Valdai Club

Even if the West does not want to admit it, the terrorists responsible for the attacks of 9/11 exactly twenty years ago inflicted a historic defeat on the West and drove NATO out of the Middle East. The aim of Bin Laden's diabolical plan was to lure the US into the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan in order to defeat it there in the gruelling petty war.

The US, NATO, EU and the West – they failed miserably in Afghanistan. The withdrawal from the Hindu Kush and the resulting disaster are comparable to the ignominious defeat of the USA in Vietnam half a century ago.

A country like Serbia will soon be faced with a strategic decision: continue to cooperate with China and Russia – or act purely on the side of the West, where a kind of alliance will be created among the democratic countries, against the “dictators” of the planet. The concept of a Common Space from Lisbon to Vladivostok will be important for the future partnership between Russia and Serbia, writes Alexander Rahr, Research Director, German-Russian Forum. The article was prepared specially for the Russian-Serbian Conference of the Valdai Discussion Club and Russia House in Belgrade.

It is good that Europe is finally realising that Libya can quickly become a second Syria. Europe is now suffering severely from the disintegration of the Middle East and the countries of Africa. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Mali, Libya, Syria – tens of “failed states” could be added to this list during the 2020s. They produce mass migration, international terrorism, civil wars on Europe’s doorstep.

Merkel may have realized that successful peacekeeping in the region should be negotiated with Moscow rather than with Washington. With her visit to Russia, Merkel demonstrated that Germany and the EU will seek their own strategy toward Russia instead of letting themselves be harnessed against the rest of the world by the US.

The trend of world politics for the 2020s is evident. The transatlantic bloc is weakening, but it remains united under American pressure. In Asia, a counter-alliance is developing, in which China and Russia will play the leading role.

Now Germany wants to take Russia's interests in Syria into account. But no one is waiting for the EU in Syria any more. The great regulatory power in the Middle East is Russia, which has even managed to approximate the opposing positions of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Sebastian Kurz made a strategic mistake when he expelled his party's partner, the populist Austrian Freedom Party, from the government. Thus, he was virtually left without a government, without a majority in parliament. He thought that the Social Democrats, the main opposition force, would not oppose him. However, they had an agreement with the right-wing populists and overthrew Kurz.

Humanity is increasingly caught up in the maelstrom of new conflicts. Disorder in the world is growing. A great war can no longer be ruled out. The global conflicts have nothing to do with territorial claims or conquest, as in earlier centuries. No state today seeks territorial expansion, not even Russia, which laments the collapse of the Soviet Union; the events in Crimea in 2014 were a response to NATO's eastward enlargement.

Will Great Britain face the same fate that the Soviet Union faced 30 years ago? One of the outcomes of Brexit could be that Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose populations for the most part voted to remain in the EU, could withdraw from the UK. For London, losing Scotland would be like losing Ukraine was for Moscow, since Scotland is where Britain deploys its nuclear weapons and naval bases. In order to prevent such a course of events, the ruling elite will do everything within its power to insist upon a new referendum. The EU will not object to this, because Brexit could seriously damage continental Europe as well. Following the example of Ireland, where after a first referendum resulted in a vote against the Treaty of Lisbon, another vote was taken, the British could also be sent to the ballot boxes a second time in order to achieve the “right” result. However, wouldn't such manipulation harm liberal democracy?