MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Monday that it agreed with U.S. President Joe Biden on the need to build a “new world order”, but that it disagreed that the United States was capable of building it.
In a call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the U.S. was talking about an “American-centric” world order that would not exist in future.
The exchange was emblematic of a contest, playing out against the background of the Ukraine and Gaza wars, in which Russia is trying to persuade developing countries to join it in building a new world free of U.S. “hegemony”.
In a speech on Friday, Biden said the order that had worked well for 50 years after World War Two had “sort of run out of steam” and a new one was needed. He said Americans had “an opportunity to do things, if we’re bold enough and have enough confidence in ourselves, to unite the world in ways that it never has been”.
Peskov said Moscow was in rare agreement with Biden about the need for a new order that, in his words, would be “free from the concentration of all mechanisms of world governance in the hands of one state”.
But he said Russia disagreed with Biden about the capacity of the United States to build such a system.
“In this part we disagree because the United States… no matter what world order they talk about, they mean an American-centric world order, that is, a world that revolves around the United States. It won’t be that way any more.”
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Gareth Jones)
