At today’s “Forum of the Future 2050”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov provided a history of “multipolarity,” as a basis for a healthy cooperation with the Trump administration in the United States. He explained that his predecessor, Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov had put forward the concept of multipolarity in the mid-1990s and it “was truly groundbreaking at the time. It came as a response to the mantras by prominent political scientists that the ‘end of history’ had arrived, and from now on the Western liberal order would dominate the world….” Russia and China in the 1997 Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Formation of a New International Order, and “when Vladimir Putin became President, the first trilateral Russia-India-China summit took place.”
Economic growth creates “new centers of power” and the Global South and East want “to be in charge of their own development and the development of their quarters of the world.... Multipolarity has been gaining momentum ever since.... The globalization model,” based on the desire “to continue living off the back of others,” was exposed as defunct. Trump, after his own fashion, has no interest in propping up this globalization model. And this autumn, the Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter, created in 2022 with nearly 20 countries, will put their resolution on “the need to counteract the current neocolonial practices” center stage at the UN General Assembly.
Economies measured not by financial statistics but “in terms of purchasing power parity” put China at number one and Russia as fourth, surpassing Japan and Germany last year. The “BRICS as a collective entity overtook the Western Group of Seven in the same metric several years ago. The gap between them continues to expand. Moreover, what we are witnessing is not merely mechanical economic growth figures. These achievements are the result of profound structural transformations.” Hence, they “are establishing mechanisms for foreign trade settlements beyond Western control, forging new transport and logistics chains, and constructing a new architecture of collaboration in culture, education, and sport.”
Lavrov made sure to point out that, in January 2025, that his “counterpart, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio ... described the unipolar world order as an anomalous product of the Cold War’s end—when it seemed that ‘the end of history’ had arrived and everything would henceforth unfold as the West decreed.”
