Russia in Global Affairs

Russia’s trajectory towards establishing a BRICS plus Africa Energy Order underlines its strategic pivot towards the development of a new global energy order, mainly by encompassing the fast-developing and developing nations worldwide.

Together with other dramatic events, above all, the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s special operation in Ukraine has opened a unique window of opportunity for resource-rich countries to influence the immediate future of the world economy that currently hangs in balance.

For half a century, both sides have benefited from close cooperation, but that era is drawing to a close.

In an open and interdependent world, we are all exposed to global sanitary and environmental degradations. Russia is no exception: it has gone into lockdown, with increasing economic and social costs adding up to the fall in oil and gas prices and upcoming impacts of the global recession.

The rapid and unforeseen collapse in the oil markets is the outcome of an economic crisis which has very little to do with Russia, OPEC and OPEC plus. It is a situation that may continue to occur every time there is a serious global crisis of one sort or another. We have been there with excess capacity in 1985, 1996, 1998, 2008, 2014 and now, yet again!

Since August 2017, legislation allowing the imposition of a range of new sanctions against Russia has been passed by US lawmakers. Although not all this legislation has thus far been implemented by the president, Donald Trump, the mere threat of more draconian economic sanctions from the US created considerable uncertainty in Russia.

Islamism. Political Islam. Islamic fundamentalism. The mass media and academic studies are literally brimming with these terms. However, what we see today as a natural component of international relations, in the 1970s-1980s was an unheard-of and inconceivable phenomenon in world politics.

Globalization American-style has reached its natural limits, and now China and Asia as a whole are becoming the main beneficiaries of world development. The current growth of neomercantilism, protectionism and regionalization in the world resembles the situation of the decade before World War I.

The history of sanctions against Iran deserves close analysis in light of the growing sanctions pressure on Russia. Although Iran and Russia are different countries facing different sanctions paradigms, Iran’s experience is meaningful if only because both countries have to contend with US sanction law.