Valdai Club

The confrontation between the world’s leading economies in the high-tech sector has become a sort of proxy war of this new age. We are witnessing a standoff on the markets for chips, 5G technology and artificial intelligence as a modern-day reincarnation of traditional great power rivalry and competition to maintain and expand their influence along their borders and across the world.

In 1944, the Bretton Woods System was de facto created by two states (the United States and Britain), which at that time had the authority and resources to impose their will on four dozen states that were guided by them during the world war. Today there is no state or group of countries on the planet capable of imposing its will on the entire world community. A new or radically reformed Bretton Woods, of course, should take into account the opinion of all the states of the planet, regardless of their size. The solution of such a problem through negotiations will last for many years, while the likelihood of success will be minimal, writes Valdai Club expert Stanislav Tkachenko.

The competition between technological platforms that are being formed at the poles of the modern world economy, which were previously identified by the experts of the Valdai Discussion Club, is growing.

There is no accepted definition for the term “technological platform,” because it has been applied to information and communication technologies (ICT) only recently. The experts, politicians and business people who discuss technological platforms understand what one another mean, by and large.

The private sector, of course, would be happy to remain neutral, acting simultaneously in the two largest national markets of the planet. But by their actions, Washington and Beijing have deprived businesses of such an opportunity, demanding that they take sides, writes Valdai Club expert Stanislav Tkachenko.

At the moment, holding a summit of the leaders of the permanent members of the UN Security Council seems rather unrealistic. The only two topics worthy of such a summit are related to nuclear weapons issues. For Russia, this is the preservation of the current model of nuclear arms reduction and limitation (New START, which may cease to exist next year). For the United States, it’s forcing China to participate in international efforts to control and limit the number of nuclear weapons.

Russia, realizing that international processes were taking an unfavorable turn, encouraged the creation of a totally different structure, where its voice would be heard plus its interests would be taken into consideration. BRICS has proved precisely this kind of organization.

Russian policy towards Cuba today serves as a litmus test for assessing relations between Russia and the United States. If issues of military-technical cooperation will prevail in the dialogue between Moscow and Havana, it means that the Russian-American conflict is growing.

Luckily, Donald Trump, unlike most of his predecessors, has not yet unleashed new military conflicts involving the use of weapons and human casualties. But his passion for trade disputes and full-scale economic wars has surpassed anything known before and will certainly go down in history.

The confrontation between China and the US that has been escalating for several years reached a new level this August due to the actions of the US administration, which itself is likely to become the first victim, followed by China, the world trade system and the entire global economy.