Two World Orders have Collapsed in Less than 40 Years, Sergey Medvedev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 29 – Perhaps the most remarkable thing about recent history is that in less than 40 years, two world orders have collapsed, the first in 1989-1991 and the second now, Sergey Medvedev, the host of Radio Liberty’s Archaeology Program which looks back to the recent past in order to better understand the present and the future.

            In many respects, he argues, what is taking place now is a reversal of 35 years ago. “Then an era opened up; now it is closing.” Then walls and dictators fell, leading to “naïve” ideas about the end of history; now, new walls are going up and democracy is being destroyed (svoboda.org/a/god-velikogo-pereloma-sergey-medvedev-ob-itogah-2025-go/33634292.html).

            “Today,” Medvedev says, “Today it is becoming clear that the era between 1989 and 2025 was not the norm, but an exception, a unique opportunity” for the expansion of freedom. “The possibilities seemed endless;” and events like 911 and Putin’s Munich speech in 2007 were dismissed as bumps on the road rather than harbingers of a new direction.

            But 2005 became the watershed, because the current epochal shift “did not being with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but with Donald Trump’s second coming to the White House and the radical reversal of American policy. It was Trump rather than Putin who closed down the previous era and became “the embodiment of the spirit of the new age.”

            That turn above all marked “the end of the American myth and the American century, a time when America was the pillar of the world order, a gobal model, a global benefactor and a global policeman” which “committed many injustices … but overall remained a normative force that maintained order based on values, rules, and faith in freedom and responsibility.”

            According to Medvedev, “That America is no more, and Trump's second presidency confirms this fact. For too long, we have ignored the social and demographic shifts in the US, the rise of inequality and resentment (read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy), the hatred of elites, "intellectuals," and the deep state, and the sclerosis of the political and party system.”

            And he continues: “The problem is not with Trump's personality, but with the fact that his revolution was brewing, and his re-election with a convincing majority is the best proof of this. The Trump phenomenon is objective and inevitable just as the Putin phenomenon is objective and inevitable.”

“Regardless of how one feels about them both,” Medvedev says, “both are figures born of national culture, who legally rose to the head of superpowers and are changing the course of world history. Such individuals appear at the intersection of historical trends and personal characteristics, however accidental, willful, or inadequate they may seem.”

Both Trump and Putin “pursue the same goal,” he continues, “the destruction of the liberal world order that emerged after the Cold War which they believe is unfair to their countries: Trump is convinced that the liberal world order exploits America and Putin believes it humiliates Russia.”

“In this sense then, the two are strategic allies; and Ukraine and Europe stand as annoying obstacles in their path.”

Medvedev argues that “Putin is not winning in Ukraine, but he is currently winning the war against the West. He imposed this war on the world, forcing everyone to play by his rules, he holds the strategic initiative and always makes the first move, to which the West is forced to respond.”

            With the blood of Ukrainians, Putin is “reclaiming Russia’s place in the world and his own right to exist.” But despite that, “it doesn’t even occur to anyone to raise the question of defeating Putin’s Russia in the same way as the allies did with Hitler’s Germany some 80 years ago.

            For most Western leaders, “Russia is too big to fail; Russia is too big (and too nuclear, and too belligerent, and too unpredictable) to simply abolish it or raise the question of its military defeat and regime change: there is only one thing that Western politicians fear even more than the fall of Kyiv – the fall of Moscow and the subsequent hypothetical chaos.”

            In much of the “old” West, rightwing populists are either in power or close to it, Medvedev suggests, a reflection of the way new media have played up the hostility of ordinary citizens to the complexities of modernity and their belief that all their problems are the work of elites, leftists, minorities or immigrants.

            According to Medvedev, “The result is MAGA-Trumpism in America and Brexit in Britain, where the disappearance of the political center and the strengthening of radicals on both flanks threatens to tear apart the political body of democratic countries.” Other examples of this danger can easily be found as for example in Israel.

What awaits us in 2026?” the commentator asks rhetorically. “ It's easier to say what won't happen: there will be neither stability nor peace (neither in Ukraine nor on a global scale), nor a return to the previous, pre-war state – we are in a situation of polycrisis, where different systems are failing simultaneously, causing cascading effects.

"Last year was difficult for all of us, but don't worry, next year will be even worse," Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni promised in her Christmas address, like in the old joke about the pessimist and the optimist, where the former gloomily says "it can't get any worse," and the latter joyfully replies: "Oh yes, it can!"

Today, what hope there is is to be found “where it would seem there should be the least of it: in Ukraine,” a country and a people “now resisting the impending chaos both of the Russian horde and global disorder, and it is Ukraine that is the focal point of international solidarity, faith institutions and in justice, the foundations of which are now being tested.”

“Ukraine stands guard over Western civilization and European values,” Medvedev argues. “It is not so much that it seeks protection from NATO and the EU, but rather that it itself protects the EU and NATO from Russian barbarism, and that is why it deserves membership in both institutions as a provider, not a consumer, of security.

Consequently, the Radio Liberty commentator concludes, despite everything “we should not be afraid of the future but should meet it with dignity as the Ukrainians have met the Russian invaders.”