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The 20th century was centered on the geopolitics of scarcity, with nations vying for control of limited resources concentrated in narrow geographic areas, such as oil fields, natural gas reserves, and strategic minerals. This competition forged alliances, fueled wars, and defined the hierarchy of global power.

The 21st century may be built on a different logic: power may increasingly derive not from controlling scarcity, but from regulating abundance. Agricultural biomass exemplifies this shift. Every year, the world produces billions of tons of agricultural waste: rice and wheat straw, corn stalks, and sugarcane residue—that are burned, discarded, or left to decompose. This waste constitutes one of the most abundant renewable resources on the planet, yet it remains largely invisible to markets, policymakers, and strategists. This invisibility is not accidental: it is a product of an international economic system built on rewarding concentration and scarcity rather than distribution and renewal.

Agricultural biomass should be understood as a form of strategic capital—a renewable asset capable of generating economic returns, technological leadership, institutional resilience, and geopolitical independence simultaneously.

Instead of treating agricultural biomass merely as an energy source or environmental asset, we can frame how renewable biological resources can be generated and transformed into sustainable geopolitical capabilities through coordinated industrial organization. By embracing this transformation, BRICS countries can reshape the political economy of energy and food, and regain strategic power.

From Scarcity to Abundance: The Geopolitics of Biomass

Since the mid-20th century, the global economy has been organized around the principle of scarcity-driven value. Resources that are finite, geographically concentrated, and difficult to extract—oil, natural gas, and critical minerals—command high prices precisely because their supply can be controlled. This control generates rents that fund states, corporations, and strategic influence.

The post-Cold War international energy system evolved around institutions and financial mechanisms that provided considerable influence to countries controlling capital, technology, maritime routes, and reserve currencies. This architecture has created dependencies that are increasingly being leveraged for strategic advantage. From the perspective of many BRICS policymakers, recent measures—such as the proposed 100% tariffs on Russian energy buyers, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. controlling the Venezuelan oil supplies—are interpreted as part of a broader pattern of strategic competition over energy markets. This system, however, is beginning to fray. As carbon pricing mechanisms expand, as the costs of pollution become harder to ignore, and as the strategic vulnerabilities of fossil fuel dependence grow more apparent, the economic calculus is shifting.

Therefore, the agricultural biomass is becoming visible not because its physical properties have changed, but because the institutional frameworks for valuing it are finally emerging. As Chatham House report  notes, transitions towards bio-based economies “bring a new set of geopolitical dynamics and could give rise to new dominant players with natural resource endowments, R&D and innovation investments, and processing capacities.”

The Biomass as a Strategic Asset

Agricultural biomass exhibits characteristics that are the opposite of fossil fuels. It is abundant rather than scarce, distributed rather than concentrated, renewable rather than finite, and locally manageable rather than dependent on complex extraction infrastructure.

India alone produces over 500 million tons of agricultural residues annually, of which nearly 92 million tons of rice stubble are burned each year. The economic cost of this practice is estimated at $339.4 billion annually, equivalent to 9.5% of India’s GDP, while the human toll reaches 1.72 million premature deaths annually from fine particulate pollution. China generates even larger volumes—over 600 million tons of crop residues annually. Brazil, Russia, and South Africa collectively add hundreds of millions more.

These residues have the potential to meet up to 25% of global liquid fuel demand, while simultaneously reducing dependence on imported chemical fertilizers, which cost India alone over $14.5 billion annually. Converting agricultural residues into biofuels and biochemicals could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60–80% compared to fossil fuels, while improving soil health through biochar and compost application.

Shared BRICS Resource

While India exemplifies both the crisis and opportunity in agricultural biomass, it is by no means the only BRICS nation rich in this resource. Russia has extensive wheat and barley straw, Brazil boasts abundant sugarcane bagasse and soybean residues, China produces enormous volumes of corn and rice straw, and South Africa has significant maize and sugarcane residues. The critical issue is not which country dominates the feedstock supply, but whether BRICS nations can forge a collective framework to transform this dispersed resource into a shared strategic asset. Joint research centers, harmonized quality standards, and coordinated investment strategies could unlock far greater value than any single country could achieve on its own.

Traditionally viewed as a renewable energy source or a component of the circular economy, agricultural biomass should also be recognized as strategic capital—an asset that delivers sustained economic, technological, institutional, and geopolitical benefits through effective management and innovation.

Its value hinges on the technologies employed to transform and govern it, positioning biomass as a vital multidimensional asset for economic growth, technological leadership, institutional resilience, and strategic independence, ultimately contributing to both economic stability and international geopolitical stability.

Why Russia Matters: A Strategic Opportunity

Russia occupies a distinctive position in the emerging bioeconomy. As the world’s largest exporter of wheat and a major producer of barley, corn, and other grains, Russia generates substantial agricultural residues—estimated at 100–150 million tons annually. These residues represent not merely a disposal challenge but a strategic opportunity to diversify Russia’s economic base beyond hydrocarbon exports.

Moreover, Russia has developed significant expertise in biocatalytic and enzymatic conversion technologies through decades of investment in biotechnology and industrial chemistry. This scientific infrastructure provides a foundation for Russia to emerge as a technology exporter in the bioeconomy, rather than merely a feedstock supplier.

Geopolitically, Russia’s potential role in the bioeconomy aligns with its broader strategic objectives: reducing dependence on Western technology and financial systems, diversifying export markets towards Asia and the Global South, and building institutional frameworks within BRICS that are independent of Western-dominated structures. The bioeconomy offers Russia a pathway to maintain its status as a major power while transitioning from fossil fuel dependence to a more diversified and resilient economic base.

The Architecture of Implementation

The transition from agricultural residues to strategic capital requires an institutional architecture capable of coordinating investment, standardizing quality, facilitating trade, and sharing knowledge. Several building blocks already exist.

First, a BRICS Bioeconomy Platform. In February 2026, President Vladimir Putin proposed launching joint bioeconomy projects with BRICS partners, describing the sector as key “from the point of view of the quality of global growth.”

Second, dedicated financing through the New Development Bank (NDB). The NDB has committed to directing 40% of all its financing to climate and energy transition projects in 2026, with approved renewable energy projects totaling $300 million for Brazil, $250 million for India, $180 million for South Africa, and $81 million for China.

Third, BRICS Biorefinery Corridors. The existing BRICS STI Framework Program supports collaborative research on biomass conversion, which could be scaled into a network of biorefinery corridors linking feedstock-rich regions with industrial processing hubs.

Fourth, harmonized standards. In July 2026, India signed a first standards cooperation pact with BRICS partners, pointing towards a common regulatory framework for biofuels and biofertilizers.

Fifth, a common BRICS market for biofertilizers. The 2025 “Indore Declaration” by BRICS Agriculture Ministers committed member states to strengthening food security through greater cooperation.

Finally, carbon market integration. BRICS countries could collectively negotiate access to international carbon markets.

These six institutional pillars, built on existing platforms, extend them into a coherent bioeconomy architecture. What is needed is not invention, but coordination.

Limitations of the Biomass Model

Any balanced perspective must acknowledge three key limitations. First, collecting agricultural residues is often economically unfeasible due to logistical challenges, particularly in areas with weak infrastructure, where the cost sometimes exceeds the value of the raw materials. Second, a portion of the residues must remain in the fields to maintain soil health, depending on local conditions. Third, biomass has a significantly lower energy density than fossil fuels—about one-third that of crude oil—which presents challenges in storage and transportation. However, technological advancements are gradually addressing these issues. These limitations underscore the need for innovation, regional collaboration, and the development of biorefining facilities. While biomass cannot completely replace oil, it has the potential to play a significant strategic role in future energy and agricultural systems.

The New Geopolitics of Strategic Abundance

Throughout modern history, strategic power has largely been associated with the possession of finite resources. Yet the defining strategic resource of the 21st century may prove fundamentally different. It will not be exhausted by extraction, but renewed with every harvest. The transition from fossil dependence to biological abundance represents not merely an energy transition, but a transformation in the political economy of power itself.

The 20th century taught states how to compete over finite resources. The 21st century may reward those capable of organizing renewable abundance. Oil shaped the geopolitics of the past, biomass may shape the geoeconomics of the future. The strategic question for BRICS is therefore no longer whether agricultural waste has value, but whether it is prepared to recognize that value before others do.

For BRICS countries, which collectively represent nearly half of humanity, this transition offers an opportunity to break the cycle of dependency and to build a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable economic order. The resource is abundant. The technology is available. What remains is the political will to act—not as a gesture of defiance, but as a demonstration of strategic foresight.

If the 20th century rewarded those who controlled oil wells, the 21st century may reward those who mastered biological production systems. In that world, the decisive geopolitical advantage will belong less to countries endowed with scarce resources than to those capable of transforming renewable abundance into strategic power. The decisive question for the emerging international order is therefore not whether renewable abundance exists, but which states will acquire the institutional capacity to transform it into strategic capital.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has turned quarter a century in June, and, significantly, it has grown to counter Western hegemony in the global political and financial systems. Throughout the SCO’s history, Russia has viewed it primarily as a platform to utilize in order to remain influential in Central Asia at an affordable cost and never lose it to China, and establish multipolarity in the face of the Western-led order which it sees as threatening. During the first 15 years, the SCO was only secondary for Russia after to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Subsequently, the platform has become more important in Moscow’s diplomatic bag. After 2014 and particularly after 2022, it has become one of the last institutions where Russia can act as a normal member of the international community, rather than an isolated pariah state.

Russia’s multilateralism is of a broader pattern: international institutions are important to it primarily as a means to affirm its status and overcome Western constraints, and less as a means of profound integration.

The Founding Logic: Border Security and a Secondary Track

The SCO is the successor to the Shanghai Five formed in 1996. The latter was born out of a technical issue: demarcating and demilitarizing the Sino-Soviet border with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. As Moscow’s politics at the time was recovering from the collapse of the Soviet administrative structures, its main concern was preventing an institutional vacuum rather than establishing a new supranational mechanism. For Russia, it was beneficial but not imperative. Moscow’s focus during the post-Soviet era was on its own post-Soviet arrangements, particularly the CSTO as a military alliance, rather than the SCO, which is more of a bridge to China. This hierarchy has hardly changed following the SCO’s formalization as an organization with counter-terrorism ambitions in 2001. In the 2000s, Russia’s Central Asia policy shifted to bilateral agreements and the CSTO’s collective-defense provisions, deliberately not in the SCO’s repertoire. What the CSTO could not provide was a framework involving China, while the SCO offered a way to handle Beijing’s regional agenda without granting it sole authority over it.

A Division of Labor, Not a Partnership of Equals

In the 2010s, a working division emerged. After the 2018 Qingdao Summit, the International Institute for Strategic Studies stated: “Russia leads in politico-military affairs, communications, and culture, whereas China leads in economic development, investment, and infrastructure.” The comparative advantage was not accidental: Russia was not able to compete with China for capital. Yet Russia possessed cultural and military capabilities with which it could dominate a region with a Soviet-trained population: the Russian language was relatively accessible and many Central Asian officers had been trained in Russia. Russia’s relevance to the SCO has payed its way in the Peace Mission joint exercises, in which Russia typically takes the lead while China is comparatively inexperienced in training military forces’ interoperability. This “division of labor” allows Moscow to maintain presence in the security field where Beijing becomes less significant.

The SCO was obviously never intended to be the real driver of Russia’s regional agenda, as its parallel institution-building reveals.

The Eurasian Union proposed by Vladimir Putin in 2011 and realized as the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in 2015 was a Russian-led alternative to Chinese-led economic integration. It duplicated, rather than complemented, the SCO’s long-awaited free-trade aspirations. With Russia and China coordinating the projects, it became a forum that all SCO members could attend, once the terms were agreed between the two countries. As the pattern suggests, when Russia controls the terms, it builds its own structures and joins the SCO only as a cheap move.

Guarding against Chinese Primacy through Enlargement

Russia has been pushing for India’s SCO membership (along with Pakistan’s) as a strategy to reduce Chinese influence in the region, not as a sincere effort to strengthen regional order. The growth of the SCO, in which China backs Pakistan and Russia backs India, was also a point of difference between the two powers. By 2018, both South Asian states had become full-fledged members, and the SCO’s promotional numbers—80% of Eurasia’s landmass, 43% of the world’s population, a quarter of the global GDP—proved useful not because they indicated a functional integration of the states under the club’s influence, but because they reduced China’s share in the bloc. It is in keeping with what the preface of Marochkin and Bezborodov’s book[1] says about the SCO’s value: “a new experience of reference within intergovernmental regional organizations which would be appropriate to a new international world of growing attempts to establish a unipolar world to the detriment of a multipolar one.” The preface, written mostly by Russian university scholars, reflects Russian official discourse and speaks of mistrust between “world powers,” a “crisis of the geopolitical paradigm,” and a “post-COVID world of turbulence and uncertainty” in which the SCO’s chief utility lies in proving that it is possible to live in a world without Western tutelage.

Sovereignty as a Design Principle, Not Accident

This symbolic function accounts for Russia’s lack of aspirations towards the SCO’s supranational authority, unlike its rhetorical flirting, at times, with the EAEU’s deeper integration—a tool in which Moscow has the edge.

The organization’s initial pledges of “mutual trust, mutual respect, equality, ... respect for diverse civilizations” are appropriate for Russia twice over: they preclude the organization from permitting the outside world to examine its own policies and practices, and they set the SCO apart from the European Union model that the Kremlin has always seen as a tool for exporting Western values.

The same is evident in Naarajärvi’s conceptual framework of new-regionalism, where the SCO is ranked low in “political integration” and Central Asian regionalization is characterized as being “tightly in the hands of the state administrations”[2]—an aspect the researcher considers to be somewhat old. For Russia, it is not a failure but the essence: inscribing itself as the center of the forum simultaneously shields its rulers’ sovereignty from external criticism.

Conclusion: Dependency without Deference

Russian policy towards the SCO has always been that of measured instrumentalism—with little investment where it had other options, with symbolic emphasis when it needed a stage, and with a constant opposition to any institutional depth that might limit its capacity for action.

The SCO has become more integral to Russia’s interests in the last few years: following the imposition of Western sanctions its search for alternative venues for diplomatic negotiations and non-Western political forums has grown, as well as the need to rely on China as an economic partner of last resort.

Also, the SCO has become more important to Russia as Beijing has strengthened its influence within the SCO while Russia has weakened its own.

Russian multilateralism has one obvious core contradiction: institutions become more valuable to Moscow when its role in fashioning them decreases. Rather than a keystone of Russian grand strategy, the SCO is a reflection of its limitations; and the more it remains the only choice for posturing, the more useful it is.

The abridged version of this text has been published in Russian in the newspaper Kommersant as part of the project Contours of the Future.

Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap has become a fatalistic narrative in Western policy circles, asserting that a rising power and an established hegemon are bound to clash. This article rejects such determinism while acknowledging genuine bilateral risks. Great-power war is a political choice shaped by institutional guardrails, economic ties, strategic doctrines, and domestic politics. Structural frictions between the U.S.-led alliance system and the emerging multipolar order are manageable through reciprocal transparency, balanced crisis mechanisms, and mutual respect for sovereign equality under the UN Charter. Drawing on the May 2026 Trump-Xi Summit and recent defense shifts, this analysis outlines a pragmatic path towards managed coexistence—contingent on parallel adjustments by Washington and Beijing.

The Trap Is a Warning, not a Verdict

Twelve of sixteen historical power transitions ended in war, yet these statistics are a historical correlation, not an unbreakable law. The Thucydides framework ignores modern constraints absent in ancient Athens and Sparta: nuclear deterrence, the UN Charter’s prohibition on aggressive war, over $1 trillion in bilateral economic integration, and global public aversion to great-power conflicts. A 2023 Pew survey shows that most people in both countries view war as an existential threat, which creates shared political incentives for de-escalation.

Conflict erupts only when three conditions converge: mutual security anxieties calcify into paranoid misperception, domestic hawkish voices override war’s catastrophic costs, and crisis communication collapses. All three are amenable to policy intervention.

The question is not whether war is inevitable, but whether the leaders on both sides possess the political will to keep these triggers in check, and whether Washington can abandon its zero-sum framing of China’s rise.

Structural Tensions: Asymmetric Postures and Divergent Interests

The current frictions arise from a structural mismatch: the U.S.-centered alliance order built for bipolar confrontation struggles to accommodate a multipolar world. China does not seek to overturn the international system but to reform its inequitable elements—a legitimate aspiration shared by many developing nations.

Washington’s perspective: U.S. strategists cite China’s military modernization, South China Sea infrastructure, and Taiwan Strait drills as sources of regional instability. These concerns are understandable but must diregard the context: China’s naval buildup is defensive, with over 80% of its energy imports traversing vulnerable sea lanes.

Beijing’s perspective: The U.S. maintains 375 military installations across the Indo-Pacific, has expanded exclusive blocs like AUKUS, enforces unilateral technology containment, and repeatedly passes legislation interfering in China’s internal affairs—most egregiously on the Taiwan question. This constitutes strategic encirclement that no sovereign state could tolerate.

Acknowledging legal contestation: Beijing regards activities around Taiwan and the South China Sea as sovereign rights under its interpretation of international law, though it acknowledges that the U.S. and its allies hold a different legal interpretation, yet such differences cannot serve as grounds for repeated military provocations near China’s territorial waters.

The disproportionateness is clear: U.S. forces operate globally; China’s posture is regionally defensive. Yet Washington demands Chinese transparency while reserving its own opacity—an imbalance that fuels rather than reduces mistrust.

Strategic Doctrine, Not Cultural Stereotypes

Many Western analysts invoke Confucian or Tianxia tropes to label China as inherently non-expansionist—a flawed civilizational essentialism that explains little. Pre-modern dynasties conducted frontier expansions; culture alone does not determine a state’s behavior.

China’s official defense White Papers (2019, 2022) offer a clearer framework: Beijing rejects hegemonism and expansionism, prioritizes homeland defense, and follows Sun Tzu’s logic of deterrence over offensive warfare. Military strength exists to counter external threats, as confrontation would derail China’s core goal of high-quality development. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) embodies this orientation, prioritizing developmental influence through economic interdependence rather than military conquest. While critics have raised debt concerns, China has implemented meaningful reforms: restructured repayment timelines, expanded grant financing and independent third-party audits in partner countries. Implementation remains a work in progress, but the trajectory reflects a strategic choice for cooperation over coercion.

The Decoupling Paradox: Eroding Economic Guardrails

Bilateral trade reached $664 billion in 2025, with total commercial activity exceeding $1 trillion. The Peterson Institute estimates full-scale conflict would reduce global GDP by 10–15% within two years. Yet economic integration alone cannot prevent war, as pre-1914 Europe tragically demonstrated.

Today’s critical paradox is that the U.S. actively enforces decoupling in strategically vital sectors—semiconductors, AI, quantum computing—via export controls and industrial subsidies, while low-stakes sectors like consumer goods provide limited stabilizing effect. The economic buffer is being eroded where it matters most. The 2026 summit’s Trade and Investment Boards offer some relief, but their impact is undermined by Washington’s unilateral technology containment. While China has consistently advocated for open, rules-based trade, Washington’s export controls and industrial subsidies have increasingly weaponised economic interdependence. China maintains that such unilateral measures are counterproductive but also recognizes that strategic competition in dual-use technologies will likely persist, making it all the more urgent to preserve cooperation in non-strategic sectors.

The May 2026 Summit: Partial Progress, Unresolved Contradictions

The May 2026 summit yielded tangible results: joint trade boards, expanded agricultural cooperation, resumed military dialogue, and a ‘strategic stability’ framework. The U.S. Defense Secretary softened adversarial rhetoric at the Shangri-La Dialogue—a positive but insufficient step.

Yet severe risks persist. China’s decision to send scholarly rather than ministerial defense delegates reflected Beijing’s assessment that U.S. congressional actions on Taiwan undercut the Summit’s positive momentum. While this was a diplomatic signal of displeasure, it also highlighted a mutual problem: neither side has fully insulated crisis communication from domestic political interference. The two sides have not established clear, symmetrical red lines distinguishing routine operations from provocations. The summit built a dialogue framework but failed to resolve distrust rooted in U.S. containment strategy. Above all, Washington must stop repeatedly damaging China’s core interests such as the Taiwan question to create necessary preconditions for sustained high-level military exchanges.

Domestic Politics: Reactive Pressures on Both Sides

Domestic hawkishness in both nations is largely reactive to the other’s strategic moves. In the U.S., Congress consistently outflanks the executive on China policy, with partisan incentives pushing presidential candidates towards anti-China rhetoric and legislative interference in Taiwan affairs.

In China, public sentiment on the Taiwan question constrains unilateral concessions when citizens regard territorial integrity as an inviolable bottom line. This nationalist sentiment arises from decades of external pressure, not inherent aggression. For China, sovereignty, particularly over Taiwan, is non-negotiable, a position rooted in domestic consensus.

For the U.S., alliance commitments and democratic values are similarly non-negotiable domestic imperatives. Recognizing each other’s domestic red lines, rather than testing them, is essential to prevent domestic pressures from driving escalation.

Three Symmetrical De-escalation Mechanisms for Consideration

To translate the summit’s diplomatic momentum into durable stability, policymakers on both sides may wish to consider several equal, verifiable operational rules to prevent accidental escalation:

First, a 72-hour advance notification mechanism for missile tests, large-scale coastal naval exercises, and strategic bomber deployments, modelled on the 1988 U.S.-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement, with identical obligations for both sides. Such transparency would reduce the information asymmetry that fuels worst-case assumptions.

Second, a dual-site joint crisis communication center in Hawaii and Beijing, staffed with dedicated language officers and enabling real-time, symmetrical data sharing on maritime and aerial activity, transforming crisis response from hours to minutes.

Third, mutual annual disclosure of military exercise schedules: China publishing South China Sea and Taiwan Strait drill plans and the U.S. publishing its Freedom of Navigation Operations and allied exercise plans near Chinese waters. This would normalize activities currently interpreted as provocative.

These measures are technically feasible and low-cost. Their adoption depends on political willingness, particularly whether Washington can accept symmetric transparency rather than demanding Chinese concessions while reserving its own prerogatives. China has consistently supported balanced confidence-building; the question is whether the U.S. is prepared to reciprocate.

Reciprocal Adjustments, Differentiated Responsibilities

Sustainable stability demands reciprocal but differentiated adjustments based on each side’s structural position.

For the U.S.: Washington must accept China’s legitimate aspiration for fair global governance reform, scale back provocative close-in patrols, end blanket industrial suppression disguised under tech security safeguards, and cease legislative interference in Taiwan. The U.S. alliance system was built for a bipolar era; its expansion now destabilizes rather than secures the region.

For China: Beijing will continue enhancing UN-aligned military spending transparency, strengthen multilateral BRI oversight, and publish defensive drill schedules on a reciprocal basis, without compromising sovereignty over Taiwan and adjacent waters.

U.S. adjustments require reconsidering military deployments and technology controls that Beijing views as hostile; China’s adjustments require deepening transparency measures that Washington views as essential. Both carry domestic political costs. The challenge is not determining who moves first but designing a parallel framework where both sides’ adjustments are sequenced and verifiable, building trust through simultaneous, reciprocal action.

*   *   *

The Thucydides Trap is a cautionary tale, not an inevitable prophecy. Managed coexistence requires symmetrical crisis rules, balanced domestic narratives, and guardrails separating global collaborative issues from geopolitical competition. Climate action, pandemic response, and nuclear non-proliferation can anchor bilateral ties if insulated from rivalry.

The 2026 Summit established the foundation for dialogue. The task ahead is to populate it with equal, reciprocal operational rules. In a nuclear multipolar world, coexistence is not idealism, it is the only rational path. Long-term stability hinges on both capitals: Washington acknowledging China’s legitimate aspirations for global governance reform and security, and Beijing continuing to provide the transparency and reassurance that addresses allied concerns. Neither side can demand the other move first; both must move together sequencing their adjustments through the institutional framework established at the 2026 Summit. Fundamentally, enduring stability cannot be achieved unless the U.S. abandons its outdated hegemonic mindset of containing China’s peaceful development.

Since the second decade of the 21st century the world has been living in a situation of disorder, which has now transformed into the most dangerous geopolitical turmoil since World War II. Its main characteristics are:

1) The emergence and consolidation of a multipolar world triggered by the rapid rise of China and other East Asian nations.

2) The relative decline of the West, accelerated by the United States’ highly problematic strategic choices: a three-front war against Russia, China, and Iran and, since 2025, an unprecedented fragmentation of the West.

3) The West’s frantic efforts to reverse its gradual decline, stopping short at nothing, including violation of international rules, use of violence, and piracy. To preserve their dominance, the U.S. and its allies are resorting to military operations and even wars.  

4) This notwithstanding, the West, and especially the U.S., remain powerful to cause—and are causing—great damage urbi et orbi. This fact should not be underestimated.

An important facet of the West’s decline is its moral decay and intellectual degradation. This is clearly seen in the low morals of current European leaders, with few exceptions, and of U.S. presidents; as well as the electoral fraud and manipulations (e.g., used to elect George W. Bush and then Donald J. Trump twice as presidents).

Few could have imagined the scope of corruption, debauchery, and pedophilia among politicians, businessmen and intellectuals as the disclosed sex offence scheme of Jeffrey Epstein and his high-profile circle has shown.

The Intensification of Racism in the West: Geopolitical Implications

All of this is well known in general outlines. Less recognized and often overlooked is the racial underpinning of the current tense geopolitical situation. The widespread ingrained racism of structural nature adds a particularly perverse connotation to the current geopolitical picture.

For purposes of analysis, today’s world can be divided into two parts—the Collective West and the Global South. The Collective West is normally understood as comprising the U.S.-led states: Canada, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and some other high-income countries. The population of the West, excluding Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, accounts for merely 12% of the world’s population, with a tendency to decrease. The Global South is usually understood to correspond to the Rest (to recall Niall Ferguson’s book The West and the Rest), i.e., the emerging and developing countries of Eurasia, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The central point is that approximately 3/4 of the people residing in the West are white, with non-white minorities mainly employed in low-skilled jobs that whites are no longer willing to do.

The population of the Global South is completely different in terms of racial composition. The vast majority are blacks, browns, yellows, mestizos, etc. Whites have been a minority in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America, where European colonization had more weight.

 In the white West, structural racism has taken root, anchored in the conviction that Western civilization, more developed and sophisticated, is the product of superior people. People of much older civilizations, such as Chinese, Indian and Iranian, smile ironically at this pretension. When Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a journalist what he thought of Western civilization, the answer was: “I think it would be a good idea.”

Western racism is an old and persisting phenomenon. In the second half of the 20th century it was disguised by varying layers of hypocrisy, today the feeling of superiority over non-whites has become more transparent.

Yet the peoples who were previously colonized or semi-colonized no longer recognize the superiority of whites. They resist the colonial or neocolonial schemes of exploitation imposed by the Europeans and the Americans. They want to have their rights accepted—in practice and not just in theory. As Vladimir Putin said, “The Western elites are used to stuff their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. That vampire’s ball is coming to an end.”

The world’s white minority adamantly resents losing world hegemony and the privileges associated with it. ‘Human, all too human,’ Nietzsche would say. Centuries of world domination are not easily forgotten and abandoned.

The Growing Resistance to Immigration and Civilizational Regression

Another phenomenon of crucial importance is the large-scale migration of Latin Americans, Africans and West Asians who flee wars (many of them unleashed by the West) or seek better living conditions in the U.S. and Europe. As migration grows, so does the revulsion in the West towards immigrants, especially Muslims. Restrictions on immigration have gained broad public support among Europeans and Americans. The barriers and—often—inhumane ways of border control, hostility against immigrants, and resentment against even migrant citizens, are indicative of the U.S. and Europe’s civilizational regression.

The popular fight against immigration, on both sides of the North Atlantic, partly reflects the desire to protect Western culture against the growing presence of people belonging to other cultures and other religions. This is understandable. However, it is mixed with deep-rooted racism—the belief in the superiority of whites. Remarkable in this respect is that white immigrants, e.g., from Ukraine, face far fewer obstacles in Europe than Arabs or black Africans. A Ukrainian immigrant or refugee is basically seen as “one of us.”

What we have, in fact, is a new form of xenophobic fascism, with the radical rejection of immigrants at its heart. On the political party level, it is manifested in the rise of the ‘new right’ discourse in Europe and the United States.

Often referred to as ‘populist’, resonating with broad anti-immigration public sentiment, it is growing—partly because the traditional parties cannot embrace it without violating their basic principles.

Like Jews in Nazi Germany and other European countries, Muslims and other non-whites have been made a convenient scapegoat for the adverse social consequences of the West’s decline and the impossibility of continuing to exploit the rest of the world. Non-white migrants are held responsible for all sorts of crimes and violence. They are accused of replacing white workers and generating unemployment among them—when, in fact, migrant workers are engaged in unautomated and low-paid jobs that the white population rejects.

The ‘new right’ discourse in Europe and America is not exactly new, it is rather a regression to the pre-Enlightenment conceptions. It can be called fascist or Nazi, as it contains elements of this worldview, with Muslims occupying the place previously reserved for Jews. Civilizational regression has acquired such a dimension that it would be appropriate to speak of an Age of Obscurantism or an Age of Endarkenment. In what other era could an absolutely crude figure like Donald Trump be at the center of the world stage? Trump is an extreme case, but the truth is that few Western leaders measure up to the positions they hold.

In short, Europe and the U.S., previously at the forefront of the Enlightenment, are vigorously sponsoring a movement in the opposite direction.  The 18th century became known as the Century of Enlightenment; the 21st century may go down in history as the Century of Endarkenment.

Palestinian Genocide

The genocide perpetrated by Israeli Jews against Palestinians is perhaps the clearest symptom of Western civilization’s shipwreck and the central ingredient of this Age of Endarkenment. Europe’s and, above all, the U.S.’s support of Israel has compromised, perhaps irreversibly, the West’s adherence to the moral values it has been preaching so vigorously.

Importantly, Israel is far from an isolated case. Israel’s settler colonialism and genocide in Palestine have many precedents. In fact, Israel’s criminal behavior is part of the centuries-old European tradition.

 What is happening in Gaza is the latest colonial genocide practiced by white Europeans against non-whites. Beginning in the 16th century, Europeans and their descendants destroyed peoples in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania to occupy their lands with immigrants from the metropolis. In Europe itself, the Holocaust would not have had the prominence it has if it had not victimized whites. Using various forms of genocide, Europeans victimized other races in what we now call the Global South, to the point of exterminating them completely or partially, like in Australia and North and South America.

The crucial and much commented difference of the genocide in Gaza from the previous genocides is that it has got wide and instantaneous media coverage, with a planetary impact. The Germans could, with some credibility, claim that they were unaware of the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps, the Israelis are not in a position to claim the same.  And they do not really try. Moreover, Zionist extremists, inside and outside the Netanyahu government, take pride in killing Palestinians, justifying it by the “fight against terrorism” and even presenting the murder of Palestinian children as the elimination of “future terrorists.”

Furthermore, Gaza is sometimes interpreted as an experiment of the decaying Western Empire—a genocide broadcast globally in real time as a warning to all. The message goes like this: look what can happen to non-white peoples who resist the imperial pretensions of the West.

Inevitably, political, economic, and military support for Israel by the U.S. and most of Europe exacts an immense political price. No one believes anymore in the existence of Western values. The image, once so strong, has been destroyed in the name of a stalwart defense of Israel’s policies and priorities.

Challenges for Brazil

In conclusion a few words about Brazil that may be partly relevant to other nations of the Global South.

How can we prepare Brazil for a new international era, very different from the one we were used to?

The first imperative for Brazilians is to abandon, as soon as possible, the belief that international differences can be resolved with goodwill, diplomacy, and soft power. Careful psychological, economic and military preparation is imperative to face the storms ahead. It is not a choice or something that can be postponed. This is the most urgent challenge facing the country.

In the psychological realm, we need to overcome the inferiority complex that downgrades the country and makes our international relations so difficult. In other words, we must throw overboard all the remnants of centuries of cultural colonization. We also need to abandon our traditional pacifism—not to attack anyone, but to remember that to live in peace one needs to prepare for war. Se vis pacem para bellum, as the Romans said.

In the economy, Brazil must seek self-sufficiency in essential areas, avoiding dependence on foreign suppliers whenever feasible, especially from countries that appear as potential aggressors. Strategic production chains must be built mostly within the national territory or in reliable countries.

Self-sufficiency generates, of course, losses in economic efficiency, but the time is gone when one could rely with some plausibility on trade and financial openness as levers for development.

The second imperative is of positive nature. Brazil is able, perhaps like no other country, to offer a new word to the world, a message of reconciliation and unity. Moreover, our historical destiny may be in starting, together with other nations, a Second Renaissance that will free us from the threats and catastrophes of the Age of Endarkenment.

Thanks to its dimensions, mix of peoples from all parts of the planet, and tradition of openness to the world, Brazilians can play a significant role in the world’s salvation.

As recently as 26 July this year, Ursula von der Leyen appeared full of confidence in victory during her visit to Kyiv: she claimed the tide of the war had turned, that Ukraine had regained the initiative, and that Russia was on the defensive. The cause of this supposed turnaround, after four and a half years of a devastating war, is said to be a new ‘wonder weapon’: drones which, with the help of AI provided by Palantir and others, can carry the war deep into the Russian hinterland and precisely destroy oil refineries and other critical infrastructure there. The Russian economy – particularly the energy sector – is said to be severely weakened, and the war Russia started has now hit the country itself “with full force”.

On the battlefield too, according to these accounts, Ukraine has achieved considerable success with autonomously operating “killer drones”. These drones are said to be capable of automatically detecting and destroying all life at a distance of 30 kilometres on the front line. Technology, it is claimed, has thus more than compensated for the shortage of Ukrainian soldiers. Russian soldiers, by contrast, are now said paying a heavy price in lives without being able to demonstrate any military successes. This must be wearing down the aggressors and forcing Putin to acknowledge that he is going to lose the war.

These accounts were accompanied by media-effective drone attacks on Moscow and St Petersburg. No wonder, then, that the mainstream Western media have been full of victory reports over the past two months. Some even speculated that Russia could only hold out for another six months; a coup in Moscow was deemed possible. The strategically important Crimea was said to have been largely cut off from Russia by Ukrainian attacks. Putin would now be forced to the negotiating table as the loser – and on the terms of the European NATO states, which would amount to a Russian surrender. Their policy of providing massive military, political and financial support to Ukraine, whilst at the same time refusing any talks until Russia was ‘brought to its knees’, seemed to have paid off.

But is that really the case? Or may the tide actually have turned in Russia’s favour?

It is striking that for the past week there have been hardly any reports on the course of the war, and the victory announcements have largely fallen silent. This is because doubts are mounting, both in the US and in Ukraine itself, about the success of the drone war deep within the Russian hinterland.

One need only heed the warnings of General Zaluzhnyi: the drone war is not very successful and far too expensive. As a former Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and current ambassador to London, he should know. According to the pro-Ukrainian war monitors ‘Dron-Bomber’, the Russians are now reportedly achieving a high shoot-down rate of Ukrainian drones. The dismissal of Ukrainian Defence Minister Fedorov is also likely to be linked to the looming failure of the drone war. Is the realisation taking hold that this conflict cannot be won by a drone warfare alone?

This means that developments on the battlefield remain decisive. However, there can be no question of the military stalemate claimed by the Western media. According to a report by the Ukrainian ‘Telegram Channel’: “in July this year, the armed forces of the Russian Federation occupied 728.45 km² of territory in the SVO (Special Operation) zone, which represents the best result since October 2024 … The pace of the Russian armed forces’ offensive is increasing”. Russian territorial gains are said to have occurred not only in the Donbas but also around Kharkiv and in Zaporizhzhia. This is still proceeding slowly, but it is a war of attrition whose primary aim is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Could this objective be achieved by capturing the last remaining fortified defensive positions around the Donbas cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk?

Even more serious for Ukraine is the fact that its drone attacks have led to a hardening of the Russian position. The Russian leadership is now openly speaking of a war – including a war by NATO against Russia – and has significantly intensified the conflict. In the cruel logic of war, the destruction in Ukraine now far exceeds that in Russia. Another crucial factor is that Ukraine has no air defences to speak of and is barely able to defend itself against massive Russian drone and missile attacks, whilst the intensity of Ukrainian attacks is reportedly waning.

This is already having consequences. The Ukrainian Black Sea ports in and around Odessa are said to have been bombed so heavily that Ukraine has effectively become a ‘landlocked country’. If these reports are accurate, this would be a severe blow: to date, around 70 per cent of all Ukrainian imports and exports, as well as 90 per cent of agricultural exports, have been handled via these ports. Key bridges, such as the Zatoka Bridge, which connects Odessa with the Romanian Black Sea ports, have also been destroyed. Furthermore, rail and road links, petrol stations, the power grid, industrial facilities and warehouses are being systematically destroyed.

The European NATO member states can do little to change this – they lack the military capabilities. Plans to station a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Poland or even to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine are completely unrealistic. The United States has recently announced that it will hand over the leadership of the NATO centre in Wiesbaden, which coordinates military support for Ukraine, entirely to European NATO member states. There is even talk of disbanding this NATO facility, which is crucial for Ukraine. Further, with the Iran war ranging, the US has hardly any weapons left to spare. There can therefore be little question of renewed US military involvement in the war in Ukraine.

Even before the latest escalation of the war, there were clear indications that the Ukrainian army was in considerable difficulty. Upon taking office in January, Minister Fedorov spoke of around 200,000 deserters; other MPs even cited significantly higher figures. Furthermore, some two million Ukrainian men are said to have evaded conscription orders. Whichever figures are accurate, they point to an alarming state of affairs within the Ukrainian armed forces – a situation that cannot be remedied either by forced recruitment on the streets or, as is now becoming apparent, by drones controlled by artificial intelligence. Similarly, a proposal now being discussed by the EU – to withdraw refugee status from Ukrainian men who have fled, in breach of international law, and to send them back to Ukraine to face the war – is further evidence of the hopelessness of the situation.

In May, the Ukrainian Minister for Social Affairs, Denys Ulyutin, stated that the population in the government-controlled part of the country had shrunk from 52 million (at the time of independence in 1991) to possibly 22 million. Of these, around 11 million are on social security, predominantly pensioners and war invalids. He expects the population to continue to fall after the war ends, as young men – once exempt from military service – would follow their families to the West. He does not expect any significant return of Ukrainians living abroad. Added to this demographic decline are increasing impoverishment, deep social inequalities, pervasive corruption, astronomical public debt and the country’s economic collapse.

This is hardly a state – let alone an army – to which the media could realistically attribute an imminent military turnaround or even victory.

Of course, such forecasts must be treated with caution. Yet the apparent failure of the drone war to bring about a strategic turning point should make it clear to the European NATO member states that, at the end of this escalation which we have accompanied with such fanfare, Ukraine may not emerge as the victor, but is instead sliding into an increasingly devastated, depopulated and bled-dry country. This should give us cause for great concern for the suffering people in Ukraine. European NATO-states must ask themselves whether a continuation of the war – which they have demanded and supported – can still be morally justified at all.

The European NATO member states are only harming Ukraine with their illusions of victory and wonder weapons, and must finally base their policy on a more realistic assessment of how the war is unfolding. It is therefore time to consider what would happen if the Ukrainian army’s resistance were to collapse one day and Russia were to capture Kharkiv and Odessa as well. Any remnant of Ukraine that remained would scarcely be viable. It must be in the top interest not only of Ukraine but also of its western backers to prevent such a scenario to develop. But how?

Certainly, this cannot be prevented through direct military intervention by NATO. This would make the situation only much worse – also for Ukraine – as such a course of action would inevitably entail the risk of a nuclear war, which nobody can win. Diplomacy therefore remains the only realistic option. After almost five years of war, it is high time that the European NATO member states actively sought dialogue with Russia. Germany – given its role as the strongest country in the EU, its geographical location and its historical responsibility – should take the first step.

To move beyond the entrenched positions of both governments, an initial rapprochement through a civil‑society initiative involving respected and influential figures may be advisable. Such an approach could open a first, cautious pathway toward renewed understanding after years of silence and mutual demonisation. Europe needs peace, and lasting peace can only be achieved with Russia, not against it.

There is not much time left for this.

This text has been published in Russian in the newspaper Kommersant as part of the project Contours of the Future.

There is one brutal truth about war. No matter how devastating it becomes, states continue to find reasons to fight each other. But while war is a permanent attribute of global politics, its characteristics are always evolving.

Today, military power has been democratized by changes in warfare technologies and economics. The proliferation of cheap, precise, and mass-produced drones and missiles has leveled the playing field, allowing small states to compel larger, more sophisticated militaries to accept stalemate. Already, protracted wars have ensnared the United States and Russia, two of the most powerful militaries, and this trend will continue.

Over the next decade, easily deployed destructive weapons will ordain indecisive conflicts that cost a lot and achieve little. This will not convince political leaders that military force should be abandoned. But it will shape the tactics of future wars, as states will try to avoid the challenges of attrition warfare.

First, hybrid tactics—those that fall just below the threshold of full-scale conflict—will become more prevalent and aggressive. These tools have clear benefits for states trying to stay out of long and expensive confrontations because they limit direct involvement, attribution, and the scope of the victim’s retaliation. These tactics are already widely used. China, for example, has exploited hybrid methods against Taiwan and Japan to limit their freedom of maneuver.

In future wars states will upgrade their use of hybrid tools qualitatively and quantitatively. They will substitute them for conventional warfare, using pressure to open space for future more assertive military action. They will also revise the boundary between war and peace, normalizing a new hybrid status quo that encompasses even some kinetic operations.

This might include physical destruction of critical infrastructure, debilitating cyber and economic campaigns, and limited strikes on government and civilian targets.

As a result, future war will increasingly develop into a daily routine, spilling off battlefields into the lives of average citizens far from frontlines.

Second, wars fought primarily as campaigns of dueling deep strikes will become more common and punishing. Such ‘stand-off wars’ (so named because they can be fought by adversaries far from a line of contact) have a low and falling cost of entry, but they can still impose physical and psychological damage, destroy industrial capacity, or disrupt an adversary’s military development. This makes them seductive for states seeking to avoid expensive ground campaigns and the collateral risk of a deadlock.

In the past, deep strike capabilities were the privilege of major powers, but this is changing. States will still invest in advanced powerful missiles, but they can also turn to inexpensive long-range munitions and drones that are almost as effective if less powerful. This will expand the frequency of stand-off wars but also their ferocity, as combatants increase the volume, precision, and payload of their strikes, as seen in the Iran war.

As deep strike weapons become faster, more deadly and difficult to intercept, acceptable target sets are likely to be expanded, making future stand-off wars more grueling and terrifying for civilian populations. In addition, as deep strike weapons can more easily hit sensitive military sites and assassinate leaders, their use will feed insecurity, fuel arms race, and make pre-emptive attacks or nuclear strikes more likely.

Finally, future war will be increasingly automated. This may not mean war fought by robots, but rather by remote-operated uncrewed systems and artificial intelligence.

The push for automation is about efficiency. Reliance on AI-controlled, remote-operated, and uncrewed systems make war faster and less personal. These systems reduce the demand for manpower, allow military commanders to take greater risks, and speed decision-making in high pressure environments. Israel, for example, has used such systems in Gaza to search houses and map tunnels while soldiers remained out of danger.

As their quality improves, automated and AI-powered systems will dominate warfare planning and execution. This will relegate military personnel to the role of programmer or remote operator. However, automation may never be absolute. Autonomous systems cannot (yet) replicate human strategic thinking or judge context.

Automated war will feel different to those involved. It is hard to imagine a populace being invested in a war fought by machines on their behalf, though this prospect is deeply unnerving. Automated war will also bring uncertainty and misperception, especially when errors occur, which will complicate decision-making and lead wars to spiral in undesired ways.This picture of future warfare is unsettling. Political leaders may think twice about costly ground invasions. But the type of warfare that emerges instead will be more diffuse, blurring the line between war and not war. It will also be more vicious and perilous, dominated by high-powered missiles and automated systems only loosely controlled by humans.

Future wars, then, will not be more decisive or controllable. They will simply swap the old risks for new risks, leaving the enduring potential for catastrophe unchanged.

After U.S. Navy forces attacked two Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf on 19 October 1987, Wall Street suffered one of the heaviest losses in its history—$560 billion. Black Monday went down in history next to the 1929 stock market crash.[1] But a rising New York property man from Brooklyn was already underscoring the vital importance of not permitting Iran to possess nuclear weapons. That man was Donald Trump.[2]

The Iran war which began with U.S. and Israeli attacks on 28 February this year (following the Twelve-Day War in summer 2025) is in a strategic stalemate. The ceasefire exists only on paper and concerns about escalation are growing.

Since WWII, major democracies have been the ones who started most wars of aggression or got involved in asymmetric wars against smaller states—Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam, and Algeria. Remarkably, they lost most of them.[3] Today, the U.S., vastly superior militarily and economically, is stuck in an asymmetric war with an extremely uneven distribution of power. Why is the global power, with a military budget exceeding the combined volume of the next ten largest states’ budgets, unable to defeat a middle power?

My assumption is that since an asymmetric war is not a matter of existence for democracies (unlike for their weaker opponents), public opposition to the continuation of such a war—especially where there is no coherent overall strategy— soon begins to grow, raising pressure on the executive to end it as quickly as possible, i.e. without achieving the objectives and thus losing the war.

In an asymmetric war[4] the politically, militarily, and economically weaker party, which cannot defeat the stronger party in an ‘open battle’ (i.e., impose its will on the opponent by kinetic means, to borrow from Clausewitz), employs non-kinetic means along kinetic (military) ones: attacking public opinion through disinformation and a war of narratives, destabilizing the opponent’s public institutions, influencing government policy, and shaping public opinion in its favor—exactly as great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu recommended in the 5th century BC.[5]

This does not mean that Iran is exploiting and fanning the flames of antiwar opinion among the American public or covertly spreading Iranian propaganda in the U.S., for example, by paying American actors.[6] But in an asymmetric war decisions leading to victory or failure lie in the realms of morale, legitimacy, politics, and/or the economy, or a combination of the above, with the dominant factors shifting over the course of the war.[7]

What is important in any war, including asymmetric, is a clearly defined unambiguous political objective. By contrast, the means to achieve this objective can and must be deployable in any combination without restriction.[8] In the book fittingly titled Unrestricted Warfare in the English translation, Chinese military leaders and party officials Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui identify different types of warfare according to the dominant means deployed: environmental war (change of the weather and composition of the atmosphere, artificial earthquakes, and engagement through NGOs; psychological warfare; smuggling warfare; media warfare; drug warfare (e.g., fentanyl in the U.S.); resources warfare, economic aid warfare (with development assistance as a disguise for control of a foreign market); cultural warfare (assimilation by cultural hegemony); international law warfare.[9]

The problem for the U.S.—and generally for the collective West and to a certain extent for Russia in the Ukraine war—is the misguided belief that political, military, and/or economic objectives can be achieved through technological superiority alone. This delusion can metapolitically be traced to the Enlightenment ideology of progress, advocating the creation of a kind of technological nirvana—a secular, materialist, atheistic paradise on Earth built with the help of technology. The Chinese military thinkers decry this fallacy on several points, emphasizing that “…in future warfare, certain advanced weapons may play a leading role. However, as for determining the outcome of war, it is now very difficult for anyone to occupy an unmatched position.”[10] Referring to U.S. strategists, they write: “They would rather treat war as the opponent in the marathon race of military technology and are not willing to look at it more as a test of morale and courage, wisdom and strategy.”[11]

William Lind, a wise American military theorist, agrees—not least with regard to the current war with Iran—that faith in technological superiority and air power is a major error of U.S. strategy, which keeps failing in asymmetric wars and conflicts.

Lind cites Gen. Merrill McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff at the time, who frankly admitted on camera: “Historically, air power has over-promised and under-delivered.”[12] In that respect the hype around drones is also futile. Recent research by the Swiss renowned Center for Security Studies (CSS) clearly shows that: “…while new technologies and the novel adoption and adaptation of existing platforms such as drones function as force multipliers in specific contexts, they have not yet produced a fundamental revolution.”[13] A revolution in military affairs (RMA) is defined not as the use of some new supposed wonder weapon (Wunderwaffe) but as “a profound transformation in the character and conduct of warfare produced by the innovative application of technology in conjunction with fundamental changes in doctrine, organization, and operational concepts.”[14]

To apply the foregoing to the Iran war: first and foremost, the U.S. had no clearly defined objective to the war and therefore no coherent overall strategy. Over the course of the war, the U.S. administration has cited a wide range of aims, which are certainly not clearly defined or unambiguous:

• to prevent Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons;
• to neutralize its military capabilities, such as the missile program, or destroy the Iranian navy;
• to stop Iranian support for proxies (militias) in Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon;
• to effect regime change;
• to contain Israel, which would have attacked with or without the U.S., through joint coordination and loss reduction;
• to protect freedom of navigation (after the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz).

In fact, this variety of aims reflects the varying views on the Iran war of leading representatives of the U.S. administration. Vice President JD Vance, for instance, whom Trump ordered to Pakistan to negotiate with the Iranians, was against the war right from the beginning.[15]

Another striking fact about the U.S.’s lacking a coherent overall strategy is that the Iranian threat to block the Strait of Hormuz had been known for years. As early as December 2011, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, then Vice-President of Iran, warned that “if sanctions are adopted against Iranian oil, not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz.”[16] So this came as no surprise to Washington and should have been incorporated in the U.S. strategy—particularly when it came to planning countermeasures.

Without clear aims, it is also impossible to communicate clearly. No wonder that most Americans have been against the war from the very beginning. Since its outbreak, almost two out of three Americans have expressed opposition to Trump’s continued attacks against Iran and see the progress of the war as negative for the United States. Even among Republicans, a large proportion (especially in younger age groups) take a highly critical view of the war.[17]

This is where Iran’s strategic closure of the Strait of Hormuz comes into play—at least for Western states and U.S. allies in the region. The blockade has a huge impact on energy supplies, given that a fifth of the world’s oil and gas is transported via that seaway. Fuel prices, in turn, have a direct impact on inflation. A blockade of such transport routes hampers energy supplies essential for many industries. It also affects food production and shipping of fertilizers—which makes food prices rise across the world, and even exacerbates or significantly contributes to famine in some regions. It is therefore not surprising why most Americans want a quick end to the war and welcomed the memorandum of understanding which was to guarantee free passage for at least 60 days and find a follow-on solution for the Strait of Hormuz.[18] U.S. citizens’ concerns in relation to the Iran war do not center around democracy or regime change, they are primarily about gas prices, the deployment of ground troops (which the majority oppose), and their own casualties.[19] Even the notoriously passive House of Representatives, including the Republicans, has voted two times(!) against the continuation of the Iran war.[20]

Iran has been preparing for this war since 1979 and is playing its hand cleverly, not only on the economic plane. Political analyst Mehran Zolfagharieh notes that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corpse’s aim is to gain a psychological victory, sap or even eliminate the opponent’s will to fight. Ali Jafari, commander of the IRGC from 2007 to 2019, said: “Asymmetric warfare… is [our] strategy for dealing with the considerable capabilities of the enemy.” In that view, the key capabilities of the Iranian armed forces are manpower, strategic thinking, and willingness to absorb losses while exploiting the weakness of their enemies who tend to be risk-averse, sensitive to losses, and tightly bound to their technology or dependent on it as well as on regional bases.[21]

So, what to do, Mr Trump? The problem is that the U.S. has maneuvered itself into a strategy dilemma. In order to win the war, it would have to massively escalate hostilities and, for example, occupy the oil hub Kharg Island (whoever controls Kharg Island controls Iran’s oil) and the Strait of Hormuz simultaneously.

However, this would mean[22] deploying U.S. ground troops and risking the lives of American soldiers, which, given the American public’s aversion to casualties[23] and opposition to the use of ground troops, would make the Republicans’ stock fall even further—and that in the run-up to the midterms in November. An occupation beyond Kharg would be an adventure with incalculable risks: Iranian big cities and important military bases with nuclear infrastructure are protected by the Elburs Mountains in the north and the Zagros Mountains in the West. In the East, there are the Salt and Lut Deserts. According to some estimates, to occupy the whole of Iran, the U.S. military would need 3,3 million soldiers.[24]

Yet things cannot remain as they are: Iran is still in a position to threaten the U.S. allies and American bases in the region and is likely now to want nuclear weapons more than ever.[25] An important point, not only from the U.S. perspective but also Europe’s, is that control of the Strait of Hormuz remains with Iran, which will probably also demand tolls for passage—possibly even in Chinese renminbi, which would be another step towards de-dollarization.[26]

Iran is exploiting U.S. strategic cul-de-sac: Trump can move neither forward nor backward, and is now exactly where Tehran wants him to be. The lesson of history, applicable to all asymmetric wars, is: “If strategists have little or no confidence that a prospective war can be kept short, then arguably the only prudent policy is not to fight it at all.”[27] This vital point was clear to John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-1829): “Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”[28]

The 1979 hostage crisis (U.S. Embassy in Tehran), was resolved not through direct military action, but the freezing of Iranian currency reserves, the arms embargo, and support for Iraq in its war against Iran, which, along with subsequent diplomatic negotiations, helped to achieve the U.S.’s aims.[29]

Today, like in the past, it is time to take a diplomatic route, combined, of course, with (military) pressure—not least because no other route is realistic.

Les propos tenus par la sénatrice paraguayenne Celeste Amarilla à l’encontre de Kylian Mbappé sont d’une gravité qui dépasse largement le seul cas du joueur français. Ces déclarations, à caractère suprémaciste et déshumanisant, portent atteinte à la dignité de millions de personnes noires à travers le monde qui subissent encore les conséquences de préjugés racistes. […]

L’article La lutte contre le racisme anti-Noirs doit devenir une priorité mondiale est apparu en premier sur .

Financial sovereignty has gradually moved from specialists’ attention to the forefront of strategic economic discussions. Over the past decade, BRICS countries have made substantial progress in developing alternative settlement mechanisms, expanding the use of national currencies in bilateral trade, and strengthening institutional frameworks for financial cooperation. These achievements are tangible and significant.

Yet, as the transformation of the global economy continues, new priorities are emerging. The structure of cross-border economic activity has changed. While interstate and corporate transactions remain vital, a growing share of cross-border payments now involve individuals: tourists, students, medical travelers, remote workers, freelancers, and small entrepreneurs. Importantly, these actors are not only beneficiaries but drivers of economic integration.

The existing international financial architecture was designed in a different era and for different purposes. Serving the global economy, it has been primarily focused on large-scale institutional and trade-related flows. Its retail dimension—money transfers of people moving across borders—has received far less attention.

This gap is becoming increasingly relevant for BRICS.

With nearly half of the world’s population and a growing share in global GDP, BRICS countries have both the opportunity and incentive to extend financial integration to reach ordinary citizens.

The task is to complement existing systems with new mechanisms that would comply with contemporary human mobility and economic exchange.

Why the Present International Financial Infrastructure Is No Longer Fully Effective

The international payment systems that dominate today were developed during the period of unipolarity and relative geopolitical stability. They have facilitated decades of global economic growth. However, the world has changed. Emerging economies now account for a significantly larger share of global production, consumption, and trade. New economic corridors have appeared across Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Cross-border transactions have become more varied. Alongside traditional corporate financial flows, there is a substantial volume of citizen-to-citizen and citizen-to-business transactions. A student paying tuition abroad, a tourist purchasing services in another country, a freelancer receiving payment from an overseas client are not marginal financial activities; these money transfers amount to hundreds of billions of dollars annually and involve hundreds of millions of people. However, individuals often face practical difficulties in getting access to their domestic financial resources while traveling or doing business abroad. These difficulties are a natural consequence of a system that no longer fully aligns with the realities of a multipolar and highly mobile global economy.

Meanwhile, recent technological developments have demonstrated that many of these difficulties can be overcome. National payment systems such as Russia’s MIR, India’s UPI, China’s digital payment ecosystems, and Brazil’s PIX have proven efficient and secure for large-scale retail payments processed within domestic contexts. What is lacking is a framework for connecting these national systems across borders in a seamless and user-friendly manner.

Some digital platforms demonstrate high technical feasibility for cross-border transactions. For example, while staying in the United Arab Emirates, users of the Russian Yandex application can access transportation services abroad with payments processed through their domestic accounts in Russia and currency conversion occurring automatically in the background. This shows that the technological barriers to broader integration are much lower than is often assumed. The challenge is not technological but institutional: it lies in the lack of agreement on common standards, settlement procedures, and governance mechanisms.

From States to Citizens’ Financial Connectivity: The Rationale for a BRICS Card

BRICS countries’ financial cooperation has been focused on state-level issues: local-currency trade settlements, alternative payment messaging systems, reserve diversification, and development finance. These efforts are essential and should continue, but further integration may require an additional focus—one that would bring the benefits of financial cooperation directly to citizens. This is where the idea of a BRICS Card becomes relevant.

The rationale is straightforward. Economic integration is sustained not by governments alone but also by millions of daily interactions between individuals: tourists spending money, students paying for accommodation, entrepreneurs purchasing services, workers sending remittances. When these interactions are hindered by financial friction, the full potential of economic integration remains unrealized.

A practical response to this challenge would be the creation of a common BRICS payment ecosystem centered on interoperable national payment systems and a shared BRICS Card or digital wallet framework.

Such an ecosystem would not seek to replace national currencies, nor would it require a supranational central bank. It would enable citizens of participating countries to access their domestic financial resources when traveling or conducting business across the BRICS space, using local currencies and domestic banking relationships. A BRICS Card would be the visible, user-friendly instrument that makes this connectivity tangible.

The core principle is interoperability, not uniformity. Each participating country would retain full control over its monetary policy, banking regulation, and financial supervision. The common layer would handle the automatic conversion, settlement, and clearing of transactions according to agreed rules. For an individual, using a BRICS Card would be similar to using a domestic payment card at home—familiar, convenient, and predictable.

This approach has several advantages: it is built on existing infrastructure rather than requiring costly new systems; it respects national sovereignty while enhancing connectivity; and it focuses on practical utility rather than geopolitical symbolism. The BRICS Card is not a political statement; it is a practical tool.

Potential Benefits for Key Economic Sectors

A common payment mechanism embodied in a BRICS Card could have positive effects for further growth and smooth operation of several sectors.

Tourism and Business Travel. BRICS countries include some of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and major sources of outbound tourism. A BRICS Card would facilitate seamless payment access for travelers, reducing administrative burdens and making travel more convenient, potentially encouraging greater flows of visitors within the BRICS space.

International Education. Thousands of students from BRICS countries study in other BRICS nations. Tuition fees, living expenses, and family remittances all require cross-border payment instruments. A unified BRICS Card would simplify the necessary procedures for students and educational institutions alike.

Medical Travel. Healthcare services are an increasingly important area of cooperation, with patients traveling to specialized clinics across BRICS countries. At moments when financial certainty is particularly important, having a reliable BRICS Card that provides direct and reliable access to domestic funds would be a tangible benefit.

Digital Services and Freelancing. The growth of remote work and digitally delivered services has created new opportunities for professionals to offer their skills across borders. A BRICS Card would reduce friction for these workers, allowing them to focus on their activities rather than on payment logistics.

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). For smaller businesses, international expansion is often complicated by payment-related challenges. A BRICS Card would lower these barriers, making it easier for SMEs to access customers and partners in other BRICS countries, thereby broadening the base of economic participation.

Existing Foundations for Creating a BRICS Card

The creation of a BRICS Card would not require a single dramatic leap. A phased approach is both more realistic and more likely to succeed.

The initial stage could embrace tourism and business travel among a limited number of participating countries, and be based on the use of existing national payment systems and bilateral agreements on settlement procedures. The BRICS Card could first be issued as a co-branded card linked to national systems like MIR, UPI, or PIX. The next stage could expand to include educational payments and medical services. Later stages could incorporate digital commerce, freelancing, and small-business transactions.

The technical foundation for this already exists. Russia’s MIR system, India’s UPI, China’s digital payment platforms, Brazil’s PIX—are all proven technologies capable of handling large volumes of transactions securely and efficiently. The task is to establish common technical standards, agree on settlement rules, and develop a governance framework that would ensure transparency, security, and consumer protection for the BRICS Card.

There is also the necessary institutional foundation for issuing and operating a BRICS Card. The New Development Bank has accumulated ample experience in facilitating multilateral financial cooperation. Commercial banks with cross-border operations are increasingly active in BRICS markets.

A BRICS Card would not need to be exclusive. It could operate alongside existing international payment networks, offering an additional opportunity for those who would like to use it. The goal is not to create a closed system but to expand the range of available options, thereby enhancing consumer choice and financial resilience.

Addressing Challenges and Potential Concerns

Issuing and operating a BRICS Card is a challenging task that may naturally raise concerns.

Technological feasibility. As noted above, the necessary technology already exists in the form of national payment systems that process billions of transactions annually. The missing element is not new technology but agreement on interoperability standards—a matter of coordination, not invention.

Regulatory and legal harmonization. Different countries have different rules regarding banking, data protection, anti-money laundering, and consumer rights. These differences are real but manageable. International payment systems have successfully navigated such differences for decades. The same principles of mutual recognition and common minimum standards could apply to the BRICS Card.

Geopolitical considerations. Some BRICS members face sanctions or other external restrictions. Others do not. The BRICS Card would be designed as a voluntary, complementary layer of infrastructure. It would not require countries to choose between existing and new systems. Participation would be based on mutual benefit, not political alignment.

Trust and security. Any payment system must be reliable, transparent, and secure. This requires robust governance, clear dispute resolution mechanisms, and strong data protection. BRICS countries already have regulatory institutions capable of providing such oversight for the BRICS Card. The challenge is to coordinate them effectively.

None of these concerns is insurmountable. They are the same types of challenges that every successful international payment network has faced and overcome. What is required is sustained dialogue and a willingness to find practical solutions.

The proposal for a BRICS Card is not a grand geopolitical declaration. It is a practical response to a real and growing need. The world has changed. Patterns of human mobility and cross-border economic activity have diversified. Financial infrastructure must evolve accordingly—not through confrontation with existing systems, but through addition of new, complementary mechanisms.

The BRICS Card as an new mechanism would not replace national currencies, challenge monetary sovereignty, or seek to undermine any existing financial network. It would simply make life easier for hundreds of millions of people: students, tourists, medical travelers, freelancers, entrepreneurs acting across the BRICS space.

The technological base is available. The economic rationale is clear. The institutional foundations are already being laid. What remains is the political will to move forward—not in opposition to anything, but in commitment to the shared interest in deeper, more inclusive, and more practical economic integration.

For BRICS, which collectively represents nearly half of humanity, taking this step would be a natural progression from trade settlements to human connectivity. That is what economic integration is ultimately about.

In an article titled “Eyes Wide Shut” published two years ago, I outlined twenty challenges that had brewed up and taken shape in Europe by the third year of the conflict in Ukraine. All of them, congested withing a focal point in time and space, structurally created an existential crisis in today’s Europe. The EU politicians concluded that the only recepie against it was the escalation of hostilities and—lately—direct involvement in the war against Russia.

They have been able to cope with some secondary challenges. For example, with France’s direct participation and involvement of the Viginum state agency, Brussels secured a favorable outcome of elections in Romania, Hungary, and Armenia, clamped down on European protests (at least for now), and, exploiting some of Donald Trump’s idiosyncrasies, managed to avoid a rapid collapse of the U.S.-Europe relations, letting them on a path of slow degradation.

The remaining challenges have definely aggravated. Europe has so far failed to revitalize its military-industrial complex; over 60 percent (in quantitative terms) of its weapons and military equipment still comes from the United States, with the costs amounting to a quarter of the EU budget (about €41 bn). European (to be precise, German) industry is shrinking: the automotive industry, once the pride of Germany, is cutting workforce and reducing production. Despite diplomatic efforts, Brussels has not overcome the crisis in relations with China. It has failed to completely abandon Russian energy imports, and what it has replaced by other sources comes at double or even triple price, with raw materials shipped through third countries or in circumvention of Europe’s own sanctions.

Supporting the Ukrainian regime is conctantly consuming more and more effort and resources. According to rough estimates, During 2022-2025 European countries collectively as well as within the EU framework provided about €170 bn of direct aid to Ukraine. The EU was greatly helped by the U.S., which donated a total of $106 bn, including $33.6 bn in monetary assistance. Now that Trump has slashed American assistance to Ukraine and Europe has to support Kiev all by itself, it is said to be  spending about €90 bn on military supplies in 2026-2027 or even €70 bn during 2026.

The EU’s monetary support strategy is determined exclusively by Paris, Berlin, Brussels, together with adjacening London. And this quartet wants all 27 EU countries to chip in. Tensions between EU states are more than likely in the near future, especially between those who ignore the Maastricht standards (gross debt of no more than 60 percent of GDP—France, Italy, and Germany are among the most developed European economies violating this criteria) and those who at least try to comply with them. Poland is among the latter.

Poland and other ‛New Europeans’ whose economy is not so grossly credit-strapped—Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria (Sweden too)—are invited to foot the bill for further support of Ukraine. This, in fact, is tantamount to cannibalizing their credit rating in the EU’s interests in order to achieve the foreign-policy and military goals set by Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and London.

It is doubtful that Poland, which has long been seeking a special role in the EU, will agree to bow.

A ‘happy alliance’ of Poland and Ukraine looked unnatural from the very beginning, given the complexity of shared history. Besides tough relations in the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there were many instances of mutual antagonism in the 20th century, ranging from clashes between Lvov Poles and the army of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Volyn massacre, to decisive actions of the Polish border guards and Armed Forces to eliminate the OUN-UPA underground as part of Operation Vistula (when compared to the Russian NKVD/MGB forces, the Poles took much less time to wipe out the OUN underground groups.)

Despite the Polish authorities’ ostentatious solidarity with Kiev since 2022, Polish politicians have not forgotten or dropped their painful reminiscences. Polish politicians most likely still remember the three partitions of Poland. And the Poles seem to have much to say about this not only to the heirs of the Russian Empire but also to the heirs of Prussia and Austria. Similarly entangled are today’s relations between Poland and Germany, as borne out by the disputes about WWII reparations that flare up every year.

Poland’s historical traumas urge it to pursue an active policy in Europe in order to secure its special role as a buffer between the West and the East, no matter what happens in the continent in the future. Is this not an opportunity for Russia to seize? Two years ago, I have already speculated about the hypothetical prospects for Russia-Poland interaction amid the deepening conflict with Europe. The situation has only become even more vivid since then.

As Polish President Navrotsky and the Kiev leadership brawl over the glorification of Bandera, returning each other’s high state awards, dissatisfaction with Ukraine policy is brewing among ordinary Poles. To some, this may seem just a political game, but inside the Polish establishment some may take the Polish-Ukrainian split — while being strong-armed to pay for the Ukrainian strategies conceived by Brussels, Berlin, and Paris—quite seriously.

Let us engage in foreign policy speculations, and at least suggest to try to establish a confidential ‛second track’ of communication between the Russian and Polish expert communities or even between the relevant foreign policy operators from both ends in order to discuss not simply the post-war fate of Ukraine and the Ukrainian part of Kresy Wschodnie (Eastern Borderlands), but rather Poland’s key role in the post-war European Union?

Despite the current antagonisms between Russia and Poland, our historical experience and great-power (albeit from a long time ago) legacy allow us to at least assume that the Polish leadership is capable of exercising a kind of weird rationalism, looking for long-term benefits.

As I have noted in my earlier publications, once the conflict is settled, Poland could become a natural and influential hub for the supply of goods and energy resources from Eurasia to Western Europe, a tool for influencing Brussels that continues to disregard Poland’s fundamental interests and its’ ‘politics of the past’ by dragging Warsaw into an unnatural interaction with Kiev.

Sergei Karaganov now and again speaks about the need to deliver a preemptive nuclear strike on the NATO logistics center in Rzeszow. This indeed may have a purely military effect. But perhaps it would be more prudent to talk informally with influential Polish counterparts and discuss Uktraine’s post-conflict reconstruction and Poland’s security against crime? The latter issue is becoming particularly relevant in the context of the EU’s declared and intended deportation of Ukrainian migrants in 2027.

And after all, the Polish leadership and the Polish people are unlikely to be tempted by the prospect of becoming the next frontier in opposing Russia after Ukraine, as the European media often claim. Leading European powers have always been artful masters of throwing other countries under the bus while avoiding their own costs. (albeit, this never ended well for them, yet for some reason each generation of European “strategists” consider themselves smarter than their predecessors). These informal talks could also be used to discuss, hypothetically of cource, Europe’s post-conflict politics and economy, as well as Warsaw’s special role in determining Western European affairs, which in the long term can bring Warsaw more benefits than Brussels’s annual subsidies.

Knowing the Poles’ deeply rooted hostility towards Russia, and, worse still, utter mutual distrust, anyone would say that this is a utopian idea. Fair enough, though there is certain vital issue worth considering.

We are living not just in time of geopolitical instability but of a tectonic shift of the world order, with completely new relationships rapidly emerging and old constructs becoming obsolete. In times like this, unanticipated interests may coincide and very strange, albeit situational, alliances may emerge.

The national interests of Poland and Russia, say the parties might agree to deescalate against each other, may prove to be more concurring and complementary to each other than it might seem at first—ideologized and exalted—glance.

Western narratives portray Russia as isolated, desperate, and nearing an internal collapse. This is not true. Moscow has shifted to a sustainable attrition strategy in Ukraine, NATO’s pressure tactics have backfired, and the U.S.’s strategic distraction in the Middle East has left Europe dangerously exposed. China holds unique mediation leverage—yet squanders it through underdeveloped communication mechanisms and unaddressed credibility gaps. The next two years will show whether the world fragments further into an armed rivalry or pivots towards peaceful coexistence. The choice demands more than rhetorical gestures—and time is not on Europe’s side.

A Misread Signal

When The Economist recently splashed Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko across its cover under the headline “The Man Who Would Change Russia,” Western analysts quickly framed his interview as evidence of the Kremlin’s teetering on the brink—besieged by war fatigue, elite infighting, and the public’s weariness to sacrifice. Melnichenko did indeed strike a sombre note, warning against Russia’s future of an “austere self-sufficiency” or “vulnerable dependency.” He advocated for a new generation of state administrators and a shift away from hyper-centralized governance.

But to read this as a death knell for the current Russian administration is to mistake a weathervane for a storm.

Melnichenko’s remarks may reflect his personal anxiety, a collective signal from Russia’s business magnates, or even a deliberate trial balloon floated with the Kremlin’s approval to test Western reactions. What is certain is that the Kremlin faces genuine pressure—domestic and external. Yet pressure is not paralysis. And Western media, in their eagerness to prophesy Russia’s collapse, have systematically misread the strategic calculus that actually drives Moscow’s decision-making. An establishment under stress is not one in retreat.

The Battlefield Reality: Misreading Tactical Harassment as Strategic Reversal

The first and most dangerous Western illusion concerns Ukraine’s supposed battlefield momentum. Headlines trumpet Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russian territory—hitting refineries, supply depots, and even civilian energy infrastructure. These raids are spectacular, psychologically unsettling for Russian citizens, and technologically impressive. But they are tactical harassment, not strategic reversal.

A sceptic might object: Ukraine has reclaimed significant territory since 2023 and inflicted measurable damage on Russia’s rear areas. That’s true, but reclaiming territory and holding it against a mobilized Russian army with superior artillery and manpower are two different things. Territorial gains without attrition superiority are ephemeral. The West has mistaken YouTube footage of drone strikes for operational momentum.

Basic military logic dictates that cross-border raids, however audacious, do not alter frontline dynamics. Russian forces continue their slow but steady advance in eastern and southern Ukraine, grinding through defense lines with the relentless weight of superior artillery and manpower.

Worse still, Ukrainian strikes have given Moscow a legal justification for escalation.

Over the past two weeks, the Kremlin seems to have abandoned the euphemistic term ‘special military operation,’ with official spokespeople now explicitly referring to it as a ‘full-scale war.’ This semantic shift is quite meaningful: it signals expanded targeting, broader conscription, and end of self-imposed restraint. Every Ukrainian drone that hits Russian soil brings Russia-NATO confrontation closer to an all-out conflict that Europe is not prepared to sustain.

Meanwhile, NATO’s Group of the Willing—assembled to funnel weapons, intelligence, and training to Kyiv—has fundamentally miscalculated. From Moscow’s perspective, this conflict has always touched a core national security red line: NATO’s eastward expansion into Ukraine would erase Russia’s remaining strategic buffer and place offensive missiles within minutes of its major cities. Having invested vast human, economic, and strategic resources, Russia cannot retreat as it would equate to a collapse of its great-power status. The West’s incremental pressure has not forced compromise: it has repeatedly pushed Moscow to double down, consolidate domestic support, and enhance its countermeasures.

The Strategic Calculus: Why Europe Will Break Before Russia Does

The second pillar of Russia’s strategy that is often overlooked in the West is that Moscow has abandoned the pursuit of quick victory and embraced a protracted war of attrition designed to exhaust Europe’s economic, social, and political resilience.

Three facts underpin this grim calculus:

First, following the official escalation to a ‘full-scale war,’ Russia has launched a national conscription drive and is deploying large quantities of advanced heavy weaponry: Soviet-era stockpiles, newly produced systems, and—increasingly—Iranian and North Korean-supplied munitions. Russia’s military-industrial complex has shifted to wartime footing, and its economy, while battered, has been reoriented to bypass Western sanctions through alternative trade corridors with China, India, Turkey, and Central Asian states.

Second, Europe’s heavy reliance on Russian energy and commodities has turned anti-Russian sanctions into a self-defeating exercise. The numbers are stark: German industrial production fell 3.8% year-over-year in Q2 2026, EU natural gas storage is at 58% capacity compared to 74% at the same point in 2023, and inflation across the Eurozone remains above 5.5%, with food and energy prices still climbing. Social unrest is spreading from Germany’s factory floors to France’s streets: recent protests in Lyon and Marseille drew over 40,000 participants demanding reduced military aid to Ukraine. The cost of subsidizing Kyiv’s war effort, securing alternative energy supplies, and maintaining domestic social cohesion is rising exponentially. European leaders speak of resolve, but their publics are increasingly asking: “At what price, and for how long?”

Third, the U.S.—long the backbone of NATO’s deterrent posture—has become strategically entangled elsewhere. Under the Trump administration, U.S.-Iranian tensions have escalated, diverting vast military and diplomatic resources to the Middle East. Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at the 2025 Munich Security Conference and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 2026 address have already shaken European confidence in unconditional American backing. With U.S. attention now split between the Persian Gulf and the Pacific, Europe faces a growing strategic isolation that its leaders are reluctant to admit publicly.

The result is a dangerous gap between Western strategic ambitions and practical capabilities. Europe talks of defeating Russia, but it lacks the energy independence, industrial capacity, and unified political will to sustain a multi-year attrition campaign. Russia, by contrast, has structured its entire state apparatus around endurance. In a long war, endurance often trumps firepower—and Europe’s clock is ticking faster than Moscow’s.

The Alternative Path: China’s Mediation and Untapped Potential

Amid this escalating standoff, where both sides seem locked in a zero-sum mindset, alternative approaches to conflict resolution are often dismissed as naive or self-serving. Yet one major power—China—can offer a fundamentally different path rooted in its traditional culture of harmony, tolerance, and win-win cooperation.

An ancient Chinese saying advises: “Taking a step back opens up boundless horizons.” This maxim advocates compromise over non-principled disputes. It does not imply moral ambiguity or ignorance of injustice; rather, it reflects a strategic tradition that values long-term stability over short-term victory. China’s consistent stance of promoting peace talks and mediation in resolving the Ukraine conflict stems directly from this tradition.

In practical terms, China has three unique advantages as a potential mediator: 1) it maintains normal economic and diplomatic ties with both Russia and Ukraine; 2) it has refused to impose unilateral sanctions, preserving its credibility as a neutral actor; 3) it is the only major power capable of engaging all parties—Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Kyiv—on a relatively equal footing.

However, China’s mediation potential is hampered by two persistent challenges—both of which are better understood as unrealized assets rather than fatal flaws.

First, the underleveraged communication mechanism. Beijing’s calls for peace are timely but fragmented, lacking the sophisticated global communication infrastructure that Western nations have built over decades. Chinese spokespeople often rely on diplomatic clichés that fail to resonate with foreign publics, while Western media continues to frame China’s neutrality as either pro-Russian appeasement or self-interested opportunism. This is not a deficit of substance—China’s peace narrative is coherent and principled—but a deficit of delivery. It is a fixable communication challenge, not a fatal flaw.

Second, the credibility problem. Sceptical Western observers will reasonably ask: Doesn’t China benefit from a weakened Russia that has to rely on Beijing for trade, finance, and diplomatic support? Let me be blunt: yes, China gains some short-term advantages from Russia’s isolation: cheaper energy imports, expanded market access, and a strategic counterweight to U.S. influence. To deny this would be dishonest. But these are tactical gains that purchase strategic losses: a fractured Europe, a nuclear neighbour driven into a corner, and a global ‘rules-based order’ decaying into armed rivalry.

No competent strategist would trade long-term stability for short-term bargains. China’s interest lies in ending this war, not prolonging it. Acknowledging this openly—rather than ignoring it—would strengthen China’s credibility as an honest broker.

What would Chinese mediation look like in practice? Here is the concrete, phased pathway:

• Phase 1 (immediate):proposing a humanitarian corridor framework, jointly monitored by China, Turkey, and the UN, to evacuate civilians from active front-line areas and facilitate prisoner exchanges.
• Phase 2 (short-term):hosting back-channel Track II dialogues between retired Russian and NATO military officials in Beijing or Shanghai, focused on protocols for de-escalation and prevention of miscommunication.
• Phase 3 (medium-term):offering China as the venue for formal negotiations, conditional on a mutual ceasefire-in-place along current front lines, with international verification.
• Phase 4 (long-term):linking ceasefire to a broader European security architecture discussion, including NATO-Russia force posture agreements, arms control verification, and a roadmap for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction with multilateral financing.

This pathway transforms China from a passive bystander into an active convener—without requiring Beijing to abandon its neutral posture or impose solutions on unwilling parties.

The Root Cause: Hegemonic Competition and the Zero-Sum Trap

A step back from the tactical minutiae of the Ukraine war reveals its deep structural sources. The root cause of this conflict—and of the broader turmoil from the Middle East to the South China Sea—lies in the hegemonic competitive logic of traditional Western geopolitics. This logic assumes that major powers must suppress rivals, expand spheres of influence, and view development as a zero-sum game. Russia, it must be acknowledged, has long been both a victim and a practitioner of this very logic.

China’s modernization trajectory offers counter evidence: that a nation can achieve prosperity and national strength without suppressing others or pursuing hegemony. Its Belt and Road Initiative, however imperfect, is predicated on connectivity and shared development rather than military containment. Its diplomatic rhetoric consistently emphasises “win-win cooperation,” “inclusive coexistence,” and “common development.”

Yet rhetoric alone is insufficient. The global community is drowning in conflicts, and China can no longer remain a passive bystander. The time has come for Beijing to embrace a special mission: to systematically disseminate the vision of peaceful coexistence, to break the shackles of Western-dominated narratives, and to drive the global community towards abandoning hegemonic competition once and for all.

This will not be a short-term campaign with quick wins. It is a strategy that requires comprehensive, multidimensional, and coordinated efforts across media, academia, cultural exchanges, and multilateral institutions. It demands patience, reserve, and willingness to listen as much as to speak. But it is a transformative endeavour worthy of China’s historical stature and future aspirations.

The Choice Before Us

The Ukraine war will eventually end—on the battlefield, at a negotiating table, or through mutual exhaustion. But the bigger question will remain: What kind of world will emerge from the ashes?

One path leads towards continued division, turmoil, and the perpetuation of zero-sum rivalries—a world where major powers arm themselves against each other, regional conflicts multiply, and humanitarian catastrophes become routine.

The other path leads towards peaceful coexistence—where differences are managed through diplomacy, development is shared rather than hoarded, coercion yields to consent, and force gives way to negotiation.

The choice hinges on the strategic decisions that major powers—particularly the U.S., Russia, China, and Europe—make in the coming months and years. China has a role to play, but it cannot play it alone. Nor can it do it without confronting its own communication underdevelopment and credibility challenges.

This is not an argument for passivity. It is a call for strategic imagination—the kind that sees beyond the next artillery barrage to the architecture of a sustainable peace.

No competent strategist would trade long-term stability for short-term bargains. China’s interest lies in ending this war, not prolonging it. Acknowledging this openly—rather than ignoring it—would strengthen China’s credibility as an honest broker.

Author’s Note

Dimitri Simes, a renowned Russian American political scientist and former chairman of the Center for the National Interest, is re-entering public discourse with a new political journal, Politika, as its editor-in-chief. He has graciously invited the author to contribute to its inaugural issue due to be released this September. The observations featured above form the core of my forthcoming article, War and Peace Revisited: A Chinese Perspective on the Ukraine Conflict and New Pathways to Global Peace. Readers are invited for debate, critique, and—above all—action.

Debates on global governance are usually framed in terms of institutional collapse or systemic breakdown. However, this diagnosis misses a more subtle but far more significant symptom—its mutation. The contemporary international order is not abandoning multilateralism; rather, it is undergoing a structural transformation from within. Its formal institutions created after 1945 remain in place, but their regulatory capacity is systematically hollowed out by the very great powers that are meant to sustain them.

To understand this dynamic, we must look past the universalist rhetoric of the ‘rules-based international order.’ As Hans Morgenthau (1948) observed, the institutional architecture of multilateralism always functioned as a “Holy Alliance within the Holy Alliance”—a legal framework designed to concentrate effective power within a selective group of dominant states. Instead of establishing an impartial international arena, the global juridical order merely reproduces functional asymmetries. In this realist scheme, international law often operates fictionally (Zolo, 2000): designed as ethics to define international justice, it actually embodies the structural capacity of those who command the dominant military and economic networks, setting the rules and its boundaries.

Coercion operates simultaneously on two levels: 1) formal—through multilateral frameworks providing diplomatic cover, and 2) substantive—through weaponized interdependence that enables routine deployment of permanent coercion.

In fact, we are witnessing an inter-systemic change with the formal structures remaining intact but their regulatory substance being drained out. This change rests on the normalization of permanent coercion. Coercive practices—financial, commercial, technological, and strategic—are no longer exceptional measures used to address crises; they have become routine mechanisms of interstate competition.

Great powers no longer seek to dismantle the multilateral system; instead, they instrumentalize its central nodes. While offensive realism explains the baseline incentives for states to maximize relative power in an anarchic environment (Mearsheimer, 2001), the use of specific mechanisms of contemporary competition is rationalized by weaponized interdependence (Farrell and Newman, 2019). In a highly interconnected global economy, structural power is exercised through control of the critical infrastructure of international exchange. States that occupy central positions in global networks can monitor, exclude, or choke adversaries, transforming connectivity into an unprecedented geopolitical lever.

This distinction matters because the persistence of institutional form can easily be mistaken for the persistence of institutional function. In reality, the sustained multilateral procedures serve to conceal a deeper transformation in the distribution and exercise of power. The most significant change is not that states have stopped invoking rules, but that the rules increasingly operate within environments shaped by coercion. In this sense, multilateralism does not disappear; it becomes increasingly dependent on the structural capacities of those actors which are able to activate, suspend, or reinterpret its mechanisms.

The vectors of Structural Coercion

The shift from rule enforcement to infrastructural weaponization manifests itself across multiple domains of global governance, turning once-neutral regulatory frameworks into asymmetric instruments of pressure.

Intra-Institutional Obstruction: The WTO Appellate Body’s Paralysis

The erosion of the multilateral trading regime is vividly illustrated by the structural paralysis of the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Mechanism. By unilaterally blocking the appointment of new members to the Appellate Body, the U.S. effectively dismantled the system’s second-instance adjudication (Barrueco, 2025). This means that panel reports are now stripped of legal finality.

This strategy points to the WTO’s functional hollowing out. It demonstrates how a dominant actor can utilize an international institution to serve own immediate interests, turning a multilateral framework into a defective mechanism and depriving vulnerable states of their primary legal shield against unilateralism.

Network Weaponization: Market Access and Secondary Pressures

Economic networks are now increasingly used as levers of disciplinary power in interstate competition. China’s synchronized trade restrictions on Australian exports—targeting barley, beef, wine, and coal following Canberra’s alignment with Western security demands (Ferguson, Waldron and Lim, 2023)—showcase how central nodes of value chains can be weaponized under the guise of technical or sanitary regulations. This practice is not entirely new, but its growing scale and frequency suggest a radical shift. Similarly, Beijing’s secondary supply-chain pressure against European firms linked to Lithuania (WTO, 2022) demonstrates how targeted economic insulation can be used to punish diplomatic deviations.

This dynamics has triggered a reactive institutionalization of coercion, exemplified by the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, established by Regulation 2023/2675 (European Union, 2023). The use of this instrument, designed to neutralize foreign economic pressure through legal deterrence and commercial countermeasures, proves that globalization has ceased to function as a neutral arena of exchange. It has been transformed into a highly securitized space structured by strategic chokepoints, where even major regional powers must institutionalize counter-coercive capabilities to preserve autonomy.

Sovereign Revisionism: U.S. Unilateral Tariffs

The expansion of broad-based import tariffs justified under national security exemptions (such as Sections 232 and 301 of the U.S. Trade Act) exemplifies how multilateral commitments are systematically subordinated to unilateral decisions (Mulder, 2025). When a hegemonic power perceives that the structural costs of maintaining a liberal trading order outweigh its relative gains, it expands its autonomy by redefining the boundaries of rule application. Under this logic, tariff pressures are no longer exceptional anomalies, but regular, structural mechanisms deployed to manage interstate competition and make market access a permanent lever of geopolitical coercion.

Systemic Infrastructure Exclusion: The Case of Russia

The economic and financial sanctions imposed on Russia are the pinnacle of permanent coercion exercised through control over global systemic infrastructure (Dowlah, 2025). Rather than introducing selective trade restrictions, Western powers leveraged their structural dominance in international payments by:

• freezing Russian Central Bank assets and foreign reserves;
• enforcing targeted exclusion from the SWIFT financial messaging system;
• restricting access to dollar- and euro-denominated capital markets.

From the perspective of weaponized interdependence, the global monetary sysatem functions as a perfect structural chokepoint capable of isolating a state from vital transnational flows. Here lies the core contradiction of the contemporary international legal order: while the discourse justifying these measures claims to defend the ‘rules-based order,’ the capacity to enforce them depends entirely on an asymmetrical distribution of power over global infrastructure. Normative universalism is thus being unmasked as a fiction, blurring the boundary between economic coercion and strategic warfare.

These cases reveal that institutional structural persistence coexists with operational asymmetry.

The WTO case shows how enforcement can be neutralized from within; the China-related cases illustrate the weaponization of market access and supply-chain dependence; the European response demonstrates the institutionalization of counter-coercion; and the anti-Russia sanctions regime reveal the strategic centrality of financial infrastructure.

Remarkably, coercion is exercised through the very mechanisms that sustain global interdependence.

The Transfiguration of Warfare: Coercive Unmasking

The hollowing out of rules-based multilateralism inevitably transforms the ontology of military conflicts. As institutional predictability declines, warfare abandons the long-standing requirement for universal normative legitimacy, operating as a primal tool for managing geo-economic interests (Blackwill and Harris, 2016). Historically, great powers felt compelled to drape their military interventions in the vocabulary of humanitarianism, promotion of democracy and human rights. Today, normative justifications are abandoned in favor of a brute, transparent coercive unmasking.

The U.S.’s recent coercive interventions graphically illustrate this shift. The 2026 U.S. operation to capture the Venezuelan president (Barabanov, 2026) was a direct enforcement that sidestepped multilateral mediation, even as it remains intertwined with broader methods of economic and financial pressure. Similarly, Trump’s territorial claims over strategic regions such as Greenland suggest a growing willingness to translate structural advantages into more explicit geopolitical assertions (Gupta, 2025). These developments indicate that coercion is no longer an exceptional, but increasingly consistent practice, employed across military, economic, and infrastructural domains. It signals not so much a breakdown of order as a more contested power reconfiguration, where managing transnational circulatory systems becomes the central condition for exercising power.

Furthermore, this transition signals the rise of a ‘geopolitics of flows,’ where territorial control is reconfigured around strategic nodes and global supply chains. U.S. hegemonic ambitions regarding Greenland and the escalating tensions over the Arctic do not signify a nostalgic return to 19th-century imperialism; rather, they reflect a cold calculation to control global energy routes and critical minerals. Westphalian principles, such as territorial integrity and non-intervention, are now treated by structurally dominant states as mere interpretive obstacles to be ignored whenever national vital interests prevail.

Crucially, contemporary conflict has been transfigured into an asymmetric ‘police execution’ (Zolo, 2007). Rather than serving as a legal punishment imposed for breaking a law enforced by equal sovereign states, penalties are now meted out from a position of absolute hierarchical and technological superiority. Certain actors arbitrarily assume the de facto mantle of global police forces while selectively relegating non-compliant nations to the status of ‘rogue states.’ This allows dominant powers to execute punitive actions, externalize the material and political costs of aggression, and deprive the targeted state of any effective legal protection.

In this world of weaponized connectivity, kinetic military intervention becomes the final, complementary act of an encirclement previously executed within the transnational financial and energy networks, though the boundary between these domains is increasingly difficult to sustain.

Strategic Agency without Structural Backing

The empirical vectors of permanent coercion and the transfiguration of warfare do not merely alter the geopolitical balance, they fundamentally dismantle the institutional conditions that sustain what this paper conceptualizes as strategic agency without structural backing. This analytical category theorizes the specific, calibrated modalities of international action deployed by states that lack material, military, or structural power within a system marked by profound structural asymmetries.

The Global South now faces a profound strategic dilemma: while universal multilateralism historically functioned as an asymmetric shield enabling predictable dispute mediation, the current normalization of permanent coercion reduces rules to a legal veneer, severely narrowing the room for maneuver for states lacking structural power.

Far from being a systemic anomaly, strategic agency without structural backing constitutes a rational, deliberate statecraft. It is, however, structurally conditioned by a foundational requirement: the existence of a rules-based normative framework endowed with a minimum threshold of institutional credibility and operational predictability. Under the aegis of traditional multilateralism, less powerful states—particularly in Latin America and across the Global South—consistently drew upon international law and stable multilateral fora not as abstract moral preferences, but as vital strategic resources. When international norms are perceived as relatively stable and universally applicable, weaker actors can leverage them to channel asymmetric disputes, legitimize foreign policy positions, form diplomatic coalitions, and constrain the discretionary exercise of power by hegemonic states.

This form of agency depends less on the material attributes of power than on the availability of institutional procedures permitting to partially translate legal arguments into political leverage. For states lacking control over military, financial, or technological infrastructure, multilateralism historically offered a limited but meaningful capacity for action. It did not eliminate hierarchy, but it created a procedural space where weaker actors could delay, contest, expose, or diplomatically reframe asymmetrical pressures. In this sense, international law operated not as a neutral guarantee, but as a strategic language through which vulnerable states could seek recognition, build coalitions, and raise the political costs of unilateral coercion.

The transition towards permanent coercion brings a fatal tension into this mechanism.

As great powers shift from normative compliance to selective instrumentalization and infrastructural weaponization, the universal framework is hollowed out of its substance—capacity for ordering.

Rules continue to be invoked as a superficial language of legitimation, but they no longer function as real constraints on material power. Consequently, the strategic value of multilateralism as an instrument of asymmetric insulation is drastically diminished.

The problem, therefore, is that the conditions that make weaker states’ agency effective are progressively degraded. Agency remains possible, but it becomes more reactive, more exposed, and more dependent on the actors that control the infrastructures of enforcement. Not only is the legal framework eroding, but also the fragile mediation that allowed states without structural power to transform normative claims into a diplomatic resource is no longer operative.

These observations shed light on the structural limitations of alternative institutional frameworks like BRICS. While politically potent for diplomatic coordination among revisionist and emerging economies, they cannot ensure predictability for weaker states. This also explains BRICS’s weakness, which lies not in the lack of political will, but infrastructure. Specifically, BRICS lacks:

• a unified, binding legal architecture;
• standardized and enforceable dispute-settlement mechanisms;
• independent, comprehensive control over the core global financial infrastructures.

Without autonomous payment systems, binding dispute-settlement mechanisms, and reliable mechanisms of legal coordination, alternative coalitions like BRICS may express dissatisfaction with the existing order, but they are not yet able to reproduce the stabilizing functions that made multilateralism strategically useful for weaker states.

Furthermore, the fragmentation of the Global South itself—compounded by deeply divergent levels of development and conflicting foreign policy alignments—prevents the formation of a cohesive coalition capable of anchoring a new normative regime. In this inter-systemic interregnum, the collapse of institutional predictability means that the room for maneuver for countries with strategic agency but without structural backing is squeezed, forcing weaker states into a highly volatile arena where form is entirely divorced from function.

*   *   *

The transformation of contemporary global governance cannot be adequately explained by institutional collapse or a crisis of the multilateral order. The multilateral order is undergoing a more insidious change—a functional hollowing out of its regulatory capacity from within. Formal structures persist, international law remains the nominal language of diplomacy, and institutions retain their architecture. Substantively, however, their ability to act as effective constraints on power is eroding, rendered contingent upon and subservient to the underlying power reconfiguration.

This transformation can be conceptualized as ‘permanent coercion.’ Coercion is no longer used as an exceptional tool; it is now routinely embedded in the everyday operation of multilateralism. By weaponizing critical nodes within global economic, technological, and financial networks, dominant powers have transformed interdependence into a mechanism of geopolitical discipline, stripping global governance of its normative neutrality.

What appears as the continuity of multilateralism conceals a deeper transformation—the consolidation of a structurally stratified and operationally selective order.

“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

Sun Tzu. The Art of War

China is in the process of redefining its relations with the rest of the world, with the West in particular. During the first decades of economic reform and ‘opening up’, initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, China sought a “peaceful rise” within the international framework established after World War II. It avoided confrontation with the U.S. and other Western nations with strategic prudence and patience, in line with the classical Chinese maxim advocated by Deng: “Hide the force, wait for the hour.”

However, Washington preferred to pursue a policy of containment and confrontation towards China. It was launched during Donald Trump’s first presidency (2017-2020), continued during Joe Biden’s (2021-2024), and dramatically intensified during Trump’s second term. Today, Washington sees China as a rival and main threat. Accordingly, it has adopted measures to undermine China’s positions in the commercial, technological, military, and diplomatic spheres.

During Trump’s first presidency, and probably even before that, Beijing recognized that the classical strategy of “hiding the force and waiting for the hour” was no longer viable.

China became too strong, surpassing the U.S. in economic terms (if estimated by GDP at purchasing power parity) and international trade (having become the main trading partner for most countries in the world). China’s rapid development aroused envy and suspicion, ultimately making it the target of intrigues, diplomatic maneuvers, and sanctions.

But Beijing has not abandoned its strategic caution. It continues to avoid conflict whenever possible, remaining careful with its words and actions even in the face of the West’s systematic hostility. The Chinese maintain the traditional style of dealing with challenges that Henry Kissinger, in his famous book On China, described as a mix of thorough analysis, careful preparation, and attention to psychological and political factors.

One important part of the China’s preparation, which has proven decisive in 2026, was the formation of strategic oil reserves. Thanks to this, China suffers relatively little from the oil price shocks triggered by the Iran war. The country’s monetary reserves are also immense, now less exposed to confiscations and sanctions. A large part of these international reserves has been transferred by the Central Bank to commercial and public banks. In coordination with the Central Bank, these banks buy foreign currency in the foreign exchange market to avoid unwanted appreciation of the national currency. In addition, China has begun building cross-border payment systems as an alternative to Western-controlled systems, which the West uses to punish and sanction countries deemed hostile. The share of the renminbi in China’s international transactions has also grown. Its trade with Russia, for example, is now almost 100% conducted in rubles and renminbi.

Thus, China is well positioned to weather the storm unleashed by Trump during his second term. He resorted to more radical instruments against his opponent, but he has found that Beijing is now more capable of addressing international threats.

Under Xi Jinping, China appears as an adversary that knows how to defend itself with great effectiveness. Moreover, it knows the U.S. and its allies and satellites’ vulnerabilities and is ready to exploit them.

China has got the better of this confrontation with the U.S.—because of its prudence and strength, but also because of the opponent’s mistakes. Overestimating its power and having engaged itself in conflicts with Russia, China and Iran all at the same time, the U.S. has motivated the three countries for a strong alliance. And worse: it is losing on all the three fronts. The war against Iran seems to be a milestone that may prove to be the harbinger of the end of the American Empire.

Beijing not only follows a consistent strategy, but also knows how to maneuver tactically, taking advantage of the opponents’ mistakes. The Chinese follow the maxim attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt an adversary when he is making a mistake.” There is no reliable evidence that Napoleon actually said or wrote this, but this apocryphal Western formula is entirely consistent with Chinese classical military thought, which is notably expressed by Sun Tzu in The Art of War cited in epigraph to this article.

China is changing and adapting its policies to the arising challenges, while at the same time preserving its traditional philosophy and ancient culture. It does not abandon Confucius, nor Mao Zedong. It does not cling thoughtlessly to the past, but neither does it forsake its roots.

China’s ascent, no longer peaceful but increasingly conflictive, can be expected to continue without interruption.

The end of World War II accelerated the modernization of most capitalist countries, giving rise to the welfare state. A mark of social progress, it also served as a bulwark against the socioeconomic alternative represented by the USSR and the socialist states of Eastern Europe. The capitalist class was compelled to moderate its appetites — largely out of fear of communism.

The Soviet political, economic, and social system appeared as a viable alternative to capitalism. Western leaders were forced to compete by offering their citizens unprecedented economic and social rights. The dismemberment of the USSR — and with it, the disappearance of a socioeconomic alternative to capitalism — has had a demodernizing effect on the populations of most Western countries. It opened the door to an aggressive globalization of neoliberal economic policies, widening inequality, and a massive transfer of wealth from the public domain to private ownership.

From Welfare State to Neoliberal Abyss

The clock is being turned back — but at different speeds. What happened overnight in the former Soviet Union is unfolding more gradually elsewhere. The massive and rapid impoverishment of former Soviet citizens in the 1990s was an accelerated variant of the unprecedented economic polarization observed in most other countries in recent decades.

Preserving religious and ethnic diversity is a key achievement of modernity — and it is now under siege. Where relatively stable multicultural and multiethnic societies once existed, ethnic nationalism, tribalism, religious militancy, and various forms of exclusion — economic, social, and cultural — are gaining ground.

Nativism and xenophobia are on the rise around the world, from Argentina to India to the United States. These are unmistakable signs of demodernization — a regression on the scale of modernity. Yet demodernization need not be all-encompassing. Israel, for example, exhibits technological modernity alongside political archaism.

Criteria of Modernity and Demodernization

Demodernization can be assessed by the same criteria that were codified in modernization theories, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s — the era of decolonization. These theories foregrounded instrumental rationality: the drive to master nature through science and technology, and to establish rational governance in society. Modernity held out the promise of a better life — a promise particularly attractive in the wake of World War II, with the emergence of a bipolar equilibrium between the USSR and the United States and the collapse of colonial empires.

The Soviet Union and the United States each offered its own model of modernization. Despite their differences in property relations — socialist versus capitalist — the models shared surprisingly common ground in defining what it meant to be modern.

Elaborated largely during the Cold War, these theories envisaged a comprehensive set of transformations: the shift from tribal or religious identity to national identity; the narrowing of socioeconomic gaps and the reduction of poverty; the lowering of unemployment and underemployment; the enhancement of social mobility; the democratization of culture; and the strengthening of civil institutions — particularly trade unions — that mediate between labor and capital, thereby reinforcing social stability. Free and rational policy debate was deemed the key to achieving these objectives.

Knowledge Under Siege

Knowledge is an essential ingredient of modernity. It can create or destroy ideologies, justify or undermine class dominance. Demodernization necessarily entails the denial of knowledge and a challenge to rational thinking. Today, the right to know is being eroded on several literally explosive foreign policy issues — even as authors like Steven Pinker argue that humanity is becoming more rational and therefore less violent.

Renaming streets, removing monuments, and banning languages are integral to demodernization — attempts to obliterate historical memory. Language is reduced to a ritualized set of clichés (e.g., «regime» for inconvenient political actors) and deployed as a tool for incantation and the spread of ignorance.

In the West, this role of the media is particularly stark with respect to the war in Ukraine. Media effects have largely overshadowed actual military outcomes. They shape public opinion, drumming up support for continued warfare. On the Western side, this conflict is as much a war of narratives as it is a war of missiles and drones.

A case in point is the mainstream Western media’s near-compulsory use of the phrase «unprovoked full-scale invasion» to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Respected experts in geopolitics who argue that NATO’s eastward expansion provoked the war are promptly sidelined. Their analysis of the «hidden causes» — which Abélard urged us to investigate nearly a millennium ago — is dismissed as «Kremlin propaganda.» Like all sociopolitical processes, the erosion of rational debate is the result of concerted efforts by political actors. Discreditation, sanctions, and even intelligence services are mobilized to silence or marginalize respected specialists, thereby undermining the quality of publicly available scholarly expertise on Russia.

By contrast, the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran — which would surely warrant the label «unprovoked» — have yet to be described as such in the legacy media, now transformed into instruments of propaganda and obscurantism. In Germany, understanding the adversary has become a term of reproach: «Putinversteher.» Rational deliberation on alternative approaches to Russia has been supplanted by partisan, self-righteous, and self-serving rhetoric. Similarly, specious accusations of antisemitism stifle public discussion of Israel’s actions.

Appeals to emotion are crowding out rational arguments. The passionate language of otherwise lackluster State Department and EU bureaucrats suggests that demodernization has penetrated deep into the corridors of power. The articulation of geopolitical interests increasingly morphs into claims of moral superiority.

It was Ronald Reagan who introduced the phrase «Evil Empire» in March 1983 — language that was perhaps appropriate for the National Association of Evangelicals, his audience at the time. Nearly two decades later, in January 2002, the «Axis of Evil» appeared in a seemingly more rational context: George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. It designated states and movements resisting U.S. hegemony, and its emotional charge helped prepare the ground for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. More recently, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has also been justified as a moral imperative — the «liberation of the Iranian people.»

A rational case for both wars does exist, but it is rarely voiced in polite company. It is laid out in the document «A Clean Break: Securing the Realm,» prepared for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Western attacks on Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Iran have made that plan a reality. Israel’s role in instigating these wars is now an open secret.

Claims of moral superiority invoke democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law to argue that liberal regimes are inherently superior to other forms of political organization. These pretensions have replaced the earlier claims of religious and racial supremacy that for five centuries sustained colonial conquests, legitimizing exploitation, violence, and genocide. «Mission civilisatrice,» «White Man’s Burden,» «support for democracy,» «regime change,» and «Responsibility to Protect» denote broadly similar interventions by «the White Man» in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Paradoxically, the Nazis — though known for their emotional outbursts — couched their invasion of the Soviet Union in rational terms: eastward expansion (Drang nach Osten) in search of living space (Lebensraum). Moreover, they drew on the scientific concepts of their time to establish a genocidal racial hierarchy.

Demodernization implies a lasting degradation of material, health, and cultural conditions in a formerly modernized society — a return to "premodern" forms of life and collective identity. This provokes protests, uprisings, and insurrections.

In Russia during the first post-Soviet decade, tanks and, later, electoral manipulation were used to quell them. The crisis in Ukraine can also be viewed through the lens of demodernization. A vast region once at the forefront of Soviet industrial development underwent demodernization long before 2014, when outside forces transformed grassroots protests into a violent overthrow of the government.

Following the model of the 2016 Russiagate affair, election results can now be annulled (Romania), manipulated (Moldova), or rigged (Armenia) under the pretext of «Russian meddling.» In other countries, popular movements such as the Indignados in Spain and the gilets jaunes in France have petered out without consequence. This reflects demodernization — the transformation of citizens into depoliticized consumers, which greatly facilitates narrative control.

Demodernization breeds essentialism — the attribution of immutable properties and values to one’s own or other groups. This allows Israelis to believe that God granted them exceptional rights to the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and that their army is «the most moral in the world.» According to this essentialist logic, Arabs understand only force — which justifies Israel’s incessant violence across the region. Europe’s current rulers seem to think the same about the Russians.

Prejudice as State Policy

The normalization of prejudice is another manifestation of demodernization. It depends on the denial of knowledge. Positive news about Russia and the Russians has largely disappeared from Western media over the past two decades, fueling Russophobia — the attempt to portray Russia and the Russians as congenitally evil.

Russophobia has a long history, but its contemporary resurgence was the focus of a conference held in the medieval Russian city of Pskov in June 2026, as part of the forum «On This We Stand.» The title paraphrases the finale of Eisenstein’s film classic Alexander Nevsky: «Go and tell foreign lands that Russia lives. Let them come to us without fear. But whoever comes to us with a sword shall perish by the sword. On this stands and shall stand the Russian land.» Produced in 1938, the film depicts the defeat of the Teutonic knights near Pskov in 1242. It was a thinly veiled warning to the Nazis and their European allies — who, sadly, ignored it and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Pskov was occupied by German, Estonian, Latvian, and Spanish troops for more than three years. When the Soviet army liberated the city in July 1944, only 168 original inhabitants remained from a prewar population of 68,000.

Scholars gathered from several countries to explore Russophobia and the reactions it provokes. The program included a survey of Russophobic phenomena among the Russian intelligentsia. Another paper addressed the ethnonationalist demodernization of several former Soviet republics, where «the Russians» — the remnants of the Soviet multiethnic population rather than ethnic Russians proper — have been cast as foreigners. Many of them have become stateless non-citizens.

The Baltic Lesson

The recent history of the Baltics is instructive in this regard. Despite occasional lapses into magical thinking, the Soviet reformers around Yeltsin operated within a framework of political rationality. Most supported the Baltic republics’ efforts to free themselves from the Soviet system. Yeltsin and his allies actively backed the Baltics’ drive for independence from the summer of 1990 onward, as its discourse was couched in political terms they could endorse. Russia recognized Baltic sovereignty in August 1991; the United States followed only a few weeks later.

This political framing changed dramatically after independence: liberation was no longer from the Soviet system, but from «the Russians.» This shift was facilitated by the elevation of long-time émigrés to positions of power — including the presidency — in all three republics. The new ruling class turned public opinion against «the Russian occupiers» and reverted to the ethnonationalist terms of legitimacy that had prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s.

In Estonia, a stone’s throw from Pskov, Russians are often referred to as «occupiers.» Rather than building inclusive civic nationalism, the Baltic authorities emphasize ethnic identity. This breeds Russophobia, further intensified by their decision to expose their countries by turning them into NATO’s frontline states on Russia’s borders.

Perceptions of Russia

Russophobia is a Western phenomenon. A survey conducted around the world in 2024 asked: «What is your overall perception of Russia?» The results showed a clear divide between the political West and the rest of the world. While most European countries and European-settlement countries expressed negative attitudes, the Global South — from Egypt and Nigeria to China and India — showed predominantly positive feelings toward Russia.

The conference demonstrated the broad range of views being debated in Russia as it faces Western sanctions, imposed since 2014 and particularly since 2022. Participants also discussed reactions to Russophobia. Several speakers showed how Russophobia can provoke indiscriminate anti-Western attitudes, which in turn lead to isolationism and cultural demodernization. Mirror reactions are not always effective. The conference debated the utility of imitating the ideological adversary by claiming the superiority of «traditional values» in opposition to «Europe’s betrayal of its historical heritage.»

The idea of separating Europe from Russia and China is entirely rational within the framework of Sir Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical theories. Equally rational are the motivations of those who promote and profit from global financial imperialism. It is no conspiracy theory to point to the overtly anti-Russian agenda outlined in the 2019 Rand Corporation report «Extending Russia.» Its ideas were imposed on Europe by the Biden administration.

The «apolitical technocrats» of the EU have made confrontation with Russia their raison d’être. Today, the European Union is the main political force committed to continuing the war in Ukraine. Even when Washington temporarily toned down its enthusiasm for the previous course, Brussels kept advancing — like a beheaded chicken continuing to run for a while.

The Price of Hatred

The specter that once haunted American strategists — a powerful Eurasia stretching from Shanghai to Lisbon — no longer exists. Europe is more divided than during the Cold War. Germany, the EU’s economic engine, has been cut off from Russia’s cheap energy, dragging the rest of Europe down. Russophobia serves to justify this decline by blaming it on Russia.

Russophobia also helps convince European citizens to accept the dismantling of the welfare state and its social support mechanisms in favor of militarization. To sell this unpopular idea, Western ruling circles appeal to emotion, tightly control information, and punish dissent. Confident in their righteousness, European leaders — by dismissing inconvenient views — have come to mistake their own narrative for reality.

Bans on cultural exchanges with Russia, boycotts of Russian musicians, the cancellation of conferences on Dostoevsky and concerts of Rachmaninov have become routine. Under pressure from Ukrainian nationalists, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has relabeled Ilya Repin as a "Ukrainian artist." Yet these same nationalists have not so far claimed the pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — still widely known as "Russian pogroms" — as Ukrainian.

The EU has severed rail and air links with Russia, even though they functioned throughout the Cold War, including under Stalin. The necessity of flying via Istanbul to get from St. Petersburg to Helsinki — a flight that used to take forty minutes — is a true sign of demodernization.

Russophobia, like all racism, can veer toward the absurd. A peace summit on Ukraine convened in Switzerland in 2024 excluded Russia, one of the belligerents. The organizers deemed inviting Russia unthinkable — a step toward «moral equivalence.»

Alongside Russophobia, demodernization manifests itself in attempts to rehabilitate colonialism — which also relies on excluding and dehumanizing millions. A few years ago, a French president called on his compatriots to be proud of the achievements France brought to its former colonies. And at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, U.S. Secretary of State Rubio praised the European colonization of the Americas as «a sacred inheritance.» He also called on Europeans to be «unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance.» Josep Borrell’s comparison of Europe to a garden in the jungle fits the same trend.

While American officials clearly state their goal of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, the EU dresses these restrictive measures as a moral issue. Such measures have yet to be applied to Israel — even as a rift begins to appear between Israel and the United States. The EU maintains its free-trade agreement with Israel, plausibly accused of genocide, while major European countries continue to supply weapons and authorize the transit of arms used to kill Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians. All the while, the EU claims moral superiority.

The late Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, once observed that «righteousness and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive.» Deeply entrenched Russophobia is particularly dangerous when it is wrapped in claims of moral superiority. The fledgling movement in Russia to reject all things Western is also potentially dangerous. Both trends point to a growing demodernization that poses an existential threat to all humanity.

During U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to China in May 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of avoiding what he called the “Thucydides Trap.” This concept underscores the need for the U.S. and China to prevent tensions escalating into a military confrontation.

Some analysts believe that the era of direct confrontations between great powers has ended, and that problems between China, Russia, and the U.S. could be managed in the near future. Others regard the current geopolitical tensions as merely the suspension of an inevitable major conflict between China and the U.S.

Whatever the state of the international system, the “Theodosian Trap” appears to be looming on the regional stage, particularly in the Middle East, between Iran and its Arab neighbors.

If Trump and Netanyahu decide to re-escalate their military operations against Iran, the conflict will likely be between Iran, a powerful military and ideological power seeking regional hegemony, and its economically ambitious Arab neighbors, especially the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, which oppose Iranian influence in the region.

During the second round of the Iran war, in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli actions, Iran targeted, besides American military bases in the neighboring countries, civilian and economic infrastructure, including airports, ports, oil refineries, power and water facilities, as well as residential and government complexes. Such targeting extends beyond military objectives and encompasses key economic and civilian sectors. Iran has launched at least 5,200 missiles and drones, with the United Arab Emirates bearing the brunt of these airstrikes. The ensuing hostility between UAE and Iran became especially evident in the diplomatic tensions during the recent BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi.

Iran’s resilience in countering the Israeli-U.S. aggression launched by Trump and Netanyahu in anticipation of Tehran’s rapid collapse, has placed it in two strategic traps deliberately set by Israel and the U.S.

Provoking Iran to attack its neighboring countries

The primary trap was to provoke Tehran to attack neighboring states. Iran responded to U.S attacks extensively, targeting Azerbaijan, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, and several Gulf Cooperation Council states—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. These tactics have undermined Iran’s regional standing: it is no longer perceived as a victim, but rather as an aggressor. This transformation has led to increased hostility from regional actors that are not directly involved in the conflict, fueling appeals to establish a regional security architecture where Iran is portrayed as the primary adversary.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) may view strikes against Gulf states as tactically advantageous, but they have proven strategically unfavorable, as the costs exceed the gains.

Iran has lost important regional neighbors and alienated them. Moreover, in some cases it has acted like Israel, targeting perceived threats without direct intervention. By drawing Iran into these attacks, Israel may have sought to embroil the Gulf states in the conflict. However, they have largely avoided direct confrontation.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz

The U.S. and Israel exerted maximum pressure on Iran to push it into this move, aiming to provoke international outrage against Tehran. As a result, Iran is perceived as an aggressor in terms of international maritime security. According to international law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, all commercial vessels have the right of “innocent passage,” which coastal states are prohibited from obstructing or suspending, even during times of armed conflict.  So, Iran has no legal right to completely close the Strait of Hormuz or obstruct international navigation. NATO now considers sending warships should a peace deal is not secured between Trump and Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

These scenarios shed light on U.S. and Israeli decision to assassinate the Iranian Supreme Leader and other senior officials in the early days of the war. They likely anticipated Iran’s reaction to the loss of its symbolic leadership, as well as a hostile response extending to Iran’s neighboring countries.

Escalating the conflict was surely not in Iran’s interests, but eventually it left it surrounded with more adversaries—a development that aligns with U.S. and Israeli strategic goals.

Invoking Stubbornness

Another predicament Iran may face during negotiations could be termed the “trap of stubbornness.” Iran has demonstrated resilience in countering Israeli aggression and has succeeded in striking deep in its territory. Such resilience has revived hope among its allies for a revitalization of its regional axis.

However, excessive optimism risks clashing with stark geopolitical realities. Syria’s case provides a good lesson. After 2018, the Assad regime confidently declared victory over all local, regional, and international actors seeking its overthrow. Notably, in 2024, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rejected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s offer for reconciliation and negotiations. Ultimately, the Assad regime failed to maintain internal stability. Since 2018, the year of its supposed victory, Syria had suffered the consequences of a comprehensive economic blockade, which exacerbated a severe humanitarian and economic crisis. The Assad regime was unable to pay the salaries of the Syrian army personnel, support the martyrs’ families or the wounded. Discontent grew even among its supporters, fueled by complaints about the deteriorating economic situation, the increasing influence of Iran and Hezbollah, rampant corruption, and skyrocketing prices. Although Bashar al-Assad ultimately managed to retain power, life in Syria became unbearable due to the sanctions, blockade, and pervasive corruption.

There are concerns that Iran might fall into this trap during negotiations, especially given its difficult economic situation. In this context, Russia’s role as an ally, mediator, and facilitator becomes crucial.

It might also be beneficial for Russia to explore the possibility of establishing a secondary negotiating track between Iran and the Gulf states, parallel to the Iran-U.S. negotiations. This track could facilitate reaching mutual understanding and guarantees. Such a move would reassure the Gulf states and open a back channel for dialogue with the U.S. and consequently, with Israel.

However, a fundamental dilemma remains: both sides are inclined to claim victory, and the victor will be unwilling to compromise. The negotiations could falter and come to a mutual deadlock, threatening a renewed round of war with increased regional and international involvement. In this context, it is worth recalling King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who after achieving victory in the first two battles against the advancing Romans and realizing the heavy losses these victories bore, famously said: “One more such victory, and all is lost.” Subsequently, Pyrrhus’s army lost momentum and was defeated by the Romans in the final, decisive battle.

Iran and Israel have reached what could be considered the most difficult stage of the conflict—a state of attrition leading to a state of neither peace nor war. In this situation new actors are likely to emerge, capable of tipping the scales in favor of one side or the other. These third parties may be internal rather than external.

Perhaps the most insidious harm an adversary can receive is self-harm—like shooting oneself in the foot. In the aftermath of Hamas’s attacks on Israel the 7 October 2023, Netanyahu adopted a policy of collective punishment, committing acts of aggression against civilians in Gaza and attacks against neighboring Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. This approach resulted in a significant loss of international public support and advanced the Palestinian cause more effectively than the Palestinians themselves could have. Similarly, in the case of Iran, if revenge supersedes pragmatic considerations of national interest and future stability, even a legitimate cause would be compromised. (However, this comparison is grounded on the action-response analysis only, and it is essential to recognize the fundamental differences between Israel and Iran.)

In the absence of a prompt negotiated settlement, the third phase of the Iran war is likely to be catastrophic and have repercussions for the entire region. But even if Iran avoids it and instead faces a comprehensive embargo, economic sanctions, and international isolation, they will not serve the interests of the Iranian people or their leadership. This will inevitably lead to further escalation—an outcome that neither Iran nor the region can afford, given the existing crises and conflicts.

This situation raises a fundamental question: Who truly benefits from Iran becoming a failed, fragmented, or isolated state? Some might argue that this scenario serves Israel’s interests, but I do not see it that way. The IRGC, the Basij, and armed factions within Iran, as well as in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, could operate with impunity in the region, exploiting porous borders to export crises and destabilize neighboring countries and even Israel itself.

The only viable path forward is dialogue—negotiations, reassurances, and guarantees for the neighboring and Gulf states—leading to a potential agreement with the U.S. Time is of the essence. Nations must adapt and progress—even if it requires making difficult, albeit temporary, choices—to bridge the gap with global development and progress. Failing to prioritize the national interest and clinging to past grievances will inevitably bring nations to instability and failure.

Now that the conflict in Ukraine has entered its fifth year, Western media’s attention is largely focused on the military operations on the ground. With verifiable information remaining limited and filtered by the war of narratives, the main lens through which the Western media sees the EU’s confrontation with Russia is its aid to Ukraine and the extensive use of drones as the primary military assets.

However, the interpretation of Russia’s policy and actions through the Ukraine conflict diverts attention from the internal dynamics that reveal much of Moscow’s strategic orientation, including on the front. Three recent developments are indicative of a possible aggravation of Russia’s confrontation with the EU, beyond the current Ukrainian border.

Foreign Policy vs Military Action

The first sign is of regulatory and institutional nature.

On 13 May 2026, the State Duma adopted a provision that authorizes the Russian President to deploy the armed forces extraterritorially to protect Russian citizens abroad. Formally, the law concerns individuals subject to criminal proceedings by foreign or international courts not recognized by Moscow, but essentially it implies a significant expansion of the President’s powers.

Specifically, it provides for a broader institutional framework for protecting Russian citizens and Russian-speaking populations in the post-Soviet countries—a political justification that has already been used by the Kremlin in various crises, including the Ukraine one, and opens the door to actions against other countries, above all the Baltic states, which Moscow sees as broadly discriminating Russian-speaking minorities.

The West, which often reduces the Russian political system to a caricature of Vladimir Putin’s personal power, has largely ignored this novelty. Meanwhile, it provides solid institutional support to the Kremlin’s usual practice of legally substantiating the implementation of its political decisions.

The point is that for the Kremlin, defense of Russian citizens and ethnic Russians living abroad is now a strategic priority that requires structural integration of Russia’s foreign policy and direct military action.

Russification of Transnistria

The second sign is of geopolitical nature. Almost the same day, on 15 May, Putin signed a decree granting fast-track Russian citizenship to Transnistria residents. Formally part of Moldova, this break-away territory, inhabited by around 400,000 people and de facto controlled by structures close to Moscow, is the site of a frozen conflict since 1992, with around 1,500 Russian troops still present in the area.

Facilitating access to Russian citizenship (waiving standard legal requirements—a five-year residency in Russia, language proficiency, and civic testing) for people permanently residing in one of the most sensitive post-Soviet territories, this decree, backed up by the law on Russia’s extraterritorial defense of Russian citizens, echoes the precedent of the Donbass, where the granting of citizenship to Russian-speaking people gave Moscow formal grounds to claim its right to protect them and subsequently justify its intervention.

This may have direct geopolitical implications: any territorial link between Russia-controlled areas and Transnistria would necessarily pass through southern Ukraine, which brings to the fore the issue of Odessa and control of the Black Sea (the objectives now discussed in the circles far beyond Russian radical patriots).

On the Moldovan front, the strengthening of Russia’s presence in Transnistria would inevitably lead to confrontation with the pro-European leadership of Moldovan President Maia Sandu, who is openly supported by the EU, Germany, the UK, and France. In a country already deeply divided between pro-Russian and pro-European factions, Moldova may become fertile ground for a new proxy war between Russia and Europe.

The New Military Intelligentsia

The third sign is of socio-political nature.

In Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and is exposed to the war, General Alexander Shuvaev, a decorated veteran of the Ukraine conflict, has been appointed acting governor (following Vyacheslav Gladkov’s resignation). Hero of the Russian Federation, General Shuvaev has been appointed to this post through the presidential program Vremya geroev (The Time of Heroes), which promotes veterans and people who distinguished themselves in the Ukraine war, to positions in the state apparatus, regional administration, public companies.

This episode is emblematic of the formation of a new military intelligentsia, uniting figures that have war experience, enjoy public recognition, and are integrated in the political and institutional circles. This is a basically new important development in Russian society, where the military, intellectuals, and administration people have traditionally formed separate strata.

Today, a cohort of people, who distinguished themselves in the Ukraine conflict, are gaining access to social and political channels, primarily through training at elite institutions supported by privileged access and quotas reserved for the veterans.

The veterans’ social mobility, which is also political and institutional, demonstrates how war experience is becoming a new source of legitimacy for gaining government roles. This is likely to create a political system built around more rigid patriotic values, and lead to Russia’s more radical position in the current and future conflicts. More generally, it may lead to the institutionalization of a state of permanent confrontation with Europe.

The U.S. empire is in a state of apparent relative but terminal decline. Some say this is a good thing and the world shall not necessarily be less safe. Others argue that the demise of Pax Americana will cause global upheaval and chaos: the removal of the U.S. as the central actor in the global economy, ‘guarantor of democracy’, and military superpower will create disorder until a new hegemonic power or a group of powers emerges and engineers a new order. Thus, the post-Pax Americana geopolitical order is now being contested in an increasingly tumultuous international relations environment.

Pax Americana, but Whose Peace?

Historians’ approach to defining the eras of relative stability achieved through imperial hegemony in the IR hierarchy as ‘Pax’—Pax Romana, Pax Britannica and, currently, Pax Americana—has generated a deceptive perception that these were periods of peace and prosperity. However, this begs two questions: Whose peace was it? and Who paid the price for it? A closer look at the facts and lessons of history uncovers the thin veneer of the “benevolence.” The Century of Humiliation during Pax Britannica weakened the Chinese civilization by the devastating effects of the British drug trade and the spread of its “civilizational values.” The native American Indians paid a high price by their blood and soil to live in Pax Americana, the peoples of the Philippines endured decades of repressive rule as the U.S. empire replaced the Spanish empire after the Spanish-American War, and Pax Americana’s insidious tool of warfare—economic warfare designed to turn subjects of international relations into powerless objects of U.S. geopolitics—has resulted in the deaths of millions of people around the globe.

Pax Americana is a systemic branding used to legitimize the exercise of brutal power in the name of the empire and a cognitive definition defying its dystopian realities. The power it wields is both hard and soft: the hard power is used to expand the empire and impose its geopolitical will, and the soft power helps consolidate Pax Americana by legitimizing those of its aspects that cannot be explained away rationally.

Trump as a Symptom of Pax Americana’s Decline

One of the most noticeable tell-tale signs of a declining empire is the degradation of its political and military leadership that becomes unable to inspire, prime, and mobilize its people internally, and to impose its will on external audiences by fear and respect. Once the veneer of imperial power collapses in people’s minds, the empire begins to decay physically. In the 21st-century, Pax Americana’s relative decline is rapidly picking up pace as the wars of choice, originally born of the hegemon’s arrogance and now driven by its desperation and unwillingness to see the consequences of its actions, persist and lead to an imperial overstretch in the political, economic, and military spheres. The U.S. political and military leadership’s inability to comprehend and adapt to the transforming global geopolitical environment speeds up its decline. A clear symptom is its arrogant political assessments of the global objective processes and forces that are actively resisting Pax Americana and promoting an alternative model of international interactions.

President Donald Trump is sometimes seen as a reaction to the U.S. empire’s stagnation brought about by the lack of transparency and accountability of its heavily politicized bureaucracy unable to understand, let alone work towards its own self-interest and preservation. However, I would argue that he is not a reaction, but rather a symptom of America’s imperial stagnation. Despite his initial rhetoric and the MAGA catchphrase—now mostly meaningless slogans—Trump’s current actions show that he is doubling down on the pursuit of the geostrategic imperative of preserving the empire as identified by Brzezinski in 1997. The difference between Trump and his predecessors lies not in the end goal of upholding Pax Americana, but in the tactics used to achieve it. Henry Kissinger’s keen observation “To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal” remains as pertinent as ever now that Pax Americana is going off the stage. This is what the European Union, the Gulf States, and other U.S. vassals and client states have recently found to their frustration, even if some are unwilling to admit it.

International Relations Without Nuance

Preserving what remains of the once uncontested absolute global hegemony requires that the U.S. exercise total control of its client and vassal states, and prevent the rise of independent powers that can challenge its dominance. This was clearly articulated by Brzezinski in a set of three geostrategic imperatives (which are not only an academic premise, but a real-world geopolitical practice). At the inflection point of 2020, choices were between accepting Pax Americana’s decline or challenging it. The decision was made in favor of the latter, and today Trump continues to uphold this geopolitical choice. Importantly, as the desperation and anxiety about Pax Americana continues to rise, the room for smaller powers in the IR system is shrinking, challenging their national interests and security. The situation is equivalent to the phenomenon well described by the theory of relativity: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The decline of Pax Americana has set in motion a counteraction in a manner that increases the risk and insecurity for all IR actors.

An empire that is confident of its power does not need to impose its will in absolute terms, whereas an empire in decline is anything but confident. Classical Pax Americana permitted vassal powers to exercise—within certain boundaries—hedging in international relations because this ensured that they would remain pliant to the empire’s will.

In the current iteration of Pax Americana, the empire’s rampant practice of wedging and subverting other actors, whether client, vassal or independent, is aimed at creating a binary global system consisting of IR objects and independent IR subjects, i.e. a system of micromanaging and regulating the correlation of power and influence stacked in favor of the hegemon and against other states’ national sovereignty and dignity. Meanwhile, in the 21st-century geopolitical environment it is crucial for states to remain independent subjects in international relations in order to maintain self-interest and security and not to become expendable pawns in the geopolitical games of major powers. Today, Pax Americana’s great global geopolitical game is aimed at obstructing foreign policy goals of the Global South, which reflects the Global North’s lack of competitiveness as an attractive center of power and influence. Rather than changing its attitude and behavior, the U.S. empire continues to display arrogance and unipolar impulses, trying to prevent the rise of independent powers from realizing their potential.

Three Key Pillars of the Global South

The Global South (a name that defies its absolute physical form) is far from being a unitary and homogenous network of international actors and intentions. It is a system of non-Western centric powers in a multipolar constellation. They differ vastly in terms of size, hard and soft power projection, foreign policy intentions, and political and philosophical tangible (physical) and intangible (informational and cognitive) forms. Also, there is a clear line of delineation between the Global South nation-states and civilization-states.

To enforce its geostrategic imperatives, the U.S. and its vassal and client states seek to break the unity of the Global South as a center of growing influence and power. Brazen acts of aggression—waged or threatened—against Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, and Cuba are aimed at discouraging other countries from aligning more tightly with the Global South.

There are three powers in three key global geopolitical regions that the Global North covets the most to contain and weaken as they are central in engineering a viable alternative to Pax Americana. These are China in the Indo-Pacific region, Iran in West Asia, and Russia in Europe.

These key pillars of the Global South are civilization-states insofar as they are multi-ethnic, multicultural and/or multi-confessional, and have a long history of being independent subjects in international relations. They tend to think strategically over longer periods of time than their counterparts in the Global North.

Taken as a total sum of the parts, these actors have a powerful potential for making Greater Eurasia a sovereign and independent subject in international relations, free from the toxic and subversive effects of Pax Americana. This explains the Global North’s decades-long obsession with the desire to simultaneously subvert China, Iran, and Russia and prevent them from realizing their intentions.

A Basically New Approach to World Order

The Global North approaches international relations in a very transactional manner, which is ideologically messianic and results in zero-sum outcomes that are disadvantageous for its counterparties’ interests and security. Its aim is to generate IR objects that would sacrifice their own interests and security for the ‘greater good’ of Pax Americana. It is also highly West-centric and unipolar in nature. The Global South, on the other hand, is very different in terms of approach and intended outcomes. The Global South countries are driven not by ideological messianism but by pragmatic pursuits and national interests. Their interaction with other powers is based on reciprocity and win-win outcomes, where differences are understood and respected rather than used for division and subversion.

This is evident in the geo-economic goals of the Belt Road Initiative, BRICS+, and the Greater Eurasian Partnership. These projects are based on relational reciprocity between powers as partners and equals, not on the desire to monopolize key economic resources and transportation routes, which marks the U.S.’s economic warfare objectives and myopic focus on keeping other powers from realizing their potential. These basically different approaches prompt some useful conclusions.

Perhaps, first and foremost is that ideology is unable to adapt to a global geopolitical environment that is in a state of transformation. The way to solve Rodrik’s trilemma is to enact: 1) a re-globalization of the world order that supports the principles and spirit of the Global South; 2) a principled and pragmatic approach to politics to regulate and manage the international system; and 3) the upholding of national sovereignty and dignity in international relations.

Pax Americana, now intensively and rashly upheld and mismanaged by Trump, is reactive and non-sustainable. It requires submission of the will of IR actors and world resources to maintain a degenerate and dying empire.

The inconsistencies of U.S. foreign policy reveal its short-term and situational tactics intended to take a spontaneous advantage of situations as they emerge or are engineered. These tactics are aligned in the broadest and most vague terms with the three geostrategic imperatives of maintaining Pax Americana, but the defeats in Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated its limits and deficiency. Pax Americana client and vassal states have learned through hard experience that having U.S. military bases on their soil is not a security guarantee; on the contrary, it is a guarantee of insecurity. Therefore, these desperate, risky, and inconsistent tactics, in the absence of a coherent and viable strategy, are the noise that comes before the strategic defeat and collapse of Pax Americana.

The UK has had eight Prime Minister’s this century, with most serving after Brexit and for an average of two years. Sir Keir Starmer is deeply unpopular and the public (and some in his party) want him to resign.

This is not the first challenge to Starmer, but Labour’s slump in recent local elections—to English councils, the Scottish Parliament, and Welsh Assembly—is especially bruising.

For the first time ever, Labour lost control of Wales, one of its traditional heartlands. Despite finishing joint second with Reform in Scotland, it was Labour’s worst ever result north of the border. In England, Labour lost almost 1,500 councillors in different parts of the country to parties on the left and right.

Calls for Starmer to resign intensified ahead The King’s Speech to reopen Parliament. A relatively unknown MP, Sarah West, offered to challenge Starmer if nobody else would. She ultimately backed down from her pledge, but around 90 of Labour’s 400 MPs called for Starmer to go or begin a leadership transition. Yet over100 MPs publicly backed him.

So far, no leadership challenge has materialized, but potential rivals have made their moves. Wes Streeting has resigned as health secretary and, having no support to challenge Starmer himself, is now backing Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester, who is planning to run for Parliament again. One MP voluntarily has given up his seat for Burnham to do so. More quietly, former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has also hinted at a challenge, and Labour’s left are urging former party leader Ed Miliband to run.

But why is Starmer surviving and why do Britons feel the urge to keep replacing their leaders? A few factors are important here.

First, there is no obvious alternative to Starmer within the Labour Party. Andy Burnham would lose an election to Parliament. Wes Streeting, on the party’s right, would lose a membership vote. Angela Rayner is not popular with the broader British electorate, and Ed Miliband has already lost an election as leader (with the British press incredibly harsh on him and his family).

The elections’ stubborn arithmetic is also illustrative. Beyond the headlines, Labour’s health is much better than it seems.

The Green Party, challenging Labour from the left, underperformed in these elections. Much of that had to do with recent antisemitism within the party and its controversial leader, Zack Polanski. Although the separatists won in Scotland and Wales, it was not due to any appetite for independence. The SNP remains deeply unpopular in Scotland (perhaps more so than Labour), but the unionist party votes were very split.

On the right, Reform also underperformed and appear to have peaked. Whilst Reform won the most councillors and came second in Wales, its vote share was down from last year’s elections. Also, increased voter turnout seemed to work against Nigel Farage’s party. Reform only won in places that voted for Brexit and is yet to attract any new voters. In other parts of the country, their vote never reached above 10%.

Translated to a General Election, Reform would fall far short of a majority. Some estimates show that it would need to increase its vote share by 22 points to win any sort of governing majority. For that to happen, either the Conservatives or Labour (or both) would have to see their vote collapse, or voter fragmentation would need to be rife across the board.

Thus far, the Conservative vote has proven remarkably stubborn, as has the Liberal Democrats’. Labour is also clinging onto around 20% of the electorate, depending on the poll. As for the Greens, they did well primarily among students—a small slice of the electorate—and urban-based women.

On top of that, Farage is not popular with the British electorate. In every single head-to-head poll with Starmer—and all the other party leaders—Farage lost. Britons do not directly elect the Prime Minister, but cast votes for who will be living at 10 Downing Street. So, whilst Reform has led the polls for over a year now, it is losing support and Farage is a turn-off.

That brings us to Britons themselves. Why, indeed, are Britons so impatient with their leadership this century? Their appetite for regicide is greatly misunderstood.

It is worth remembering that a hundred years ago, from 1900-1926, Britain also went through eight Prime Ministers in quick succession (from three different parties). There are some parallels, even though the times were very different. As Winston Churchill famously quipped about the early 20th century, “the market was free, slaves were free, and conscience was free. But hunger, squalor, and the cold were also free, and people wanted something more than liberty.”

In Britain today, people want something more. After the 2008 financial crash, austerity, Brexit, COVID-19, and recent cost of living crisis, the British public is tired and impatient.

But unlike then, there is no new intellectual thinking to tackle today’s economic problems (mostly generated by Brexit). Instead, there are demagogues and populists, shouting their empty promises and muddying the waters.

Starmer might be unpopular, but the sad truth is anyone else would be. Britain is close to going ungovernable because the population are too impatient. They are desperate to see government working in earnest, as Starmer promised it would.

Britain needs to have an honest conversation with itself about where it is going and how it will get there. To unite the kingdom, Britons need something more than the Football World Cup and the Amandaland TV show.

In 2025, Russia became India’s top supplier of crude oil, accounting for about 32.3 percent of imports, with the bilateral trade reaching $68.7 billion (~₽ 74.45), following a sharp rise over the recent years. These figures reflect not a temporary spike, but a structural shift. The supplies of energy, fertilizers, and industrial goods are increasing. Yet the negotiation and execution of transactions are far from easy-going. Contracts sometimes take too long to conclude; payments are overdue because of excessive scrutiny, and shipments are delayed for reasons that are rarely disclosed in official reports. Today the need for aligning the countries’ legal systems has become urgent than never.

Several issues require a thorough consideration and prompt solution.

Firstly, the lack of a centralized legal coordination interface continues to hinder contract formation and enforcement. The negotiating parties often have different expectations of each other’s core legal concepts. In addition, since 2022 contract performance has been seriously challenged by sanctions. In Russian legal practice, sanctions are often treated as a valid force majeure reason for transactions’ disruption. Meanwhile, the Doctrine of Frustration, enshrined under Section 56 of the Indian Contract Act,1872, specifies whether disruption of contract performance has become objectively impossible rather than commercially difficult. Thus, a supplier may consider itself excused for disruption, while the buyer sees it as a breach. This difference affects risk-based pricing, definition of contract obligations, and resolution of disputes.

Without a shared interpretation baseline, every contract involves a negotiation not only of terms, but of the legal meaning. A standing bilateral interface, even with non-binding guidance, would help reduce this uncertainty if it clarifies sanctions-related force majeure and aligns the relevant governing law and enforcement practices.

Secondly, the absence of sector-specific mutual recognition frameworks continues to influence costs. A pharmaceutical product approved in India still undergoes additional conformity checks in Russia, including registration and quality evaluation under Russian State Pharmacopoeia requirements. Engineering equipment certified under Russian standards often requires additional testing in India through the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) for compliance with Indian Standards (IS) specifications. Each repetition extends timelines and raises costs. Pharmaceuticals, energy equipment, agricultural products, and heavy engineering products form a large share of bilateral trade. Targeted recognition in these sectors would not require full harmonization, but should involve identifying areas where standards already align and formalizing that recognition. Even limited agreements could significantly reduce duplication.

Thirdly, in customs and trade documentation, even small differences can create major disruptions. Disparities in rules of origin, inconsistencies in Harmonized System classification, and differing documentation formats lead to repeated queries at ports. Traders handling processed goods or mixed consignments are especially affected. The lost time translates directly into costs through demurrage, storage, or missed deadlines. Both countries have invested in digital customs systems. India’s GST and and Russia’s EDO systems already operate at scale domestically, but interoperability gaps remain. Digital invoices and electronic bills of lading are not always recognized by the systems and force manual checks, despite efforts to enforce interoperability of the national payment systems. Mutual recognition of digital formats and alignment of documentation standards would remove much of this disfunction.

Fourthly, the sanctions restrictions have caused legal ambiguity that affects decisions at every level. Companies must decide on contract structure, payment routing, shipment insurance, and risk allocation. However, legal boundaries often allow differing interpretations, which causes a cautious response. Even legally permissible transactions face delays because the cost of error is high. This cautious overcompliance may not appear in trade data, but it continues to influence commercial activity.

A coordinated, sanctions-aware framework would not remove risks, but would define them more clearly. Standard clauses, model structures, and clearer allocation of responsibilities would allow businesses to proceed with greater confidence.

Fifthly, an equally important challenge is banking and transactional legal interoperability. Russian banks, such as Sberbank and VTB, now operate actively in India, while Indian banks have enabled trade through special vostro accounts approved by the Reserve Bank of India for rupee-based settlements. These mechanisms have kept transactions moving. Yet uncertainty persists around non-SWIFT systems, particularly concerning the legal moment of settlement and applicable compliance requirements. In practice, Indian public sector banks have increasingly assumed a quasi-regulatory role, sometimes imposing excessive requirements, including confirmation of non-SDN status from Russian parties that are often not in a legal position to provide such assurances. This creates operational deadlocks; a delayed or disputed payment can disrupt entire supply chains.

Russia is tightening oversight of the financial flows, including stricter regulation of cryptocurrency-related activity. A bilateral protocol clarifying settlement finality, recognition of alternative messaging systems, and compliance norms would make existing channels more reliable. Another practical step could involve joint working groups between the Russian and Indian Ministries of Finance tasked with issuing operational clarifications for categories of market participants and commodity classes.

Sixthly, investment and corporate law complexity continues to limit deeper engagement. While Russia-India trade has grown, long-term investments remain modest. Companies are cautious as they face layered regulation, ownership restrictions in some sectors, taxation ambiguity, and repatriation and exit uncertainty. The India–Russia Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement, in force since 1998, already provides a framework to avoid double taxation through tax credits and rules on permanent establishment. However, parts of it remain under-used. More consistent application of permanent establishment thresholds and faster use of mutual agreement procedures could reduce disputes, improve tax certainty, and support investment. The issue is less about formal openness and more about clarity in application.

Finally, the burden of legal complexity falls most heavily on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Larger firms can manage regulatory differences through dedicated teams. SMEs often cannot. Many depend on intermediaries, raising costs and reducing control. The absence of standardized contracts, limited familiarity with international commercial terms, and complex customs procedures create barriers. Practical steps can help. Bilingual contract templates for common transactions would provide a clear starting point. Clear guidance on Incoterms and simplified customs procedures for smaller consignments would lower entry barriers. Faster, lower-cost dispute resolution would ensure that smaller firms are not excluded due to legal costs.

In all these areas, the core issue is effective coordination.

Russia and India have established national legal systems of their own strength. The challenge arises when these systems interact without a shared framework. Businesses do not need identical laws; they need predictability. They need to know how a clause will be interpreted, how a shipment will be processed, and how a payment will be settled.

Russia-India economic engagement has moved from exploratory trade into a sustained cooperation at scale. Legal alignment will determine whether this cooperation continues smoothly or face limits. The task is to reduce uncertainty where it matters most. When contracts are clearer, certifications are recognized, documents move smoothly, payments settle with confidence, and smaller firms can participate without excessive burden, the relationship becomes easier to sustain.

The opportunity is already vivid in the performance figures. The next step is to ensure that the legal framework supports this progress. Without institutional and regulatory coordination, the difficulties will persist. One practical starting point could be a bilateral model contract approved by both countries’ ministries of justice, which would cover sanctions-related force majeure, governing law, and streamlined arbitration, while leaving technical implementation issues to working groups rather than political summits.