Excerpt from the Primakov Readings by Dr. José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on November 28, 2023
Let me first of all thank the organizers in the persons of Alexander Dynkin, Director of the Primakov Institute, and IMEMO President Feodor Voitolovsky. I take this opportunity to acknowledge the academic and diplomatic legacy of Yevgeny Primakov.
During the current year 2023, a series of events have taken place in the multilateral sphere that reflect, on the one hand, the changes taking place in the world on this scale and, on the other, the proposals put forward by regional groups or global articulation groups to face new and old challenges.
The backdrop has been the growing loss of U.S. hegemony in the main political and economic events on a planetary scale, plus Washington’s declaration of the end of neo-liberal globalization, as well as the attempts to disengage in the commercial sphere from important markets, particularly China.
The People’s Republic of China, for its part, celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, one of the main alternatives for relations with the Global South, based on the principles of equality and cooperation, which is increasingly expanding in the face of the inability of the United States and Europe to articulate programs that represent a practice other than the constant plundering of the resources of Africa, Latin America-Caribbean and several Asian countries.
The continuous non-compliance with the agreements to prevent NATO expansion towards the east, created the conditions in 2022 for Russia to launch a military operation in Ukrainian territory, which continues until 2023. This conflict was attempted to be used from Washington and other European capitals as a turning point to create international alliances, try to isolate Moscow and foster a Russophobia all along the line. However, most of the international community did not respond to such a call.
The ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel since the beginning of October against Palestine, as a culmination also of the disrespect for several multilateral instruments that have repeatedly called for the creation of two states living side by side in peace, has generated new alliances both at the international level and within each of the societies of the main parties involved. The unrestricted support of the United States for this barbarity has further limited its ability to act as a leader, not only of a group of nations that maintain genuflective foreign policies contrary to their national interests, but of ruling classes that have viewed with fear the social mobilization that has taken place in their respective territories, in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
In the midst of these changes and upheavals, it has fallen to the Republic of Cuba to hold the presidency of the Group of 77 and China, the largest mechanism for political coordination among the countries that are part of the United Nations system. One of the most important results of the summit held in Havana in September was the approval of a political resolution summarizing the main concerns of the group and a set of proposals for the future.
From the Center for International Policy Research and other institutions we have taken a quick look at some of the main group meetings that took place during the year. Several of them show the incapacity of the mechanisms of the unipolar world to deal with the old problems of Humanity, while others reveal the attempts to move towards a multilateral world, rather than a multipolar one, in which all nations interrelate as equals and dependencies and subjugation disappear.
Thus, in a more extensive document of which we leave a copy to the organizers of this event, you can consult the opinions on the G7 Summit (May), the CELAC-EU Summit (July), the Russia-Africa Summit (July), the BRICS Summit (August) and the G20 Summit just before the Havana meeting. Finally, we talked about the challenges of a New International Information Order, as this is an issue that directly affects the domestic and foreign policy cycles of each country, as well as the weight that information management will have in the international alliances that will be forged in the future.
At the same time that we are rightly concerned about a world in transition, in which there are regional armed conflicts that have the potential to expand and reach world conflagration proportions, we also wonder whether, with the changes that have already taken place, we are not moving towards what we would call “new wars” or new types of confrontation, against which we are not protected by any type of international agreement to confront them.
These new conflicts may be posed by actors that are supranational in nature, or at least behave as such, that at some point served specific interests in countries of the so-called center or periphery, but ultimately today only respond to their own interests, which may have an almost planetary scope. They do not obey any law and much less would they answer to courts, beyond what has to do with the payment of their taxes.
The large digital information platforms attack and colonize the consciences of those who are supposed to lead social movements before governments, parties, unions, parliaments, or companies. But in a good number of cases what they achieve is to alienate the common human being, who belongs to the lower income classes, so that he or she turns away from the political paths before him or her to build a system that responds to his or her needs.
Today there is absolutely no international mechanism, beyond general declarations, that limits the capacity of the megacorporations that manage the algorithms, to prevent them from entering the privacy of each one of us, from benefiting from the contents that are “protected” in the so-called clouds, from creating false information that triggers military alarms, or from articulating campaigns that disrupt the political life of a candidate. Only a few countries have managed to create their own digital islands, separated from the major continents.
If these actions have already reached unsuspected limits, let us then try to imagine how their capabilities will multiply thanks to the advances of the fourth industrial revolution and, especially, due to the misuses of artificial intelligence.
Another example is related to the number of transnational companies and laboratories that today, at least in theory, create new tools so that all or part of humanity can face a new COVID19 style pandemic. The occurrence of the latter, which had more devastating consequences than several regional military conflicts, clearly demonstrated that vaccines and other related drugs were used speculatively as if they were stock market shares and were not even available to all.
But the real danger is that such laboratories, which are usually located in a small group of powers, do not obey any binding code that prevents them from generating the cause or the transmitting agents of new mass infections themselves, with the aim of making even greater profits from “solutions” that they have already manufactured in advance.
There is not even a public record of each and every one of these institutions, let alone shared codes of conduct or international supervision.
Humanity today faces old imbalances, which could make it disappear. These will be joined by new ones, to the same extent that the supposed driving force of change is competition and not cooperation.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez has 37 years of experience in the Cuban diplomatic service. In the internal service he has been Deputy Director of the US and Canada, Director of Consular Affairs and of Cubans living abroad, Director of Documentary Management and Deputy Minister.
Source: Centro de Investigaciones de Política Internacional (CIPI)