Russia's Valdai forum presented a world in which Western dominance is giving way to a more contested international system centred on sovereign states, competing power centres and institutions such as BRICS. That is Russia's interpretation of the transition, not an established historical verdict, but the underlying shift matters greatly to New Zealand
INR Report: Based on analysis by Timofey Bordachev for RT HERE
For most New Zealanders, arguments about a "multipolar world order" can sound like distant geopolitical theory.
They are becoming anything but theoretical.
The 23rd annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, held outside Moscow from 28 September to 1 October, brought together 120 participants from 40 countries. Its discussions ranged from nuclear deterrence and artificial intelligence to economic resilience, war and the future structure of international power.
The importance of the gathering was not that it produced an agreed blueprint for a new world system. It did not.
What it revealed was something more fundamental: outside the traditional Western political sphere, governments and intellectuals are increasingly discussing international affairs not in terms of restoring the post-Cold War system, but of constructing whatever comes after it.
Russian political scientist Timofey Bordachev, Program Director of the Valdai Club, describes this as the beginning of the end of an era extending back approximately 500 years, during which Western civilisation progressively acquired the ability to determine much of the world's political and economic development.
That is a sweeping interpretation and should be treated as such.
Western countries continue to possess enormous economic, technological, military and institutional power. The United States remains the world's dominant military power. The dollar remains central to global finance. Western states retain considerable influence over international financial institutions and many of the world's most important technological companies.
But something else is also happening.
China, India, Russia, Brazil and other emerging powers are demanding greater influence over the institutions and rules governing the international system. Organisations including BRICS are expanding their role. Trade increasingly flows through multiple centres of economic power.
The debate is therefore no longer simply about whether Western influence is declining.
It is about what kind of international system emerges as power becomes more widely distributed.
Putin's Argument: The Old System Cannot Simply Be Restored
Russian President Vladimir Putin used his Valdai appearance to advance Moscow's preferred answer.
His argument was that the international system must become genuinely multipolar, with sovereign states retaining greater freedom to determine their own political and economic direction.
He called for reform of international institutions, including the United Nations, and for greater representation of developing countries and the Global South.
Russia is hardly a neutral observer in this debate.
Moscow has strong strategic reasons to promote an international system in which American and European power is reduced. Russia has been subjected to extensive Western sanctions since its invasion of Ukraine, while NATO has expanded and European governments are rebuilding their military capabilities.
A multipolar system therefore serves Russian interests.
But that does not automatically make the underlying transformation imaginary.
China and India, for example, are not simply Russian satellites. Both pursue their own interests and maintain extensive economic relationships with Western countries.
India simultaneously participates in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation while maintaining strategic relationships with the United States, Australia, Japan and increasingly New Zealand.
That tells us something important about the emerging system.
It may not divide neatly into two Cold War-style blocs.
BRICS Is Not NATO
Bordachev presents BRICS as one possible institutional expression of this new international environment.
The distinction between BRICS and traditional Western alliances is important.
BRICS does not operate like NATO. It has no equivalent of Article 5 collective defence, no integrated military command and no single political authority capable of directing its members.
Its members also have significant disagreements.
China and India have longstanding strategic competition. Iran and the United Arab Emirates have their own regional disputes. Brazil's geopolitical interests are different again.
Those weaknesses make predictions that BRICS will simply replace Western institutions difficult to sustain.
But they may also explain part of its attraction.
BRICS allows countries with different political systems and competing national interests to cooperate without requiring the level of political alignment traditionally associated with Western alliances.
That model appeals to governments seeking greater strategic autonomy.
Instead of asking countries to choose permanently between Washington, Beijing or Moscow, the emerging system may allow them to maintain relationships with several centres of power simultaneously.
India is perhaps the clearest example.
And that matters directly to New Zealand.
War Is Changing Faster Than Diplomacy
The Valdai discussions also confronted another transformation.
Technology is changing warfare faster than international institutions are adapting to it.
Unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, autonomous targeting, cyber warfare and increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies have altered the relationship between human beings and military power.
Nuclear deterrence is simultaneously becoming less predictable.
One Valdai session explicitly asked whether nuclear weapons still deter conflict or whether they may increasingly encourage adversaries to search for ways of neutralising nuclear forces before they can be used.
That is an extraordinarily dangerous question.
For most of the nuclear age, deterrence depended upon a relatively simple proposition: an attacker could never be certain of destroying an opponent's ability to retaliate.
Artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons, cyber operations, autonomous systems and increasingly sophisticated intelligence networks complicate that calculation.
If states begin believing that technology might allow them to disable an opponent before retaliation becomes possible, the stabilising assumptions underpinning nuclear deterrence become weaker.
The greatest danger may therefore not be that leaders deliberately choose nuclear war.
It may be that increasingly complex military systems compress decision times until leaders have less opportunity to prevent one.
AI and the Question of Control
Putin also raised the danger of what he described as "digital totalitarianism".
The phrase reflects Russia's political framing, but the underlying issue extends well beyond Russia.
Artificial intelligence increasingly allows governments and corporations to analyse enormous volumes of personal information, automate decisions, identify behavioural patterns and potentially influence populations at unprecedented scale.
China, Russia, the United States and European countries are all confronting different versions of the same question.
Who controls the technology?
And who controls those who control it?
The geopolitical competition surrounding AI therefore involves more than economic productivity or military advantage.
It involves political power.
A state capable of combining ubiquitous digital identity, financial information, communications data, biometric surveillance and advanced artificial intelligence could potentially exercise forms of social control that were technologically impossible only a generation ago.
The political systems governing those capabilities may ultimately matter as much as the technologies themselves.
The West Has Not Disappeared
There is an important counterargument to the Valdai thesis.
Predictions of Western decline have appeared repeatedly for decades.
The United States and its allies still possess immense economic resources, sophisticated military forces, leading universities, deep capital markets, technological industries and a network of alliances extending across Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
BRICS, meanwhile, remains politically diverse and institutionally loose.
Nor does greater multipolarity automatically produce a safer world.
A system containing several competing great powers can create more opportunities for smaller countries, but it can also create more points of friction.
The period preceding the First World War was highly multipolar.
That did not make it peaceful.
The real issue therefore is not whether multipolarity is inherently better than Western predominance.
It is whether international institutions can prevent competition among several powerful states from becoming military confrontation.
That remains unanswered.
Does This Affect New Zealand?
Profoundly.
New Zealand's strategic and economic relationships increasingly straddle the competing systems now taking shape.
Security relationships remain heavily Western.
New Zealand's closest defence relationship is with Australia. Wellington maintains longstanding intelligence relationships through Five Eyes and increasingly engages with NATO and other Indo-Pacific security partners.
Economically, however, the picture is very different.
China is New Zealand's largest trading partner.
Two-way trade with China exceeded NZ$41 billion in the year to September 2025, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. China has been New Zealand's largest trading partner since 2017.
India is moving rapidly in the same direction.
New Zealand and India established a Strategic Partnership in July 2026, covering areas from security and defence to trade and education.
The two countries have also ratified their new free trade agreement, which enters into force on 20 October 2026.
India-New Zealand two-way trade reached approximately NZ$3.9 billion in the year to June 2026, and the two governments intend to increase it substantially.
This produces an interesting strategic reality.
Two of New Zealand's increasingly important economic relationships are with China and India, both central members of BRICS and both advocates, in different ways, of a more multipolar international system.
New Zealand therefore cannot treat the transformation Bordachev describes as somebody else's geopolitical debate.
We are already economically connected to it.
New Zealand's Strategic Balancing Act
The challenge for Wellington will be maintaining relationships across increasingly competitive centres of power without allowing New Zealand's own interests to become subordinate to any of them.
That does not require abandoning traditional partners.
Nor does it require accepting Russia's interpretation of the international system.
It requires recognising that the international environment in which New Zealand prospered for several decades is changing.
For a small trading nation, the consequences could be substantial.
A world divided into rigid economic blocs could force New Zealand to choose between security relationships and export markets.
A more open multipolar system could instead allow Wellington to maintain strong relationships with the United States, Australia and Europe while simultaneously expanding trade with China, India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The difference between those outcomes may determine New Zealand's economic room for manoeuvre for decades.
New Zealand's own stated trade policy already reflects part of this reality. Wellington continues to advocate a rules-based multilateral trading system while simultaneously expanding relationships across Asia and the Indo-Pacific.
That approach may become increasingly difficult as strategic competition intensifies.
Sovereignty May Become More Valuable, Not Less
There is another implication for small countries.
If the world genuinely becomes more multipolar, national sovereignty may become increasingly valuable.
Large powers can absorb the consequences of strategic mistakes.
Small countries have far less margin for error.
New Zealand therefore has a strong interest in maintaining the ability to make independent decisions about trade, foreign policy, technology and defence rather than automatically importing the strategic priorities of larger partners.
That does not mean neutrality on every international dispute.
It means preserving decision-making autonomy.
The emerging world described at Valdai is unlikely to be governed by one ideology, one economic system or one centre of power.
China will pursue Chinese interests.
India will pursue Indian interests.
The United States will pursue American interests.
Russia will pursue Russian interests.
New Zealand should expect to do the same.
The Search Has Only Just Begun
Bordachev may ultimately be right that the international system is undergoing one of its largest transformations in centuries.
He may also be overstating the speed or permanence of Western decline.
History has not yet delivered its verdict.
What is increasingly difficult to dispute is that political, economic and technological power is becoming distributed among more actors and that the institutions created during the previous international order are under growing pressure.
Valdai offers one interpretation of what should replace that system.
Washington, Beijing, Brussels, New Delhi and other capitals will offer their own.
New Zealand does not need to accept any of those visions wholesale.
But it does need to understand them.
Because for a small country dependent upon international trade, stable sea lanes and predictable rules, the struggle over the next world order is not an academic argument.
It may determine the environment in which New Zealand trades, protects its sovereignty and makes its own decisions for the remainder of this century.
Independent reporting. Original context. Credited sources.
Sources
Timofey Bordachev, RT, 3 October 2026: Valdai 2026: The search for a new world order has only just begun
Valdai Discussion Club, 28 September–1 October 2026: 23rd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club
President of Russia, 1 October 2026: Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club
New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade: New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement
New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade: New Zealand-India Strategic Partnership
New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade: New Zealand-India Free Trade Agreement