This was the insightful message that journalist Patrick Lawrence delivered in an Aug. 22 article published by Consortium News under the headline “Putin and the Emerging Order.” He takes as his starting point President Vladimir Putin’s Aug. 16 speech at the Moscow Conference on International Security, in which he pointed to the dynamic changes in the world, and the emergence of a multipolar world. “An increasing number of countries and peoples are choosing a path of free and sovereign development based on their own distinct identity, traditions and values,” Putin asserted.
Lawrence recounts his own observation that a multipolar world began to emerge as early as 1945, but in the ensuing years, and through the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies sought to suppress it, dividing the world into blocs and forcing nations to choose which side they were on. Nonetheless, the Non-Aligned Movement still lives—"the impulse driving it was never extinguished"—although the “East-West divide did its awful work over the years.”
Lawrence expresses his confidence that Russia, along with other non-Western leaders, including Xi Jinping and others, “will at last push the world through to an enduring world order with multipolarity as its core principle.” In fact, he says, “Putin’s remarks reminded me of direct reference to the Five Principles Zhou Enlai proposed in the mid-1950s and which formed the basis of the 10 principles the NAM articulated in Belgrade a half-dozen years later. This is the well from which I draw confidence.”
For Lawrence, Putin’s forceful language in his Aug. 16 speech represents a turn, which he attributes to the document he had signed with President Xi on Feb. 4, “the Joint Statement on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” That, he said, was a “remarkable document.” It seems there, he observed, that Putin and Xi drew the line: “If you insist on adversarial relations, you will get them.” He terms Putin’s speech evidence of “well-developed” clear and committed thinking, “another reason I am confident a multipolar world will win against Washington’s unilateralism.”
Compare Putin and Xi, he says, to what passes for the global leadership that Joe Biden always talks about. Look at the succession process taking place in Britain, where current Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, whom Americans would call “a piece of work,” will undoubtedly “be the stupidest, least serious PM in recent British history…the U.S. President shows signs of senility. The German Chancellor can’t seem to get out of his own way. And so on.”
The baton of this global leadership, Lawrence concludes, “is passing to non-Western leaders as the West surrenders out of sheer self-absorption. The tasks ahead are too many to count. Humanity is in desperate need of the new order, leaving to them their histories, cultures, traditions, economic models, politics and domestic affairs.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/22/patrick-lawrence-putin-the-emerging-order/
