What Russia wants in 2016: A new world order

Now we know what Russia wants in 2016. Not a bigger piece of Ukraine. Not the right to prop up the regime in Syria. Not the restoration of the old Soviet Union. Not the right to use nukes on the world stage. No, what Russia wants in 2016 is a whole new world order.

Rossiya 1 — the same Russian TV network that gave us the documentary film Crimea: The Way Home to explain Russia’s annexation of Crimea — is back with a bigger, better two-hour “documentary” featuring an extended interview with Vladimir Putin that gives us the Kremlin’s view of the current international world order.

It would be easy to dismiss the documentary film, which premiered on December 20 on Russian television, as just another bit of Russian state propaganda, except for the fact that a surprising number of high-powered politicians, diplomats and cultural tastemakers show up in the film — Julian Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jon Stewart, Lord David Owen, Shimon Peres, Pervez Musharraf, and yes, Oliver Stone (who shows up just 38 seconds into the film).

I probably shouldn’t have mentioned Oliver Stone because, well, now you know that the film might just be a giant conspiracy flick starring Vladimir Putin as the unreliable narrator. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union 25 years ago, suggests Putin, the U.S. has become a hegemonic actor on the world stage, turning Europe into a vassal state and systematically attempting to sow rage and chaos around the world — especially in the Middle East — in order to step into the void with its “illegal” attempts at democracy promotion.

As Putin suggests in a series of interview clips, the world forever changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. (Coincidentally this is the same year that former President George H.W. Bush first mentioned the “new world order” in a speech about Iraq.) In the 1990s, then, a bipolar world morphed into a multipolar world, but all the participants of the post-Yalta system continued to play by the old rules.

Well, kind of. It depends on how you define “play by the rules.”

That’s where the “World Order” documentary actually becomes interesting. Putin suggests that all the old rules set into place to prevent a new global war after the end of World War II have been ignored again and again by the U.S. The whole point of the UN Security Council, points out Putin, is to prevent one nation from unilaterally acting alone on the world stage to destabilize the global world order.

And, yet, that’s exactly what’s happened ever since the 1990s.

The film seeks to link a number of disparate world events — the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the American military campaigns in Iraq, the Arab Spring in the Middle East, the violence in Ukraine, the Middle East refugee flows to Europe, and now the military intervention in Syria — as part of a broader global conspiracy by the U.S. to remain the unchallenged global hegemon. Even the new trade blocs — the TTIP and the TPP — are seen as a way for the U.S. to spread its power and influence in new ways to Europe and Asia.

All of that would sound like some bizarre JFK conspiracy hatched by Oliver Stone — the world is out to get Russia! — except for one thing the standard bit players in any Russian propaganda film are nowhere to be found. In the Crimea documentary, you had the Night Wolves motorcycle gang, the Crimean partisans, and the rabid right-wing Ukrainian nationalists setting school buses on fire. In contrast, a number of Russian actors make their way onto the stage in “World Order” — notably, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kremlin press spokesperson Dmitry Peskov — but it’s the foreign actors who do the biggest talking.

Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica explains why refugee flows into Europe are so dangerous. Shimon Peres explains how he and a longtime rival — Yasser Arafat — eventually came to the negotiating table, something the U.S. has refused to do with Russia. DSK explains how the powers that be will stop at nothing — including a potential frame-up in New York — to quash any efforts to supplant the U.S. dollar as the underpinning of the global financial system. Assange even suggests that the U.S. drops surveillance nets over the UN in New York in order to monitor and prevent dissenting opinions.

In the film, Putin actually comes off as one of the most rational actors on the world stage. (OK, OK, so that’s how these propaganda films work, eh?) Hillary Clinton is seen cackling at the idea that the U.S. finally got rid of Qaddafi in Libya (“We came, we saw, he died”). Barack Obama is seen clumsily retreating from the mockery of Jon Stewart about the failure of the U.S. to enunciate any kind of policy for the Middle East.

As Putin notes in the film, war is an inescapable reality of geopolitics. What’s changed over the past 25 years, though, is how we wage this war and who controls the very concept of war. War, says Putin, should be civilized, transparent, understood and controlled. And there should always be a diplomatic option to end any war. But as we’re seeing now with ISIS, the very notion of “war” seems to be slipping away from us. We no longer know who we are fighting, or why. And the rules keep seeming to change.

Putin also offers his view of “interests” in the geopolitical context. Every nation has “interests,” he suggests. What are needed are general, transparent rules of the game so that each nation can pursue its own interests. If the rules are routinely broken, or even worse, if double standards are applied in the interpretation of these rules, that’s when the problems start.

Cut, splice, cut, splice… You can come up with your own interpretation of the current world order. Yet, it’s hard to set aside the notion that the world is once again on edge and that the world needs Russia to play an important role to keep things in balance. That’s the problem with multipolarity — it’s not enough just to have one global hegemon.

In hindsight, it almost seems like Russia actually got things right after the break-up of the Soviet Union. NATO advancing to Russia’s borders after the collapse of the Soviet Union probably wasn’t a good thing. The U.S. playing divide and conquer in the Middle East was certainly not a good idea, given the rise of ISIS and the massive refugee flows into Europe.

There’s a clip of Putin from the 1990s, stating his opposition to the bombing of Yugoslavia. There are clips of Putin from his recent UN speech in New York, in which he outlined the scope of the problems facing the world today. There are repeated outtakes from politicians acknowledging that, in hindsight, Russia has been more progressive than the U.S. in recognizing the changing contours of global affairs since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

And that’s really the point: that the world has forever changed since the break-up of the Soviet Union, an event that Putin has famously described as the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century. Over the last 25 years, the bipolar world became a multipolar world, but the U.S. continues to ignore this fact. It continues to divide the world into “good” and “evil,” without any regard for traditions, history or culture. It continues to portray itself as the “moral leader” of the free world, a term that Putin dismisses as a cliché of the Cold War era.

Massive refugee inflows into Europe and the rise of ISIS are two events that probably nobody predicted 25 years ago, but now they’re here, and Russia is proving the more willing and agile of the two former superpowers to create a New World Order. Until someone treats Russia as an equal, it will continue to rage against the machine. That might not sound so terrible, except for one very terrifying detail: Russia still has nukes and isn’t afraid to use them.