In-Between Times: On the Titanic

Titanic Sinking. Willy Stöwer. 1912

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born:
now is the time of monsters.”
Antonio Gramsci

POLITICAL INTERTEMPORALITY

The world order which was formed after the end of World War II and has existed for almost 80 years, is taking a bow — the previous era has ended, but the new one has yet to begin. Judging by the processes that we are observing today, in big politics this is something that current political leaders or the people in their entourage either fail to understand or even perceive: they appear to have no idea either about the new world order or about the new era. And this is the most dangerous and complex time in history to be seeking the path to a positive future.

As 2024 drew to a close, we did indeed find ourselves for the first time in decades on the verge of a large-scale military confrontation, involving the use of arms, if not nuclear weapons (although this is also entirely possible), which are comparable in terms of their destructive impact. We are witnessing virtually every day progressive escalation that is intensifying. This is not some abstract threat, this is no bluff and this is not a form of blackmail. In actual fact professional experts assess the risk as very high¹. Given the magnitude of the impending catastrophe, it is highly unlikely that the moaning so characteristic of the intelligentsia along the lines of — “who could have even thought this possible?” — will even be expressed this time round, as there will already be nobody left to emit such a groan.

When it comes to global politics, we are de facto facing a dearth of any effective deterrent international structures, agencies or instruments. The United Nations, the UN Security Council and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which have operated for decades, have forfeited their significance of yesteryear. The issue of creating new institutions or reforming existing ones is not even being debated seriously at a senior political level, as there is no understanding of the objective processes that are developing rapidly. The world has ended up in a geopolitical vacuum –bereft of effective international political institutions, deterrent treaties and working diplomacy. And this is happening at a time when civilisation is threatened by the application of a lethal weapon, while a military conflict with the direct and indirect participation of nuclear powers is heating up.

We did not find ourselves in this situation all of a sudden. The underlying processes can be traced back 35 years ago and were expressed in major upheavals. In Russia’s case, the upheavals that exerted a colossal impact on the public consciousness and societal perceptions were attributable to the break-up of the Soviet Union, the extremely unsuccessful economic and political reforms of the 1990s which ended in failure and the bloody war in Chechnya.

Owing to the transformations in Russia, the harsh economic situation and the severe political crisis, the country’s positions on the international stage weakened for a while. It goes without saying that this had an impact on America’s political mindset — the USA was for some time the leader of a unipolar world. Unipolar — at the time it appeared that this represented not only a consequence of the obvious economic and military supremacy of one country over all others, but also in a sense a monopoly on guidance and the direction of travel to a freer, fairer, more democratic and safer world for everyone. However, how did the global elite leverage the opportunities that had emerged?

After the end of the Cold War and the renunciation of the arms race, vast amounts were freed up in Western economies, funds which should have been allocated to develop countries of the so-called third world — they should have been spent on education, healthcare and business development. However, instead of this step, the billions that had been saved were invested in financial pyramids. It didn’t take long to see the result: the rapidly widening chasm between a West growing richer and increasingly impoverished third world countries was one of the key premises for the act of terrorism committed on 11 September 2001 in the USA. The disastrous American military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria represented a continuation of this process. The United States did not achieve its goals in these operations and caused these regions to suffer chaos. At the same time, the funds invested in the 1990s in the financial pyramids disappeared without trace during the biggest ever economic crisis in history in 2007-2008. The consequences of this crisis were catastrophic in many countries and can be felt to this very day.

All these major shocks of the past three and a half decades represented one of the drivers of change in the world. However, another specific factor was at play: as there were no positive qualitative improvements in the state of the world in these years, material qualitative shifts of a different nature started to happen — consequences that were completely unexpected and practically unpredictable.

Populism has always been part of political life to a bigger or smaller extent. However, the populism in global politics that we see right now has a distinctive trait. Its qualitative difference from previous marginal forms is that today’s populism has become virtually the absolute political dominant force, expressing and implementing ochlocracy, which is in turn formed and strengthened in the mental space and information media through the use of digital technologies, the Internet and social networks.

Such political populism is assuming qualitatively different magnitudes and forms than had been the case in the past.

It is a well-known fact that ochlocracy (literally mob rule) represents a degradation of democracy, which goes so far as to pander to the momentary whims of the masses where emotions and passions prevail over reason, indicative of a lack of any general understanding of reality and an inability to assess threats adequately. In the present circumstances, it is namely this trend that is assuming a dominant position and is being implemented through political populism.

We will call this populist ochlocracy.

Ever since social networks were transformed at the end of 2000s from a popular online activity into a global social phenomenon, the online mob has gained the upper hand in politics. Human values, national interests and an understanding of global and regional prospects — they have all ceased to be the defining factor when political decisions are adopted. The politicians adept at populist ochlocracy are now governed by prevalent moods in social networks, bend to the absurd and frequently self-serving logic of online communities and pander to the online mob. Furthermore, the influence and role of erstwhile authoritative world-class traditional media continues to plummet. And even though politicians adept at populist ochlocracy seek publicly to comply with the moods and desires generated in social networks, in actual fact they frequently implement the interests of reactionary, closed and fundamentally anti-democratic groups. And this is how the crux of democracy is degraded, while retaining for a while its external appearance and form. Modern digital technologies afford populists virtually unlimited opportunities. The world is being plunged into chaos.

It is not hard to notice that in the context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict leading international politicians, in particular in Western countries, discuss anything whatsoever and back their reasoning with all manner of arguments, everything other than from the perspective of saving human lives — this key value is never the focal point of such discourse.

The consequences of jettisoning human values from politics and the growing gap with reality are evident: in the final analysis populists are unable to fulfil the unrealistic promises that they made to the electorate and start instead looking for enemies in a bid to justify their setbacks — both domestic and foreign. And this is how the foundations are laid in domestic politics for authoritarianism, totalitarianism, up to and including fascism. And as we know well in foreign policy, a search for enemies leads to war.

The internet and social networks play a decisive instrumental and practical role in the large-scale implementation of ochlocracy, in other words, the populist satisfaction of the desires and power ambitions of the mob, and the ensuing predominance of violence and illegality. Emotions and opinions prevalent online, and not real events, now serve as the basis of the information flow. The previous classification and hierarchisation of messages no longer works: it transpires that the assessment of a dilettante blogger who has millions of subscribers is more influential than the analysis and arguments of an expert academic. Today bias is considered the norm, whereas fact-based news without prejudiced interpretation are as a rule deemed irrelevant. And this is exactly what leads to a parallel flow of information that only formally has any bearing on reality. “This opens up extensive opportunities to manipulate the information agenda and in the process politics for the widescale redistribution of economic power, and going forward political power.” This is what I wrote back in 2020 in my article “Information Ochlocracy”².

These trends are particularly perceptible in American politics. A great deal has been said and written about the role of social networks in the presidential elections in the USA in 2016, 2020 and 2024: both Democrats and Republicans were accused of manipulating public opinion through social networks. However, there are also other examples. For example, in December 2024 the Constitutional Court of Romania overturned the results of the presidential elections in the country because one of the candidates had used during the electoral campaign “aggressive propaganda through the excessive application of the algorithms of the platforms of social networks” and thereby misinformed Romanian voters.³ The court asserted that the candidate had manipulated the votes of the electorate through his use of digital technologies and artificial intelligence.

Today there is an increasing danger that the ochlocracy will, with the assistance of new information technologies and digital technologies, bring to power populists and their venal manipulative backers who will in the final analysis transform the absolute majority of citizens into their own type of modern slaves. And this is not some exaggeration: this is not some pie-in-the-sky scenario from the distant future.

Information chaos unlocks vast opportunities to manipulate the public consciousness and opinions: in terms of their potential and the consequences, modern technologies already circumvented classic press censorship a long time ago and turned out to be far more effective than standard propaganda-based brainwashing. And in actual fact they no longer need to brainwash anyone — the human consciousness is now formed through social networks.

For a long time people were sold the illusion that the internet represented an alternative to traditional television, that access to a vast number of information resources without clear-cut censorship restrictions would facilitate the development of independent thought. It is only now that the public is starting to realise that such a vision is mistaken. It is probably the case that Australia’s parliament recently adopted the decision to prohibit the access of children and adolescents under the age of 16 to social networks in an attempt to alter these dangerous trends⁴. However, it is highly unlikely that such an explicit prohibition will prove to be effective. In addition, it remains unclear what should be done about the stultification of people older than 16.

It is worth noting here that at the start of December 2024 the Oxford University Press named brain rot as the word of the year in the English language press. The publishing house noted that these words had become particularly popular in social networks in the outgoing year and had gained traction among bloggers⁵. This word combination characterises best what is going on in the minds of both rank-and-file social network users and populist politicians targeting the online mob.

The global trend of ousting professional news mass media from the information space has been intensifying now for several years. The substitution of news with an information agenda generated by mainstream users is no longer an isolated phenomenon: media platforms and social networks deliberately remove news content from their platforms (for example, in Canada Facebook and Instagram officially block links to news).

A study of the predominant trends in the information space today shows that at a time when the audience is more and more tired of political news, opting instead for entertainment-based content, the information flow continues to skyrocket and is de facto no longer structured and formatted. The Economist confirmed in its own recent assessment that opinion-based journalism would prevail over facts in the information space over the next four years. Furthermore opinion articles will gain even more publicity when they are most extreme, and neither existing media platforms, nor current political leaders, will be able to cope with such a flow⁶. We can already see today how populist ochlocracy is becoming one of the causes of political crises in Germany, France and South Korea. We are reminded of the dangers of political ochlocracy by the dramatic consequences of Great Britain’s departure from the European Union four years ago.

However, going forward we are confronted with even more complex and unpredictable phenomena pertaining to the deployment of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)⁷. However, there is more to come. The era of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), which is for the time being hypothetical, but is already being developed, is coming soon — a system disposing of intellectual potential surpassing its human counterpart and capable of generating ideas that transcend everything that people are able to do or even imagine doing.

That is why the specific issue today is how human consciousness and the human soul will manage to overcome the aggressive chaos of online networks — how it will protect democratic politics, how it will safeguard politics from ochlocracy and populism, in other words, from the demands of the mob who are hysterical in terms of form and inadequate in terms of the substance of their demands. This should be the key objective when we establish the new world order. We cannot defer the resolution of this challenge to some point in the distant future — otherwise, we might miss the only moment when we have a real chance to alter the dead-end destructive course we are on and save civilisation from chaos.

Meanwhile chaos has already started. The global shocks of the end of the 20th century — start of the 21st century, taken together with modern digital technologies, have resulted in political entropy and the globalisation of disorder. The world has embarked on an era of ochlocracy and aggressive political populism, while the idea of the future as the framework for the development of mankind has been cast to one side.

Globally, the situation is more and more reminiscent of the period immediately preceding the catastrophe of 1914 when the politicians and elites of world powers, while in principle opposed to war, moved closer and closer to it and launched a global military conflict involving 38 countries which led to the death of between 15 million and 22 million according to different estimates⁸. It should be noted here that at the time, at the very start of the 20th century, mankind had enjoyed a powerful technological revolution: we witnessed the emergence of the telephone, telegraph, aircraft, internal combustion engines, cars and principally new types of weapons (chemical weapons). All this overshadowed the real dangers and threats which became one of the decisive factors culminating in the start of the absurd world war (and as a result the coup d’etat in Russia in 1917). And today, as was the case 110 years ago, new inventions and modern technologies surpassing human consciousness are energising negative emotions in people and are once again leading mankind on a very dangerous sequence of events.

The post-war European model, based on human rights and the prioritisation of human life, is de facto no longer relevant and has stopped serving as the underlying principle and key issue in modern politics. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has obscured the evident social and political crisis in the European Union, which will inevitably lead to serious economic and social problems, and as a consequence to the ascent of both radical right-wing and radical left-wing forces in a number of European countries.

REPRESENTATIVE OF THE ERA — DONALD TRUMP

Donald Trump won a commanding victory in the US presidential elections. Due to his characteristic personality, specific behavioural patterns and personal experiences as an aggressive American businessman, Trump manifests populism in politics better than anyone else at the highest level in its modern form, giving voice to the whims of the mob, the okhlos, or as some like to joke, the “so-called deep state (hoi polloi)”.

For what in fact does Trump promise? The rapid satisfaction of the interests of the least protected population strata: a decrease in taxes, significant deregulation (a reduction of state controls over private business), an increase in trade tariff barriers for importers (including importers from the European Union) of up to 10-20% (in the case of Chinese goods, of up to almost 60%), the mass deportation of illegal migrants, rejection of the climate agenda and instead a focus on the energy and extractive sectors (using hydraulic blasting to intensify extraction). For the time being it is unclear what steps Trump will take in particular to achieve all these promises. Similarly there are no answers to questions as to what to do, if such politics are implemented, about the abrupt increase in state debt and the critical continuing surge of the budget deficit. However, the frenzied excitement on the markets and in the press is already extremely noticeable.

As to Trump’s foreign policy, then proceeding from the statements of the President elect and his close entourage over the past four years and publications in political mass media, it can be stated that American foreign policy will be based on a simple principle: the USA will only pursue its own national interests and will be preoccupied solely with security risks in North America. The USA should no longer have to be responsible for maintaining world order at large and should not have to stand up to countries that do not pose any direct threat to the United States (regardless of the dangers and threats posed by these countries in their regions).

According to Trump’s foreign policy doctrine, the USA intends to retain its unequalled military power, but only to protect itself. Americans no longer intend to run the risk of military confrontation with Russia either over Ukraine or over the Baltic States. In addition, the USA does not need confrontation with China over Taiwan. Why on earth should the Pentagon protect Chinese trade with Europe from Houthis in the Red Sea?! What is the point for the US of any alliances with Europeans or Asians! Trump is counting on the geographic isolation of the United States, on its nuclear arsenal and on the country’s ability to control the northern parts of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in order to keep potential aggressors at a distance.

In addition, Trump’s concept implies undermining the role and importance of international law and international organisations which are already de facto ineffective — for example, the UN, the UN Security Council, the WTO, etc. This will constitute an attempt to weaken restrictions — both legal and institutional — that the “liberal world order” is imposing on the US authorities. Trump asserts that such an approach would reduce the risk of confrontation between the USA and China, Russia and even Iran, as in this case it would be possible to disregard violations of international norms by these regimes. In addition, there would no longer be any need to worry about the fate of democracy in small states thousands of kilometres from America’s borders.

However, Trump could also make exceptions in his foreign policy in the case of vested political interest. During his first presidential term the USA facilitated the conclusion of the Abraham Accords — agreements on the normalisation of Israel’s relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. It was also the case that during Trump’s first term Serbia and Kosovo agreed to the mediation of the USA on the normalisation of economic relations, while Egypt settled together with key Gulf States the conflict with Qatar. In addition, the United States concluded a peace treaty in February 2020 with the Taliban, which made it possible to all intents and purpose to prevent the loss of American lives in military actions in Afghanistan during the last year of Trump’s administration.

Nevertheless, the role of peacekeeper is far from the main mission for Trump. Naturally, if his advisers come up with any peaceful initiatives, then why not implement them? However, if this concerns issues of trade and economic interests, then all manner of tensions and conflicts are possible: for example, if China were to pose a threat to the semi-conductor industry of Taiwan, the world’s biggest chip manufacturer, on which the US economy depends. Or if American citizens were to become the victims of Iranian attacks — in such instances, Trump might well be ready to act even when this is happening thousands of kilometres from the USA.

However, in actual fact America First is the underlying driver of Donald Trump’s politics. And it should be understood here that this will have devastating consequences for global stability in future. World history, in particular before 1945, effectively leaves us with little hope that the current global political crisis will resolve itself peacefully. In addition, compared to its competitors, the United States today is far less powerful than was the case in 1945 or even in 1991.

The modern world order could collapse with shocking speed. The refusal of the USA to defend the global economy will only strengthen mercantilism and protectionism. Everything considered normal over the past few decades — free trade, the unobstructed crossing of continents and oceans, the inadmissibility of the conquest of other countries — all this will be a relic of the past.

The specific traits and tragedy of Trump’s isolationist policy, which constitutes to all intents and purposes the result of the political ochlocracy established in the USA, are that such a policy will only yield the desired results in the short term. Over time Americans will feel compelled to regret choosing “America First”. It is true that initially other countries will suffer chaos and anarchy. However, the catastrophic changes globally will also reach the USA sooner or later. However, the analysts around Trump respond in virtually the same way as of the heroes of Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don: “You die today, I will go tomorrow!”

The fact that Trump’s first term was no accident — did not constitute a deviation from the norm, but rather the establishment of a new norm — the very same populist ochlocracy — was clear, if not in 2016, then definitely already in 2020. And after Biden came to power, a solution to this problem had to be sought. However, the disturbing new trends in American politics were not recognised and Trump’s failure at the 2020 elections was transformed on 5 November 2024 into his triumphal victory.

I wrote about these dangerous phenomena in November 2020 in the article “Trump Wins Even in Defeat”: “… owing to the internet and new digital technologies, together with the deformation of political competition, the quality and professionalism of politicians as state figures no longer plays any major role. Politics needs organisation, implementation and control over performance. Strictly speaking, that is why managers are needed — competent, energetic, decent and adequately motivated. However, today we are presented with a completely different picture … The real significance of these elections is not that Trump lost, but that the Democratic Party won. The bottom line is that a weak and mediocre politician was defeated, while his party strengthened its positions materially in all other echelons of power.. And this is the perfect situation for a capable right-wing nationalist populist who will run for US President in 2024…⁹.

And within two months, in January 2021, in the article “Put Your House in Order” I noted that Trump had managed to do the key thing: “he expanded the horizons and prepared the next autocrat and populist to come to power in the USA… And in this situation, it is important not to make a mistake. Soon populism will be armed with respectability strategies in order to look like a serious, and not marginal, new and promising political direction. Such populism will be disassociated from its followers, vulgarly stretching its legs on the table of the speaker of the house of representatives of the US Congress. We will witness how populism with the associated collapse of institutions will pretend to be an alternative “spirit of the times”…¹⁰

Trump’s victory at the 2016 elections and subsequent time in power during his first term to all intents and purposes removed a number of moral and professional restrictions in politics not only on advocates of the leader of the Republican Party, but also on its opponents. Populist manipulative technologies have gained a foothold in big politics, while the substantive agenda has taken a back seat, yielding to external forms and eye-catching statements. One striking example is the promise of the Republican candidate, repeated on a number of occasions during the electoral campaign and discussed endlessly, to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. And Trump’s return to the White House is only one aspect of the victory of populist ochlocracy (otherwise known here as power-based political populism) as the prevailing vector in international politics.

Let me repeat that we are not talking here simply about some unique personality: it is also a fact that modern information technologies have laid the groundwork for the sustainable presence in power of right-wing populists, nationalists and isolationists inclined to authoritarian management methods and manipulation of the popular consciousness. This is a protracted multifaceted crisis of the global political system (see the articles Political Entropy¹¹ and New World Disorder¹²). The distinctive feature of the current crisis concerns the common shift of politics towards populism and the principled rejection of human-centric political content.

It is important to note here that Trump’s agenda has already transcended to a large extent the ground occupied by the supporters of the Republican Party in the USA. A month before the election, The Economist published an article entitled “The Trumpification of American Policy”¹³. The publication noted that the electoral programmes of the candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties hardly differed, and that “American policy has become thoroughly Trumpified.” In actual fact, before the elections Trump promised to bomb Mexico and deport illegal immigrants, termed opposition politicians “the enemy from within” and alleged that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And despite all this — or possibly, even thanks to it — Trump secured almost 50% of the electoral vote. Consequently, it transpires that all these soundbites and appeals no longer represent the position of fringe elements of society, but rather the views of almost half the US population in the 20th century.

It may well be the case that a group of billionaire entrepreneurs — technocrats from Silicon Valley — will now be particularly influential in America’s domestic and foreign policies. First and foremost, this concerns such figures as the universally recognised Elon Musk and the lesser known Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir (American company specialising in the development of big data analytics software, whose main clients include the defence sector and intelligence agencies, such as the Pentagon and the CIA, investment banks and hedge funds). While Musk’s role in Trump’s victory was fairly straightforward — the founder of SpaceX spent USD 277 million on the last campaign of the Republican Party¹⁴ — Thiel’s participation was not as trivial: J.D. Vance, elected as candidate for Vice President of the United States, ended up in this position to large extent thanks to promotion by Thiel. And it is namely with Vance, and not simply Trump that the billionaire technocrats, who have stormed into big politics, link their long-term plans. Their main bet of the future is on artificial intelligence (AI), and their entire ideology at the end of the day is that human values and social problems are no longer relevant, while the state as a democratic institution is in today’s world more inefficient and is merely holding back technological process in its attempts to regulate AI and prevent the development of the cryptocurrency industry. In the opinion of the billionaire technocrats, the country should be managed as a business company. They believe that digital technologies, once combined with authoritarian rule, will resolve all problems.¹⁵

Judging by Trump’s nominations immediately after winning the election, his government will consist of individuals who will report solely to him and depend on him — who will always agree with Trump on all questions and in all instances. Columnists in authoritative Western mass media assume that “Donald Trump’s return heralds a new gilded age for money in US politics and diplomacy”, and that he “looks set to start with a cabinet of billionaires.”¹⁶

The result of these elections is not simply due to Trump’s personal attributes: it is not only an individual phenomenon. Trump’s return represents yet another important sign attesting to the end of the era of a post-war world order and the onset of global disorder as a result of increasing political entropy. The trend symbolised by Trump is winning in many countries. That is why this phenomenon should not be narrowed down simply to “Trumpism”. Trump is not the creator and is not the ideologue of this political line: he merely rode on the wave and became the brightest and most powerful representative of populist ochlocracy in international politics. Incidentally, even if he had lost the last elections, it goes without saying that this trend would have continued to grow both in the USA and in the world.

POPULIST OCHLOCRACY — TRIUMPH ON THE TITANIC

The clearest sign of the inability of international politicians to understand and confront contemporary challenges is demonstrated by the tragic political and diplomatic deadlock that is becoming clearer and clearer today — the impasse of all the parties involved in some way or other in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The political and diplomatic impasse differs from its military counterpart. The military stalemate is indicative of the objective state of the opposing forces, taking into account their capabilities. By contrast, the political and diplomatic gridlock is a consequence of the decreasing level of professionalism in international politics and diplomacy and the repudiation of fundamental values and key principles.

Today’s politicians operate in the context of all-encompassing populism and are for that reason frequently caught in a bind; they are unable to understand and assess correctly the prospects going forward. While this is extremely sad, it is not at all surprising that they were unable to discern the window of opportunity for an end to the bloodshed which appeared in autumn 2022 — winter 2023.

Now the well-known political scientist Ivan Krastev has noted in his recent publication in The Financial Times: “the special operation failed by September 2022. What we have witnessed since then is a puppet war against NATO, led on Ukrainian territory.”¹⁷ This is entirely true. Only what price has been paid for these two past years and what is still to come?! For some reason this is an issue that nobody is even talking about.

I talked about the threat of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO on Ukrainian territory back in summer 2021 (see “This will not be a war with Ukraine, but instead with the entire Western world”¹⁸). However, at the time nobody wanted to listen either in Russia or in the West. It was only at the end of 2021 that some people in Europe and America started to realise the extent to which the threat of military conflict was real, while the so-called Russian opposition did not understand anything at all up until the actual start of the special military operation.

In November 2022 a note I had penned that a ceasefire agreement should be concluded and that a window of opportunities had appeared for such a step was transferred through the Vatican’s diplomatic mission in Moscow to Pope Francis. However, his voice was also not heard.

Meanwhile a brief summary of this appeal was published in early February 2023 in Novaya Gazeta as a call for a ceasefire¹⁹. However, at that time virtually nobody understood anything — everyone was waiting for some contrived “victory on the battlefield”. And the moment was missed. Leading international politicians have already deliberately rejected now for more than one thousand days any practical diplomatic attempts to bring an end to the loss of lives and the destruction of an entire country. This is one of the key mistakes of Western diplomacy as a whole and to a large extent Biden’s administration.

Let me repeat: this state of affairs in international politics is attributable not so much to the personal traits of specific decision-makers, as to fragmentation and the gradual, but possibly irreversible breakdown of the most important functions of the state and even society, due to the loss of a value-based system and its replacement, thanks to social networks, by cynical post-modern populism.

This is also one of the key reasons for the progressive exacerbation of the crisis in the Middle East. Israel is continuing the war because none of the international structures (the UN), nor the USA, nor the European Union, nor influential Arab states — either acting separately or together — are able not only to implement in practice, but also to even propose even in theory any cogent plan that would guarantee long-term security. There is a profound and mounting gap between declarations and decisions even adopted at the level of the UN and how they can be implemented in the current environment.

Such a world order is a world driven by political entropy and chaos, in other words, the collapse and disruption of global social and political processes. For example, such a world is dangerous for Russia with its vast territory and its declining population. And this must be resisted. However, fundamentally new decisions are required to overcome political entropy.

Nevertheless, as time passes, there are less and less grounds for hoping that the American and European political systems will cope successfully with the escalating crisis.

Given current political trends, it is highly likely that the example of a Western model of prosperity will no longer be operable in such countries as Russia. Political processes in the West, and Western politicians themselves, are veering further and further away from the standards of democratic and liberal values and in general from universal human values.

An understanding of these threats, together with real concern for the future, implies that we will have to rely first and foremost on our own resources not only within our country, but also in international relations.

The main crisis of our time does not revolve so much from geopolitical confrontation, as from the imperceptible, but increasing loss of human values in international politics, combined with a lack of any comprehension of this problem. And therein lies the crux of developments today. Neither economic successes, nor the consolidation of military potential, will offset the deficit of such ideas.

In the time to come, the primary area of responsibility of politicians is to advance towards key tenets, values and goals: to save lives, protect freedoms, advocate human dignity and realise the opportunities granted.

It is important to stress here that historical experience proves that in politics, if one misses the chance, then real opportunities are lost for a long time to come, and in some instances — forever. And mankind will have to pay a high price.

The world order formed after 1945 is in the midst of a profound crisis. It would appear that the departure of this previous model is already irreversible. One specific trait of the current global changes is the inability of today’s politicians responsible for decision-making to understand what is happening, and also the dearth of any serious ideas expressed by such politicians about the future. And this is driving the emergence and further escalation of chaos.

A desire to adapt to the current circumstances, which can be observed more and more often, can be compared to the desire of the passengers on the Titanic to find a more comfortable cabin on the ship which is inevitably veering closer and closer to a catastrophic clash with an iceberg. Take, for example, all the exuberance about Donald Trump’s spectacular return to the White House and the total disregard for the contextual meaning of this comeback — this is also redolent of triumph on the Titanic. For in general, everything that is happening, including Trump’s victory, is a process which is fraught with the large-scale, and possibly even absolute defeat of all the passengers on the ship, regardless of their cabin class.

There is no point in just hoping against hope that it will be possible to find a comfortable and safe place in the current conditions. Another course of action is vital — we must start as rapidly as possible to deliberately and consistently design, configure and agree on qualitatively new international security systems and simultaneously create radically new national state institutions. And both must be configured on the basis of fundamental human values that can be called European, Christian or universal.

I am convinced that the key for the future is the acknowledgement, understanding and adoption of a system of human values as the central core of multipolar global development which is common for everyone, as well as a readiness to institutionalise these values. In other words, this means the creation of a programme for the practical implementation of values of the entire system of international and national state structures and institutions.

It is absolutely crucial and of the utmost importance that this is all actually protected (and this is a major challenge that cannot be resolved at present) from the warped influence of the newest digital technologies and rapidly developing artificial intelligence.

In other words, we must be ready to implement such reforms that will put the newest technologies, the state as an institution and the world order in general, at the service of mankind, and not the other way round.