Valdai Club

On April 15, the Valdai Discussion Club and the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) held an online discussion on regional strategic changes and prospects for bilateral relations. The meeting, which brought together leading experts on the region, was held in a closed-door format.

It is clear that the modern European Union is much larger than the ECSC in its scale and depth of integration. Under the auspices of the EU, there is a single currency and the Schengen area, and now there is also a special vaccine policy. However, the first steps were associated with coal and steel 70 years ago, when Germany went from being a defeated enemy to being a key US ally in the Cold War, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.

What does the world community need to undertake to address the weak response to the pandemic? Nearly every major crisis faced by the world in the past was followed by a reconfiguration of global architecture, with new coordination mechanisms and new international organizations being created. Perhaps this time it is not so much about the creation of new organizations, but rather the greater responsibility that is to be taken by the major powers represented in the UN Security Council, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Yaroslav Lissovolik.

Countries around the world are placing high hopes on the new COVID-19 vaccines in their joint efforts to fight the COVID-19 epidemic, while continuing to face “deficits” in vaccine production capacity and global distribution issues. As a developing country, China has offered to provide its vaccines as public goods to the rest of the world, particularly to people from less developed countries, emphasising the concept of building a global health community for mankind, write Wang Yiwei & Chen Chao.

There may be grounds for qualified optimism, writes Simon J. Evenett, Professor of International Trade and Economic Development, University of St. Gallen, and Founder, the St. Gallen Endowment for Prosperity Through Trade. While traditional big picture trade deals are out, other consequential initiatives involving trade cooperation with America’s trading partners are possible—especially if those initiatives can be linked to restoring President Biden’s plans to restore America economic and public health.

Experts and readers often fail to comprehend the closeness of the economic ties Russia maintains with states where official rhetoric regarding Russia, its interests and values are, to put it mildly, unfriendly. One of the most striking examples is the countries of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. For the latter, anti-Russian rhetoric in recent years has dominated foreign policy almost exclusively. With this commentary by Nikolay Mezhevich, a well-known Russian expert on the region, we begin a series of publications on how Russia could economically punish its neighbours, whose policies provide objective reasons for this.

The decision to increase the cap on nuclear warheads marks an abrupt departure from a generation of previous UK disarmament initiatives and advocacy. Andrew Futter, Professor of International Politics, University of Leicester, discusses why it was taken now.

The gradual squeezing of Russia and China out of the common spaces of a world that has become global is probably an inevitable consequence of the American strategy to retain leadership in the world system, since the key condition for the growth of the influence of both China and Russia has been the global economy and market-based exchange of goods, writes Andrey Sushentsov, the Valdai Club Programme Director.

While the wars in Yemen and Syria dominate global news cycles, the conflict in North-East Nigeria features less in media. The conflict, with no sign of abating, has decimated communities, livelihoods and local economies of the region that depend on farming or grazing, rendering farming impossible on large swathes of land that are prone to attacksб writes Leonard Blazeby, Head of Prevention, Delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The Arab world has been unable until this moment to produce its own integrated intellectual, cultural and pragmatic project that can understand the language of the future and the rapidly increasing knowledge and bring people together. In case that happens, it will have the rug pulled out from under those who raise religious and nationalistic slogans, writes Ebtesam al-Ketbi, President of the Emirates Policy Centre.