MOSCOW, December 6. /TASS/. The unipolar world order and its key attribute - the dominance of the West - are a thing of the past. The Northern Hemisphere has seen a return to the Cold War and the confrontation of the two poles - the US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute Of World Economy And International Relations (IMEMO), Alexander Dynkin, said at the opening of the Primakov Readings international forum of experts on Tuesday.

"A unipolar world with its mode of global governance that defies the diversity of the modern world and the rise of other non-Western states is a thing of the past. It is premature to judge what the structure of a future world order will be. It is obvious, though, that the Cold War is back in the Northern Hemisphere. A new bipolarity is a fact of life, with the United States and other NATO countries at one pole, and Russia and China at the other," he said.

Expansion and resistance

Dynkin stressed that "NATO's endless eastward expansion has run into Russia's resistance."

"In its attempts to retain its dominant position in the world and maintain its current level of domestic consumption, the United States, in just two decades of the 21st century, has ruined 16 major agreements and institutions of global governance - those concerning arms control, climate, the global economy, and the Arctic," he continued. "The liquidated international treaties and organizations had one common feature - either the absence of US dominance, or the priority or consensus principle of activity."

This "sad truth," Dynkin said, indicates that political realities that do not fit in with the Western ideological narratives are being neglected, while "the most professional expertise often remains untapped due to exorbitant geostrategic assets."

"The reason for these failures, among other things, can be seen in the obsession with the exclusively Western-centric model of strategic planning and attempts to build the scenarios of world development entirely on European or transatlantic historical experience. Iraq, Syria, Libya and the Afghan catastrophe were the dramatic milestones of such ideological stubbornness and continued defiance of reality. Now it’s Eastern Europe’s and Ukraine’s turn," the scholar said.

Intra-Western failures

Dynkin pointed to what he described as "dramatic changes" afoot in the domestic politics of Western societies.

"Inequality has been growing over the past 40 years. Originally confined to the humanitarian sphere, inequality has now acquired environmental, epidemiological, and digital dimensions, too. During the entire period under review the global human development index has been on the decline for two years in a row. In 2020 and 2021, it was down in more than 90% of countries around the world," Dynkin recalled. "This is also a clear sign that the social contract that has been in effect for centuries in the developed part of the world has now expired. In accordance with that contract, each next generation was more prosperous than the previous one. On average, children were more successful than their parents. These days this social contract formula works far better in Eurasia than in the Euro-Atlantic area, which is very well seen in Vietnam, Uzbekistan, India, Malaysia and so on.