The US can bomb a country to the Stone Age, but cannot create global governance, a policy expert said at the Primakov Readings

Published 24 Jun, 2026 14:23 | Updated 24 Jun, 2026 15:25

 

The Iran conflict shows that the era of the unipolar world is over, a leading policy expert has said. The US can bomb a country to the Stone Age, but cannot “create global governance,” Samir Saran, the head of the Observer Research Foundation, told the Primakov Readings International Forum in Moscow.

“If the biggest power in the world cannot open the Hormuz Strait, I don’t think that power should be recognized as being anything close to being powerful,” he said on Wednesday at the event.

Speaking exclusively to RT on the sidelines of the event, Saran stated that traditional friends Moscow and New Delhi do not have another partnership that can claim the same level of trust.

“India and Russia have a very special relationship and a special connection with each other,” he said.

On New Delhi’s concerns regarding Moscow’s ties with Beijing, he said Russia and India should “view only what we do with each other. We should double it, then triple it, then grow [the relationship].”

“We should be each other’s most essential partners and we should continue to invest in that. What we do with others should not be a concern to either of us.”

 

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Earlier at the Primakov Readings, Saran described China and the US as “very powerful countries, both not powerful enough to dominate.”

“We will not have the dominance of the USA and USSR of the past ever. There will be no real superpower in the next 25-30 years,” he said.

Saran went on to say that commodities will be key among the “four drivers of the world of the future,” listing technology, demography, and identity as the other three.

He slammed the “new export control ethic emerging around AI,” saying it will create divides like never before. “Technology is going to create an underclass,” he warned.

Saran predicted that “identity and sovereignty are going to be stronger in the next 20 years than they were in the last 20 years.”