A new Nomos of the Earth
The resurgence of nations is trendy: 139 nationalities gathered in St Petersburg for the 2024 edition of the St Petersburg Economic Forum (SPIEF).
This is in defiance of a West that is stubbornly wedded to the supposed universal validity of its ‘values’.
From its hegemonic expansion at the dawn of the 1990s to its final decay, globalism has definitively inoculated Russia and the Global South from the enchanted Western garden extolled by the sinister Josepp Borrell.
Today, globalism is war because it is incapable of thinking through its contradiction.
Having imposed a fluffy ideology and a mockery of democracy on the peoples it has contaminated instead of concrete freedoms, it is now held together only by institutions it deems sacrosanct: the US army, the big banks, the mainstream media and George Soros’ NGOs.
But imposing this conception of democracy on the rest of the world has proved impossible, while an easterly wind has brought the revival of multipolarity. Globalism without unipolarity is the ruin of its promoters, and the West finds itself alone in the middle of the ford ‘armed’ with its propaganda, its sanctions and its counterfeit currency.
The gigantic challenge of post-globalisation is a war of movement, a process that is invented as it moves forward. Its priority must be to map out the logistical corridors and create the payment systems of multipolarity. Fortunately, the stupidity of Western decision-makers is encouraging this shift in world order.
Beneficial sanctions
It is becoming increasingly clear that, ironically, it is the economy that will decide the fate of a war waged by the West to dismember Russia. Fully mobilised, Russia is taking advantage of the sanctions as a beneficial cure of protectionism, enabling it to boost its competitiveness.
Russia has become the world’s fourth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), ahead of Japan (source: World Bank), and the BRICS have just overtaken the G7 in terms of GDP.
Self-sufficient and low in debt, Russia is engaged in a virtuous economic spiral, while in terms of real economic power (raw materials and processing capacity) the China-Russia-Arab World combo has no equivalent.
‘Moscow is looking eastwards and southwards’, Vladimir Putin said in his speech at the Far Eastern Federal University on 12 September.
This means defining alternative logistics corridors to the US-controlled Suez Canal route.
Two major international connectivity routes enable Russia to effectively bypass this route: the Northern Sea Route, which runs from the Barents Sea, near Russia’s border with Norway, to the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, and the 7,000km-long International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which will link St Petersburg to Bombay, via Iran and the Caspian Sea region.
As a result :
– Freight that takes 40 days to travel from Tokyo to London will take 18 days on the Arctic route. Yet delivery times are a far more important critical factor in long-distance trade than price.
– Saudi Arabia, which is rapidly distancing itself from the West while drawing closer to Iran, used the INSTC to trade with Russia as early as last August.
Logistics corridors and payment systems
Arctic route
The Northern Arctic Route is enabling the development of inter-regional trade (from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, and via the rivers flowing into the Arctic) and international trade (from Shanghai to Western Europe). Challenges remain: developing the fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, securing freight with emergency rescue centres that are still in short supply, and training more technicians to handle freight in extreme conditions. This route should be fully secured by 2028, with the Chinese putting resources into establishing a permanent Shanghai-Arkhangelsk link as soon as possible. New-generation icebreakers, the doubling of Arctic port capacity by 2030 and the construction of a floating gas liquefaction facility (the largest floating platform ever built) are all contributing to the development of the Northern Sea Route. Russia’s gas pivot towards Asia is clearly underway. A veritable diplomacy of Research and Development has been put in place and several working groups will be meeting this month in Arkhangelsk.
North-South route
The North-South route (INTS) of multimodal corridors to South Asia, combined with the New Silk Roads, are making Washington and Tel Aviv’s nightmare a reality: the Middle East is being pacified!
The key players on this route linking St Petersburg to Bombay are Russia, Iran and India, all members of the BRICS.
For Russia, this route enables the export of three main products: cereals, fertilisers and coal. Potash fertilisers are already being supplied to Iran. By 2025-2027, up to 80% of coal used in India will come from Russia.
In June-July 2024, Russia plans to start shipping coking coal to Iran by rail from Kemerovo via Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Last July, Turkmenistan joined the project, and the Russia-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran branch of the corridor will be completed in 2027.
Division of labour: Iran is supplying the steel for the road infrastructure, while the Indians are building the ships for maritime freight on the Caspian.
Finally, a new Russia-China overland grain corridor will support China’s food security strategy. China, home to a fifth of the world’s population, has just 7% of the planet’s arable land.
Afghanistan, which links Karachi to Central Asia and shares a border with China, also wants to get in on the act, now that it has dispensed with the American occupation. Russia and Afghanistan are to build a logistics centre in the province of Herat for the transit of oil to South Asia, while Afghanistan has significantly increased its imports of oil products from Russia.
Another key player on this route is Azerbaijan, the only country to share borders with Russia and Iran. Baku’s anti-colonialism knows no borders…
As we can see, the telluric tremors of the new global geopolitics are having rapid, numerous and sometimes unexpected repercussions.
Finance
Reserve currencies (the US dollar, the euro and sterling) have become toxic for nations because they are constantly militarised by the collective West. So de-dollarisation is not a whim, but a matter of survival. Already, the share of national currencies in Russian-Chinese payments was 80% last year, compared with only 25% the year before; in the very short term, trade between Russia and China will already be 100% in national currencies.
But setting up a monetary system takes time, and some countries cannot rid themselves of their dependence on toxic currencies overnight. India does not use the yuan, Russia is not interested in building up reserves in rupees, Kazakhstan remains tied to toxic currencies and China has neither the ambition nor the capacity to replace the dollar.
But Saudi Arabia has already denounced the renewal of its petro-dollar security agreement with the United States, which expired on 9 June. This agreement (signed in 1974) organised military and economic cooperation between the two countries.
Another avenue: the digitisation of currencies to short-circuit the laborious and unrealistic construction of a common currency on a Eurasian scale. A Eurasian payment system could soon see the light of day, based on a blockchain platform. The digital rouble is becoming a necessity. Alternative payments via blockchain and payments in local currencies are gradually replacing dollar payments. De-dollarisation is a slow process, under way for several decades, but it is inevitable.
Moscow and Beijing also want to create a common financial infrastructure that would enable them to operate independently of the Western-dominated financial institutions (IMF and World Bank).
The New Development Bank (NBD) is there to help.
At SPIEF, the BRICS committed themselves to the forthcoming creation of an independent payments system; they are in the process of developing an exchange currency that would complement local currency exchanges and be backed by the gold reserves and a basket of currencies of the member countries.
The new cross-border payments system, independent of foreign currencies and banking systems, will be announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan in October.
Tectonic shifts
Even before SPIEF, Russian diplomacy had already laid the foundations for a new nomos of the world: the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg at the end of July 2023, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg at the end of August, the Russian Far East Economic Forum in Vladivostok at the beginning of September, and the Russia-Islam summit in Kazan last month.
Africa
Far from being isolated, Russia has achieved the feat of untying Africa from the West.
It has, of course, benefited from the arrogance and rapacity of Westerners who, after the collapse of the USSR, saw fit to make their aid conditional on the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and the World Bank: austerity, privatisation, deregulation and opening up the economy to multinationals then became the norm for Africans.
This neo-colonialism would soon add the harassment of oligarchic whims (so-called ESG ‘good governance’ criteria, including the promotion of the LGBT agenda) to economic predation. All this had the remarkable distinction of provoking spontaneous and unanimous repulsion among their African and Muslim partners.
Conversely, relations between Russia and Africa have never seen such a favourable alignment of the planets. Electrification (civil nuclear projects piloted by Rosatom) and opening up the continent (roads again!) are on the agenda.
For Africa, the issues of sovereignty (food, energy and financial) and technology transfers are critical. Russia can make a contribution, and would like to see the most dynamic African economies in a BRICS+ group as soon as possible.





Muslim world
Russia is a mosaic of 180 peoples and a multi-faith federation.
The Russian state is based on a territory, not a race; it is necessarily multi-ethnic and has no colonial past. This allows it to contract with the global South without any complexes or ulterior motives.
The resurrection of Russian power has taken place in Syria and Moscow’s Arab policy is an undeniable success. Russia has become a kind of judge of peace in the Middle East.
Its credibility is of course based on subtle and proactive diplomacy, but it also has its roots in the long history of relations between Russia and the Muslim world. Russia has a genuine religious diplomacy. A Muslim power and observer member of the OIC, Russia has the world’s best research centre on Islam (the Institute of the Eastern World of the Moscow Academy of Sciences). In Russia, you can be a Muslim and a staunch patriot. The Russian way of life (the importance of the family, tradition and intergenerational solidarity) is also more in tune with Islamic values than with those of the West, particularly in its terminal degeneration.
Significantly, Turkey, still a member of NATO, has announced its desire to join the BRICS, without mourning the loss of its membership of the European Union, which it clearly no longer wants. As a 19th century Russian diplomat once said, Turkey can only be Russia’s first friend or foe. The West is clearly losing Turkey.
Far East
At a time when neocon ‘strategists’ are drawing with their crooked fingers the little maps of the dismantled Russia of their dreams, the real Russia is inventing a destiny for itself in the East, as if to mock them.
Faced with the moribund powers of ‘globalism among friends’ (the United States and its decaying European ‘garden’), it is completing its Asian pivot.
The Russian Far East is Russia’s largest federal district in terms of surface area. The figures are staggering:
– The Russian Far East economic region covers 41% of the total area of the Russian Federation
– Its resources (98% of Russia’s diamond production, 75% of known oil reserves and 90% of gas reserves in the Arctic alone, 80% of tin, 50% of gold, 40% of fish and seafood, 33% of coal reserves, 30% of Russia’s total forest area, etc.), which are numerous but untapped, still only contribute 5% to Russia’s GDP. What’s more, only 35% of Russia’s Far East has been explored. The potential for development seems infinite.
– Its geographical location: access to two oceans (Pacific and Arctic), shared borders with five countries (China, North Korea, Mongolia, the United States and Japan), spread over four time zones and different climatic zones, ranging from Arctic deserts to subtropical zones.
– Its foreign trade grew by 14% in freight terms and 11% in monetary terms in the first eight months of 2023.
– Its investment rate is three times the national average.
– Its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production in the Russian Arctic is set to triple by 2030. There are also plans to connect the Siberian gas pipelines to the integrated national supply system, because the challenge is also to develop domestic industrial consumption.
What is being built here is the new Rome of the Asia-Pacific, nothing less than the European capital of the Far East.
Inforoutes
For a long time, the information sphere remained an Anglo-Saxon monopoly.
The countries of the South were informed about themselves by the North, while the Russian world did little to counter the West’s information dominance, either in the production of content or in new information and communication technologies (the famous NICTs).
Russia is now taking its digital and information sovereignty seriously
As in other areas, the beneficial effects of Western sanctions have propelled Russia towards a revolution in information routes. The banning of their flagships in the West (Russia Today, Sputnik, RIA Novosti) has forced them to think strategically and acted as an electroshock:
– The emergence of new platforms that compete directly with Western platforms (Rutube vs Youtube), which are increasingly being abandoned by viewers deterred by the censorship that reigns there.
– Boosted technologies to circumvent Western censorship (Telegram and the information ecosystem of its channels). Russia is becoming the leader and creator of new standards in social networking.
– Ongoing innovation in artificial intelligence and machine learning
– Media diplomacy: after RT in Algiers, several Russian media (TASS, VGTRK, etc.) are to open offices in French-speaking Africa. Russia will be increasing the number of ‘digital attachés’ in its embassies, particularly in Africa. There it can export its know-how in cloud technologies, e-government (tax administration, registration of property rights, provision of electronic public services) and cyber security. A movement towards continuing training for Western journalists in Moscow and St Petersburg is also emerging.
Of course, these interesting trends are nothing without the creation of quality news and original programmes, but the new spirit of international openness among Russian professionals should have a positive impact on content creation.
These new routes, the outlines of which were sketched out at SPIEF 2024, deserve to be elevated to the rank of Russia’s national strategic priority for the 21st century. The West has ‘destroyed with its own hands the commercial and financial system that it itself had created’ (V. Putin at the Vladivostok forum). It has succeeded in uniting almost all the countries of the ‘global South’ and all free people against it. Multipolarity is the watchword of this new world, washed clean of the ‘values’ of the Western shipwreck.

Thierry Thodinor
Former international official