor, waiting for the overseas troublemaker to make a fatal mistake or become completely absorbed in the fight against his regrouped internal opponents. Both those opponents, and many European politicians and populations, are beginning to see Trump’s America as a ‘rogue superpower’ (Kagan, 2026) as dangerous as ‘expansionist’ Russia.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, ever-fewer people have tried to find some farsighted calculation in each of his decisions. But his anti-NATO diatribes are repeated too often to be attributed solely to his psycho-emotional state. If his frustration undercuts the remaining pillars of the rules-based order (including its European subsystem), this probably reveals a strong (perhaps subconscious) drive towards chaos, removing the last restraints on ‘America First.’ A new attempt to seize Greenland cannot be ruled out; this time it may be presented as necessitated by the unreliability and duplicity of NATO allies.

The politico-ideological estrangement between Trump and the majority of European leaders, whom he can rightfully view as sympathizers and likely allies of the U.S. Democratic Party, may evolve into a more structured confrontation. Vice President Vance’s speech in Munich, and NSS 2025 contain the necessary arguments for that. The Strategy directly links Europe’s civilizational decline to the EU and other transnational bodies that undermine political freedom and sovereignty, pursue transformative migration policies, impose ideological censorship, and suppress political opposition (National Security Strategy, 2025). Acting under the slogan of restoring Europe’s former greatness, the Trump administration may intensify pressure on the EU’s supranational institutions and the European political mainstream, and increase support for America’s political and ideological allies within Europe. However, these efforts may be hindered by imperial overstretch, as well as by Trump’s antagonization of many of MAGA’s apparent European partners.

It is noteworthy that Western commentators sometimes describe the growing rift in NATO by referring to Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue. Projecting the fate of the unfortunate Melians onto Europe, and lamenting that the U.S.’s benevolent leadership of a symmachia of free polises has been replaced with crude imperial diktat, commentators point to the inexorable logic of political realism, according to which an empire cannot permit neutrality for states within its sphere of influence (Schnaas, 2026; Patrick, 2026).

But the Melians (Europeans) for decades indulged the powerful Athenians’ (Americans’) increasing tilt towards brute coercion. Regardless, such reasoning could be considered indicative of a new pragmatism for a new geopolitical situation—if Thucydides’s realism were not immediately abandoned for Herodotus’s narrative of Thermopylae, as soon as the subject changes to Ukraine and Russia.

As long as we see such a readiness to swap narratives, there is no reason to expect European mainstream politicians to seriously approach building a new regional order. Unconditional confrontation with Russia anchors them to moral superiority as the guardians of liberal civilization from the barbarians to the east.

A change of political elites would not necessarily end the anti-Russian dogma, and would in any case proceed unevenly and require many years to complete.

The EU has become institutionally incapable of equal dialogue with Russia. Its norms, rules, policy directives, etc.—especially since its 2004 enlargement—are determined by the union’s most anti-Russian members. Anti-Russian European Parliament resolutions gave way to binding decisions of the European Commission and the European Council, eventually permeating the entire EU policy-making process. Russia-EU relations were constrained to their minimum possible level. This array of decisions, restrictions, sanctions, etc. steadily grew over time, becoming a giant ‘glacier’ that institutionally blocked any effort to alleviate tension. There are no grounds to expect EU institutions to engage in a constructive dialogue with Russia in pursuit of a reasonable political deal, let alone a stable European geopolitical order.

As the EU’s landsknecht, Ukraine will continue to generate geopolitical disorganization even if the armed confrontation with Russia ends (or is suspended for a long period). While the question of Kiev’s membership in NATO has practically been removed from the agenda, its fast-tack admission to the EU, demanded by the Zelensky regime, may deepen the EU’s internal divisions. Concerns for Europe’s labor and food markets are already enough to delay eastward expansion indefinitely. But the main challenge would be incorporating a relatively large country with a ruined economy, a huge military dependent on massive European funding, and a likely willingness to ‘creatively’ interpret the EU’s common foreign and defense policy in service of anti-Russian revanchism. If Kiev gets a voice in the EU (even on certain political matters), it will never be satisfied with the role of a backbencher. Riding the Thermopylae narrative, Ukrainian leaders will seek to consolidate their exclusive role in Europe and insist on a constant supply of resources to “contain” Moscow.

The most realistic scenario is that, soothed with promises of a European future, Ukraine will for a long time get stuck as a limitrophe state, controlled by the U.S. and European powers, which will continue to transform it into a “steel porcupine.” The Coalition of the Willing, whose very appearance amplified strategic cacophony in Europe, is likely to remain an anti-Russian ad hoc partnership, but will not become a real replacement for NATO or a structured military alliance within the EU. However, the Kiev regime will use the vagueness of the Coalition members’ commitments, and their lack of clear behavioral algorithms in crisis, to push them towards ever-riskier testing of Moscow’s red lines. Ukraine will also remain the epicenter of attempts to destabilize Russia’s political system and constitutional order.

*  *  *

A new European order is needed to, at the very least, prevent total war, but is not yet possible. The UK and leading EU powers—unsure of their own capabilities, their main ally’s reliability and intentions, and their main opponent’s willingness to put up with the blurring of its red lines—will remain the core obstacle for a new, stable configuration in Europe. The post-bipolar order became dysfunctional in 2014, but most Europeans continue to cling to it, unable even to articulate the need for a different order whose external guarantors and beneficiaries would include Russia. So far, European official thought has gone no further than Ursula von der Leyen’s call for the “completion of the European continent, so that it is not influenced by Russia, Türkiye, or China” (Kemper, 2026).

The problem, however, lies not only in the limitations of the European elites’ strategic vision. It is produced by the distribution of power within the EU, and by the political legitimacy thereof. Calls for the EU’s further expansion and strategic autonomy are exacerbating ‘Eurosclerosis 2.0.’ Meanwhile, the disturbing processes—described by the Trumpists and national-sovereigntists, with some reason, as endangering civilizational identity—continue.

One of the main dangers of progressive Eurosclerosis is that the desire to defeat Russia continues to unite the majority of European politicians. Moscow has limited room to keep the current European elite from uncontrolled military escalation.

This could be accomplished through a clear message that such escalation, if unleashed, would proceed rapidly and Russia would go beyond the use of tactical nuclear weapons (Trenin, Avakyants and Karaganov, 2024).

Aside from enhancing awareness of this threat, within European societies and the more reasonable part of their political forces, Russia should at some point raise the possibility of agreeing on a European order that would ensure greater security and at least a partial return of the benefits of peaceful coexistence.

This requires preparation. It will be very difficult and dangerous, since Russian-European interaction is determined by mutual desire to exploit the other’s vulnerabilities.

But it would be a simplification to view Russia and the European countries as existentially incompatible. Rather, their interaction is cyclical. We are currently in the phase where Nikolai Danilevsky’s conclusions, drawn from the Franco-Prussian War, are relevant again: “1) struggle with Europe is in any case unavoidable,” and “2) any disturbance of the political balance in Europe is beneficial for Russia” (Danilevsky, 1890, p. 8).

Danilevsky’s maxims will not hold forever, but they will endure until all sides recognize the need for a new, internally and externally balanced European order. Russia needs it to protect itself from the West, and build its desired future, no longer linked to Europe.

This article is part of the project “Interaction between Russia and Europe as Partner-Vulnerability Management: Mutual Risks and Opportunities for Departing from the Confrontational Agenda” carried out with the support of HSE’s Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs.

From 28 September to 1 October 2026, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club is taking place under the theme: “Responsibility for the Future: Limits of the Possible, or Limitless Possibilities?” The Club’s flagship conference brings together 120 participants from 40 countries, including Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

You can watch the live broadcast of the plenary session of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club on our website on October 1.

Last year, participants in the Annual Meeting discussed the factors that enable states to remain resilient amid ongoing change. Today, the organisers believe that, despite the crisis in the global order and the unprecedented escalation of conflicts, it is important to continue analysing what the future may look like in order to be able to influence the process of shaping it.

The issue of responsibility for the future has been a central theme, shaping the agenda of Valdai events throughout the year. Participants in the Annual Meeting will continue to discuss the question of how manageable and predictable international affairs can be against the backdrop of the crisis facing multilateral institutions. The organisers propose that participants in the 23rd Annual Meeting consider the possible consequences of escalating the military and political situation, the restructuring of trade and economic ties, and the introduction of new technologies, as well as discuss the responsibility of states and their role in the future international order.

Read the Programme for details.

Read the Annual Report of the Valdai Discussion Club here.

Not to be disheartened by adversity or elated by happiness—
that is the mark of a strong spirit and a mighty power.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Should we expect the future to be worse than before? As trivial as this might sound, it all depends on us. No matter how complex and confused, the international environment can be apprehended and adjusted, as well as managed. All the elements forming today’s global palette are obvious, and they existed before. Today, they have manifested themselves in a new quality (with greater intensity) and in a different sequence with everything happening all at once.

The accumulated experience must be treated as a guideline rather than a dogma, including negative experiences, which teach us what we should not do. The last three decades have been a case in point. There can be different ways of evaluating the intentions of those who shaped history in late 20^th century, but the results that are visible today demonstrate that this stage in the development of international relations cannot and should not be replicated.

Instead of crowning global political development, this era was marked by the post-WWII model falling into crisis. In itself, this is not a tragedy since no system has ever been nor will be set in stone. Even the most outstanding projects have a limited lifespan.

Will the future be better for those living in today’s world compared to those who preceded them? Not necessarily. After all, future is always a set of probabilities that come to fruition to various degrees. There are specific patterns defining the way developments unfold, but it all depends on how responsible we are in our approach.

The expectation that the “end of history” would address all the challenges and lead us towards a brighter future for the so-called “last man” failed to materialise, which was to be expected.

If becoming the last man is not what people really want, they should realise that charting the future is not the apanage of neither natural forces, nor social development patterns, nor sophisticated robots, nor AI. It is in their hands. Taking responsibility for the future is not a slogan but a behavioural imperative. Over the course of history, humankind has invented so many effective ways of destroying itself ranging from physical annihilation to moral destruction. These are the fruits of progress too. We do not need a future that would be better than the past. We need a future that will not be worse. Overall, having a future is what matters the most.

Authors: Oleg Barabanov, Anton Bespalov, Timofei Bordachev, Fyodor Lukyanov, Andrey Sushentsov, Ivan Timofeev.

You can download the report here.

Valdai Discussion Club

The latest state elections in Germany have confirmed a trend that is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. The issue is no longer the occasional success of one party or failure of another, but the gradual dismantling of a political system that for decades appeared almost permanent.

The postwar German model rested on competition between two “people’s parties,” the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats and this conservative-social democratic axis provided stability after the upheavals of the first half of the 20th century, allowing governments to alternate while remaining within broadly accepted political boundaries.

Germany adhered to this model particularly closely, so the political landscape expanded significantly only twice, first with the rise of the Greens in the 1980s, which brought the rebellious generation of 1968 into the establishment, and then after reunification with the emergence of the Left from the former East German political tradition, but that orderly system is now breaking down.

The results in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, following Saxony-Anhalt two weeks earlier, leap off the page, as the AfD won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, while the CDU fell below the 5% threshold for the first time in a German state election. In Berlin, meanwhile, the Left finished first, with the CDU second and the SPD falling to fifth place.  

For the leaderships of the CDU and SPD, it’s tempting to reduce the problem to the rise of the AfD and concentrate on how it should be contained, but the deeper problem is the fragmentation of the entire electoral landscape and the disappearance of the political manageability that Germany once took for granted.

Whether the AfD itself is capable of governing effectively remains another question, given the party has never governed a German state, while the established parties continue to reject coalitions with it.

Germany is therefore moving towards something resembling the politics of smaller European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, or Austria, with fragmented parliaments and increasingly complicated multiparty coalitions.

There’s nothing inherently unworkable about such a system and plenty of European countries function this way, but Germany is different. Its political culture has traditionally valued predictability and institutional continuity, but if fragmentation now spreads inside the CDU and SPD themselves, the consequences will extend beyond election arithmetic.

Germany isn’t particularly comfortable with political upheaval and when Germany becomes politically nervous, its neighbors have historically had reason to pay attention.

RT