Dmitri Trenin

Putting National, Not Imperial, Interests First

Dec. 7—The following is an edited transcript of Professor Dmitri Trenin’s presentation to Panel 1 of the Dec.7-8 Schiller Institute conference, “In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men, Become Brethren!” Prof. Trenin is Academic Supervisor of the Institute of World Military Economy and Strategy at the Higher School of Economics University in Moscow, Russia. The panel was titled, “The Strategic Crisis: New and Final World War, or a New Paradigm of the One Humanity.” The full video of that panel is available here.

Thank you very much for this invitation. I am very honored to be invited to the conference of the Schiller Institute. Let me use the opportunity to congratulate the Institute and the people who work there on their 40th anniversary.

Dr. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her brilliant analysis of where we are today, laid out a very wide and rich analysis of the current developments in the world, and the dangers that humanity is facing. I fully subscribe to her analysis, and I support her clarion call to avert the looming nuclear catastrophe. In my own remarks I will try to provide a few elements of the more general context to the world crisis … as it’s seen from where I sit in Moscow.

We need to understand where we are at this juncture. Globalization driven by the West is over; the world system has become global, but it is no longer tending toward Western-modeled uniformity. Instead, regionalism is on the march. This is an epoch of transition, and transition is normally influenced by high turbulence, crises, and wars.

We are not, however, in Cold War II, as some people claim. This is a misnomer. The analogy is wrong, because the world is very different today from what it was in the second half of the 20th Century. Dangers are more abundant, and mostly new. Deterrence, Cold War–style, which kept the Cold War cold, does not work to prevent major power conflicts leading to a direct collision anymore. The salutary fear of nuclear weapons has mostly dissipated. The balance of power, another pillar of strategic stability, has shifted and become lopsided.

Unchecked and unrestrained power, which recognizes no limits for itself, has led to a first-ever global hegemony of a single country. Within a generation, that hegemony—as it must—has begun to crack and crumble. Attempts to salvage it now are as dangerous as they are futile.

We are witnessing this now in Ukraine: The desperate effort of the current U.S. administration to inflict a strategic defeat on a peer nuclear superpower is a case in point. Unable to reach the goal, the Biden White House has been raising the stakes ever higher in that conflict, lest the U.S. hegemony is exposed as less than complete and far from invincible.

Ukraine is neither an isolated case, nor is it unique, as has been mentioned by Dr. Zepp-LaRouche. A U.S.-China confrontation, ostensibly over Taiwan and/or the South China Sea, looms ever higher. In the Middle East, there are well-grounded concerns that the Biden administration might use the current moment as a window of opportunity to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Thus, there are at least three major hotbeds of conflict which can lead to a world war, all involving nuclear powers. I have few illusions about the possibility of reversing this trend completely and in short order. Changes of world order are inherently messy, and usually bloody. However, there are ways of mitigating the impact of the current world crisis on humanity. The most important thing would be the realization in the United States of the dangers of imperial overstretch, and the replacement of the hegemonic security of the United States–led global system by the national security of the United States as a first order of priority.

It is very interesting and telling that Russia’s leadership of the day—despite the loud calls within the country to mobilize all its resources for the war in Ukraine, which is seen as defense against the U.S./NATO geopolitical aggression—is prioritizing sovereign economic, social, technological, and intellectual development, and using the war as a major instrument toward that goal. Russian leaders remember well the lessons from their Soviet past when they spent so much on their far-flung empire and its military, ideological, and security apparatuses, that they left mounting domestic issues neglected, and vast but finite resources misdirected—a lesson worth looking at by others today.

Let me conclude and again thank the Institute for inviting me to speak. Thank you.