In his keynote address to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) today, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a tour de force in describing the world situation, telling his audience that he wanted to begin with the same point he made at the World Economic Forum in Davos a year and a half ago—that the unipolar world is dead. “There is no way around it. This era has ended despite all the attempts to maintain and preserve it at all costs.” The flawed concept of a unipolar world is based on the idea that there is just one “albeit strong power with a limited circle of close allies, or, as they say, countries with granted access, and all business practices and international relations, when it is convenient, are interpreted solely in the interests of this power. They essentially work in one direction in a zero-sum game. A world built on this doctrine of this kind is definitely unstable.”
Putin pointed to the willful blindness of the U.S. and Western powers that, following the Cold War, ignored the emergence in recent decades of new “increasingly assertive” centers of power, with their own political systems, models of economic growth and the right to protect themselves and secure their national sovereignty. These are “genuinely revolutionary tectonic shifts in geopolitics, the global economy and technology in the entire system of international relations.” These “dynamic and potentially strong countries and regions are growing,” Putin said, and their interests can no longer be ignored.
Putin excoriated Western states for refusing “to notice obvious things, stubbornly clinging to the shadows of the past…. They seem to believe that the dominance of the West in global politics and the economy is an unchanging eternal value.” But, he warned, “nothing is eternal.” Western nations are trying “to reverse the course of history. They seem to think in terms of the past century,” considering that any nations outside the so-called “golden billion” are a backwater, are colonies and second-class citizens. Any nation that does not blindly obey is punished or crushed.
The Russian President went through a quite detailed and systematic discussion of the Russian economy, assessing its problems, priorities and accomplishments, especially under the onslaught of the “sanctions blitzkrieg” which the West deluded itself into thinking would “suddenly and violently” crush the Russian economy, industry and people’s living standards. “This did not work,” Putin pointed out. The propaganda about the dollar at 200 rubles and economic collapse was just information warfare. “Real life has belied these predictions.” But, he said, “to continue being successful, we must be explicitly honest and realistic in assessing the situation, be independent in reaching conclusions, and of course, have a can-do spirit, which is very important. We are strong people and can deal with any challenge…. The entire thousand-year history of our country bears this out.”
