Geopolitical Redivision: Does Power Safeguard Peace or Invite War? - Discussion Seminar at Valdai Discussion Club, Moscow, 8 Sept 2026
Multi-polarity frameworks in the context of Russian civilisational sovereignty — Before addressing the conventional Great Power academic thesis of the over-riding competition between the three Great Powers, we need to first ask, what it is that matters to a people — the Russian people, for example?
We should talk about people first, rather than just speak of the attributes of a powerful State. What matters most to a people? We have, on the one hand, the classical response that military hardware, population size and GDP count that summarises it all in the survival stakes.
On the other hand, I would suggest that the thing that matters most to peoples is their sovereignty.
Hard power is indeed a component to survival, yet counting tanks and fighter aircraft available does not equate to a communal sovereign state-of-mind embedded itself amongst a people. Palestinians have a sovereigntist consciousness and still it survives, despite the lack of tools to turn the impulse into practical shape — and despite Israel’s genocidal assault.
In the present era, we are dealing with one overriding and inescapable factor when considering sovereign civilisations — which is that Western civilisational inheritance is so eroded that the ancient moral norms considered inherent to what it is to be human have been robbed any coherent meaning or merit derived from the context from which they originally sprang.
Furthermore, with the collapse of western civilisational underpinnings, the very moral and legal basis to any Multi-Polar Order no longer possesses the past civilisational referent when dealing with today’s imperial power.
It is of course feasible that some civilisational entities might still be able to group together to agree some sort of lose framework in which they co-ordinate, but that is likely to be more of a pragmatic, deterrent character limiting vulnerability (such as a by-pass to the dominant dollar-based chokepoint), rather than to any wider vision beyond the merits of a joint discussion hall.
A ‘Trumpism’ which has come to embody a ‘Roy Cohen’ mode of shake-down coercion simply ignores and despises the challenge from any emerging competitive axis. The result has been global moral chaos and anarchy in the geo-political sphere.
Western modernity, based in material rationalism, is now framed by its evident dysfunctionality and decline. This has transformed the West into embracing a radical hostility towards the values and the norms by which human beings commonly identify themselves (gender, family and community affinity, etc.) for purely mercantile interests.
It has thus embraced this radical amorality primordially in order to preserve the primacy of its ‘dark state’ ambitions for one world governance, and secondly, to underwrite the place of its financial oligarchy as its enforcement structure.
Behind Trump’s unrepentant iconoclasm therefore, it is possible to espy a clear design for the preservation of a certain power structure’s ambition to attain global primacy. That is to say, it pursues its aim through resort to radically amoral means — including triggering economic destitution, air bombardment (“wipe them out!”) or even genocide on non-compliant sovereignties or insinuating the use of nuclear weapons.
So why are we even talking about a world order? We agree, I think, that the treaties, conventions and laws on which the so-called ‘world order’ were claimed to be based — since 1945 — have been trashed in this recent era.
Consequentially, it becomes hard to see an end-game. Does the West and its dollar hegemony have first to be fully imploded before a concert of powers with moral underpinnings has the space in which it can operate? Or is war or a major financial implosion in the western paradigm among the pre-requisites to a multi-polar world?
The western supra-élites simply cannot bring themselves to imagine a world in which the West does not give their orders to others. Trump tells friends that he is busy “managing the world”. This not said facetiously, but in earnest.
I don’t think we are going to move smoothly from a unipolar to a multi-polar world order — we don’t have enough consensus in today’s fractured world. I don’t think either it will be case of sliding seamlessly into new structures, albeit that a defensive concert of powers may prove to be the first step, if the there is the will-power to pursue it determinedly.
I envisage the breakdown of our present world order rather like a nova star in the Cosmos, suddenly exploding. It breaks up, and what you get is a huge emanation of destructive energy and particles. Most ofthose emanations are likely to prove highly dangerous.
The issue then comes down to the issue of deterrence — which is where kinetic power fits in — and how to limit community vulnerability from the destructive emanations from the hegemonic power.
It is not just tanks and how much money you spend, how many airplanes you possess, that offers security. There is another notion of power perfectly illustrated by Iran.
Until recently, people said ‘Iran was weak’. Well, it has now demonstrated its ‘civilisational power’ – a composite of well-thought out asymmetrical means of war, combined with altered consciousness. This is, I believe, real power. A power that is more potent than that of regional rivals that may have more ‘hardware’, but no psychological backbone.
Iran does not have an air force, nor a navy, and does not have a strong economic base. And yet, today it is successfully challenging the US and becoming an actor at the global table. It has undeniably acquired real power.
How has it done this? From where does the strength, unity and resilience of the Iranian people derive?
It comes from those fragments of an older tradition reaching back to earlier eras — even to those preceding Islam. Moral narratives and myths in traditional culture alone provide both the norms and architectural structure by which men and women can accept past sufferings, can understand the metaphysical explanation to their historic pain, and from this foothold, look to the future — to an eschaton, in other words. The meaning to life.
One of the most interesting aspects that we have seen in Iran has been how, under the impact of war and the shock effect, this took Iranians back to other, older modes of thinking. Pulling them away from the materialistic, downwards orientation of thinking in the West; returning them to older upward modes of old cognitions — to the likes of Shurawadi, Ibn Sinna and Mulla Sadra.
These different modes of wholistic thinking prompt Iranians to dispose their attention, and therefore their consciousness, to the world differently. By so doing, they spatialise the world in a very different way — because how you dispose your consciousness will determine what you see and understand.
Rather than sinking into nihilism, Iranians visualise a new spatiality that in itself beckons the perceiver forward, towards a future.
This represents the real core — besides missiles and leadership — which provides for communal cohesion and the resilience to sustain sacrifice and foster a revolutionary ambiance.
Palestinians are willing to sacrifice their lives to sustain the ideal of a civilisation; of a Palestinian way of being; of a Palestine as a way of seeing the world.
‘Trumpism’ illustrates how we in the West have lost touch with comprehending the role that a strong consciousness plays in the vitality, energy and resilience of a people. Consequently, we have let western civilisation slip, sacrificing more and more of our identity and cultural traditions with the sole aim of preserving our global captaincy.
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The dark tone in this latest posting is understandable given what we have witnessed over the past few months. The venomous threats to the very idea of civilizational norms gushing out of Mr Trump's mouth during his UNGA speech should be setting off alarm bells around the world, yet seem to have been heard as part of a now normal world view. Only a few years ago, his words would have been enough to have him impeached by his own people, at least according to their own version of themselves. The "Land of the free, home of the brave" rings a little hollow if that bravery is now heard as a meaningless refrain chanted by a mob backing a bully as he prepares to kick the daylights out of helpless victims. Our best hope of preserving something of the value system that has oriented the West for centuries is that the Trump regime breaks itself on the rock of Iranian resistance.
That said, I would like to suggest that the inability of Western nations to respond to the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 should have provided a clear warning to anyone still wedded to the notion of some form of universal human rights. The value system underpinning the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention and the UN Charter were all shown in that moment to be little more than hollow rhetoric shaped according to national interests. This tendency to ignore our own values, perhaps, as Mr Crooke argues, because they are really little more than a thin veil masking material interests, is still misguiding us to our own doom.
Thank you, Mr Crooke, for speaking out so eloquently and for trying to share insights that take us beyond the shouting. The pity is that the noise of all that shouting has drowned out reasonable voices.
One thinks of Evelyn Waugh's "Put Out More Flags".
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if even a few European politicians could read this article, but they are so stubbornly set upon a destructive mindset, knowing their handle on power is fast diminishing, that they would be beyond comprehending the sagacity of Mr. Crooke’s words.