Valdai Club

Great power competition-driven instability over the most-used trade routes, combined with climate change, is making the INSTC more attractive and the North Pole more navigable; it is offering Asia’s greatest powers the epoch-making opportunity to reshape the geography of world trade. Russia is the player set to economically benefit the most from such a development, but the diplomatic reverberations have the potential to positively affect all the greatest powers in the international system, Emanuel Pietrobon writes. The author is a participant of the Valdai - New Generation project.

The demographic winter is jeopardizing the future of many nations, particularly in the West. In the Balkans, Europe’s historic powder keg, the empty cradle crisis could overlap with the great power competition, writes Emanuel Pietrobon, geopolitical analyst from Italy.

Cuba has a role to play in the current hegemonic struggle between the West and the Rest. Russia and the BRICS should take advantage of its geostrategic and geopolitical position and act accordingly — Cuba’s salvation might mean the Multipolar Transition’s culmination, writes
Emanuel Pietrobon.

BRICS no longer exists: the time of BRICS+ has come. But to make this informal forum into a structured reality, one capable of withstanding bumps and games, a radical rethinking of its purposes and its current skeleton is needed, writes Emanuel Pietrobon.

The Caribbean island country has been living under a US embargo since the early 1960s. With scarce natural resources, but a lot of creativity, the country not only managed to face economic isolation, but also developed some top-tier specialisations, writes Valdai Club expert Emanuel Pietrobon.

In a growingly multipolar world, where the United States is slowly ceasing to be the primary pole of power, it is not strange, but absolutely normal and physiological, to witness a worldwide process of reserve currency diversification, writes Valdai Club expert Emanuel Pietrobon.

The Russian Arctic is as resource-rich as it is inherently weak. It is militarily vulnerable to malicious foreign activities. It is demographically poor, being home to only two million people. Additionally, it lacks a highly developed land-and-sea infrastructure network, although the adoption of a pioneer mindset could give rise to a Russian remake of the American Westward expansion

The key to the multipolar transition is the opening of the Latin American front, that is the shifting of the center of gravity of the great power competition from Eurasia to the Americas. The question is whether America’s challengers will be willing or able to do so, writes Emanuel Pietrobon.

The Ukraine conflict will act as a catalyst of a greater engagement in the region, with an increased support to Japan’s historical rearmament and with increased sales of weaponry and military hardware to Taiwan, South Korea and other American-friendly countries located near the PRC’s near abroad, writes Valdai Club expert Emanuel Pietrobon.

What role will Russia play in tomorrow's world order? The answer is: it depends on Russia's reaction to today's total economic warfare. And Russia itself needs to draw on the past if it does want to pass the stress test, as the past offers a lot of examples of economic wars, like the Nixon's assault on Allende's Chile.