On October 2, 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, with the central topic being “The Polycentric World: Instructions for Use.”
One thing to immediately note about the Valdai Discussion Club is that it is listed and identified as a think tank, and it appears to be precisely that, a genuine think tank, a forum for discussions on geopolitical issues and the sharing of political, historical, philosophical thoughts, theories, and ideas. It appears to be a Russian institution; that is to say, the institution values intellectual activities and output in the form of valid and viable ideas.
It is not a think tank in the Western sense; Western think tanks are staging areas or holding pens for warmongering agitators, subversives, and former ambassadors to park themselves at while writing subversive agitprop, beating the drums of war, and waiting for the next election cycle and the possibility of formally returning to government. American think tanks are similar to NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), which might as well be called GOs or Government-Organizations, they are just sounding boards for Western neo-colonial ideas, cheerleaders for war, and sometimes even conspiracies for destabilizing foreign nations to promote color revolutions and the advance of woke ideologies that help culturally weaken a nation and make it ripe for a takeover by the neo-colonial Western world order.
There is something in all of this that Americans must realize and reluctantly admit. Our society seldom produces statesmen or true intellectuals anymore. Few Americans born after a certain period (shall we say 1950 or 1960 or perhaps 1970) have anything vaguely resembling a classical education; they never studied the great works of Western literature, they don’t know the names of Cicero or Plutarch, Strabo or Aeschylus, they don’t know Cassius Dio, Thucydides, Josephus, Herodotus, they think “Simpson” when they hear “Homer.” They don’t know Virgil; they haven’t read Shakespeare or Melville, or even Mark Twain, and they certainly haven’t read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. They haven’t even heard the names of Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, or Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev. If they know anything, it is simply Kant and other pseudo-enlightenment ideas.
They haven’t studied Latin or Ancient Greek; they don’t even know a modern foreign language except perhaps for a few words in Spanish, such as how to ask for the bathroom. They probably don’t know much about their own nation’s history, the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, the debate about the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, or that Morocco was the first sovereign nation to recognize the new United States, or that Russia helped undermine the British naval blockade of the American colonies during the Revolutionary War, or that Tsar Alexander I corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and expressed his admiration for the United States and American people.
It is also doubtful that many Americans are aware of the history of the founding of modern Russia, the Byzantine influences, which began as early as the 9th century with the Early Cyrillic alphabet, and then the activities of the Kievan Rus in the 10th century. Americans know very little about their own nation and its founding and virtually nothing about antiquity and great historical powers or the recent and ongoing histories of modern great powers.
America has gone from a nation of classically educated, well-read intellectuals who had similar personal libraries and literary exposure, to a nation of ill-informed or misinformed celebrity worshipers, receiving their news and having their worldviews formed not by a careful analysis of history, philosophy, and study of politics, but by insipid sound-bytes from celebrities who are even less educated and less well-read than their audiences and fans are. In the modern USA, the American intelligentsia prides itself on not knowing things. Having read Cicero is seen as evidence of reactionary or far-right tendencies in much of academia. Similarly with Plato and Aristotle and countless other great giants whose volumes used to form the pillars of Western thought and tradition.
On the other hand, there are the Russians, whose intellectual class and even the general populace appear to have a voracious appetite for consuming the great works of traditional Western civilization, whether from classical antiquity, the medieval period, or the more recent period, whether from their own ancestors, or from those authors further south or further west. While Americans keep up with the Kardashians and satisfy their 15-second attention spans with TikTok reels trying to go viral and trend, Russians actually continue to read, especially among their intelligentsia class.
Given this cultural background, we would expect some serious intellectual discussion from the Valdai Discussion Club, and the 2025 seminar did not disappoint.
The only downside was that President Putin’s Valdai Discussion Keynote presentation, being approximately 4 hours long, will be largely inaccessible to a typical Westerner, given the very limited attention span in the Western world, and the simple fact that most Westerners are working 60-80 hours per week just to stay afloat, and they will seldom have 4 continuous hours to listen to something as intellectually significant and serious as President Putin’s address at the Valdai Discussion Club.
At most a Westerner can stream a laid-back Joe Rogan podcast for 30-60 minutes while tidying up his apartment or doing his laundry; not that there is anything wrong with Joe Rogan or his podcasts, but President Putin’s address is in a much higher league in terms of its intellectual level and the attention one must devote to listening and digesting it, it isn’t the sort of thing one streams in the background while doing other chores or errands, it commands ones exclusive focus, similar to the Tucker Carlson interviews with President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov, they are of such depth and substance that you give them undivided attention or else you won’t derive the full benefit from them.
As I said, unfortunately most average Westerners don’t have the opportunity to spend four hours listening to President Putin, as they are only ever one late paycheck away from an eviction or one medical problem, or car problem, or a leaking roof, away from a catastrophic collapse in their life. Indeed, as of 2023, a full 63% of American workers would be unable to afford a $500 dollar emergency expense.
Even if money were not an issue, who in the West has time to listen to a classically educated, multilingual statesman discuss a path to peace and a roadmap to avoid escalation to nuclear war when there are reels of half-naked women debasing themselves available with just a scroll away, or when the latest superhero movie is streaming and Americans can pretend they too could be a superhero if only radiation would unlock their superpowers (if they keep playing childish games on the world stage, they might get their radiation).
President Putin has shown the world that in an era of carbon copy empty suits such as Macron, Merkel, Starmer, von der Leyen, and the rest of the eminently forgettable NPC (non-player character) drones who parrot the same lines as they read from the same script of Modern Western Sham Democracy while their societies decay in anarcho-tyranny, true statesmen still exist, although it seems one must travel to Russia to find them. Unfortunately, the people in the Western world are too busy making OnlyFans content, subscribing to OnlyFans content, and drooling over the opinions of digital prostitutes, to take notice and give weight to the wise words of a statesman such as President Putin. Macron is a truly empty suit, a nothing, a phantom, a fraudulent counterfeit, an impostor play-acting as a statesman; the name will die before the man. Macron will leave office and be replaced by another empty suit, a technocratic pawn for a globalist cabal, some mass produced Sciences Po graduate. President Putin will likely be studied in 200 years in political classes by those seeking guidance for statecraft, the way orchestras still perform Beethoven and Mozart. Macron will be a footnote in the decline of 21st century France.
President Putin has clearly articulated the rise of a new multipolarity in a world that is no longer going to be dominated by a solitary American superpower operating as a global hegemon, but this hegemon is not going quietly and has resolved to use its military might to impose itself on many diverse nations around the world. Many in the West are not willing to countenance the existence of a competing civilizational model, this being the traditional Western civilization as represented by Russia. In the mind of the modern Westerner, the present West is civilization and Russia is some barbaric steppe culture, when in actuality Russia is the faithful torchbearer of traditional Western Civilization in the lineage of the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines, while the modern West is actually anti-civilization, an anarcho-tyranny organized and overseen by technocrats who utilize sham democracy.
Because Russia is a living example of a superior civilizational model, the Western world hates it, despises it, censors media from it, and restricts access for their citizens to travel to Russia. It is similar to how in the 1930s-1970s the Soviet Union restricted the ability of their citizens to travel West. You cannot allow people to actually go somewhere and experience a reality contrary to state propaganda. The West knows this, which is why Russia is vilified and travel restrictions are in place. The West has undertaken to emulate Soviet style censorship, while demonizing Russian civilization; it is rather ironic and perverse. Western elites will build walls to keep their people from going East before they build coastal barriers to keep illegal migrant boats from arriving.
The conflict between the West and Russia is actually civilizational and philosophical. The West is in steep, precipitous decline and refuses to decline gracefully (or accept and acknowledge the new geopolitical reality of its decline) and is willing to resort to war to plunder the resources of a neighboring great power whose greatness (much like their own decline) they refuse to acknowledge.
President Putin (perhaps one of the last true statesmen in this modern world) was fairly clear about multi-polarity and peace, the raging hegemon in decline, and the hegemon being the cause of instability, but was anybody in the West listening? Was anybody able to listen? Were they willing to listen? Do they even want to listen? The wise man was speaking, but Westerners are hypnotized by the village idiots who seem to congregate in Brussels.
Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations
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