As the new president of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), historian Dmitry Trenin charted, in an interview with Kommersant, a course for Russia to deal with the breakdown of law and diplomacy in the West and, effectively, a looming world war. He stated: “Despite the apparent chaos and illogicality of what is happening, we should not pretend that nothing like this has ever happened in history. Today’s events have their own distinctive features, partly due to technological developments, but this is not the first time the world has gone through a period of fundamental change. In the past, such periods were linked to world wars. Today, we are experiencing something akin to a world war.
Trenin had last addressed EIR at its Jan. 12 Emergency Roundtable entitled, “It’s Worse Than You Think: The Strategic Implications of the Attack on Venezuela and How to Bring the World Back from the Brink”. At that point, he stated that “the action that Israel and the United States took, slightly more than six months ago with regard to Iran, was a much more stunning example of what war could look like in the 21st century. What happened in Venezuela just a few days ago was a very light version of that new style of using force to reach political goals.”
Now, he explained to Kommersant that the world has changed considerably since his 2021 book on seeking “foreign policy equilibrium…. Back then, it was still possible to try to work together with countries that were subsequently deemed unfriendly…. We are forced to wage war against a significant part of the collective West. A significant part, not the whole, because even within the European Union we see differing approaches towards Russia; it is important to take this into account when formulating policy.
“It’s a difficult task to strike a balance with the US, which is in fact our adversary, as they share intelligence with Ukraine to launch strikes against us and do much more for Kiev. Nevertheless, under the current US administration, we should not regard America as the same kind of adversary as, say, Britain.”
