Sergei Lavrov - Russia's Role in the Global Realignment and the End of Pax Americana

With those of us who live in the West being exposed to a steady diet of anti-Russian narratives by our mainstream media over the past year and a half, sometimes it pays to go directly to the source of information about how Russia views the West and the global reality.  A recent interview with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, one of the world's leading and most intellectually capable diplomats that appeared in Indonesia's Kompas newspaper, explains how Russia's leadership views a "new Cold War".

 

Here is the question posed by the Kompas journalist:

 

"How is Russia going to push for achieving a new balance in international politics and what path is it going to take? A new Cold War is believed to be ongoing. What are its ramifications for the political economy of the world? What policy is Russia pursuing in the new cold war?

  

Here is Lavrov's response with my bolds throughout:

  

"We do not define the current phase of international relations as a new Cold War. The issue at hand is different and is about something different, namely, the formation of a multipolar international order. This is an objective process. Everyone can see that new globally meaningful decision-making centres are strengthening their positions in Eurasia, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. These countries and their associations promote values such as national interests, independence, sovereignty, cultural and civilisational identity and international cooperation. In other words, they are fully within the global development trend and are, as a result, going from success to success."

 

As the thinkers among us have observed, there is a new multipolar global reality developing with the United States no longer functioning as the world's sole "police force".  Other nations and other organizations (i.e. BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) are now taking their place of leadership at the global table, becoming ever more important when it comes to the future of geopolitics.

  

Lavrov continues, focusing on the United States and its new role in the world:

 

"With regard to the US-led collective West, these countries are trying to slow these processes down and turn them around. Their goal is not to strengthen global security or engage in joint development, but to maintain their hegemony in international affairs and to keep on pursuing their neo-colonial agenda, or in simple terms, to continue to address their own problems at the expense of others, as they are accustomed to do."

 

Here he weighs in on the West and its foreign policies and how these policies have impacted developing nations (i.e. the Global South and Global East), emphasizing the use of sanctions to punish nations that do not fall into line with the West's agenda and how this has led to the new global reality:

 

"Unilateral economic sanctions and our Western colleagues’ overall selfish foreign policy undermine global food and energy security. Their actions have complicated things for the developing countries. Enormous amounts of money that could have been spent on promoting international growth, including on helping the countries that are most in need, are being burned up in the form of thousands of tonnes of military equipment and ammunition supplied to Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

 

Western egocentrism and disregard for the interests of the Global South and Global East encourage the latter to look for alternative cooperation formats across all areas. The seizure of Russian gold and currency reserves in the United States and Europe have led the international community to realise that no one is immune from expropriation of tangible assets that are kept in Western jurisdictions. Not just Russia, but a number of other countries are consistently reducing their dependence on the US dollar and transitioning to alternative payment systems and payments in national currencies.

 

At the same time, the effectiveness of country associations without Western participation is on the rise. The SCO and BRICS are a case of modern multilateral diplomacy without leaders or followers where decisions are made based on consensus....".

 

Russia's leadership is clearly seeing the new global geopolitical reality and is playing a key role, along with China, in the global realignment.  While Washington still holds sway over many nations in the world largely because of the importance of the U.S. dollar to the global economy, it's ability to influence many of the world's largest nations is waning as the sun sets on decades of Pax Americana.  Those leaders who choose to wholeheartedly propagate the Western philosophy of exceptionalism are doomed to fail as the Global South and Global East rise.