The Genie of Unipolarity

Alexander Dugin argues that the West’s systematic dismantling of the post-Yalta bipolar order, aided by Russia’s own geopolitical self-destruction in the late 1980s and 1990s...

Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.

Host: We planned to start today with the words of Vladimir Putin, with his remarks and the set of theses that were voiced at the meeting with sailors of the Navy in St. Petersburg. In principle, Vladimir Putin did not reveal anything new. Probably no one’s eyes were opened; nothing new or breakthrough was discovered. But once again he reminded us that in certain, rather frequent cases, the behavior of Western countries by their actions postpones, sidelines, so to speak, relegates to the background the Charter of the United Nations, trying to bring the world to some order of their own, to their own vision. Well, to put it mildly, this is wrong. In this case, Vladimir Putin compared such behavior to letting the genie out of the bottle — saying that afterwards it cannot be stopped. It turns out to be a very multilayered thesis. And in principle, a great deal was said at the meeting with the sailors. What will you pay attention to? How should this be commented on or perceived in general?

Alexander Dugin: There is a declarative side here: we emphasize our commitment to the UN system, to the Yalta model that took shape as a result of the Great Patriotic War and the Second World War, and we are guided by it. The Yalta world, whose structure is embedded in the UN, was bipolar. In it there existed a parity of only two truly sovereign powers — the USA and the USSR. All the rest aligned themselves: some joined the USA, some the USSR. Everything rested on this dual balance of power, plus there was the Non-Aligned Movement (India, Yugoslavia and other countries), which, although numerous, had no independent political position of its own, merely maneuvering between the two poles. This UN model suited both us and America at the time. And now the president emphasizes that dismantling it — which the West has been doing for almost the last 40 years — is very dangerous.

The West began dismantling this bipolar model as early as the end of the 1980s, and we, to our great regret, helped it in this. We ourselves, with our own hands, dissolved the Warsaw Pact and destroyed the USSR, effectively agreeing to the unipolar moment that arose as a result of the collapse of the Union. We threw out the white flag and surrendered. And although we still mumbled something vague about the UN and the Yalta world, no one took it seriously any longer. The West set about rebuilding the world model under its unipolar system — under a “league of democracies” and other institutions. To our great regret, until Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin came to power we participated in this, effectively releasing this genie from the bottle. We ourselves committed geopolitical suicide, allowing the genie of unipolarity to break free.

From that moment — almost 40 years ago — the UN as a real system of international relations no longer exists. We defend it as phantom pain, as something in which we were at least second, if not first. After our self-liquidation — the geopolitical suicide committed by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the liberals and the entire state as a whole — what was left for the West to do? The bipolar world disappeared, one of the poles self-destructed, and only unipolarity remained. The West began fitting the system of international law to the so-called “rules-based order.”

But then something went wrong for the West. This transformation of international law met with resistance. And that resistance became Russia — precisely Putin’s Russia, and not that Russian Federation which had originally capitulated. After all, the RF was built around the white flag of capitulation in all its institutions, having accepted the ideology, politics, values, education and worldview of its geopolitical enemy. We simply surrendered into captivity.

And it is unsurprising that they treated us that way. But Putin said: “I do not want to be a slave and a province of the West” despite everything — despite the fact that it seemed as if we had lost, but we had not lost. And he began to strengthen our sovereignty.

In parallel with this, China went by a completely different model. It almost fitted itself into this West, pretending that it fully recognized its rules: in the economy it submitted, in politics it preserved its positions a little, but on the whole it was ready to become part of the global world. And suddenly it turned out that China had its own cunning plan — unlike us. It consisted in making use of the methodologies of the West’s unipolar world, copying them (in essence, simply stealing everything) and building power on the basis of its own advantages: demography, industriousness, perseverance and the working capacity of the gigantic Chinese population. All of this was successfully transferred inside the country, and when the West woke up, an enormous competing civilization already stood before it. Once again unipolarity was called into question.

It turned out that thanks to Putin’s uprising against the status of a province — and in the 1990s we had practically become a province of the West, and we were being offered the chance to enjoy that status — the uprising of the Russian province began, and it continues to this day. And China went a different way and thereby found its own distance in relation to the West. Let us add to this two other vigorous fundamental forces — Shiite Iran and the DPRK, which did not bow their heads. Thus the first sketches of a multipolar world appeared, with which we are working now.

And suddenly we discovered that with the existence of these four poles, which are no longer provinces (or at least do not recognize themselves as such) and are fighting unipolarity, there still exists the organization of the UN. It was never reformed under the unipolar world. I do not think that anyone seriously believes that this phantom pain of the bipolar world left after Yalta can really be saved. But at least it is a kind of diplomatic cover for building an entirely new system on the basis of BRICS. However, that former UN system still exists and already has no previous meaning.

The West continues to push toward unipolarity, and Trump — despite hopes that he would behave differently — did not become an alternative, fully continuing the course toward unipolar hegemony. BRICS is still finding it hard to create its own system, although work on this is being conducted. Therefore I think that the UN is simply an intermediate moment. Before transitioning to a new multipolar system of international law, we preserve the remnants, the rudiments, the phantom images of this already non-existent bipolarity in order to continue resisting the unipolar model.

But the genie has been released. And the most unpleasant thing is that it was released not only by enemies — the West — but by us as well. We liquidated ourselves. You understand, when a person commits an act of suicide, he sins twice: before himself, because he has no right to surrender so easily, and before God. Suicide is a terrible sin. This is the terrible sin that the Soviet Union, its political leadership, committed when it abolished itself and handed power over to a pure colonial administration of liberal Westernizers. Herein lies the main problem.

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The Genie of Unipolarity