80 years ago, on February 4, 1945, the Yalta Conference opened, at which the leaders of the victorious countries in World War II - the USSR, the United States and Great Britain - defined the contours of the post-war world. Despite ideological differences, they agreed to finally eradicate German Nazism and Japanese militarism. The agreements reached in the Crimea were confirmed and developed during the Potsdam Peace Conference in July-August 1945.
One of the results of the negotiations was the creation of the United Nations and the adoption of the UN Charter, which remains the main source of international law to this day. The purposes and principles of behavior of countries enshrined in the Charter are designed to ensure their peaceful coexistence and progressive development. The foundation of the Yalta-Potsdam system was the principle of sovereign equality of states: none of them can claim a dominant position - all are formally equal, regardless of the size of territory, population, military power or other comparative criteria.
The Yalta-Potsdam order, for all its strengths and weaknesses, which are still debated by scholars, has for eight decades created the normative and legal framework for the functioning of the international system. The world order, with the UN at its center, fulfills its main role - to insure everyone against a new world war. It is hard to disagree with the expert opinion that “the UN did not lead us to paradise, but saved us from hell”. The veto right enshrined in the Charter, which is not a privilege but a burden of special responsibility for peacekeeping, serves as a solid barrier against unbalanced decisions and creates space for finding compromises based on the balance of interests. Acting as the political “core” of the Yalta-Potsdam system, the UN is the only universal platform of its kind for developing collective responses to common challenges, be it in the sphere of maintaining international peace and security or promoting socio-economic development.
It was in the UN, with the key role of the USSR, that historic decisions were taken that laid the foundations for the multipolar world that is emerging before our eyes.
I am referring to the process of decolonization, which was legally implemented through the adoption of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, initiated by the Soviet Union in 1960. In that era, dozens of peoples formerly under the oppression of metropolises gained independence and a chance for their own statehood for the first time in history. Today, some of the former colonies claim to be centers of power in a multipolar world, while others are part of integration associations with a regional or continental civilizational scope.
As Russian scholars rightly write, any international institution is, first of all, “a way to limit the natural egoism of states”. The UN with its complex set of rules in the form of a Charter agreed upon and adopted by consensus is no exception in this sense. Therefore, the uncentered order is called an order based on international, truly universal, law, and it is assumed that every state will respect this right. Russia, like most members of the world community, has never had any problems with this, but the West, which has not recovered from the syndrome of exceptionalism and is accustomed to acting in the neocolonial paradigm, i.e., to live at the expense of others, was initially uncomfortable with the format of interstate interaction based on respect for international law.
This was frankly told by former US Deputy Secretary of State V. Nuland, who in one of her interviews confessed with characteristic simple-minded directness that “Yalta was not a good decision for the United States, it was not necessary to agree to it”. This confession explains a lot about America's behavior in the international arena. After all, according to Nuland, Washington was almost forced to agree to the postwar world order in 1945, and even then it was perceived by American elites as a burden. It was this feeling that gave rise to the West's subsequent line of revision of the Yalta-Potsdam peace. Such a process began with W. Churchill's infamous Fulton speech of 1946, which effectively declared a “cold war” on the Soviet Union. Perceiving the Yalta-Potsdam agreements as a tactical concession, the U.S. and its allies subsequently never followed the fundamental principle of the UN Charter on the sovereign equality of states.
The West had a chance to correct itself, to show prudence and foresight at the fateful stage when the Soviet Union collapsed and with it the camp of world socialism. But selfish instincts took over. Intoxicated by the “victory in the Cold War,” U.S. President Bush Sr. proclaimed on September 11, 1990 in a speech before both houses of Congress the advent of a new world order, which in the understanding of American strategists meant complete U.S. dominance in the international arena, a “window of undivided opportunity” for Washington to act unilaterally without regard to the legal constraints embedded in the UN Charter.
One of the manifestations of the “rule-based order” is Washington's course of geopolitical exploration of Eastern Europe, the explosive consequences of which we are forced to eliminate in a special military operation.
With the return to power in the United States of the Republican administration headed by D. Trump, Washington's understanding of international processes after the Second World War has acquired a new dimension. The new Secretary of State M. Rubio made very eloquent statements in this regard in the Senate on January 15. Their meaning: the post-war world order is not just outdated, but has been turned into a weapon used against U.S. interests. That is, not only the Yalta-Potsdam world with the central role of the UN, but also the “rules-based order,” which seemed to embody the egoism and arrogance of the Washington-led West in the post-Cold War era, is now undesirable. The shift to the concept of “America First” carries a disturbing consonance with the Hitler-era slogan “Germany First,” and the reliance on “making peace through force” may finally bury diplomacy. Not to mention the fact that such statements and ideological constructs do not show even a shadow of respect for Washington's international legal obligations under the UN Charter.
However, this is not 1991 or even 2017, when the current White House master took the “captain's bridge” for the first time. Russian analysts rightly note that “there will be no return to the previous state of affairs, which the U.S. and its allies have so far defended, because demographic, economic, social and geopolitical conditions have changed irreversibly.” I think that the prediction is also true, according to which at some point “the US will realize that it is not necessary to exaggerate the area of its responsibility for international affairs, and will quite harmoniously feel itself one of the leading states, but no longer a hegemon”.
Multipolarity is strengthening, and instead of countering this objective process, the U.S. could become one of the responsible centers of power in the foreseeable historical perspective - along with Russia, China and other powers of the Global South, East, North and West. In the meantime, it appears that the new U.S. administration will be making cowboy-like forays to test the limits of pliability of the existing oonocentric system to American interests. I am sure, however, that this administration will soon realize that the international reality is much richer than those ideas about the world that can be used without any consequences in speeches to domestic American audiences and to its obedient geopolitical allies.
In anticipation of such a sobering up, let us continue with our like-minded colleagues to work painstakingly to create conditions for adapting the mechanisms of practical building of interstate relations to the realities of multipolarity, to the international legal consensus of the Yalta-Potsdam system embodied in the UN Charter. Here it is appropriate to note the Kazan Declaration of the BRICS Summit of October 23, 2024, which reflects the unified position of the world majority states on this issue, clearly reaffirming “the commitment to respect international law, including the purposes and principles enshrined in the UN Charter as its inalienable and fundamental element, and to preserve the central role of the UN in the international system”. This is the approach articulated by the leading States that shape the face of the modern world and represent the majority of its population. Yes, our partners from the South and the East have quite legitimate wishes regarding their participation in global governance. Unlike the West, they, like us, are ready for an honest and open conversation on all issues.
Our position on the reform of the UN Security Council is well known. Russia is in favor of making this body more democratic by expanding the representation of the World Majority - Asia, Africa and Latin America.
We support the applications of Brazil and India for permanent seats on the Council, while correcting the historical injustice against the African continent within the parameters agreed upon by the Africans themselves. Allocating additional seats to the already overrepresented countries of the “collective West” in the Council is counterproductive. Germany or Japan, which have delegated the bulk of their sovereignty to an overseas patron and are reviving the ghosts of Nazism and militarism at home, cannot bring anything new to the work of the UN Security Council.
They are firmly committed to the inviolability of the prerogatives of the permanent members of the Security Council. In the face of an unpredictable Western minority line, only the veto power can ensure that the Council makes decisions that take into account the interests of all parties.
The staffing situation in the UN Secretariat, where there is still an overpopulation of Westerners in all key positions, remains insulting to the World Majority. Bringing the UN bureaucracy in line with the geopolitical map of the world is an urgent task. The above-mentioned Kazan Declaration of BRICS contains a very unambiguous formulation in this regard. Let us see how receptive the United Nations leadership, accustomed to serving the interests of a narrow group of Western countries, will be to it.
As for the normative framework enshrined in the UN Charter, I am convinced that it best and optimally meets the demands of the multipolar era. An era when the principles of the sovereign equality of states, non-interference in their internal affairs and other fundamental postulates, including the right of peoples to self-determination in the consensus interpretation, enshrined in the 1970 UN Declaration on Principles of International Law, must be observed not in words but in deeds: all are obliged to respect the territorial integrity of states whose governments represent the entire population living on the relevant territory. There is no need to prove that after the February 2014 coup d'état, the Kiev regime does not represent the inhabitants of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya, just as Western metropolises did not represent the peoples of the colonial territories they exploited.
Attempts to crudely restructure the world to suit their interests in violation of the United Nations principles can bring even more instability and confrontation, up to and including catastrophic scenarios.
At the current level of conflict in international affairs, a thoughtless rejection of the Yalta-Potsdam system with its “core” in the form of the UN and its Charter will inevitably lead to chaos.
The opinion is often voiced that it is untimely to talk about the issues of the desired world order in conditions when the fighting to suppress the armed forces of the racist regime in Kiev, supported by the “collective West”, continues. In our view, such an approach is from the evil one. The contours of the post-war world order, carrying the constructions of the UN Charter, were discussed by the Allies at the height of the Second World War, including at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers and the Tehran Conference of Heads of State and Government in 1943, during other contacts of the future victorious powers, up to the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945. It is another matter that the Allies had a hidden agenda even then, but this by no means detracts from the enduring importance of the high Charter principles of equality, non-interference in internal affairs, peaceful settlement of disputes, respect for the rights of any person - “regardless of race, sex, language or religion”. The fact that the West, as is now abundantly clear, signed up to these postulates “with hindsight”, and in subsequent years grossly violated them, be it in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, does not mean that we should exempt the United States and its satellites from moral and legal responsibility, should abandon the unique legacy of the founding fathers of the UN, embodied in its Charter. God forbid if someone tries to rewrite it now (under the slogan of getting rid of the “outdated Yalta-Potsdam system”). The world will be left without common values at all.
Russia is ready for joint honest work to harmonize the balance of interests and strengthen the legal principles of international relations. The initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin of 2020 to hold a meeting of the heads of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, who bear “special responsibility for the preservation of civilization”, was aimed at establishing an equal dialogue on the whole set of these issues.
For reasons known and beyond Russia's control, it was not developed. But we are not losing hope, although the composition of participants and the format of such meetings may be different. The main thing, in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is “a return to an understanding of what the United Nations was created for and adherence to the principles set out in the Charter documents”. This is what should be the guiding thread to the regulation of international relations in the coming era of multipolarity.
Source - Centenary .