As the ‘American Century’ collapses under the weight of its own dogmas, Eurasia and the Global South are breaking the chains of Bretton Woods.
Mohamed Lamine KABA
While Europe sinks into industrial suicide caused by the disruption of its vital energy flows, the Global South is breaking its chains – freeing itself from the stranglehold of the dollar and the Bretton Woods institutions – which have been around its neck since 1944. We are witnessing the redrawing of a liberated world. That is to say, an era of pragmatic multipolarity where resource sovereignty and strategic alliances (BRICS+, SCO, CIS, and many others) define a pluralistic modernity, now freed from Washington’s authority.
The Global South instantly understood that its sovereign reserves were no longer safe in the vaults of New York or London, let alone Brussels
The Icarus syndrome: from the illusion of containment to European suicide
To put it bluntly, the strategy of containment, theorized by George Kennan in 1947 and magnified by Zbigniew Brzeziński in 1997 in The Grand Chessboard, has run its course without ever achieving its ultimate goal: to contain Russia in order to better control Eurasia. The West long believed that the continued expansion of NATO, initiated by the waves of 1999 and 2004, would be enough to keep the Eurasian powers in peripheral vassalage. As Hervé Juvin points out, this model has exhausted its main resource: moral credibility. The Ukrainian conflict sealed this definitive divorce in a proxy war or war by proxy that began with the Euromaidan coup in 2014. By seeking to transform this region into an advanced bastion – an ambition that had already come up against the realities on the ground at the 2008 Bucharest summit – Washington has reawakened Russia’s strategic power. Over the years of resilience between 2022 and 2025, and contrary to Henry Kissinger’s late fears and warnings before his death in 2023, Russia demonstrated that sovereign depth and resilience prevail over the financialization of war.
Europe, held hostage by this strategy, seems to be committing what Philippe de Villiers calls ‘assisted suicide’ before our very eyes. By deliberately cutting itself off from Russian energy resources in the spring of 2022 – the lifeblood that had fueled its industry since the historic gas agreements of the 1970s – it has sent seismic shockwaves through the global economy. The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022 marked the point of no return, sealing the massive transfer of its wealth to the United States and the Global South. From 2023 onwards, Washington’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) acted like an industrial vacuum cleaner, sucking European capital across the Atlantic. Today, as we are just hours away from the transition to 2026, the conclusion is clear: the Franco-German industrial flagships, once pillars of continental prosperity, are crumbling under the weight of energy costs that have become structurally prohibitive.
While Brussels is bogged down in paralyzing regulatory bureaucracy – illustrated by the suicidal constraints of the ‘Green Deal’ and the ban on combustion engines set for 2035 – geopolitical reality is reasserting itself. What Zbigniew Brzeziński described in 1997 as the ‘Ukrainian pivot’ to break Russia has brutally backfired on a European Union that is deindustrializing and fading into the background. On the threshold of 2026, according to Philippe de Villiers’ analysis, Europe is becoming a mere colony of its own allies, dispossessed of its destiny. But what can an entity as subservient as Brussels- and London-led Europe offer in a closed system where players are forced to live together despite everything, characterized by escalation and mutual perception of threat, and where no one is sure of the other’s real intentions, except servility?
The awakening of the global South: Russia as the icebreaker of multipolarity
There is no doubt that the world order is no longer decided within the Washington-Brussels-London triangle of influence, the legacy of a 20th century that is now over. The centre of gravity of power has shifted irrevocably towards Eurasia, marking the end of Western thalassocratic hegemony in favour of an integrated continental bloc. In this new paradigm, Russia, far from the isolation prophesied by the West at the 2014 G7 summit in Brussels or after the 2022 sanctions, has established itself as the figurehead of pragmatic resistance. It now acts as the icebreaker for a Global South, which, by 2026, will assert itself as master of its own time and resources.
This total shift is first embodied on the African continent, where, since the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019 in Sochi, nations have vaccinated themselves against a declining European paternalism. This movement accelerated between 2023 and 2025 with the departure of French forces from the Sahel, as states now choose partners capable of guaranteeing their security sovereignty and the development of real infrastructure without demanding, in exchange for their lithium or rare earths, the usual lessons in ‘good governance’ from the IMF.
At the same time, in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which celebrated its bicentenary amid polite indifference, is now in tatters. From Lula’s Brazil – which became the driving force behind the BRICS in 2023 – to Argentina seeking strategic balance via Cuba and Venezuela, regional powers are ignoring Washington’s dictates. They refuse to play the role of free reservoir imposed since the 1989 Washington Consensus to integrate Eurasian value chains.
In Asia, the situation is even more striking: while the Pentagon is attempting maritime containment around the ‘String of Pearls’ in the South and East China Seas, Beijing has already won the battle for global logistics launched in 2013 with the New Silk Roads. By consolidating massive transcontinental corridors with Moscow and Tehran from 2024 onwards, Asia is bypassing the straits controlled by the West, rendering the weapon of sanctions ineffective.
The deep-rooted identity of nations, forged over the long history of civilizations’, is thus regaining the upper hand over the technocratic constructivism that emerged after 1945. The Global South no longer seeks to copy a Western model whose moral and economic limitations it has recognized; it is surpassing it by drawing on its own values and mutually beneficial cooperation, which now defines modernity in the 21st century.
From the post-Western order to the currency revolt
If we follow the analysis of former inspector Scott Ritter, the reality on the ground at the start of this strategically important year of 2026 shows that the West no longer has the means to achieve its ambitions, whether military or monetary. This year promises to be one of ‘hard truths’: the euro and the dollar are definitively losing their status as weapons of mass coercion.
The financial earthquake reached its epicenter in February 2022, when the unprecedented freezing of nearly $300 billion in Russian assets shattered the millennial contract of trust in global finance. By using the privilege of the dollar as a weapon of war, the West destroyed the central pillar of the Bretton Woods institutions created in 1944. The Global South instantly understood that its sovereign reserves were no longer safe in the vaults of New York or London, let alone Brussels.
The year 2025 thus marked the point of no return for active de-dollarisation. What was only a vague idea at the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in 2023 has become an infrastructural reality. Oil and mining transactions no longer pass through the SWIFT network, but are carried out in local currencies or via the integrated BRICS+ payment system, consolidated at the Kazan summit in 2024.
Russia, strengthened by its economic resilience forged by four long years of unprecedented total sanctions (2022-2025), has become the emergency banker for a world seeking stability, far from the austere conditions imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. We are entering an era of ‘variable geometry’ in which the pivotal powers, freed from the shackles of the 20th century, are acting with complete sovereignty. The key players are Iran (which joined the BRICS in January 2024), which is securing the Eurasian energy axis; Saudi Arabia (turning the page on the 1945 Quincy Pact), which is diversifying its strategic alliances; and Ethiopia and Egypt, which are becoming the new guardians of the southern sea routes.
From the above, we can deduce that the West is not falling under the blows of an external assault; it is collapsing because it has become obsolete in a pluralistic modernity that it refuses to understand. While the Atlanticist bloc locks itself in an ivory tower of sanctions inherited from the Cold War era (1947-1991), the rest of the world is building a future where the pluralism of civilizations replaces the façade of universalism imposed since 1991.
So, the die is cast: on 1 January 2026, the world will not wake up more Westernized; it will wake up definitively free, carried by the spirit of sovereignty that pioneers such as Hugo Chávez had been calling for since the beginning of the millennium.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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