Professor Joe Siracusa, a political scientist and dean of Global Futures at Curtin University in Western Australia, stated that Western leaders who backed Kiev and predicted Russia’s collapse “don’t know any history.”
At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the global dynamic of moving toward a multipolar order and away from one dominated by Europe and the United States.
The Russian leader noted that Western sanctions, intended to strangle Russia’s economy, have instead accelerated the process of decentering the West and spurred new relationships between Russia and partners in Africa and Asia. He also pointed to increased trade in rubles and yuan, although he cautioned that Russia has never intended to “de-dollarize” its economy.
Professor Joe Siracusa, a political scientist and dean of Global Futures at Curtin University in Western Australia, told Sputnik on Friday that Putin was “simply registering what is already a reality.”
“The world has already broken up, with the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement, and we got the Western groups. The world is broken up into multi-polar agencies. I thought it was a very good statement,” Siracusa said. “It’s not like it’s about to happen – it has happened – and Russia has joined the show.”
Siracusa noted the “really well-dressed people from around the world, men and women there” at SPIEF, saying it “suggested to me that the American-led sanctions on Russia are a complete failure.”
“Putin literally left the sanctions for dead tonight and makes it look ridiculous, what the West is trying to do. At the same time, he didn’t have a lot of malice in his voice, he invited Western companies, transnationals to come back to Russia without penalty. That’s sort of very magnanimous,” he said.
“Multipolarity is the natural condition of the world,” said Paolo Raffone, a strategic analyst and director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels, Belgium. “Unilaterality can be imposed by dominion and force but cannot be endured for a long time.”
“From 1945 to 1991, the world was locked in a bipolarity because of the post-WWII balance of power and the persistence of European colonial practices. After the end of European colonial practices and the voluntary dissolution of the USSR, the world’s natural multipolar trend regained pace,” but that changed with US and UK “interference” with the process, he explained.
“Since 2001, the USA and UK have weaponized globalization, imposing the primacy of security interests on economic development. After the financial crash of 2008, the Western powers entered a distress era while others, namely China, Russia, and some large southern countries, expanded their free actions and activities based on national interest and cooperation,” he said.
“The situation today is that the multipolarity is consolidated and it is progressively structuring its own institutional framework. Realistically, multipolarity is a fact and those who benefit from it have no intention of abandoning it. Therefore, Putin’s sentence that ‘the neocolonial international system is irreversibly finished’ is just an empirical statement. It is a realist not an ideological statement,” Raffone said.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov told Foreign Policy magazine that the West told us to “kill as many Russians” as possible.
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