Radhika Desai: Neoliberalism, Economic War, BRICS & a New Russia (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of geopolitical economist Radhika Desai in conversation with Norwegian academic, writer and politician Prof. Glenn Diesen on “Neoliberalism, Economic War, BRICS & a New Russia“, August 11, 2025.

Introduction

GLENN DIESEN: Hi everyone, and welcome back. We are joined today by Radhika Desai, a geopolitical economist, professor at the University of Manitoba, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. So welcome to the program.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great to be here, Glenn.

Defining Neoliberalism and Its Impact on Western Economies

GLENN DIESEN: The topic I wanted to discuss with you was the economic policies of Trump, the reactions of BRICS, but also where Russia fits into this wider picture. But to address the wider problems of Western economies, because things obviously were going well before Trump came along, and I think the US economy has been going from bad to worse, especially the past two decades.

But a key problem seems to be what is often referred to as neoliberalism. How do you define neoliberal economics and why do you see this as being a source of many of the ills of Western economies at the moment?

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, I think that’s actually given the sort range of topics we want to talk about, that’s a great starting point. So neoliberalism is a sort of blanket term for a set of policies and theories associated with them that have been dominant since the early 1980s, since the age of Thatcher and Reagan and so on.

Periodically people have pronounced the death of neoliberalism. In fact, I was myself one – I pronounced the death of neoliberalism in 2008, after the 2008 financial crisis. But since then my analysis of it has deepened further because clearly neoliberalism has not gone. And so here’s how I understand it today.

So neoliberalism is supposed to be the ideology that says that markets should be free, you should have free markets and free trade, and everything will be fine. And the reason why it was important for certain people to say it back in the late 70s, early 80s, is because they were arguing that the deep economic crisis in which the Western world in particular found itself, the stagflationist crisis of the 1970s, had been caused by what neoliberals claim was an excess of state regulation, combined of course, with an excess of trade union power.

So both state regulation, taxation of capital as well as trade union power, they all had to be rolled back. Societies had to, states had to be shrunk, there had to be privatization of state owned enterprises, deregulation of industry, reduced tax of capital, reduction of social spending, etc. So all of these. And so the idea was that you’re going to restore markets and competition and this is going to restore the productive dynamism of capitalism, which is naturally, productively dynamic. And only these regulations of the post Second World War period, when Keynesian welfare states were created, were preventing that.

The Monopoly Phase of Capitalism

Unfortunately, this theory is a completely bad faith theory in the sense that it was proposed at a time when they were no longer, when capitalism was no longer about free markets and free trade. It was proposed, beginning with the neoclassical revolution back in the late 19th century and developed throughout the early part of the 20th century and into our own time. This was a time when capitalism had already entered its monopoly phase.

And it wasn’t just Marxists like Lenin or Hilferding or Bukharin who were talking about that. All sorts of prominent bourgeois experts, pro capitalist experts, were also talking about the increasing concentration of capital and the fact that capitalism had arrived at a different and new phase. So in this context, where capitalism has already arrived at the monopoly phase, these people are talking about how free markets and free trade are going to restore through competition, this productive dynamic, et cetera. This is complete nonsense.

And of course, by the time it came to be applied in the late 70s, early 80s, capitalism had become even more so. So neoliberalism claims to be about free markets, but in reality neoliberalism is giving more freedom to monopoly capitalism.

What is wrong with that? What is wrong with that is that, and this is something that Marx had pointed out long time ago. He had pointed out that once capitalism arrives at the monopoly phase, it will lose its productive dynamism. It will no longer be about competition. It will essentially be massified social production. And in fact, he felt that it would be so obviously so that people would realize that there’s nothing to do but to take over these big monopoly corporations and take them into public ownership, because monopolies allow private owners to reap unearned incomes, to essentially reap rents, as they are called. They become rentiers. It becomes a rentier set of institutions or a rentier economy.

The Post-War Golden Age and Its True Causes

So Marx had predicted this and he said that by this time, whatever progressive role capitalism may have played in developing the forces of production, developing the capacities of human societies to produce, et cetera, will be finished. It will have become ripe for socialism. So he had already said that back then.

And I would say that in the course, by the early, a few decades later, in the early 20th century, you had the Thirty Years Crisis of 1914-1945, encompassing two imperialist world wars which everybody, nobody was in doubt. They were connected to capitalism. Even people like Keynes could see that, let alone the Marxists of the time, people like Karl Polanyi could see that and so on. And of course there was the Great Depression in between the two wars.

So everybody that this system is really not, its sell by date is well passed and we are going to have to construct a very different type of society and in the post second World War period and that if we didn’t that we would have another Great Depression.

Now in the post second World War period we got the golden age of growth.

And a lot of people point to this and say, “Well you know, you got this golden age of growth. This shows that capitalism was fine.” Not so, not so fast. Because actually that golden age of growth was measuring world growth. And when you measure world growth, you have to remember number one, that the so called first world countries, the imperialist countries as some may call them, had been turned into Keynesian welfare states.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm points out that the reforms that were introduced in the post second World war period were so radical that they would have even a decade before been, they would have been dismissed as socialists. So this, such reforms had to be accepted by capitalism in the second world, of course, in a vast second world of communist countries which now stretch from Eastern Europe to the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, of which of a supercontinent of which you have written so much was communist.

And of course these countries predosed an enormous growth rate, rates much higher and more consistently than capitalism, which of course at that time many people envied. And I even remember reading somewhere that at this time intellectuals in Western countries were very envious of this and they felt that given the consistency with which the communist countries were posting such high growth rates that they would overtake capitalism, which kind of in a sense has happened today with China doing what it’s been doing anyway.

And of course all the newly independent, formerly colonized, newly independent countries were pursuing policies of autonomous national development, which whatever their successes and failures, were certainly much better in terms of producing broad based growth than anything that we have seen more recently.

Neoliberalism’s Failures and BRICS Success

So for all these, these were the reasons we got the golden age, not because of capitalism. And you see, it’s especially clear now from the point of view of four and a half decades into the neoliberal age, that neoliberalism has not restored productive dynamism. It has given us low growth, low investment, financialization. The only thing capital has done with the new freedoms given to it by neoliberal policymakers is not to revive productive investment, but to essentially financialize the economy. And of course that has contributed massively to increased inequality.

So all of this is a cocktail of economic ills that is afflicting Western economies in particular and leading manifestly to their decline. And the BRICS countries have come to the forefront to the extent that they have not adopted neoliberalism. So you have for example China, which has never been subject to neoliberalism. You have Russia and Brazil which suffered enormously under neoliberalism – Brazil for longer than Russia. But eventually by the 2000s they rejected neoliberalism substantially of course, not completely. I think both economies are way too neoliberal for my taste.

And you have India, which at least up until the first decade and a bit of the 21st century was under, well, sorry between about 2004 and 2012 was under a congress led government which was quite reformist partly because it was reliant on left support. And so the reforms it introduced managed to sustain growth of a good type. But of course since we’ve had Bolsonaro in Brazil and Modi in India, the record of these countries has been much poorer.

But anyway, I think I’m straying slightly away from neoliberalism. But neoliberalism essentially I regard it as a kind of pretty big time intellectual hoax basically.

The Academic Consensus and Its Problems

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, it’s always interesting the academic argument that the more the market can operate freely, the more efficient it will be. And I don’t think there’s many economists who rejects this liberal claim. But as you refer to people like Karl Polanyi who point out that if you have unfettered market forces it tends to eat away at the social fabric. It’s also the even liberal economics like David Ricardo and in recognizing the concentration of wealth in capital and the weakening of labor. So it’s often it’s become over ideological in terms of the foundational problems have been recognized across the board.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. And you know what, if you think about what we call neoliberalism is essentially neoclassical economics, particularly the Austrian variant which emerged in the late 19th century. But you know, for a long time it never really, it wasn’t taken so seriously because initially of course you had not only Marxism but the, but some of the associated. So the historical school in continental Europe, and there was this great methodenstreit between the neoclassical school and the historical school. So there was still a lot of resistance.

Soon thereafter you had Keynes and you had the emergence of macroeconomics which is again a sort of a huge challenge to the ideas particularly of the Austrians and so on. And of course in the entire sort of middle of the 20th century it was Keynesianism that ruled the roost. So it wasn’t really, until the 70s crisis, which was then pinned successfully by the neoliberals and the think tanks. I mean, I cut my intellectual teeth writing about the neoliberal think tanks in Britain in the post Second World War period. They managed to pin the crisis on Keynesianism and that’s when they got their heyday. So in a certain sense, actually the dominance of neoliberalism is quite recent.

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Trump’s Economic War and Tariff Policies

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah. So this of course weakens the economic prowess of the Western countries. And I have to say, as an admirer of the – we’ll call it economic nationalism or industrial capitalism of Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Sergei Witte and the rest. I can see the value of, for example, tariffs as one component of industrial policies with the assumption you need industrial sovereignty in order to have political sovereignty.

But this being said, the efforts by Trump to reverse some of the neoliberal decline, it doesn’t seem very convincing in terms of the industries that the tariffs are used against the objectives they are intended to serve. And even the calculation of tariffs, none of it really makes much sense at all. I was wondering, how do you assess the current economic war by Trump in terms of tariffs going after vulnerable supply chains of adversaries trying to cut the Chinese tech sector down in size? How are you diagnosing the thought process behind this whole thing?

Economic Sovereignty and the Neoliberal Paradox

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, sure. So, you know, I tell one story about this, which I will. I normally start with that story, but I want to relegate that to the second part because you said something that I consider very, very important. You refer to economic sovereignty and, you know, not a lot of people understand how central it is to the operation of the international system of capitalism, what I call geopolitical economy.

So let me begin with that. I mean, essentially the neoliberal argument, the free markets and free trade are good, essentially lead to the denial of development. If people, if policymakers actually implement it, they will not promote development, but actively promote the development.

Which is why Friedrich List, whom you mentioned, used the expression “kicking away the ladder.” They said that Western countries have developed through industrial policies, through tariffs, through protectionism and all sorts of forms of state intervention. But once they get to the peak of development, once they climb the sort of ladder of development, then they kick it away so that nobody else can climb it.

And what is kicking away the ladder? It is to promote. It is to encourage free market and free trade policies, which have the opposite effect, not promoting development, but promoting de-development.

Now, the United States, Germany, various other countries already recognize this. Friedrich List wrote his book as an attack on free market, free trade policies. So he knew that free market, free trade policies will not develop Germany, they will de-develop Germany. And so what you go on in the second half of the. In the last third, rather, of the 19th century is accelerated development of countries like Germany, the United States, Japan, et cetera, behind protectionist walls.

The Crustacean Economy Model

And this was a recognition of something, as, you know, Karl Polanyi has this wonderful expression which, you know, which I’ve used quite a lot in my own writing. He said that economies became crustacean. You know, crustacean is this biological term for the genus of creatures that live in the sea and they have hard shells, you know, so like crabs or tortoises or whatever. So you have crustacean nations. So nations that develop a hard wall.

And only that kind of nation, a crustacean nation, can develop because it has the means to protect itself when under attack of any sort, so it can withdraw under the shell. And that’s what crustacean means.

And of course, the purpose of the neoliberal prescription of free markets and free trade is precisely to open up these economies so that they agree to supply the needs of the big imperialist powers. And that’s why the rhetoric of free markets and free trade, open economies, is the rhetoric of imperialism.

Trump’s Tariffs: Symptom, Not Solution

Now, to come back to the point you made about how do I understand BRICS and so on, Sorry, how do I understand Trump’s tariffs? Very simply, I take the policy of tariffs to be a symptom of the deeper crisis of the United States, not a sign that Trump has a strategy to solve the problems of America.

Because essentially, Trump was the. You know, what gave Trump the edge over other Republicans and what allowed him to become take over one of the established parties of the United States was that he realized that you could not win elections by telling people the economy was doing well. Indeed, he showed the Republicans that he could win the primaries and later on the election in 2016 precisely by telling people that the economy was doing very badly.

But given that Trump, like his Democratic competitors, was trying to essentially was writing the application to be the servant of the very same corporate capitalist class that the Democratic Party also served, he couldn’t just leave it there. He had to accompany it with a lie. And that lie was that the problems of the United States of economy, the problems of ordinary American voters, were not because of decades of neoliberal policies that have produced this economy, et cetera, but rather because of trade, because of China and because of immigrants. These were the things that he identified.

And today’s tariff proposals are just an elaborate show to try to make it look as if he is pursuing the exact policies that he had, he had advertised, he had campaigned on. But at the same time you can see that they are reduced to a shadow of their former selves.

So instead of tariffs, what he has is this series of so called agreements which are not even written down with Japan or the EU or the UK or what have you. What do they mean? What will they come to mean? Only the Almighty knows if there be such a thing. I don’t think, certainly Trump does not know.

The Contradictions of Trump’s Economic Policy

He has, of course done this has been very destructive. So has the attack on immigrant working people across the United States. It has been terrifying for many of them. It has led to demonstrations and the, you know, ordinary people feeling very upset at what he’s doing. Nevertheless, it’s a fraction of what he had originally threatened to do, which was to deport 11 million people. He can’t do that. He can’t impose tariffs in the way that he had threatened. He can’t do the deportations because both of them will hurt the very corporate capitalist classes and the cronies he has been gathering around him. So he can’t do that.

What’s more, if we are focusing on tariffs alone, so many different goals have been advertised for the tariffs. Right. And some of them are even contradictory to one another. So for example, if the goals is to re-industrialize the United States, and you know, he keeps saying, “Oh, the Europeans have promised to invest so much and the Japanese have promised to invest so much and Tim Cook of Apple has promised to invest so much.” But these are just promises. God only knows whether they will materialize.

But he says that you’re going to re-industrialize the United States. Well, in that case, tariffs will be effective in stopping the imports. But then he says that his tariffs are going to raise an enormous amount of income for the federal government, reducing the need, you know, justifying his big beautiful bill in which he cut income taxes and corporate taxes even further. Well, if the imports are stopped, there will be no tariff revenues or very little.

And quite frankly, the people are saying tariff revenues are higher than they have been for a long time. But that’s because they have been very low for a very long time. They are certainly nowhere near compensating for the tax cuts that he has made, let alone the tax cuts of the entire neoliberal era which are responsible for the enormous deficits, the budget deficits the United States has.

America’s Declining Market Power

So, and of course, yes, he has been using the tariffs to twist the arms of various world leaders, etc. But again, it is not clear to me that even this is necessarily going to succeed for one very simple reason. Trump acts as though the United States is still the world’s market of last resort, that everybody’s desperate to sell to the United States.

But if you look at the statistics, I have read two or three different figures. The highest figure was 15.9%. The lowest figure was 10%. This is the figure for the proportion of world imports that the US accounts for. So it’s somewhere between 15.9 and 10%. Not a small figure, but it’s not huge either.

And barring countries that have unfortunately made bad decisions in the last few decades, like Mexico and Canada, which hitched their wagons to the United States when a lot of their intellectuals were saying they should do the opposite, that’s another story. But beyond that, I think most countries can survive a shock, a trade shock with the United States.

And so I would say that. And of course, they will survive the trade shock. But what the US will not survive is the enormous climate of uncertainty that the U.S. has created. So people will say, why should we? And, you know, Trump may come and Trump may go, but the next leader is unlikely to be much better because these things are coming out. You know, as I’ve said, you know, Trump is a symptom of the deeper crisis. He’s not the actor. He’s not the problem. The problem is the deep crisis in which the US finds itself. And this is not going to go away tomorrow. Certainly, Trump’s policies are only going to exacerbate further.

So this will simply mean that actually, in the long run, although countries will go through some considerable difficulties, particularly very small and vulnerable ones, what is the rational thing to do? The rational thing they will understand is to reorient their economies away from trade and investment relations with the United States and towards other more predictable trade and investment partners. And I think this will happen inevitably. America will be left high and dry. And that long period, which, by the way, the term globalization actually refers to, during which the United States became more dependent on trade, will come to an end.

The Hegemon’s Dilemma

GLENN DIESEN: There’s many contradictions in this policies. You can also point out his argument or recognition that you need a weak dollar in order to price America back into. Well, to price American industries back into the market so to make them more competitive for export. But, of course, he also wants a strong and a stable dollar to maintain it as a reserve currency. So it’s very hard to overcome these contradictions.

But, you know, for others, they. Well, there’s been predicted at least since the 80s that these days would come for the United States because you refer to Friedrich List in terms of kicking the ladder and. Well, this is the assumption that once, if you’re the dominant economy, the hegemon, you have the leading technologies, you control the transportation corridors, you have the dominant banks, the reserve currency, then of course there’s an interest incentive to promote neoliberal economics. That is, you know, everyone integrates under a economic system which is administered by you.

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So, yeah, simply, if you have the best technologies and industries, if you have the mature industries, this is a high quality which comes in at a low price. You will out compete all the competitors who have been low quality and high price. So this was always been a good way of saturating foreign markets. They don’t industrialize or develop tech in the same way because they can’t compete against you.

The Rise of China and America’s Response

But now something has changed. Under the neoliberal model, when the US financialized its economy, its production was outsourced. I think these days the United States can’t compete against China. In the past they used to, at least when they put sanctions and different economic coercion against the Chinese, try to reference some human rights. But now they become very open that we can’t compete against China. We have to find a way of throwing a wrench into the system and, well, I guess sabotage the rise of China.

Now, because of all of this, it creates obviously demand for alternatives. You said one of the curses of the United States now, it’s not predictable. Indeed, it has an unsustainable economy. No one really believes they can take on debt like this forever. It’s weaponized all dependence on the United States. They can take your gold, it can take your sovereign funds, it can cut you off from banks, SWIFT can steal your tankers. I mean, there is no limits anymore.

BRICS as an Alternative

So there’s obviously a huge demand for alternatives. To what extent do you see BRICS being, well, pursuing this role to shape a new alternative? And how successful is it? Because I often get. Well, you often get the impression that they take two steps forward, one step back especially. Yeah, from India especially. They’re usually more harsh against BRICS than the Chinese or Russians will be, for example. So how are you assessing the role of BRICS in this new economic model system being developed?

The Evolution of BRICS: From Economic Grouping to Anti-Imperialist Alliance

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, BRICS is such an odd grouping at one level. The name, as you know, was coined by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs back in 2000 or thereabouts. He basically said, “Look, the center of gravity of the world economy is moving away from the West. It is doing so inevitably. There will come a day when these countries will dominate much more.”

He basically chose four big countries, two of them being, as he put it, resource rich, namely Brazil and Russia. Remember back then there was no South Africa in this grouping. So Brazil and Russia, and he chose two human resource rich countries, two populous countries, namely China and India.

He didn’t have any particularly critical understanding of what makes these economies tick. For example, when he was writing, there was a big commodity boom and therefore Russia and Brazil were projected to do very well out of this. But the point is that he didn’t examine the insides of the economic policy. In fact, not only did he not examine that, but he basically assumed that all four of them were pursuing neoliberal policies, pursuing market-oriented policies, which is actually not true.

Essentially what you got in this period is a situation in which, as I argued back in 2013, I was writing at the end of one of these BRICS summits, I said that the BRICS are creating a front against Western hegemony. But I qualified that by saying they are only going to do this to the extent that they are either rejecting neoliberalism, or they have never had neoliberalism, or they are now rejecting it. That was Brazil and Russia in particular, or like India, have always applied it in a modified way.

Let’s stick with the example of India. India at that time was ruled by a relatively progressive government whose policies of reform were expanding demand and they were able to promote reasonably decent growth, at least in comparison to the previous period. This was a good thing. Had India continued along those lines, India would have continued to prosper.

But of course, we have since had the election of the Modi government, which is a deeply neoliberal government. It is, in my humble opinion, driving India’s economy into the ground. Lately, though, he has taken to posing as the defender of the interests of Indian farmers. But just three or four years ago, he was fighting a battle on the streets with them because they were opposed to the neoliberal farm laws that he wished to introduce. They were opposed to it because those laws would have led to the corporatization of agriculture, the destruction of smallholder farming, or what’s left of it.

All of these problems have created a very problematic Indian economy. It is not doing well, and the growth statistics that are still marshalled to make the BRICS arguments are deeply problematic. So I would say that the BRICS have become problematic from that point of view.

In Brazil, although Lula has come back to power, it is still an open question the extent to which he will be able to tread a path which is distinct from neoliberalism simply because the Brazilian bourgeoisie is quite powerful and I’m not sure that he has the political capacity to go against them.

China of course continues to steam along this path. Although obviously compared to 10, 15 years ago, the growth rates are lower. Nevertheless, they are still way better than anything the West can post.

Russia is very interesting because in the context of sanctions and war over the past, well since 2014 and particularly since 2022, I think Russia has been forced to take progressive decisions. Although I think Putin would probably, if he had his druthers, be considerably more neoliberal than he is now forced to be. Nevertheless, he was never completely a neoliberal. That was the good thing about him. But he still gave too much to neoliberalism. But now in the context of war economy, he’s forced to pursue more developmental, more egalitarian policies. And I think these are working out well for Russia.

One hopes that something will keep him there. Perhaps the relationship with China will keep him there. But the BRICS situation has become very complex, at least if we take the four initial elements. But now they are also being joined by other countries like Iran in particular and others. There’s a sort of informal alliance. Obviously North Korea is not part of BRICS, but North Korea has very close relationships with both China and Russia.

So I think that what we are seeing is that the potential, the boundaries of the anti-imperialist grouping may be changing. Maybe some countries will go in and out. If Lula manages to pursue progressive policy, he’ll stay in. If India gets a better government, it will come back in a much more full-throated way into BRICS. So the exact alignments may change. But I think the fact that there is an increasingly solidaristic anti-imperialist bloc which is willing to support one another economically, politically, perhaps even militarily is an increasing reality.

Russia’s Pivot from West to East: A Historical Transformation

GLENN DIESEN: Well, I’m glad you mentioned Russia in this BRICS format because it is an interesting case study. If you look at the relative decline of the West and the rise of the East, which is quite a historical shift, one often points to the 500 years of Western leadership and even dominance coming to an end.

But what’s fascinating with Russia is it’s always had a foot in both Europe and Asia. It always recognized if you wanted to modernize, it had to look towards the West and Europeanize Russia. This was always the theme, if you go from Peter the Great to Yeltsin. But of course, the rise of the East and, I would say, stagnation and increasing hostility from the West has been shifting Russia’s economic calculations.

I think it was back in 2012 or 2013, Lavrov made the point that we can’t continue to do as in the past when we looked at Europe as the developed and Asia as the backward. This is simply not the world anymore. So we saw this shift from the 90s when Russia was willing to do anything to be a part of this European project, to now, when Russia is essentially throwing its full weight into integrating only with the East and indeed expressing very open, if not hostility, at least dissatisfaction with the Europeans.

I was just wondering, how did we get to this point? Because here in Europe, the narrative tends to be that the Cold War came to an end through the 90s, everything went quite well. And then Putin came in with his KGB mentality and imperialist mindset, and everything went south. How do you assess this path of Russia from the very pro-Western to the new Eurasian Russia, which we see now emerging?

The Russian Perspective: From 1990s Collapse to Putin’s Stabilization

RADHIKA DESAI: Well, this is fascinating, Glenn, and the way you put it exactly gives you a hint of why Russia and Europe are going their divergent ways today. Because you said that in Europe they said that in the 90s, everything was going well. And then in the 2000s, Putin comes along and everything goes pear-shaped. So this is the problem. The Russians look at it exactly in the opposite way.

In the 1990s, everything was going pear-shaped. Russia was put through the economic wringer. It had an enormous decline in its GDP, enormous decline in per capita GDP and incomes, destruction of the institutions of the economy. However good or bad they may have been, there was the willful destruction of an entire economy on which people depended for their livelihoods.

This was the decade during which Russians suffered a decline in longevity in peacetime. People were dying younger. It was a nightmare for Russians, and for them, Putin becoming president is associated with the period during which Russia was at least restabilized and through a long slow process brought back to at least some decent fraction of the per capita income that they used to enjoy before.

That’s a very interesting thing, but I’m so interested you also brought up Peter the Great. I was at a conference at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow back in the spring of 2023 and I remember being so struck by this. Like you, I have always been aware that Russia has always looked to the West since Peter the Great.

But also, Lenin was very interesting. It’s interesting that Putin has it in for Lenin to such an extent. But Lenin was the one person, the one Russian leader who very clearly recognized that Russia’s future lay in alignment with the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial movements and eventually countries of the third world. He wrote about this beginning with the 1905 revolution and continued writing about this till his death.

But other than that, I think other parts of the leadership of Russia were typically fairly pro-Western. So Peter the Great did indeed inaugurate a period during which Russia looked to the West for its inspiration and even perhaps help for its modernization.

But at this HSE seminar I heard intellectual after intellectual, and there were prominent people there like Professor Sergey Karaganov, Professor Dimitri Trenin and so on, all saying, “Russia, the chapter in Russia’s history where it looked to the West is closed. Russia will not look to the West anymore.” This was enormous.

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I’m sure in your conversation with Professor Sakwa this came up, but certainly I remember a very good piece by Sakwa in which he actually shows the temporality of Putin’s growing realization that try as he might to get the West to respect Russia and Russia’s security imperatives, this was not going to work.

Remember that even before he became president, NATO had already expanded, I think twice before 2000 to include more countries. So when he assumed the presidency, he was already aware that there was an issue. He spent the first eight years, I think until the 2008 Munich conference, trying to salvage what could be salvaged of Russia’s relationship with the West.

And then finally at Munich, I forget the exact words he used, but he said that “you guys, you’re not understanding what we are about.” That of course set the stage for, or certainly made Putin aware that this was not the way to go.

By 2014, just a few years later, you had the Maidan coup, the attempt by the West to try to damage Russia by damaging what I sometimes call Ukraine, the soft underbelly of Russia. The result is the situation we have today. I don’t think the West will win. The question is how much damage it will cause to Ukraine, of course, and how much effort it will take for Russia to establish a situation that it can live with.

The Absence of Security Dialogue in Modern Geopolitics

GLENN DIESEN: That’s an interesting point. Putin’s recognition that the west would not respect Russian security. But this isn’t just an issue with Russia, though I find this to be a much wider problem.

That is, at least in the past, in the Cold War, we would discuss what are the Soviets worried about, what are the Chinese worried about, you know, whether. But these days, it’s completely absent. It’s not in the mouth of the politicians. You can’t find it in the media when they discuss security concerns of opponents.

And again, you usually discuss these things and show some respect for the security of opponents, not out of generosity, but knowing that in the security competition, you do yourself an interest by taking into account the security concerning your opponent.

But again, this is economic war against China. No one seems to discuss what legitimate concerns the Chinese have and to what extent it’s foolish for the Chinese to be dependent on any technologies or any supplies from the west that would make it vulnerable.

You know, we had 30 years of NATO expansion, 11 years of proxy war in Ukraine. Yet, you know, we’ve been in the middle of a war. Now there’s talk of negotiating an end to the war, and still, you can look through all the papers, no one’s discussing what are the concerns of Russia. This is number one, isn’t it? If you want to assess the policies of your opponents, you should know first what security concerns they’re actually responding to.

And, you know, you can apply this to Iran as well. 46 years of hostility, attempt to break the country. You know, you have attack on its nuclear reactors, criminal act. We used to fear terrorists would do, but now, you know, it’s us or the Americans.

And still this, we only talk about, you know, Communist Party of China, the Putin and the Putinism or the Mullahs of Iran. I mean, this is always an assumption that their policies emerge in a vacuum, that they’re not possibly responding to anything we might be doing.

It’s very strange because the only conclusion then always becomes that we have to defeat them. This is the only way you can have security. And diplomacy always takes a back seat or becomes absent altogether.

Well, that’s a very long question, but to summarize it, why do you think it’s become so difficult in the west now to discuss and consider the security concerns of opponents? It’s not only difficult. If you try to bring up legitimate security concerns or argue that, for example, the Russians have legitimate security concerns and institutions like BRICS might respond to them. This is considered pro this, anti that propaganda as opposed to being a good way of assessing the direction of these countries and possibly being able to adjust the direction of other countries.

Neoliberal Hubris and the Nuclear Question

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, I mean, this is such an interesting question and it would take a very long time to discuss, but maybe I’ll confine my answer to a couple of points.

First is, you know, some time ago I wrote a piece on it was this title was “A Long Shadow of Hiroshima.” And then I subtitled it “Capitalism and Nuclear Weapons” because I do believe that there is a deeper relationship. I mean, it’s not just, you know, a lot of realist traditions, particularly in international relations, train you to disregard the differences in the social composition of countries, you know, and what countries do what, but different countries are not the same.

And one of the arguments that I made is that historically the Soviet Union, you know, the major capitalist powers, predominantly the US but also the other capitalist nuclear powers, have always had an offensive posture, whereas the posture of the socialist nuclear powers has always been defensive. This is to me an important point to make because otherwise we will never get a solution to the nuclear question.

But also in the course of writing that piece, I contrasted the bipolar moment of the Cold War period with this so called new Cold War that we are in. And I think that our current period is much more dangerous because back then the United States and the Soviet Union were relatively comparable, relatively comparably stable powers.

And also, of course, the United States could not entirely erase the memory of the critical contribution that the Americans had, sorry, that Soviets had made to winning the Second World War and so on. The Soviet Union had very broad legitimacy in Europe, for example, and so on. So in a certain sense it was. And of course there was the balance of nuclear terror that also compelled countries, you know, Russia, Soviet Union and the United States to take into account each other’s needs.

And of course, there was also the Cuban missile crisis where, you know, two parts of the world came very close to one another to actually having a nuclear war. And that was something that people did not wish to recreate.

And you know, there have been moments when so, for example, the signing of the JCPOA or the deal, the attempt in deals that, you know, were attempted to be made with North Korea to, you know, say we will help you, but you stop your nuclear program, etc. So these kinds of deals have taken place, but they have always implicitly been based on.

The Weakening Effects of Neoliberal Ideology

The second thing that I wanted to talk about, and that is that essentially what, and this brings us back to the beginning of our discussion. Essentially what Western countries are suffering from is a version of neoliberal hubris.

So they are so deeply convinced because quite frankly, they’re convinced because corporate power requires them to be convinced, but private corporate power requires them to be convinced that free markets and free trade are the way to go. That doesn’t necessarily apply to themselves, but it must apply to the rest of the world, because what should the rest of the world do? Open itself up to penetration by American corporations, commodities, and be ready to supply everything that they need.

So this neoliberal hubris means that really it delegitimizes states. You know, like it’s almost as though China shouldn’t even have a state, Korea shouldn’t even have a state. It should simply be ruled by rules and regulations in the whole world, which are of course, surprise, surprise, made by the United States, etc.

But the same neoliberal hubris has weakened the west economically as well as militarily. I mean, the way in which, you know, the fact that, for example, today, on the one hand, the United States spends vast astronomical sums of money on its military. But today, in terms of military technology and things like, you know, whether it is drones or hypersonic missiles or what have you, it’s actually much powers that spend much less money on their militaries is very interesting because when you have neoliberalism, what matters is not whether there is actually a military result. What matters is whether corporations have received the subsidies that they are promised.

And so you have an enormously coddled military industrial complex in the United States which is given whatever it asks for, but not asked to produce anything. And so the same military hubris is, as I say, financializing and weakening the United States economically, which means that its economic attractiveness to the rest of the world is a fraction of what it was even in the 50s, 60s and 70s when it was not so great.

And militarily it is not, you know, it is being outfoxed by a whole lot of other powers that spend much less on their militaries. And the reason why these other countries are much more powerful militarily is because they have limited aims. Their aim is to protect their country. Their aim is not to dominate the world. They aim to relate to the rest of the world by creating mutually beneficial relationships, which is the way it should be.

But of course, for the United States this would not work. Because if the US government is to work in the interests of the big American capitalist corporations, it has to work to force the rest of the world open to their operation. And this is what imperialism is all about.

Multipolarity vs. Imperial Dominance

And the anti imperialist bloc, that is why the idea of multipolarity, or what Hugo Chavez called pluripolarity is so important. Because the rest of the, or let me rephrase that. The anti imperialist bloc headed by China and now also Russia is not concerned about how you run your economy. It is concerned about how we can come up with mutually agreeable situations, mutually beneficial agreements to create, you know, stable relationships around the world.

But of course, the west can’t have that. The west must dictate how you are going to run your economy. Otherwise they can’t dictate that you must treat their corporations in this way and so on and so forth.

GLENN DIESEN: Well, Radhika, thank you so much for your time and outlining. I liked how you brought the whole thing back to neoliberalism. So it seems like a good place to finish it off. So, yeah, thank you so much.

RADHIKA DESAI: Thank you. Great, Glenn, thank you very much. Bye bye.