Valdai Club

The Valdai spirit this year captured a vital lesson: the era of empire is over, but the era of shared stewardship has barely begun. The task of our generation is to bridge that interval with imagination and will. Inclusivity is not charity, sustainability is not luxury, and cooperation is not concession – they are all conditions of survival in an age where crises travel faster than diplomacy, writes Atia Ali Kazmi.

A strategic vision of international relations is of great importance to Russia. After all, in the context of a global crisis, all global players are locked in a state of zugzwang and prefer to play a tactical waiting game: who will make the first mistake or exhaust their resources? Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is already prepared, drawing on the philosophy of complexity, to outline the contours of a new, conciliar world order in which Russia and the BRICS countries could play a role as systemically important players, writes Alexander Shchipkov, political philosopher and rector of the Russian Orthodox University of St. John the Theologian.

The West has indeed dominated global affairs for centuries. And its relative power is rapidly declining. Europeans – and populations of European origin – have always been a global minority, but they have long packed the halls of power. This disproportionate influence is clearly waning – and will likely continue to decrease over the coming decades. But “decline” does not mean ‘displacement’, writes Peter Slezkine in an article specially prepared for the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.

The rationale for the hundreds of thousands of forces that the United States has deployed around the globe over the past eight decades are many and varied: protecting allies, defeating threats to the homeland before they reach US shores, ensuring access to economic markets, and spreading democracy and liberal values.

We are currently experiencing a period reminiscent of 1914, when the UK was the global leader and the British pound sterling the dominant currency, but the country lacked the military, economic, and financial power it once enjoyed. The same is happening today in the United States, writes Abdullah bin Abdulmohsen Al-Faraj. The article was prepared for the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.

Large language models today are not a neutral technological tool, but a cultural phenomenon in which worldview differences, historical contradictions, and reflexive paradigms are marked (“labelled”). Differences and contradictions are the norm of development, expressing the uniqueness of cultures, writes Ekaterina Tikhomirova for the 22nd Annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.

The international system has always been in flux, but the early twenty-first century has seen an acceleration of geopolitical, economic, technological, and ecological shifts that appear to be rewriting the rules of world politics. Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine in 2022 and NATO’s involvement in the conflict, China’s quick global rise, intensifying US–China competition, regional wars in the Middle East and Africa, the growing role of emerging powers in Africa and Latin America, the disruptive impact of climate change, and the revolutionary pace of artificial intelligence are just some of the developments that suggest that the world order established since 1945 may be unravelling, writes Yahia H. Zoubir for the 22nd Annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.

Western global hegemony and the rules-based international order are over. The world is entering a post-Western era not only because of the rise of China, India, and other powers, but also because of the disintegration of the Western community itself, writes Gabor Stier for the 22nd Annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.