Sanctions on Russia Pit the West Against the Rest of the World

In a development that suggests difficulties, China’s basic approach – not to support Moscow’s aggression, but to resist Western efforts to punish Russia – has garnered global support. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared war on NATO. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has refused to condemn Russia. India and Vietnam, essential partners for every American strategy in the Indo-Pacific, are closer to China than the United States in their approach to war.

Western impoverishment and the powerful effect of banking sanctions guarantee a degree of sanction compliance and support for symbolic UN resolutions condemning Russia’s aggression. But the lack of non-Western enthusiasm for America’s approach to Mr Putin’s war is a phenomenon that US politicians ignore at their risk. Just as Western politicians, lost in fantasy about building a “post-historic world,” do not understand the growing threat of great power competition, they have not noticed the development of a gap between the West and the rest of the world that threatens. to give the revisionist power great opportunities in the coming years. The Biden administration does not seem to understand the rift between Washington and what was formerly called the Third World, the degree to which its own policy contributes to the separation, or the opportunities this gap creates for China.

Opposition to Russia has for many in the West looked like a global slam dunk. World opinion would be so resilient to Moscow’s attack that countries such as China would pay a high political price for not jumping on the anti-Russian bandwagon.

That’s not how it works. Some countries, such as America’s disappointed and alienated Middle East allies, are worried about the support of a retreating Washington against a rising Russia. Others balance their contempt for the Russian invasion of Ukraine against other concerns. Many non-Western countries fear the consequences of Western responses to Russia’s behavior more than they fear Russia, do not trust the West’s will or ability to manage the economic consequences of the war in ways that d ‘ Protecting the interests of non-Western states, they are shocked by the imposition of sanctions on the Russian central bank – a weapon they fear will one day be directed against them.

While enthusiastic Western liberals welcome the imposition of sanctions on Russia, the heightened readiness of Western powers to arm the global economic system, terrible leaders in many countries who believe that the West is already too powerful. Many Brazilians have long feared that Western environmentalists intend to block the development of the Amazon Basin. They fear that climate activists could force the Federal Reserve and other Western banks to “save the planet” by imposing sanctions on Brazil. Politicians in India and elsewhere share many of these fears as they see environmentalists using global economic institutions to set their agendas on countries with different priorities.

Mr Putin’s claim that an overpowered West is trying to use its economic and institutional leverage to set up a radical worldview on the rest of the planet hails Western liberals as self-serving propaganda, but his arguments resonate far beyond what most liberals understand. The Trump administration’s unilateral imposition of severe sanctions on Iran has raised international awareness of how much power the global economic system gives the United States. populists.

For those who share this perspective, an unpredictable America at the head of the liberal West poses a greater threat to the independence of many postcolonial states than the Russian or even Chinese ambition could ever have. Chinese propaganda about the need for alternative economic arrangements that limit Western power is significantly more influential now than it was a month ago.

None of this means that the West is wrong to oppose Mr Putin’s war (or, for that matter, to deal with climate change and the rights of sexual minorities). But the work to protect world peace is harder and more complicated than many newly-enthusiastic neo-cold warriors still understand. What used to be called the Global South does not always share the priorities and perspectives of the Yale Law School. Neither Donald Trump nor the awakened left inspire confidence around the world, and an American political system that seems doomed to oscillate between them will not indefinitely retain the leadership on which America’s peace and security depend.