At Financial Times Edward Luce makes a point I’ve been making around here—the statement that “the world is on our side about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” is factually untrue:
One red flag is the west’s habitual tendency to claim moral leadership. This creates three problems. First, it is hypocritical. US public opinion paid little attention to the horrific carnage in Syria, for which Assad is primarily culpable. Though Germany took in 1mn refugees in 2015, most of the rest of the west did not follow suit. Britain and the US admitted fewer than 50,000 Syrians between them. What Russia is doing to Ukraine is barbaric. But there is plenty to go round. Many in the Muslim world, in particular, think America practises double standards. Thousands of civilians died in Iraq and Afghanistan from US munitions, though they were not deliberately targeted (unlike in Ukraine).
A second point is that the west is rash to assume its values are universal. The US this week designated what Myanmar did to its Rohingya minority as genocide. Though Myanmar, unlike Ukraine, is in India’s neighbourhood, Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, made only token protests. The fact that the Rohingya are Muslim undoubtedly influenced him. India took only a tiny fraction of the refugees. This is in spite of the fact that India, unlike China, is a democracy.
A third is that much of the world resents western sanctions. With the exception of fuel exports to Europe, the west has largely decoupled from Russia in a month. The execution has been astonishing. But it has also reminded others of the west’s capacity to punish those with whom it disagrees. In this instance, it is very hard to argue the west is wrong. Putin not only poses a mortal threat to democratic values; he is also extolling the law of the jungle. No wonder so many small countries condemned Russia at the UN.
There’s a line in the musical, Gypsy. In response to one character declaiming “New York is the center of the world!”, Mama Rose respondes “New York is the center of New York”. Just because we’re convinced we’re doing the right thing and our closest allies, coincidentally mostly the countries with which we have the most in common, agree with us and are taking steps themselves, doesn’t mean that the whole world agrees with us. Don’t assume.
I wish Mr. Luce had gone into how making such assumptions impedes our ability to engage in diplomacy in greater detail but I agree that it does. In the here and now if we understood better why India isn’t going alone with us on sanctions against Russia we could be better able to convince them to go along. Right now India is taking up the slack on Russian oil exports. Why? Because it’s in their national interest.
You should check this commentary from the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
This is the key paragraph — “When fully unleashed, sanctions, too, are weapons of mass destruction. They may not topple buildings or collapse bridges, but they destroy firms, financial institutions, livelihoods, and even lives. Like military WMDs, they inflict pain indiscriminately, striking both the culpable and the innocent. And if they are used too widely, they could reverse the process of globalization that has allowed the modern world to prosper.”
And this is the opinion of a dry bureaucrat that aligned with India’s more liberal opposition. Imagine the opinion of the “hard-men” in the nationalist government.
“the horrific carnage in Syria, for which Assad is primarily culpable”
The civil war was set in motion and is sustained by the US, UK, Israel et al. Even the false flag chemical attacks were conducted by MI6’s White Helmet group. And the US is actively supporting various al-Qaeda groups and ISIS, which it defends to this day. The US has seized control of Syria’s oil fields and exports the oil for US profit.
Edward Luce is himself a member of our depraved Ruling Class.
While your author supports the current sanctions CO he seems to be pushing for sanctions to be more orderly/regulated in the future. In theory that might be good but how much international governance can we claim to have anymore. A permanent member of the UN security council is engaged in aggressive war to take territory from another country. You might get the US and the Eu to occasionally agree on stuff but China just does whatever it wants. India pretty much the same.
Steve
That’s certainly my take.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did serious damage to the international order and to the U.S. position with regards to Ukraine. The most fundamental rule of international behavior set after WWII was the prohibition on wars of aggression, that international borders were inviolate and could only be changed through diplomacy. In spite of this, the U.S. invaded Iraq when there were ample diplomatic means to resolve the problem.
Putin is acting brutally, but the fundamental crime is that he has broken the taboo against wars of aggression. But calls by the U.S. for unity are undercut by its own violations of international norms. Biden has shown the power of the U.S. lies not just in its military and economic power, but in its ability to lead other countries as first among equals, and by granting “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. Not all will follow, but that’s the nature of sovereignty.
Agreed. I said so at the time which placed me at odds with many Democrats.