Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has raised the long-needed, but rarely addressed (as far as this author knows) necessity of re-claiming control of the United Nations Secretariat, so that the UN bureaucracy works on behalf of all humanity, instead of on behalf of the “interests” of the small clique of countries known as the “historic West,” both military and economic.
He opened his May 15 press conference in New Delhi after the meeting of the BRICS Foreign Ministers with a discussion of the need for “the systemic reformatting of the global economic structure” in order to facilitate the efforts of the Global South and East countries “to conduct independent foreign policy by prioritizing national interests.” Removing the current injustices and divisions in the world inevitably, he argues, requires “adjusting” the leadership of key international institutions, including the UN and the Bretton Woods system agencies, to reflect the real correlation of forces in the world. Which interests control the IMF and World Bank is well-known. (An example he cited: over the last four years, the IMF loaned Ukraine more than the total amount of loans issued by the IMF to all African Union countries over that time.)
