![Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in the Brics summit]()
Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in the Brics summit © AP One
of the most frustrating aspects of America’s Ukraine debate is its
degree of self-deception about global unity. The assumption is false. Vladimir
Putin is hated and feared by most of the west, just as Volodymyr
Zelenskyy is lionised. But the west has not been joined by most of the
rest. When Indonesia hosts the G20 summit in November, Putin will be
there in spite of Washington’s demand that Russia be expelled. Only four
out of 55 African leaders attended Zelenskyy’s virtual address to the
African Union, which had finally agreed he could speak to them after 10
weeks of asking. Not every summit is a western movie festival, where
Zelenskyy has become a staple. And not everyone shares the US foreign
policy establishment’s view that Putin is waging an existential war on
democracy. I do not need convincing of the dark consequences of Putin’s
late imperial agenda, nor of the necessity that he fails. But I’m not an
Indian diplomat, an African consumer, or a Latin American energy
importer. The west is not the world, and the world is not the west. It
is astonishing such a truism has to be emphasised. Here
is rule number one of my unwritten primer on global diplomacy: Avoid
navel-gazing. Good diplomacy sees things from other points of view and
takes them into consideration. I fear that the US and the west in
general are missing a big underlying reality in the global reaction to
Putin’s barbarism: the Ukraine war is boosting demand for a multipolar
world, which is very different to what we have been telling ourselves. Most
of the non-west craves strategic autonomy. They may be upset by the
images from Bucha and Mariupol, just as we are troubled by footage of
ethnic cleansing in Myanmar or bombed out cities in Syria. That doesn’t
mean they will suspend their interests to stop it from happening, any
more than we do when others cry out for help. To much of the world,
Ukraine is just another humanitarian tragedy. The fact that the west
sees it as existential is an irritation. Africans and Arabs and Latin
Americans know that when there is a clash between US ideals and
interests, the latter generally win. We should be wary of judging those
who make similar trade-offs. The
world feels the Ukraine war primarily in two ways — higher food and
energy prices. Following a pandemic in which emerging market growth
collapsed and in which their debt to GDP ratios soared, inflation in
basic staples is the last thing they need. If you add in rising US
interest rates, we have the makings of the next emerging market payments
crisis and rising political instability. We cannot blame countries such
as India and Brazil for buying discounted Russian oil. Nor should we be
surprised that there are plenty of takers for Russian grain. The fact
that Putin is both blocking Ukrainian grain exports, and stealing what
he can get his hands on, is a brutal reflection on Moscow’s ethics. But
it does not alter others’ calculation. Hard economics trumps gauzy
moralism. Joe Biden, after all, is about to travel to Saudi Arabia to
press it for more oil production. This rips up two supposedly core
tenets of Biden administration — reducing fossil fuels and shunning
pariah autocracies. The
west’s speedy decoupling from Russia is bumping up against geopolitical
limits. Countries such as China and India are helping create
alternative payments systems and transportation routes for Russian
commodities. They are also blocking western attempts to eject Russia
from the multilateral system. The west’s best response to this would be
to provide the kind of largesse to emerging markets on which China has
long since taken the lead. Washington ought to spearhead efforts to
boost global food security, arrange emerging market debt restructurings,
and license Covid vaccine production (or better still, suspend patents)
around the world. If we want the rest to follow us against Russia we
must pay attention to what they want. Telling ourselves repeatedly that
we are in a war of light versus darkness in which there is no middle
ground is not a diplomatic strategy. |