Interview: West's unipolar behaviors bound to fail, disastrous for itself, says scholar

NEW YORK, April 10 (Xinhua) -- The West's diplomatic, policy and economic behaviors based on the assumption that the world is still unipolar are bound to fail and are disastrous for the West itself, a U.S.-based scholar has said.

The U.S.-led sanctions against Russia are an attempt to defend the unipolar world order established since the fall of the Soviet Union, said John Pang, a senior fellow at New York-based Bard College, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Since the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out, the United States and its allies have imposed rounds of sanctions on Russia.

These unipolar behaviors are intended to "defend and extend the liberal hegemony that prevailed for several decades after the end of the Cold War," said Pang.

"The world is no longer unipolar, especially in the economy. Those sanctions are not gonna be accepted as well, and they won't work the way they're expected to work, because the global economy ceased to be unipolar quite a while ago," said Pang.

The sanctions are rooted in the Cold War mentality, "but even the Cold Warriors were more realistic than these guys," said Pang.

"It's a kind of policy that's a combination of liberal interventionism and new conservatism, the idea (is) that for the world to be safe, everyone must adopt liberal democracy and everyone must come under the single umbrella of this liberal democratic capitalist order," he noted.

"It's a very interesting moment in world history in which they have never been more separated from the rest of the world. They have never seemed so disconnected in their view from attitudes in other parts of the world," he said.

The common sense in Southeast Asia, for example, particularly in the business community, is that the world has entered a time of multipolarity, and the attempt to keep the unipolar order and liberal hegemony is insensible and bound to fail, according to Pang, who grew up and worked in Southeast Asia for years.