Valdai Club

The global geopolitical configuration continues its transformation away from the embattled hegemony of the Western-centric US unipolar order towards a non-Western centric multipolar order. As such, the level of competition and conflict is likely to increase as the US is a declining hegemon seeks to arrest the rise of competing are perceived to grow at their expense.

This contemporary deeply undiplomatic form of diplomacy that is being waged by the US-led West is not done so from a position of strength, but rather from a position of declining influence and power.

The toxic information environment has created a cognitive effect, where political moderates on all sides, are now increasingly seen and treated as the ‘new’ radicals. The use of the Russia Gate narrative to scare American voters from Trump and towards the Democratic Party presidential candidate will only be effective if the voter segments hold like-minded value-normative based/informed worldviews, writes Greg Simons, Associate Professor at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES), Uppsala University, Sweden.

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.