While US President Donald Trump né Drumpf floats the possibility of annexing Canada, acquiring Greenland by force or finance, and “taking over” Gaza creating a diaspora of 1.7 million Palestinian People, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov diplomatically re-invokes the Yalta-Potsdam system of agreements in his latest essay for “Russia In Global Affairs” with a re-invitation to the US — to reject its unsustainable and too-long unbridled path of global hegemony — and join the future as an equal nation of a multipolarity center along with China, Russia and nations in every quatrasphere of the World:
“The West had a fateful chance to right its course, to show prudence and foresight, when the Soviet Union collapsed along with the world socialist camp. However, selfish instincts prevailed. Addressing Congress on 11 September 1990, intoxicated by “victory in the Cold War,” U.S. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the advent of a new world order,[3] an order that American strategists understood as complete U.S. dominance in the international arena, as a window of opportunity to act unilaterally without any regard for the legal restrictions embedded in the UN Charter.
One manifestation of the ‘rules-based order’ was Washington’s policy of geopolitically absorbing Eastern Europe. Russia has been forced to eliminate its explosive consequences with the Special Military Operation.
In 2025, with Donald Trump’s Republican administration back in power, Washington’s interpretation of international processes since World War II has taken on a new dimension, as vividly described to the Senate by new Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 15 January: not only is the postwar world order outdated, but it has been turned into a weapon against U.S. interests.[4] In other words, not only the Yalta-Potsdam order is undesirable; so, too, is the ‘rules-based order’ that had seemed to embody the selfishness and arrogance of the U.S.-led West after the Cold War. “America first” is alarmingly similar to the Hitlerite slogan “Germany above all”, and a wager on “peace through strength” may be the final blow to diplomacy. Not to mention that such statements and ideological constructs show not even the slightest bit of respect for Washington’s international legal obligations under the UN Charter.
However, today is not 1991 or even 2017, when the incumbent U.S. President took the helm for the first time. Russian analysts rightly note that “there will be no return to the previous state of affairs, still sought after by the U.S. and its allies, because demographic, economic, social, and geopolitical conditions have changed irreversibly.”[5] There is also probably truth in the prediction that eventually “the United States will understand that it should not overstretch its area of responsibility in international affairs, and will live quite harmoniously as one of the leading states, but no longer a hegemon.”[6]
Multipolarity is gaining momentum and, instead of opposing it, the U.S. could in the foreseeable future become a responsible center of power along with Russia, China, and other states in the Global South, East, North, and West. For the moment, it seems that the new U.S. administration will be launching cowboy raids to test the existing UN-centric system’s limits and durability versus American interests. But I am sure that this administration, too, will soon understand that international reality is much more complex than the caricatures that it is free to deploy before internal American audiences or obedient geopolitical allies.
While we wait for the Americans to sober up and realize this, we will continue to work conscientiously with our like-minded partners to adapt the mechanisms of interstate relations to multipolarity, and to the Yalta-Potsdam international legal consensus that is embodied in the UN Charter.”
Sergei Lavrov, Russian Federation Foreign Minister,
writing in “Russia In Global Affairs” published February 4, 2025, English edition.
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