Restoration, reformation, or revolution? Blueprints for the world order after the Russia–Ukraine conflict

Abstract

Though the Russian–Ukrainian conflict and the more comprehensive standoff between Russia and the West are far from over, there is already much speculation about how these dramatic developments might affect international strategic stability, major institutions of global governance, and the existing Euro-Atlantic and world orders. The author offers three scenarios for the post-crisis transformation of the international system, which can be arbitrary defined as “restoration,” “reformation,” and “revolution.” The article outlines what these scenarios might mean for the settlement of the crisis around Ukraine, for the future of European security, for Western approaches to Russia and China, and for the evolving North–South dimension of global politics. The likelihood of each scenario is debatable, as is the sustainability of the international system described in any of the three outlined trajectories. The three scenarios may be considered not necessarily as alternatives, but as sequential stages of system transformation—an incomplete “restoration” might ultimately lead to a “reformation,” while a failed “reformation” might result in a “revolution.” The author concludes that the “reformation” scenario would be the least dangerous and most acceptable option to major international players and the most conducive to the stability of the international system at large.

Introduction

Although the Russia–Ukraine conflict, which is now unfolding before our very eyes, can be seen as a primarily European crisis of regional dimensions, it will—and indeed does—have many global repercussions. Naturally, Ukraine and Russia will bear the most massive costs of the conflict: the World Bank’s latest estimates suggest that Ukraine’s GDP will shrink by 45.1% in 2022, while Russia’s GDP will shrink by 11.2% (Touitou 2022). However, the negative economic impact of the conflict already extends far beyond the immediate participants. According to the estimates of the International Monetary Fund, the recent developments in Ukraine are among the principal factors that are slowing down the recovery of the world economy from the global crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was forced to cut its economic growth forecasts for the current year for 143 countries that together account for 86% of the global GDP (Giles 2022).

Economists are adjusting their overall forecasts for global economic development, cutting their predictions from a growth of 3.6% to a growth of 2.6%. These adjustments extend to 2023, with a 0.2% drop in the previously predicted growth indicators (International Monetary Fund 2022). A sharp increase in hydrocarbon, food, and mineral fertilizer prices, coupled with a restructuring of international transportation and logistical chains as well as emergent glitches in global payment systems, may cost the global economy some USD$1 trillion in 2022, which is about 1% of the global GDP.

Mounting budget deficits, including those stemming from snowballing defense spending, will further increase sovereign debt in many nations. Global inflation, which has already spiraled in the last two and a half years, will likely swell by another 2-to-3% in 2022 (up to 5.7% for developed economies and up to 8.7% for developing nations), followed by another 1.5-to-2% in 2023 (He 2022a, b). If the active phase of the Russia–Ukraine confrontation stretches for a few more months, these figures will have to be adjusted upwards again, and the upsurge in inflation—unprecedented for our century—will turn into chronic stagflation. Some economists in the West posit that a new global recession is likely to happen as early as 2023 (Allen et al. 2022). Indeed, while the Russia–Ukraine conflict is not the only cause of the global economic slump, its significance as a catalyst of negative macroeconomic trends is more than obvious.

Some of the constitutive segments of the global economy have been hit particularly badly by the crisis, bringing about major glitches in global trade and possibly prompting as-of-yet unpredictable socioeconomic and political consequences for entire groups of states located in different regions. For instance, Russia and Ukraine together account for more than half the total wheat imports for 36 countries (UN Global Crisis Response Task Team on Food, Energy and Finance 2022). Since wheat prices are tightly bound to the prices of rice, corn, and many other foods, it is hardly surprising that overall global food prices in March 2022 were one-third higher than a year prior (UN News 2022). Russia and Belarus account for some 20% of global exports of mineral fertilizers, and any glitches in these exports inevitably take a toll on agricultural yields in Africa, the Middle East, and even Latin America.

In early March, global oil prices reached USD$130 per barrel (Dezember and Jimenez 2022). Any 10-dollar hike in these prices entails, as is claimed by the IMF, a 0.5% annual drop in global economic growth (IMF Research Department 2000). The situation on the global energy markets has put a question mark over previously approved plans for a global energy transition: growing hydrocarbon prices can prompt large-scale and long-term investment in traditional energy sources—not only oil and gas, but even coal (Kuzmanova 2022).

Apparently, a conflict that broke out in Europe has become a catalyst that has exacerbated crises in other regions. It may have influenced Turkey’s decision to launch its own special military operation in the north of Iraq, complicated—if indirectly—the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, and stimulated North Korea’s leadership to resume missile tests. The possible repercussions of the conflict in Europe are particularly troubling for regions that are mired in instability and that have a significant Russian military and political presence, such as the Middle East and North Africa (Hiltermann et al. 2022) and highly fragile states of the African continent (Ashby and Mutah 2022). There is every reason to believe that we will witness new escalations in the coming months, with both regional and domestic political crises (Ghitis 2022a). The conflict has had a clearly negative impact on multilateral talks on Iran’s nuclear program and on Russia–US consultations on strategic offensive weapons. There are now concerns over compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, and other international legal instruments on warfare.

Expert assessments of longer term international repercussions of the crisis range from cautiously optimistic to openly apocalyptic. In our opinion, the central issue is this: should the crisis be regarded as a vexing aberration of history, a regrettable exception to the established rules that underpin a mostly stable world order, an accidental blip on the computer monitor? Or are we witnessing a clear illustration of trends that will increasingly determine the overall course of global development in the foreseeable future? In other words, will the world bounce back to its more or less normal state once the acute phase of the Russia–Ukraine conflict is over? Or has the international system passed the point of no return, and our lives will never be the same as before?

These are the questions debated today in discussions on a likely and desirable future across all the dimensions of the international system, including security, economics and finance, international law, social and humanitarian cross-border interactions, and interstate cooperation on global challenges. Since we are only at the initial stage of the crisis provoked by the conflict in Europe, assessments of its next stages wildly diverge.

As optimists see it, while the crisis is having immediate and major destructive effects on the global energy and food markets as well as on international finance, today’s global trade, investment, and finance structure still has a significant margin for stability that should prevent the world from slipping into a new recession, chronic food shortages, or a frenzied renunciation of the dollar as the principal international reserve currency. Pessimists, on the other hand, believe that the most recent glitches in economic relations are irreversible and that the crisis is merely accelerating the current trend toward deglobalization and global economic fragmentation.

When it comes to issues of international security, optimists admit that the crisis will have a negative impact on weapons control, nuclear non-proliferation, international counter-terrorism, and other similar issues. However, they are slow to abandon the hope that the international security system will not merely survive in its current form, but rather, to some extent, emerge more stable after the crisis as humanity somehow learns from the lessons of current events and establishes a system of guarantees that rules out the possibility of such situations reoccurring in the future, both in Europe and elsewhere. Pessimists suspect that weapons’ control will never be fully restored, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the spread of international terrorist networks will be given a major boost, and the conflict in Ukraine will have a protracted negative impact on other regional crises and wars.

There is no consensus on the future of international institutions and international public law. Is Russia’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe and the UN Human Rights Council an isolated, even if regrettable, event? Or will we see an accelerated decline of multilateralism in the near future? What will happen to regional and global organizations, including the United Nations? When the crisis is over, will we see more generally accepted rules and norms in the international system? Or will the number of such generally accepted rules and norms start to irreversibly shrink? If this happens, will the international system survive? Or will it collapse, bringing about more chaos and unprecedented unpredictability in global politics?

When analyzing the possible consequences that the Russia–Ukraine conflict could have for the architecture of the entire international system, we need to make two important qualifications. First, the conflict itself is still far from coming to an end, and experts in the West talk and write about the prolongation of this conflict, in some shape or form, for many months or even years (Cordesman 2022). Accordingly, international consequences will accumulate over time. Second, the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv is unfolding against the backdrop of other equally important crises and upheavals, such as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, exacerbated tensions in the US–China relationship, political regime change in Afghanistan, instability in the Sahel, the ongoing civil war in Yemen, and the intensified nuclear program in North Korea.

It appears proper to identify three potential scenarios for the future post-crisis transformation of the international system, which will provisionally be termed “restoration,” “reformation,” and “revolution.” The likelihood of each scenario is debatable, but each has its own logic and its own set of arguments behind it, its own understanding of current global trends, and its own notions regarding the medium- and long-term prospects for the international system and global society.

The three scenarios presented below differ from each other primarily in terms of the scale and the direction of likely changes to the existing global order. “Restoration” implies that changes will be very limited, and, moreover, that they will move the international system back to 1990s, when the triumphant West had a monopoly over setting most of the rules in world politics and the global economy. “Reformation” assumes that there will be more significant changes aimed at reaching a mutually acceptable compromise between the West and the Rest. Finally, “revolution” suggests that there will be a radical and disorderly transformation of the international system, which will enter an extended period of disintegration, instability, and even chaos.

Of course, the three scenarios do not cover all the possible trajectories of things to come; there might be many other alternatives, including numerous hybrid options: “restoration–reformation,” “reformation–revolution,” etc. Much depends on the timeframe of the analysis. In this paper, the author limited himself to the mid-term future, with the time horizon of 3-to-5 years. The further into the future we go, the more scenarios we are likely to discover.

Restoration

The scenario of “restoration” means that the current crisis will be resolved on the terms set by the US and its allies, since any other settlement would have grievous and irreversible consequences for the collective West (Sherr 2022a). To gain “victory” over Moscow, the West will have to mobilize all of its political, military, technological, and economic resources, opposing Russia for as long as it takes (Davydenko et al. 2022). The Western strategy under this scenario could include the goal of causing Moscow to suffer long-term economic attrition, which is based on the premise of the accumulating costs of the special military operation in the context of the many structural problems that the Russian economy faces (Littger 2022). Nonetheless, it is in the West’s interests to reach peace with Moscow on the West’s terms as soon as possible, as a protracted conflict will inevitably jeopardize Western solidarity and challenge the readiness of some Western nations to sacrifice their current interests in the name of a deferred common victory (Duclos 2022).

Sooner or later, Russia will presumably be forced to return to the status quo from before February 24, 2022. The country will withdraw its troops from Ukraine without gaining any unequivocal legal recognition for the new international status of Crimea and the Donbas (Ross and Eisen 2022). This scenario also implies that Moscow will ultimately fail to impose any rigid restrictions on the size and structure of Ukraine’s military or on the nature, format, and future scale of Ukraine’s defense cooperation with its partners from the West. The Kremlin not succeed in its plans to “denazify” Ukraine by overhauling its current political regime, much less “reinvent” it by significantly changing its current national identity, values, and foreign policy aspirations.

Sanctions on Russia will remain in place for a long time to come. Moreover, both European and US sanctions will reach a new higher level (International Working Group on Russian Sanctions 2022). Increased pressure from sanctions will, in particular, result in a complete severance of energy cooperation between Russia and the EU. This will essentially cut off the main channel for the filling up of Russia’s treasury, since Moscow will be unable to rapidly change the geography of its energy exports (Van de Graaf 2022). The assets of Russia’s Central Bank frozen after the start of the conflict will not be returned to Moscow. Instead, they will be spent on Ukraine’s post-conflict restoration, payments for Western military aid to Ukraine, and compensation to European states that took in the principal flows of Ukrainian refugees. Over a relatively short span of time, Ukraine will successfully overcome the economic consequences of the military conflict with Russia. In addition, in the near future, the world will witness a Ukrainian “economic miracle” that will, in turn, accelerate the country’s integration into the economy of the European Union, allowing for Ukraine’s accession to the EU.

For many years, international courts will hold hearings on many charges brought against Russia for war crimes committed in Ukraine during the special operation (The Economist 2022). Russia’s leadership will remain toxic to international interlocutors for a long time, including those who had been among Moscow’s traditional friends and partners before the conflict (French 2022).

This scenario envisions the West emerging from the conflict more consolidated than it has ever been since the end of the Cold War. Tactical differences between the US and its allies in Europe will not become an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a common policy toward Russia and other issues of crucial importance (Grant 2022). Once energetic European discussions of “strategic autonomy” from the US will become a thing of the past and the EU and NATO will work together, consistently coordinating all areas of their activities—with particular attention paid to the addition of a number of currently non-aligned EU member states to NATO (Scazzieri 2022). Some experts even believe that should such a scenario materialize, the question of Ukraine’s membership in NATO should not be considered definitively closed (Khanna 2022a). There are claims that no other option for ensuring Ukraine’s security, including multilateral guarantees from great powers, will be sufficiently reliable given Moscow’s inevitable revanchist ambitions following the unfavorable end to the conflict (Sherr 2022b).

Overall, the scenario of “restoration” envisions the gradual disappearance of such concepts as “neutrality” and “non-aligned status.” Countries that had traditionally been neutral (e.g., Switzerland and Austria) will be forced to follow in the common wake of the collective West’s policies and accept US leadership in one way or another (Cabañas and Pietrobon 2022), while other states (e.g., Sweden and Finland) will likely soon join NATO (Duxbury 2022). The US’s strategic partnerships with its European allies and liberal democracies in East Asia (primarily Japan and South Korea)—i.e., the countries that endorsed economic and other sanctions against Moscow in 2022 with more determination than in 2014)—will remain in place (Godement 2022). As a result, the collective West will become even more consolidated than it was in the 1950s or in the 1960s.

The unity of Western nations regained during the Ukrainian conflict will prove strategic rather than situational, which means it will subsist after the acute phase of the conflict is over. It will also survive beyond the Biden administration’s first term and will pass the test of the 2024 presidential elections in the US. The Russia–Ukraine conflict will help revive the almost forgotten “spirit of 1989” in the West, reversing the global retreat of liberal democracy that has been taking place for the last few decades (Fukuyama 2022). Having learned from its mistakes of the early twenty-first century, the collective West will promote the values of liberal democracy and market economics with greater caution, yet more consistency, than 3 decades ago.

Moreover, in this scenario, the Ukrainian crisis will help incorporate the principal part of the non-Western world into a US-led Western coalition, which will bring the international system back to the “unipolar moment” of the turn of the century—albeit modified to better fit present geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions, which have changed over the past quarter of a century (Bhadrakumar 2022). China will be forced to reluctantly, yet rather consistently, play by the rules of the renewed “Washington consensus” (Biscop et al. 2022). The lessons of the Ukrainian crisis will inform Beijing’s utmost restraint and caution, both in its readiness to support Moscow and with regard to the Taiwan issue and the territorial disputes in the South China Sea (Westad 2022). Some experts believe that China is already demonstrating a high degree of such readiness to “play by the rules,” as it has refrained from providing the Russian leadership with the assistance it had apparently hoped for at the start of the conflict (He 2022a, b).

Under the scenario of “restoration,” India will ultimately consolidate its position as the principal promoter of liberal democracy in the global South, and it will gradually roll back its military-technical and other cooperation with Russia. Even such traditionally anti-Western actors as Iran, Syria, and Venezuela will be co-opted into the renewed “unipolar world” (O’Kefee and Gomez 2022)—they will be forced to not only distance themselves from Russia, but also modify the most provocative elements of their domestic and foreign policies as they align themselves with the general direction of global development toward a renewed consensus of liberal democratic values.

Universal international organizations, such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, and Food and Agriculture Organization, will retain their current standing in global politics, although the West-Russia standoff is likely to have a negative impact on most of them and might bring down their efficiency. Moscow will be excluded from some international bodies; in others, its membership will be frozen. Many international issues will be handled by flexible ad hoc coalitions mostly led by the US and its partners.

With the retention of US leadership, multilateral cooperation formats that offer maximum flexibility will be used to handle both political and economic tasks. In particular, such formats should make it possible to minimize the consequences of the Ukrainian crisis for such important sectors of the global economy as hydrocarbons, food, and mineral fertilizers (Benton et al. 2022). Russian suppliers will be successfully replaced in these sectors, which will make it possible to proceed with the “energy transition” strategy that the international community had previously agreed on. Further, cutting Russian hydrocarbons off from global energy markets should accelerate, rather than slow, the world’s transition to renewable energy sources.

Existing norms of international law, both public and private, will not undergo any radical changes, nor will they become things of the past. They will be supplemented by the rules-based order, one that entails selective application of specific universal norms—depending upon the perceived political interests of the US and its allies. The West, primarily the European Union, will remain the main source of international legal norms and regulative practices as well as the main model for their enforcement. Other actors in global politics will be forced to adapt to the leading role of the US and the West in the rules-based order.

Consolidating the West and selectively co-opting the Global South will make it possible to hope for reinvigorated globalization. Globalization’s new spiral will start in the second half of the 2020s and continue for the foreseeable future. This spiral will naturally be significantly different from the globalization of the early twenty-first century, as it will transpire primarily within the boundaries of the economic, technological, and financial “core” of today’s world. Countries on the global periphery will be locked in a fierce competition over the chance to advance closer toward the “core” in global economic and technological chains. This competition will prevent the Global South from consolidating and putting combined pressure on the collective West.

In the scenario of “restoration,” international terrorism, alongside a revanchist Russia, will once again become one of the principal threats to international security and the stability of the restored “unipolar” world order. This dynamic will stem from, among other things, increased cross-border migration flows from Ukraine, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the countries of North and tropical Africa. The subsistence of various “failed states” cannot be ruled out, and they will remain hotbeds of political and religious extremism and breeding grounds for international terrorist networks. However, the level of counterterrorist international cooperation headed by the US will generally rise.

In this scenario, Russia will find itself almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world (akin to a “large North Korea”), although some limited pockets of cooperation between Moscow and the West (for instance, on strategic weapons control) may remain. Long-term isolation will extend not only to relations between states but also to cooperation between civil society institutions (Norrlöf 2021), or even to cultural and religious interactions (Schaffer 2022). Moreover, Russia will be forced to limit its military presence in such places as South Ossetia or Nagorno-Karabakh and also have to recalibrate its relations with its international partners, such as Syria (Deyermond 2022a).

Western experts believe that Russia’s capabilities for projecting its military power abroad and its opportunities to export weapons will be significantly limited once the conflict in Ukraine is over. In addition, they believe that Russia will irreversibly lose its former standing in global energy markets (Rondeaux 2022). Moscow’s capabilities for extending major economic support to the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic and similar entities within the former Soviet Union will be extremely limited as well, which will predetermine these territories’ gradual drift away from Russia. Leading non-Western states—i.e., China, India, and Iran—will cautiously continue to seek ways to expand their interactions with Russia, but they will not openly challenge US leadership. Russia’s full-fledged reintegration into international political and economic systems will only start during the next Russian political cycle, and only if this cycle entails Russia’s complete return to its domestic policies and foreign priorities of the Yeltsin era.

The prospects for the “restoration” scenario in the mid-term future depend upon a couple of independent variables. First, they depend upon the level of resilience of both the Ukrainian resistance and the Western commitment to supporting Kyiv. Second, they depend upon the Kremlin’s decision to abstain from military escalation despite assumed strategic setbacks on the battlefield. Third, they depend the strategic nature of newly acquired Western cohesion, which should go beyond the Ukrainian crisis and define Western countries’ approaches to many other international matters, such as China, climate change, regional conflicts, non-proliferation, food security, and migration management, and so on. Fourth, the scenario’s prospects depend upon the cautious and accommodating approach taken by China to avoid provoking the West and generating a protracted conflict with the United States. Fifth, they depend upon the general readiness of the Global South to play by the rules set by a relatively small number of Western powers. If all these independent variables turn out to be favorable to the West, the international system might indeed return to the old “unipolar” model.

However, the long-term stability of the world order under the “restoration” scenario (if it can, indeed, be established) is still highly dubious. Given the changing balance of global power and the accumulation of internal problems in the West, this structure will inevitably prove fragile and will eventually collapse or transform into something very different. The later this transformation takes place, the more violent the forms it might take. Attempts to implement the “restoration” model will most likely, sooner or later, result in a reformation of the global political and economic system.

Reformation

The scenario of “reformation” is based on the premise that Moscow and Kyiv, as well as Russia and the West, will arrive at a political compromise within a foreseeable period of time (Acton 2022). Such a political compromise would be based on the US leadership understanding that Ukraine does not come within the sphere of vital US interests, as Washington’s principal strategic adversary is Beijing rather than Moscow (Kupchan 2022). Proponents of this scenario also proceed from the assumption that the West, primarily the US, is partly responsible for the events currently unfolding in Ukraine (Bandow 2022). With all due respect and empathy for Ukraine’s society, today’s Ukraine is hard to imagine as a paragon of liberal democracy and a state with the rule of law (Carpenter 2022). Consequently, it is not entirely correct to interpret the Russia–Ukraine crisis as part of the global Manichean confrontation between the powers of Western democracy and Oriental authoritarianism.

Proponents of this scenario admit that while protracting the conflict may give the West some tactical advantages, it is strategically fraught with many unpleasant consequences: the total destruction of Ukraine’s social and economic infrastructure; the further political radicalization of the country; the increasing risk of horizontal and vertical escalation, including to the nuclear level; the gradual erosion of Western unity; and the danger of the global economy slipping into a new cyclical crisis (Lieven et al. 2022). Additionally, one should not underestimate the determination of Russia’s leadership to bring the special military operation in Ukraine to victory in spite of all Western attempts to thwart such an outcome (Creitz 2022).

The initiative to reach a political settlement must apparently come from the US leadership first and foremost (Dowling 2022). In this scenario, Kyiv and Western nations recognize the new de facto, if not de jure, status of Crimea and the Donbas (with the possibility of holding a future referendum, with international watchdogs present, on the ultimate status of the disputed territories) (Graham and Menon 2022), and Ukraine confirms that it will abandon its attempts to accede to NATO in exchange for legally binding multilateral security guarantees (Lieven 2022a). Ukraine’s society accepts the idea of neutrality, since neutrality does not preclude it from fostering political cooperation with the West and allows Kyiv to play a more active and independent role in European and global affairs (Lieven 2022b). Although the prospect of Ukraine’s accelerated accession to the EU appears unrealistic, this scenario allows for a whole series of steps that would qualitatively change Kyiv–Brussels relations with a view to establish Ukraine’s EU membership in the medium-term outlook (Makszimov 2022). Ukraine and the EU might also establish relations with a special status, like the EU’s relations with Norway (Zakheim 2022a).

This scenario entails mutually acceptable arrangements on the parameters of Ukraine’s military potential and on a system of military confidence measures along the Russia–Ukraine border. In it, the US and the EU partially lift their anti-Russian sanctions (Hudáková et al. 2021), and Russia and the West agree on concomitant, if not joint, action on the post-conflict reconstruction of the Donbas and Ukraine. International investigation of war crimes launched after the end of the conflict is not unequivocally anti-Russian, and there are no charges against Russia’s top political leadership.

This scenario suggests that the Ukrainian crisis may trigger major adjustments within the international system. Such adjustments have long been overdue, but they have previously been delayed or even sabotaged by the political and economic elites of the US and the collective West for some reason or another. The scenario of “reformation” also involves Western consolidation, but—unlike the “restoration” scenario—this consolidation is largely situational, which means that it will not go far beyond responding to the Ukrainian crisis. Grave differences between Washington and European capitals over many other important issues in international affairs will not only subsist but inevitably mount. Therefore, even if a return to some semblance of the “unipolar world” takes place, it will be very short-lived. Western unity will begin to erode in the second half of the Biden administration’s first term.

Having gone through the shock of the Ukrainian crisis, the nations of the Global South, as well as China, ultimately will not succumb to the West’s efforts to coax them into forming a single unified anti-Russian front (Hulsman 2022). Their unwillingness to impose harsh economic sanctions against Moscow signals divergent assessments of the nature and possible outcomes of the unfolding conflict (Taylor 2022). Moreover, against the backdrop of the ongoing military–political crisis in Europe, these states will increasingly insist on reforming the entire global political and economic system to make the world order more inclusive and democratic. These demands will be increasingly difficult to ignore amid ongoing and accelerating changes in the global balance of power.

The confrontation between the West and Russia will not conclude with the achievement of a compromise on Ukraine. The US and Europe will see Moscow as the main challenge to global security. Therefore, the crisis will prompt the US to make additional concessions to China and the Global South to secure some loyalty from non-Western actors in global politics and economics in Washington’s contest with Moscow.

The Russia–Ukraine conflict, having demonstrated Washington’s limited capabilities in extending direct military assistance to Kyiv, will not bring Beijing to a restrained course in matters pertaining to Taiwan. The current crisis will also not accelerate India’s drift toward the US and the West in general; on the contrary, this crisis may prompt Indian elites to implement a more independent and a less West-oriented foreign policy (Jacques 2022). Beijing’s foreign and military policies will increasingly annoy Washington, which perceives China’s actions as destructive and irresponsible (Zakheim 2022b). The US, however, will be forced to account for the changing balance of power and make concessions to China. It is quite likely that the strategic priorities of the US and its partners among the conservative monarchies of the Persian Gulf will continue to diverge, especially if Washington continues to strive for a political détente in its relations with Tehran.

The US—and the West on a broader level—will have to adapt to the new geopolitical situation and overcoming its instinct to use the Russia–Ukraine conflict as a pretext for reverting to ideological confrontation between democracy and authoritarianism (Moyn 2022). In historical terms, reviving the “spirit of 1989” will prove short-lived, attempts to place liberal ideology at the core of US foreign policy will prove counter-productive, and both will have to be abandoned. This development could provoke new splits within American Society that will obstruct a consistent and internally monolithic US foreign policy.

Even though most countries of the Global South have condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine, many of them share the idea that the West is actively using double standards in its confrontation with Russia, ignoring or downplaying many large-scale conflicts in developing countries (for instance, the Yemen conflict) and glossing over the many interventions that the West conducted in past decades that incurred many civilian casualties (e.g., Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan) (Prashad 2022). Such notions undermine the stability of the global anti-Russian coalition and require adjustments in Western approaches to both regional conflicts and a broader range of issues in international security and development (Dorsey 2022a).

Western leaders’ inevitable recognition of the need for forced compromises with and concessions toward non-Western actors entails a gradual transformation of international organizations and regimes, the United Nations among them (including the possible expansion of the UN Security Council and attempts to restrict the veto power exercised by the permanent members of the UN Security Council) (Peltz 2022). The scenario of “reformation” envisions the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the IMF undergoing major institutional changes and transforming from mostly Western bodies into truly universal organizations. This scenario envisages the US abandoning its idea of rigid opposition between “democratic” and “authoritarian” regimes. The new dividing line will be drawn between “responsible” and “irresponsible” actors, and the main declared goal of the West’s foreign policy will be expanding the ranks of the former and shrinking the ranks of the latter.

Some compromise will be achieved on the role of the US dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency. None of the principal actors on global currency markets is interested in an immediate abandonment of the dollar, but most financial experts agree that the Ukrainian crisis and the US sanctions imposed on backbone Russian banks will accelerate the shrinking of the dollar’s role in global finance (Wigglesworth et al. 2022). It is possible that the share of US currency in global currency reserves, which currently total some USD$12 trillion, will be less than half that figure by the end of the current decade (today, the dollar accounts for 59% of global currency reserves, which is 12% less than in 1999, when the euro entered the markets).

The scenario of “reformation” envisions the EU gaining, mostly through the joint efforts of Germany and France, more significant military potential in the near future (Crosson 2022) and achieving greater strategic autonomy from the US (Brantner 2022). Brussels will demonstrate its newly acquired political will by approving a mechanism for Ukraine’s accelerated integration into the European Union and by making arrangements for the EU to play the leading role in Ukraine’s post-conflict rebuilding (Emerson et al. 2022). Ukraine will become the EU’s new unification project, granting the “European project” to a new lease on life and reviving confidence in European universalism that is all but gone now (Dennison 2022). One could even suppose that resolving the Ukrainian crisis will prove a catalyst for a more active and energetic expansion of the EU in other areas as well—for instance, in the Western Balkans (International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies 2022), —and will also result in the EU increasing its role in many regional crises (e.g., in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia, and Mali).

Washington will be forced to cut a compromise trade deal with Beijing in which China will enhance its control over Taiwan through non-military means and steadily move toward reunification. Reducing tariffs on Chinese goods imported by the US will help decrease inflation in the US, possibly limiting the depths of another cyclical recession (Zhong and Liu 2022). The US–China balance of power will gradually change in favor of the latter—over the next 5–7 years, China will become the world’s largest economy. However, China’s leadership will strive to preserve the principal outlines of the current international system, avoiding greater geopolitical risks (Wang 2022).

The technological race between Washington and Beijing will continue and even accelerate. However, the “reformation” scenario envisages US–China and US–Russia competition not as ideological confrontation, like during the Cold War—rather, it should acquire the shape of a relatively stable balance of power (Kupchan 2022). The prospects for Russia–China relations will primarily be determined by the success or failure of Russia’s leadership in efforts to enable a profound structural rebuilding of the country’s economy. The US will apparently fail in its attempts to involve India in some bilateral or multilateral military and political alliance. The Russia–Ukraine conflict has already manifested differences between the US and India on important international matters, including on Russia and Ukraine, and these differences will subsist in the future (Sibal 2022). One cannot rule out a détente between Beijing and New Delhi, although such a détente will not eliminate contradictions between the two states. Therefore, there will be no geopolitical and economic consolidation of the Eurasian continent in the foreseeable future.

The West will also have to seek some compromise with Iran to transform it from a global spoiler into a responsible participant in the new system of politics in the Middle East and worldwide. Some experts believe that Iran’s foreign policy can be rechanneled from the western direction (the Middle East) toward the northern direction, where, following the Ukrainian crisis, Russia’s presence and influence will inevitably decrease (Dorsey 2022b). At the same time, any compromises with Iran will burden the West with problems with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which will make efforts to maintain the regional balance of power and independently contain Tehran’s regional activities.

The international community—possibly through already existing, albeit nascent G20 bodies and affiliated multilateral groups—will establish mechanisms and procedures for ensuring a significant increase in the transfer of resources from the rich states of the Global North to the poor states of the Global South. Priority tasks for the poor states will include obtaining deferments on servicing their foreign debts, having some of those debts written off, convincing the International Monetary Fund to give the Global South additional special drawing rights (SDR) quotas of at least USD$100 billion, and winning the countries of the Global South at least USD$1 trillion in new public and private loans (McNair 2022).

Under the scenario of “reformation,” a return to globalization will be slower than under the “restoration” scenario and entail greater restrictions, since the new cycle of globalization will require coordinating the stances of a large number of actors with diverse interests and different notions regarding their preferred world order. Even the notion of “globalization” will become subject to heated debates and information wars. It is possible that the global economy will travel down the path of regionalization as an alternative to full-fledged globalization. Nonetheless, trends of globalization will continue, and under the “reformation” scenario, globalization will ultimately be more inclusive and universal than under the “restoration” scenario.

Under the “reformation” scenario, international terrorism will likely be less of a problem than in the previous scenario, since some demands of the Global South will be met to some degree. This could mitigate acute socioeconomic problems in the unstable regions of the Global South, reducing the number of “failed states.” Nonetheless, the South’s migration pressure on the North will remain and will possibly turn out to be stronger than under the scenario of “restoration,” since—with the reform of the international system—countries of the North will find it harder to justify keeping in place severe restrictions imposed on receiving refugees and labor migrants. Accordingly, problems with migrants’ adaptation and integration will mount primarily in European countries.

Under the “reformation” scenario, Russia’s long-term isolation is not only impossible—it does not agree with the West’s strategic interests (Krastev 2022a). Under this scenario, Russia will remain partially isolated for a while, but will gradually be “forgiven” and return to most international organizations and regimes (Patrick 2022). Once the acute phase of the Russia–Ukraine conflict concludes, responsible politicians in the West will proceed from the premise that changing the political regime in Moscow cannot be considered a realistic objective for the West in the foreseeable future and that it, moreover, does not necessarily align with Western interests (Frye 2022). Besides, the strategy of causing maximum possible damage to Russia’s economy and creating maximum possible economic problems for Russia’s population is already generating and will continue to generate criticism and doubt concerning its validity (Gordon 2022). This certainly does not mean that most sanctions imposed after February 24, 2022 will be lifted, but activities in this area will gradually ebb, while the practice of introducing various exemptions to the sanctions regimes will be expanded.

Russia will return to the “international mainstream,” mostly by integrating with Asian (Eurasian) multilateral regimes. This will become natural, given that the Kremlin will, with increasing consistency, associate Russia with non-liberal Asian political regimes (Khanna 2022b). Nonetheless, the long-term costs of the conflict with Ukraine will limit Moscow’s international influence for a long time; Russia’s claim to the role of a “third pole” in global politics (alongside the US and China) will have to be postponed. Russia’s dependence on China will increase despite the West’s all too likely efforts to counteract this trend.

The “reformation” scenario may turn out to be more stable and sustainable than the “restoration” of the old world order. Much, however, rests with the path world order reforms will travel in the areas of trade, economics, currency, finance, military, politics, etc. One cannot rule out acute crises stemming from reforms being inconsistent and discrete (for instance, a crisis is possible should the 2024 US presidential elections bring back Donald Trump or install a politician who shares Trump’s views of the world and of America’s role therein). Even if such crises are successfully avoided, the US will have to deal with a coalition of Eurasian states, including China, Russia, Central Asian states, and possibly nations of Southeast Asia, and such a coalition will exceed America in its material resources (Macgregor 2022). This situation will require from Washington the skill of playing the role of a “minority stakeholder” in many multilateral projects, a skill that American diplomacy still has yet to learn.

A “reformation”-based system may evolve toward a new rigid or soft bipolarity or a more complex blurred multipolarity (polycentrism) with a gradually increasing role for non-state participants in global politics. It is possible that the system will be periodically adjusted pursuant to the outcomes of local or larger regional conflicts with the direct or indirect involvement of leading actors. In any case, the system that will emerge in the course of reformation appears to be overall more stable and more inclusive than the system described in the scenario of “restoration.”

Revolution

The scenario of “revolution” is based on the premise that no arrangements—neither between Moscow and Kyiv nor between Russia and the West—on stopping the conflict in Ukraine are achieved (Haass 2022). Russia’s military will not withdraw from the territories they hold in the Donbas or in other Ukrainian regions. Repeated attempts will be made to create new “people’s republics” beyond the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. At some point, the two sides’ military activities will give way to an unstable and regularly breached armistice (Pickering 2022). The West’s military aid to Ukraine will continue in ever greater amounts to prevent Moscow from achieving, under any circumstances, a decisive military victory and concluding a peace agreement on Russia’s terms (Gressel 2022). Further, Western sanctions against Russia will be ramped up and prolonged, and there will be persistent attempts to prevent the establishment of mechanisms and procedures that allow Russia to bypass these restrictions (Fix and Kimmage 2022). The matters of the post-conflict rebuilding of the Donbas and Ukraine will be deferred until some indefinite point in the future and the costs of the conflict for Russia will inevitably increase over time, putting a question mark over the preservation of socioeconomic and political stability in the country (Deyermond 2022b).

One inevitable outcome of these developments will be the progressive internationalization of the conflict, with the involvement of new participants on both sides. Clearly, the West is particularly concerned about Moscow potentially using Middle Eastern volunteers and mercenaries with military experience from fighting in Syria (Schmitt et al. 2022). However, it also has to be taken into account that militants could come from those same countries or from their neighbors to fight on Ukraine’s side (Kemal and Soylu 2022). Consequently, Ukraine will eventually become a hotbed of chronic military conflict between the East and the West with both sides periodically testing the other’s military capabilities.

On the other hand, experts say that instead of “denazifying” Ukraine, as Moscow understands this objective, the current conflict will inevitably result in giving greater political influence to radical nationalist groups that have already played a major role in opposing Russian troops. Cutting right-wing radicals from Ukraine’s political field will be very difficult, if not impossible, for any political leadership in Kyiv. In this case, “post-war” Ukraine could become a leading international center of right-wing radicalism that visibly affects political forces throughout the continent (Kfir 2022).

Amid the continuing conflict, which the European public is gradually “getting used” to, Brussels will be progressively less ready to offer Kyiv some exclusive mechanism for acceding to the European Union. Practical matters related to launching such a mechanism will repeatedly be postponed, and Ukraine will not even receive the official status of candidate to accession (Brzozowski 2022). Consequently, the Ukrainian public will inevitably become disappointed in the country’s prospects for European integration, which in turn could be conducive to the increased popularity of radical nationalism.

Even if a shaky balance between the two sides does emerge in the Ukrainian conflict, the more general strategic equilibrium in global politics will be inevitably breached. If preserving the status quo in Ukraine can be seen as the West’s victory, then in a broader international context, this victory will inevitably prove pyrrhic (Lieven 2022c). Compared to the two other scenarios, the “revolution” scenario envisions a far more radical and far more chaotic transformation of the international system in the coming years. A revolution in global politics essentially means a total collapse of the current global order, including its economic, financial, military, strategic, and geopolitical dimensions (Von Greyerz 2022). The depths and possible consequences of such a collapse are hard to predict, but the world will have to go through a long period of instability, crises, arms races, and many military conflicts of varying scales and lengths.

In this situation, the Western unity will not be preserved for long. Very soon after the active phase of the Russia–Ukraine conflict concludes, transatlantic contradictions will once again come into the foreground. US strategy in this conflict will be increasingly perceived not as a guarantee of ultimate success, but as a path toward inevitable defeat and as testimony to the weakness and strategic ineptitude of the current US leadership (Van Buren 2022). The Biden administration’s inability to end this conflict on terms that would be acceptable for the West and the Russia–Ukraine confrontation’s entry into the permanent backdrop of European politics will inevitably generate doubts as to the reliability of American guarantees extended to US partners and allies in various regions, including the Middle East and Northeast Asia. These doubts will, in turn, stimulate individual states to “remilitarize” their foreign policy at an accelerated pace (Futori 2022).

The “revolution” scenario envisages a high likelihood of US–China contradictions becoming exacerbated in East and Southeast Asia, with the US’s European allies in some way becoming embroiled (Gady and Glaese 2022). Contrary to the hopes and expectations of proponents of the “restoration” scenario, the US and NATO’s response to the Ukrainian crisis will not necessarily serve as a deterrent to Beijing’s plans to reintegrate Taiwan—including through the use of military force, if necessary. On the contrary, America’s demonstrated unwillingness to directly engage in the Russia–Ukraine conflict could provoke Beijing to undertake more decisive actions concerning Taiwan (Brands 2022). Although it is hard to predict Beijing’s specific actions today, it is possible to suppose that any change to Taiwan’s current status will become a no less powerful catalyst for centrifugal trends in today’s world than the conflict in Ukraine.

On the other hand, this scenario involves clearer centrifugal trends within the European Union: between northern and southern members, between “old” and “new” Europe, between large and small states, between proponents of greater integration and “Euroskeptics,” etc. The US will also, to an extent, remain a split society, which will inevitably stand in the way of its ability to conduct a consistent long-term foreign political strategy.

The Global South will also fail at forming a united coalition, and consequently, its bargaining positions in its relations with the Global North will not qualitatively improve. China’s global influence will overall increase, but Beijing will not assume greater responsibility for ensuring global public goods. Consequently, the continuing relative decline of US international influence will not result in some other power or group of states filling in the expanding vacuum. Rather, ambitious regional states and non-state actors in global politics will be likelier to make use of this vacuum.

The current decline of international organizations, both universal and regional, will pick up at an even greater pace (Wintour 2022). The world will become not merely fragmented, but atomized. In this world, universal organizations and multilateral regimes will face a long-term drop in effectiveness; regional crises will multiply; and severe competition between the West and the East, the North and the South, and within individual groups of states will bring the world to multiple conflicts, with some of them taking the form of armed confrontations (Krastev 2022b). A military conflict over Taiwan between the US and China would have particularly large-scale negative consequences for the entire international relations’ system; these consequences would exceed the destructive results of the Russia–Ukraine clash (Rudd 2022).

Among the many lessons of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, experts single out the capability of middle-sized states to, unexpectedly for many, successfully oppose the military pressure of great powers. At the start of Russia’s special military operation, predictions were made that the Ukrainian army would last for a few days at most and that the operation itself would conclude with Russia taking Kyiv and other large Ukrainian states. However, Ukraine’s military demonstrated its ability for stout resistance. This experience suggests that the traditional military hierarchy of today’s world that has been inherited from the twentieth century will erode further (Clarkson 2022).

If this is the case, then political hierarchies will in some way or other be threatened, too. Medium-sized countries capable of having decisive influence on political dynamics in “their” regions will be particularly active in this. In some cases, middle-sized states (e.g., Germany and Japan) will protect the status quo. In other cases, they will promote a revisionist agenda that undermines the status quo (e.g., Turkey and Iran). Overall, however, their activity will reduce the governability of global politics and economics instead of increasing it (Moeini et al. 2022). One of the first examples of this trend is the exacerbation of differences between the US and Saudi Arabia that got in the way of promptly ensuring additional flows of Saudi oil to global markets to stabilize market prices (Kelly and Frazin 2022).

With time, universal international law norms will essentially become inoperable in this scenario. Only individual islands of these norms will remain (for instance, within individual integrated groups such as the European Union or ASEAN), but these islands will compete using “hard power” instruments. Accordingly, intense arms races between the West and Russia, between the West and China, and in regions with numerous military competitions, such as the Middle East and South Asia, will gain speed. These arms races will be primarily qualitative; it is impossible to rule out the possibility of more states getting nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (Dalton 2022). The likelihood of nuclear proliferation will become particularly high should the world perceive the outcome of the military operation as Moscow’s unquestionable victory and Kyiv’s unequivocal defeat. Having one’s own nuclear weapons in such a situation will be seen as the only certain national security guarantee. The crisis, for instance, will certainly bolster the North Korean leadership’s intent to continue its efforts in the areas of nuclear and missile development (Park 2022).

Globalization as a comprehensive social development phenomenon will have to be abandoned for a long time. Such globalization dimensions as international trade, foreign direct investment, and international travel will at best stagnate, or at worst decline. However, informational globalization based on transitioning to fifth-generation information and communication networks will continue, thereby creating additional tensions between growing social expectations and shrinking means of meeting them through geographical mobility. In some cases, these tensions may translate into chain reactions of political regime changes like the “Arab Spring” of 10 years ago.

Search will continue for ways to bolster national sovereignty and to minimize national states’ dependence on external factors in their security and development. We will see the creation of new international payment systems, accelerated movement away from the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency (Robertson 2022), the creation of national technological platforms, and various efforts to implement import substitution. The West’s traditional geopolitical adversaries (e.g., China) will travel down this road, as well as developing states that are commonly seen as supporters of liberal political models and as the West’s potential allies (e.g., India) (Sengupta 2022).

The “revolution” scenario also envisions the Russia–Ukraine conflict having a destructive influence on attempts to efficiently implement the global energy transition program. National plans to cut carbon emissions may be revised, and traditional energy sources will receive additional powerful financial and geopolitical stimuli (Dellatte 2022). This situation will inevitably accelerate the increase in global temperature with attendant planet-wide repercussions.

International terrorism, along with large-scale migrations, will become the permanent backdrop of life both in the North and in the South. Some experts believe that Ukraine has already become a training camp for militarized extremist groups from all over Europe. In this sense, the conflict in Ukraine may serve as a catalyst for a rise in right-wing terrorist organizations in Europe, as Afghanistan was for the rise of Islamist terrorist networks in the Middle East (El Guendouzi 2022). Principal differences on what is to be considered terrorism and how it is to be counteracted will remain. These differences will stand in the way of establishing stable international anti-terrorist coalitions as well as coalitions on other international security issues.

The “revolution” scenario envisions the West imposing rigid limitations on refugees and displaced persons from the countries of the Global South. Today, Western society already demonstrates radically different attitudes toward refugees from Ukraine on the one hand and those from the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan on the other (Ghitis 2022b), which testifies to the persistent latent racism in the West (Younge 2022). Many states of the European Union even hold significantly different attitudes toward “real Ukrainians” as opposed to residents and citizens of Ukraine who initially arrived there from the states of the Global South (Balan 2022).

There are no grounds to believe that the hospitable welcome most European states afforded to refugees and migrants from Ukraine will in some manner or other be extended to non-European migration flows. On the contrary, countries that received large numbers of Ukrainian refugees will gain additional arguments in favor of imposing harsher limitations on refugees and migrants from the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa, as these European states believe their involvement in solving global migration problems to have already been more than sufficient (Ghitis 2022b). The question remains open as to how successful the West will be in cutting off international flows of illegal migrants.

The collapse of the current international system will create major hotbeds of chronic instability in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and other regions (Gaston 2022). There may be intra-regional flows of millions of refugees and displaced persons who cannot move to the West and who will become susceptible to political extremism and terrorism.

Russia’s foreign policy will look for ways to minimize risks and challenges in the coming surrounding chaos. The Russia–Ukraine conflict will inevitably fall into the background amid new armed hostilities that may turn out to be even more large-scale and bloody. A broad anti-Russian coalition will be impossible to maintain for a long period of time amid the overall collapse of the current world order, and Russia’s behavior will no longer be seen as a regrettable deviation from commonly accepted rules and norms, since those rules and norms will be progressively less valid.

Given, however, that Russia’s principal attention will still be focused on Ukraine, Moscow will hardly be able to take advantage of potential opportunities to bolster its standing in the world’s unstable regions. On the contrary, Russia’s activities are predicted to drop, for instance, in the Middle East and in North Africa (Hiltermann et al. 2022). Additionally, a long and costly (in all senses) conflict with Ukraine and the West could ultimately have a negative effect on Russia’s domestic political stability, which will also have many negative repercussions for the stability of the international system (Friedman 2022).

The chaotic system that will emerge during the “revolution” scenario will be unstable as a matter of principle, since it leaves no opportunities for the stable socioeconomic development of either individual states or humanity as a whole. The pressure common problems will exert on the system’s participants will mount, and technological progress will open up new opportunities for cross-border cooperation and impose new constraints on states’ sovereignty in territories they formally control.

A revolution in international relations will ultimately end in a new world order that will bring humanity to a new level of global governance. However, the cost of this transition may include several bloody wars, acute economic and financial crises, and other upheavals. One might also suppose that the transition to a new world order through the collapse of the current international system and a post-collapse period of chaos will not be completed even within a medium-term outlook; instead, it will stretch over several decades.

Out of the three blueprints for the would-be international system after the Ukrainian conflict, as outlined above, the scenario of “restoration” remains the most dangerous and potentially costly for Russia. It not only deprives Moscow of any dividends from the special military operation, but also dooms the country to long-term international isolation; an irrevocable loss of a large chunk of its gold and currency reserves; an irreversible loss of Russia’s most important markets for hydrocarbons, weapons, and other Russian exports; persistent and stable anti-Russian sentiments in many countries; and an inevitable sharp drop in Russia’s status in the hierarchies of future global politics. The scenario of “restoration” allows for no options in which many of Russia’s losses in the West are promptly and adequately made up for in other geographical areas of Russia’s foreign policy.

However, it appears highly unlikely that this scenario will fully materialize. The West lacks the material resources and political will to crushingly defeat Moscow in Ukraine and impose its preferred peace settlement. Russia’s stakes in the conflict are higher than those of the West, and Russia’s readiness for escalation is greater than that of its Western adversaries. Further, many influential forces in the international community (including China, India, and many states of the Middle East and Africa) are not interested in the West triumphing and in Russia suffering a strategic defeat. Therefore, plans to form a stable global anti-Russian front do not appear to be entirely well founded.

The scenario of “revolution” may appear more acceptable and even profitable for Russia. Amid the general decline and subsequent collapse of the entire international system, the Russia–Ukraine conflict will be seen as a mere episode of a greater historical drama, one that will be overshadowed sooner or later by the other no less dramatic events that will inevitably attend the deconstruction of the old world order. Nonetheless, the “revolution” scenario, which some Russian analysts pin great hopes on, hardly accords with Russia’s long-term national interests. Given Russia’s significant economic and technological disadvantage in relation to its principal adversaries, a “free-for-all” can result in overexertion and a forced transition to the “minor league” of global politics. In many respects, in a world where chaos and lawlessness rule, Russia may be more vulnerable than its adversaries.

In addition, the scenario of “revolution” cannot produce a future world order for any considerable time, since it does not contain convincing mechanisms for resolving urgent problems in global development. Rather, it will be an intermediary stage in a global overhaul, since the collapse will inevitably be followed by some sort of “reassembly” of surviving fragments of the old world order and by the “filling in” of gaps with new elements. Therefore, neither “restoration” nor “revolution” is full-fledged alternative to “reformation”; only a reformed world order stands a chance to successfully operate in the long run.

The scenario of “reformation” may be arrived at either directly on the heels of the current crisis (or, rather, current crises, as the Russia–Ukraine conflict is accompanied by the coronavirus pandemic, US–China confrontation, worsening statehood problems in the Middle East, snowballing archaic elements in the international currency and financial system, emergent resource shortages, and many other problems) or indirectly, first passing through the stages of “restoration” or “revolution.” In the former case, both the costs and duration of the transitional period can be minimized. In the latter case, the transitional period may stretch for years or even decades, and its costs will inevitably be greater.

In any case, Russia will face a relatively lengthy period in which the country must reduce its activism in foreign policy, even in areas that used to be its priorities. It is consequently all the more important to use those opportunities that are still in place and to insistently seek new mechanisms for entering the future world order. These mechanisms appear to be mostly connected with participating in large multilateral development projects implemented in the dynamic and rapidly changing Eurasian space. Russia will have to significantly revise the set of foreign policy tools it has employed to project its influence in the last few decades and to be prepared to wait for the long-term returns on its new foreign policy investments.

At the same time, Moscow will increasingly have to perform a role it is not used to in Eurasia—i.e., that of a “minority stakeholder” that achieves its objectives through coalitions with stronger partners. Mastering this role and performing it with maximum effectiveness will require not only building professional competence in newly emerging areas of international cooperation, but also revising notions deeply rooted among Russian elites of today’s world and of Russia’s role in it. Russia will have to account for the fact that the international community will view any large-scale political initiatives coming from Moscow with major skepticism in the near future. Overcoming this skepticism will require precise goal setting, much time, and purposeful and consistent efforts.

Funding

The author has not disclosed any funding.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Declarations

Conflict of interest

The author has not disclosed any conflict of interest.