Ten years of Putin's Munich speech: He came, he saw, he conquers

Ten years ago, on February 10, 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered his landmark speech at a security conference in Munich, Germany. The "Munich speech" has since then become a program of Russia's foreign policy.

Putin's Munich speech produced a bombshell effect both during the summit and after it. Western media and politicians eventually assumed that "Russia was resuming the Cold War," while Putin was a "dictator."

However, ten years later, it appears that the picture of the world order, which Putin described in Munich, remains most viable today. During the speech, Putin stated that the era of the unipolar world was drawing to its end and suggested equal partnership of sovereign states in the multipolar world.

Russia was one of those sovereign states with its foreign political interests, Putin said. Yet, Western political elites strongly rejected the idea of sovereign Russia and its interests.

Ten years ago, Putin appeared not only as a designer of the new world order, but also a man, who paid attention of the whole world to objective laws of history.

Over the recent ten years, we have seen hysterical and bloody attempts of the "center of power" of the unipolar world to retain its supremacy. At the same time, we could also see the power and authority of the unipolar world flow away through fingers like sand.

To date, all have recognized the existence of two world systems. The first one is the "exceptional" one, in which the USA acts as the undisputed supremacist. The second one is the multipolar system, in which there are many decision-making centers, with Russia being one of those centers. Yet, Russia is not a supremacist nation in this system, but rather "one of the first among other equal patners."

Russia can resort to using weapons only for defensive or protective purposes, to protect civilian populations. As for the United States, it seems that the country has entirely forgotten during the presidency of Barack Obama that there is such a thing as "soft power." Instead, the USA was promoting its interests only via color revolutions or bloody military invasions and bombings.

Naturally, the number of countries attracted to Russia's vision of the world order has been growing steadily. Even Russia's historical, political and ideological rivals prefer to step out of the world order in which the USA is the only "exceptional" supremacist. The brightest example to it is the UK's Brexit.

The most striking aspect about all this is that even the USA no longer wants to be the world's No.1 supremacist. At least, we can say so about those Americans who voted for Donald Trump. He wants to make America great again by turning his back on the role of the USA as the "world policeman."

As we can see, the USA has been going through withdrawals. We can see it in many protests against the policy of Donald Trump. There are many people in America who do not seem to be able to understand that the "ivory tower" that they have been building on the blood of other peoples for years could tumble down so quickly.