{"id":209692,"date":"2022-04-25T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2022-04-25T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=209692"},"modified":"2022-04-19T04:29:02","modified_gmt":"2022-04-19T03:29:02","slug":"why-non-western-countries-tend-to-see-russias-war-very-very-differently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/04\/why-non-western-countries-tend-to-see-russias-war-very-very-differently\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Non-Western Countries Tend to See Russia\u2019s War Very, Very Differently"},"content":{"rendered":"

The West appears blind to its own hypocrisy and narrow interests in calling for a rules-based order.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

18 Apr 2022 – <\/em>Ukrainian President\u00a0Volodymyr Zelenskyy<\/a>\u00a0has been nothing short of brilliant in his\u00a0outreach to Western audiences<\/a>. The overwhelming Western support for Ukraine is due not only to the brutality of Russia\u2019s illegal invasion, but also to the astuteness and charisma with which Zelenskyy has made Ukraine\u2019s case for aid.<\/p>\n

But as effective as Zelenskyy has been in drumming up Western support, Ukraine\u2019s message has been far less compelling to audiences in the Global South, where many countries have declined to join Western campaigns to sanction Russia\u2019s economy and isolate it diplomatically. This was vividly clear at the Doha Forum last month in Qatar, where Zelenskyy and Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova were given a big platform.<\/p>\n

A powerful communicator in her own right, Dzhaparova \u2014 a Muslim Tatar from Crimea \u2014 played on themes favored by Western leaders: This war is ultimately not about Ukraine but about the survival of the \u201cinternational rules-based order.\u201d\u00a0President Joe Biden<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0European leaders<\/a>\u00a0have repeatedly framed the conflict in these terms, as well.<\/p>\n

But therein lies the disconnect with much of the Global South.<\/p>\n

In conversations with diplomats and analysts from across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, it was evident to me that these countries largely sympathize with the plight of the Ukrainian people and view Russia as the aggressor. But Western demands that they make costly sacrifices by cutting off economic ties with Russia to uphold a \u201crules-based order\u201d have begotten an allergic reaction. That order hasn\u2019t been rules-based; instead, it has allowed the U.S. to violate international law with impunity.<\/p>\n

The West\u2019s messaging on Ukraine has taken its tone-deafness to a whole new level, and it is unlikely to win over the support of countries that have often experienced the worse sides of the international order.<\/p>\n

The countries that have bucked Western calls for aid and diplomatic unity that have received the most attention are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In a sharp break from Washington,\u00a0they have furthered their economic and political embrace of Russia while rebuffing Biden\u2019s request to lower oil prices by pumping more oil<\/a>. The UAE refused to denounce Russia\u2019s invasion at the U.N. Security Council, and while its de facto leader, Mohammed bin Zayed,\u00a0refused a phone call with Biden<\/a>, he ordered his foreign minister to\u00a0travel to Russia to strengthen their ties<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The concerns of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi differ sharply from those of most of the broader Global South and are rooted primarily in their deteriorating ties with Washington over the U.S. disinclination to go to war on their behalf against Iran and its allies. One Saudi diplomat has described Saudi-U.S. tensions as \u201cthe end of the road for us and Biden, but maybe the U.S. also.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

For the rest of the Global South, various local and broader structural factors have contributed to a hesitance to support the isolation of Russia. South American powers such as Brazil and Mexico, African heavyweights South Africa and Ethiopia and Asian rising power India are all\u00a0in the majority in their regions in their refusal to sanction Russia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s relations with Russia go back to the Cold War, when the Soviet Union vetoed numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions about Kashmir in India\u2019s behalf<\/a>. Russia remains one of India\u2019s leading arms suppliers to this day. The same is true for many African countries. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 18 percent of all Russian arms sales went to Africa from 2016 to 2020<\/a>. African dependence on Russian and Ukrainian wheat and fertilizers is even greater \u2014 a quarter of African countries get a third of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Egypt knows the significance of this all too well. Rising Russian and Ukrainian grain prices in the months before the Arab spring in 2011 played a crucial role in setting the stage for the regionwide protests.<\/p>\n

But the broader Global South\u2019s dependence on or vulnerability to Russia doesn\u2019t tell the whole story. Many of these states also see flagrant hypocrisy in framing the Ukraine war in terms of the survival of the rules-based order. From their vantage point, no other country or bloc has undermined international law, norms or the rules-based order more than the U.S. and the West.<\/p>\n

There is no scarcity of examples.<\/p>\n

In recent years, America undercut the rules-based order when Donald Trump withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council<\/a> over its criticism of Israel\u2019s treatment of Palestinians and the World Health Organization<\/a> amid the Covid pandemic, and he sanctioned senior officials of the International Criminal Court<\/a> for seeking to investigate American war crimes in Afghanistan. (The Biden administration is calling for the court to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that many of these countries perceive themselves as having been at the receiving end of American unilateralism and recklessness.<\/p>\n

There is also the blatant illegality<\/a> of the George W. Bush administration\u2019s invasion of Iraq, the Obama administration\u2019s regime-change intervention in Libya<\/a>, the U.S. and the U.K.\u2019s ongoing support for the Saudi war in Yemen (which has left 13 million people at risk of starvation<\/a>) and the celebration of armed Ukrainian resistance against Russian invaders while not only condemning Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation, but also outlawing nonviolent economic opposition to that decades-long occupation. And then there is the \u201cglobal war on terror,\u201d which has destabilized much of the Middle East and North Africa while killing more than twice as many people<\/a> as the terrorists themselves <\/a>have murdered since the Sept. 11 attacks.<\/p>\n

In fact, even though the U.S. played an instrumental role in establishing the rules and norms of the post-World War II order, it almost immediately began breaking them<\/a>. During his two terms, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized<\/a> no fewer than 104 covert operations, which included overthrowing governments and arming regional revolts.<\/p>\n

But now the U.S. is demanding that countries in the Global South make massive and costly sacrifices \u2014 with little regard for their vulnerabilities and security needs \u2014 to save an order the U.S. itself has been at the forefront of eroding. To return to an order in which the U.S. can continue to act outside international law is equivalent to asking the Global South to make unbearable sacrifices to uphold American exceptionalism.<\/p>\n

Moreover, it doesn\u2019t help that many of these countries perceive themselves as having been on the receiving end of American unilateralism and recklessness. NATO, for instance, isn\u2019t held in high regard in large parts of Africa because of its military intervention in Libya, which left a path of death and destruction in the Sahel<\/a>. Defending his country\u2019s neutral stance, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni told reporters<\/a> last month that the West \u201cdestroyed\u201d Libya while spreading terrorism beyond its border.<\/p>\n

The damaging consequences of American interventionism play a significant role in the calculations of countries across the Global South. Most of them seek close relations with the U.S. But because of U.S. unilateralism, they desire options to find counterweights against U.S. power when needed. The emergence of a multipolar system provides countries of the Global South with a degree of protection against American adventurism, while they largely see Russia\u2019s military intervention in Ukraine as a European <\/em>affair that doesn\u2019t change the larger global picture, in which balancing options against the U.S. rather than Russia are sought after.<\/p>\n

As former Indian national security adviser Shivshankar Menon writes, most Asian capitals regard the conflict as a war \u201cover the European security order \u2014 not an epochal global conflagration<\/a>.\u201d Getting entangled in that regional conflict makes little sense for many in the Global South \u2014 and certainly not for the sake of restoring a flawed order that gave undue advantage to the West. Indeed, the glee with which some Western analysts view the Ukrainian war as a \u201cstrategic opportunity<\/a>\u201d to reignite a Cold War between democracies and autocracies \u2014 scholars Michael Beckley and Hal Brands went so far as to say<\/a> that Putin has \u201cinadvertently done the United States and its allies a tremendous favor\u201d by creating this window \u2014 appears to only further push away the broader Global South.<\/p>\n

For Ukraine, the support of the Global South may ultimately not be a high priority. But for the U.S., there\u2019s an important lesson here. Had it pursued a more restrained foreign policy in the past few decades, it might have found it far easier to rally the global community to its side against the aggression of another nuclear power.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Trita Parsi is the executive vice president of the\u00a0Quincy Institute<\/a>\u00a0and the author of <\/em>\u201cLosing an Enemy \u2014 Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy<\/a>.\u201d His personal homepage is here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Originally published by<\/em> MSNBC on April 12, 2022<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Go to Original – transnational.live<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

18 Apr 2022 – The West appears blind to its own hypocrisy and narrow interests in calling for a rules-based order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":209694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[2009,2197,1035,1268,91,818,253,278,254,961,70,92,481],"class_list":["post-209692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-anti-war","tag-biden","tag-eastern-europe","tag-european-union","tag-nato","tag-proxy-war","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-security","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-violent-conflict","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}