Valdai Club

India and Russia have long shared geopolitical perspectives on the balance of power in Eurasia. In the post-Cold War era both turned their attention to the West. However, over the past decade India has pursued the Look East Policy, seeking to regain its political and economic influence in Southeast Asia and building new strategic partnerships with East Asian powers like Japan and South Korea.

With the Putin government since 2000, Russia’s interest in Northeast Asia and the APR began to increase, and a new Turn to the East policy began in earnest after the beginning of Putin’s third term as a president in 2012. This policy was underpinned by two factors.

Russia’s Far East and Siberia have much in common with Australia in terms of geopolitical, geo-economic, and even sociopolitical characteristics. However, Russia-Australia economic cooperation has been showing a downward trend over the last decade.

The practices of interaction between Northeast China and the Russian Far East during 2009-2018 demonstrate the big potential in bilateral cooperation in the region. Meanwhile, such practices also hold implications for future collaboration. Under the framework of ‘conjunction’ between China and Russia, the two countries are exploring a more effective and sustainable pattern of participation.

The main objective for the Shinzo Abe administration’s active engagement in supporting the involvement of Japanese companies in the development of the Russian Far East is to create favourable environment for resolution of the territorial issue and conclusion of a peace treaty with Russia.

In order to gain a freer hand in exercising foreign policy and pursuing those objectives, which include practices such as regime change, the US and its allies needed to change the manner in which the rules and boundaries of international relations were conceived and applied.

The region remains a source of violence and terrorism, dramatic national upheavals, humanitarian catastrophes on a global scale, and waves of migration. The price of revolutions, the resultant devastation and foreign interference proved too high and relapses cannot be ruled out.

Our age is witness to a proliferation of discourses about the ‘commons’. They are emerging from more and more quarters, and the word is being applied to more things than ever before. One important strand of discourse, claiming to be communist, seeks to apply it to all kinds of spheres, from the earth and its natural bounty to culture, and to all sorts of resources, from the most immaterial, such as common knowledge, to the most material, such as the use of the earth’s finite natural resources.

The year 2018 was marked by escalation in trade tensions among the world’s largest economies, mostly via bilateral trade restrictions. This was partly compensated by the advances in regional economic integration, particularly among the countries of the Global South, with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) being one of the most important advances in this direction.

It is far from certain whether global public opinion exists, but there is hardly any doubt that the struggle to dominate it is in existence – struggle getting ever fiercer. This is no paradox. In human history, non-existent things have quite often both caused enormous tragedies and produced mass outbursts of happiness.