The End of Easy Answers

The Future Has Other Authors

Many brilliant minds are trying to understand how the world is navigating its overlapping crises. The central observation is that the world has become complex. We are beginning to grow accustomed to that complexity, and the age of simple solutions is over for good.

The twentieth century gave humanity a great deal. It also encouraged the belief that even the most fundamental questions could have simple answers: one merely had to choose the correct ideology. Capitalism and communism initially competed for the privilege of supplying the universal prescription. The final attempt to simplify everything came with the liberal globalism of the post-Cold War era. That prescription also failed.

We are now learning to live in a world where even the most difficult and dangerous developments can be discussed with composure. This helps explain why intellectual debate is increasingly occupied with questions that would have seemed almost unthinkable fifteen or twenty years ago: society’s resilience under conditions of permanent war, the inhumanity of new methods of warfare, and the uncertain future of nuclear deterrence.

Some may find it surprising that these discussions proceed without panic or attempts to frighten one another with the horrors supposedly awaiting a world in which the United States and Europe can no longer determine the rules. The explanation may lie in a conviction that, under these conditions, the global situation will inevitably improve. The prospect is being received with considerable composure outside the offices where the rules were previously written.

That conviction explains the increasingly constructive tone of these discussions, even as participants acknowledge the risks and threats. Everyone recognizes that the situation is dangerous. The discussion concerns how development can proceed under these conditions, with danger treated as a problem to be addressed and catastrophe as something humanity still has the capacity to avoid.

Much of this attitude reflects the composition of the discussion itself. The overwhelming majority of those thinking along these lines represent countries outside the West. They have little inclination to dramatize the situation: their attention is directed toward the future. Europe remains preoccupied with recovering its past. These exchanges therefore offer a useful cross-section of the global intellectual debate beyond the narrow agenda the West continues to prescribe for everyone.

It is within the intellectual communities of China, India, Iran, the Arab countries, and the states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that new ideas are emerging and alternative approaches to the most important development challenges are taking shape. The wider world has much to learn from them.

Together, these countries constitute the “Global Majority” that is building a multipolar world as we speak.

A broad exchange of views is the best way to communicate positions on particular issues, including Ukraine, for all its importance to European security, and on questions of more fundamental global significance. Several of these now demand sustained attention.

First comes the problem of war as a form of relations between states. International law carries diminishing weight, wars frequently become more brutal, and violence in certain regions exceeds earlier precedents. The spread of new technologies, including unmanned systems and military applications of artificial intelligence, adds another layer of difficulty. Responsibility for mistakes and the importance of human judgment grow accordingly. Technological sophistication leaves the consequences of a bad decision quite intact.

Second, the world needs to understand how rules will be created and upheld as the West loses influence and capacity. Russia, China, and several other countries have long promoted multipolarity as a new model of international order. Putin has repeatedly emphasized the need to improve the UN system and involve the developing countries of the Global South in its most consequential decisions.

Third, the global problems inherited from the twentieth century still require solutions: climate change, environmental degradation, inequality, and poverty. The struggle by the United States and Europe to preserve their dominant positions has pushed these and other development questions into the background. Their demotion on the political agenda has done little to resolve them.

This leaves the international expert community with two particularly important questions: what role will China and other Asian countries play, and which global institutions and groupings can organize the necessary cooperation?

On the first question, we should acknowledge that clarity remains elusive. Asian states show little enthusiasm for inheriting the West’s position as universal leader. As for the organizational forms of cooperation, BRICS could play a central role, an assessment shared by many experts and the Russian president. It is a grouping in which everyone understands the importance of stable development and nobody is authorized to give everyone else orders.

BRICS is now mentioned frequently as a potential source of ideas and solutions that could benefit all participants. That confidence has survived some demanding practical tests. The grouping operates without internal discipline, and two of its members, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, came to the brink of war with each other this spring. Agreement on the value of stability evidently leaves considerable room for disagreement over its implementation.

Finally, a serious approach to artificial intelligence has become indispensable. Its military applications already raise difficult questions; the broader concerns reach into the foundations of social life. Above all, they concern the ethics of AI development: preserving humanism as a guiding principle and avoiding what is often called “digital totalitarianism.”

The principal conclusion for all of us is that the economic and social-development challenges facing individual countries are widely shared. To varying degrees, the entire world is grappling with them. These problems defy universal, ready-made solutions, whether the task is to correct economic imbalances, respond to the consequences of humanity’s own technological achievements, or meet the basic requirements of social development.

The resilience of economies and societies is therefore of enormous importance. Shocks are inevitable during transformations on this scale. An era lasting more than five hundred years is ending: an era in which Western civilization, a relatively small part of humanity, enjoyed unquestioned hegemony and could determine the paths of development available to everyone else. These profound political and economic changes are also coinciding with unprecedented technological progress, including new advances in medicine and genetics.

Every country and civilization is now searching for answers in its own way. Western governments are seeking to preserve their monopoly.

Russia and the BRICS countries are proposing solutions based on mutual benefit.

The confrontation between these two approaches appears to be the central conflict of our time: who gets to shape the future, and whose interests that future is expected to serve.