The article examines the main institutional changes, which took place in the world economy and in international economic relations after the Second World War in the framework of four periods. These periods include the creation of the Bretton Woods agreements and GATT, which played an unusually positive role as a universal regulator of world trade within well-known trade rounds. The paper reviews the periods of unusually successful development of two subsystems of the world economy (socialist and capitalist) and their positive mutual influence (the latent development of convergence). Moreover, the author argues that the most successful period for world capitalism was the time, when on the basis of Keynesian regulation, a social state of universal prosperity has been created, poverty quickly declined and the middle class grew on the basis of a continuous rise of the standard of living for the majority of the population of the countries. This model of democratic capitalism was rigidly and uncompromisingly changed in the 1980s through the rejection of Keynesianism in favour of neo-liberal monetarism or «libertarianism», as the famous American economist P. Samuelson mentioned in the well-known doctrine of «Washington Consensus». The latter reflects the course of the most right-wing reactionary circles of large monopolistic corporations and, above all, of financial groups, which established control over national economies, especially successfully after the fall of the USSR and the world socialist system. Global competition between the two systems has disappeared; world capitalism has announced that there is no alternative. Hence — the sources of the rapid growth of inequality, a new onset of poverty, the tendency towards the reduction of the middle classes in the countries; including in the most prosperous and wealthy ones. Proclaiming the slogans of the «withdrawal of the state from the economy» in order to stimulate the mechanism of competition in the developed countries for the past three decades, state intervention has increased and in the direct forms and with growing intensity. This fact became especially noticeable from the beginning of a new millennium and in particular when the joint efforts of the United States and the European Union actually blocked the activities of the WTO as a universal regulator of international trade. The transition to a policy of pressure, blackmail, threats, unilateral introduction of duties, quotas and sanctions became Washington’s distinctive feature and style, especially after the coming of President Donald Trump to the White House. All this, to the author’s opinion, creates a new, much more complicated international situation for Russia, requires the necessity to conduct another economic policy of the country and another course of its foreign policy, including with colleagues in the EEU. It’s necessary to give new incentives for the development of not only the Russian economy, but also of the economy of this integration group, which is vitally important for the interests of Russia itself and for the countries of the group. This course should become a priority in the entire foreign economic strategy of the state.