Where The World's Headed: Breaking Down Vladimir Putin’s Momentous Valdai Club Speech

What might a truly post-colonial world look like?

Russian president Vladimir Putin offered his audience a few possibilities during a marathon engagement organised by a think tank called the Valdai Discussion Club at Moscow on 27 October.

Putin’s assessment was that the world was inexorably moving away from a centuries-old era of Anglo-Saxon domination and towards multiple spheres of regional influence.

In his opinion, this natural process is being obstructed by one part: the West. The reason for this obstructionism is that the West needs to retain control of the global economy in a mercantilist manner to maintain its own standard of living, and its primacy.

The West needs to be able to fix the production, supply, and costs of natural resources, and the only way it can do that is by ensuring, often through coercion and sometimes through force, that the rest of the world toes this line. It is a question of their survival.

In July 1944, all sovereign allied nations, and dominions of the British empire, congregated at the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the United States (US), to draft a new post-war order for the world. 

It covered the entire gamut, from international trade, lending, and finance, to a new monetary order, and remains the foundational basis for the institutional framework within which the world functions today.

But the global financial crisis of 2007-08 showed that the world had changed so much in those six decades that the Bretton Woods system had become a hindrance to most of the world; a hindrance which they had to suffer and endure because they were too politically disunited, geographically separated, and socio-economically disparate to force a change.

Curiously, it is from this period that America began its relentless, if abortive, attempts to push the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) further eastwards, and closer, to Russia’s borders — first into Georgia and then into Ukraine.

That is also when the concept of ‘colour revolutions’ — effecting regime changes by triggering popular unrest — took bipartisan policy form in America, and when Albania and Croatia joined NATO.

It is not so outlandish a thesis which Putin posits, since some parts of Europe have started falling off the post-war bus since 2008.

The economies of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland, plus Italy to some extent, were the most devastated. Debt-ridden Greeks went back to the barter system. Unemployment in Spain hit 25 per cent. And a new acronym was coined to classify these failing, flailing states — “PIGS” (ironically at a time when India’s own “BIMARU” states finally started shedding their backward tags).

A simple chart of changes in unit labour costs over time tell it all:

While the Anglo-Saxon world didn’t permit the complete collapse of those economies then, the twin, ongoing financial-energy crises in Europe caused by NATO’s sanctions on Russia will be a far deeper hole out of which to climb.

Putin remarked on the senselessness of inflicting so much pain on one’s own citizenry, calling it the inevitable outcome by the “so-called West” to ceaselessly aggravate issues at any and all cost, even to themselves, in a dangerous, bloody, dirty power game.

To him, the recklessness with which the West destabilised global food and energy markets in 2022 (with dreadful economic and humanitarian consequences to themselves), like their provocations over Taiwan, and the proxy war they are presently persecuting in Ukraine against Russia, are part and parcel of their efforts to retain global supremacy.

But that plan is failing. Humankind is at a fork in the road, Putin said, meaning that the West can “either keep accumulating problems and eventually get crushed under their weight, or work together to find solutions — even imperfect ones, as long as they work — that can make our world a more stable and safer place.”

So, did Putin have a solution?

He was blunt: he said he’d warned the West for years that this course they were on would lead to war in Ukraine; and, now that the Rubicon had been crossed, the conflict would end only if Russia achieved its stated political objectives, or if the West came to its senses.

And here, he made an intriguing distinction. There were two Wests, he said.

One, which was a lot like Russia, built around old traditions, customs, rituals, and a civilisational ethos based on faith and morality.

But there was also another West, a complex, theoretical construct, blinded by its own superiority, with a primitive, selfish, racist, neo-colonial aim of imposing its values, standards, and habits upon the rest of the World.

Russians could relate to the first West because of the goodness inherent in it, but not to the other because of the moral decay it was enveloped in.

Indians will understand this key point easily: they too love one West for the material benefits it offers, but they will have no truck with its ‘woke’ half, filled with dissent as a way of life, aggressive atheism, nihilism, and that overused catch-all repellent — “left liberalism.”

Indeed, it could so easily have been an Indian speaking at the Valdai Club, with the same weariness and regret, because the grouses were essentially the same.

In fact, Putin made precisely this point in his own way: he said that classical liberal ideology, which originally stood for rights and freedoms, had degenerated into a ‘cancel culture’ which viewed any other opinion as a sinister threat.

That other West had lost its way, and, in the process, also lost the old tradition of respecting different value systems and religions.

The reason for this degeneration, Putin said, was “a doctrinal crisis of the neoliberal American-style model of international order. They have no ideas for progress and positive development. They simply have nothing to offer the world, except perpetuating their dominance.” 

This, perhaps, is the crux of what Putin intended to convey: that the very states which spoke of democracy subverted elections through colour revolutions and prevented the evolution of alternative socio-economic models that were far more effective than what the West had to offer. 

And, again, note how similar his arguments are to those employed by Indians against our “left liberals.”

No one power had the moral right to impose its values and systems on another, not least because such efforts conflicted with the so-called liberal-democratic values they were selling.

Multipolarity was the new reality which the West would do well to embrace if it is not to be rendered ineffective and irrelevant by unstoppable changes taking place outside the Occident.

In Putin’s own words, the West’s “conceited aspirations” would only lead them to their own doom. “Every time the West will have to pay a higher price for its attempts to preserve its hegemony.”

This is the convergence of beliefs and complaints that makes India and Russia such easy friends, and Putin forced the point home during a long question-answer session following his speech.

About China, calling Xi Jinping his friend, Putin said Russia was deeply respectful of China’s culture and traditions. On bilateral trade, he said the two countries intended to take trade volumes to new heights in an accelerated manner.

The point, obliquely made, is that Russia’s lucrative engagement with China will go on irrespective of what the West seeks or tries in the South China Sea.

He expressed the same broad views on the rest of the globe, especially on Europe, while taking questions from all continents; that international relations was about respecting the will and view of other sovereign nations, while trading to make an honest profit.

Putin revealed that former German chancellor Helmut Kohl had told him that America would look after its own affairs, plus Latin America, while Asia developed ‘powerfully’, and that European civilisation (note the use of that word again) would work with Russia if it intended to remain a global force.

But, sighed Putin, the current crop of European leaders had “different views.”

He had a few special words for India. The tone was distinctly different, and hopeful. “We have a special relationship with India… We have never had any issues with India, I want to emphasise this, never. All we ever did was support each other.”

According to Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “one of the few people in the world who are capable of pursuing an independent foreign policy in the interests of his people.”

He called Modi “an icebreaker… just moving calmly in the direction that the Indian state needs.”

This was truly lavish praise, heartfelt (Putin is not usually given to making compliments of this sort), and signals the centrality of India’s foreign policy to Russian aims.

Also, these comments were delivered soon after an announcement that Dr S Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, would be in Moscow for talks with his Russian counterpart on 8 November — the day of the American midterm elections. So, obviously, there is a lot more going on behind the curtains than we realise.

Finally, through the many hours he spoke, Putin’s running theme was a reiteration that the time of the US Dollar as the world’s currency was drawing to a close.

In effect, it was a command performance by Vladimir Putin with two objectives: one, to signal that the West’s proxy war was a turning point in world history; and, two, that Europe and America need to rediscover their souls and their morals if they are to live in amity with a much larger world, which is treading its own path.

The first will happen irrespective of who else does what. The beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods system is nigh. 

The second, whether the good part of the West is able to set right its part of the world or not, remains to be seen. Either way, Putin’s speech at the Valdai Club was a momentous one, which marks a turning point in global affairs.