Russia in Global Affairs

Online in-depth discussion based upon the ideas and results of the political simulation game "International Crisis Management: Private Initiative" was run by the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (CFDP) in cooperation with the Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow, Russia) on Wednesday, May 26, 2021.

The future of negotiation and action on limiting climate change is likely to be characterized by Realist considerations of state interest and power, but with a new understanding of state interest shaped by moral pressure from international communities. Hopefully, this will lead to a new form of enlightened self-interest in time to save us all from disaster.

What does international cooperation look like during the triumph of national interests? Is it possible to realize these interests without interaction? We turned to Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council, and Anatol Lieven, Professor of Georgetown University in Qatar for their insight.

The Coronavirus will make our societies gloomy. The economic crisis may drive them mad. The pandemic may in some ways help create a psychological and cultural basis for extremism by extinguishing the naïve liberal optimism about continual human improvement that has characterized the West for generations, and in a different form is also held by the Chinese Communist state. That is fine if our societies become more serious.

In the short term, the war in Afghanistan will be chiefly not a military struggle but a test of American political stamina and of the capacity of the Afghan elites to maintain a minimally consensual state in Kabul.

Yet again, in the United States, large parts of the government are facing shutdown because of deadlock in the US Senate – the only country in the developed world where this kind of thing happens. How on earth has a country which for so long was a model for democracy, good government and modernity in general got itself into this mess?

The election victories of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party in India are in some respects the greatest moral and intellectual blow that Western liberalism has suffered in Eurasia since the end of the Cold War.

Once again, the modern Afghan urban tradition is fighting for its life against a rural Islamist insurgency. Once again, the state is overwhelmingly dependent on aid from a foreign great power for its continued survival.

Rather than a future in which Chinese hegemony will replace that of the United States, we seem to be rapidly entering a world in which no country will exercise anything resembling true world leadership. This bears a sinister resemblance to the 1920s, when the United States replaced Britain as the world’s leading economic power, but was wholly unwilling to shoulder additional burdens of global leadership.