Three days after the start of the war in Ukraine, I sent a message by phone to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. I begged him, “Please, please, stop this madness. You’re the only one who can stop him.” In less than a minute he answered me: “Who? Zelensky? Biden?”

I tried again. But the answer came straight from the playbook of Vladimir Putin, who blamed the West and stuck to the official line, “denazification” and all the other trappings. That was the moment I realized that the liberal world order was under serious attack.

There are times in history when the old order dies and the new is waiting to be born – 2022 was one of them.

There are many events that can plausibly be interpreted as marking the end of the post-Cold War era: 9/11 and the Iraq War; financial crisis; annexation of Crimea by Russia. But Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine in 2022 was something special. He seemed to be forcing the rest of the world to choose a side.

There is a widespread prejudice in the West that the whole world is united in supporting Ukraine. This is not the case, it is comforting that more than 140 of the 193 members of the UN have condemned Russia. But the 35 abstainers make up more than half of the world’s population.

More importantly, only about 40 countries, most of them Western, have imposed sanctions against Russia. There are only two from Asia, none from Africa and Latin America. Russia may be isolated from the West, but not from the rest of the world.

The new world order will be defined by a triangle of power that oscillates between the global West, the global East and the global South. The Global West – essentially the US, the EU and their allies, about 50 countries – want to preserve the current liberal order.

At the other extreme, the global east—China, Russia, Iran, and the 20 or so countries that support them—want to overturn the liberal order and create new norms and institutions that emphasize less on pooling sovereignty and more on power. states and on the agreement.

The Global South, led by countries such as India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Nigeria and Brazil, includes 125 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. For many of these countries, the urgency of the war in Ukraine is connected not so much with hegemony as with food security, energy and inflation.

The Global South does not necessarily want to take sides yet. Waiting is one way to achieve goals and shape the order that is to be born.

The Global West is wrong when it defines the new order as a struggle between democracies and autocracies. The situation is much more complicated. The Global East is interested in power and managing addictions. The Global South is interested in the means of action, representation and economic growth and development.

If the global West wants to preserve the remnants of the liberal world order, it will have to pursue a more adequate foreign policy. Which does not mean that they should sacrifice their values ​​on the altar of interests. It means listening and dialogue, not preaching and moralizing.

The global east proved to be more adept at the game of persuasion. Despite its expansionism, Russia does not carry the burden of its colonial past, at least in Africa and Latin America. China has skillfully created interdependence in finance, infrastructure and raw materials since the Cold War, becoming the largest trading partner for 120 countries along the way.

Now the world is once again faced with a choice. Will she be able to end the war and find a new system of cooperation? Or will competition between great powers lead to an escalation of conflict, perhaps even a world war?

But perhaps the choice is not binary. As always, the stakes will be a mixture of values, interests and power. I predict that we will see the emergence of more regional orders and more partially overlapping alliances. There will be no single dominant power. And even if their values ​​and political systems are different, all governments have problems to solve, some unique, some shared.

It is very likely that the current decade will shape the world order by the end of this century. Just as it happened in 1919 with the false founding of the League of Nations, in 1945 with the founding of the United Nations, and in 1989, when many of us believed that the rest of the world would finally adopt the three pillars of a successful society (liberal democracy, market economy and accessibility to globalization), we may be wrong now, we may be doing well, or we may fall somewhere between these two extremes.

We must avoid the mistakes of 1919, learn from the balance of power established in 1945, and make the liberal order of 1989 a universally attractive model.

Article by Oleksandr Stubb (former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Finland)

. The article was published with the support of the Rador agency