Upper volta non aligned movement1/24/2024 ![]() ![]() The good news for Gates is that the Biden administration has already found its cold war footing. The immediate eviction of Russian representatives and Russian culture from the institutions of the west suggest the long slumber of the cold war may indeed be over: “Putin’s war has provided the cold shower needed to awaken democratic governments to the reality of a new world.” “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history,” writes the former CIA director Robert Gates for the Washington Post. Few expected Vladimir Putin to kick it off so suddenly. The rapid rise of China and the US reaction it has provoked have prompted many commentators to predict a coming cold war. And by revealing this tectonic shift, the map can tell us something important about geopolitics in the coming age of multipolarity. On the contrary, the map reveals a rift between north and south, between the nations that we call developed and those we call developing. The invasion of Ukraine has been described as a “ test” to root out the “ pseudo-leftists” who fail to respond with force and conviction to support the west in its effort to isolate, undermine and eventually topple Putin in defense of the Ukrainian cause.īut the map of sanctions suggests that the true rift is not between left and right, nor even between east and west. “Should this war in Ukraine escalate, we say and we say it loud: do not bring it to our shores.”Īmid the Russian army’s brutal advance into Ukraine, a slew of letters, articles and Twitter commentary has addressed the “western left” for its apparent unwillingness to take on the Putin government. Sané tells me that the Ukrainian embassy in Senegal has been recruiting “volunteer” mercenaries from countries like Senegal and Ivory Coast to fight in the war. “For five centuries, we have been pawns in the hands of the warring European states, bent on looting Africa of its human and natural sources,” says Pierre Sané, president of the Imagine Africa Institute and former secretary-general of Amnesty International. ![]() The Latin American position has been echoed in Africa. “We are not going to take any sort of economic reprisal because we want to have good relations with all governments.” Argentina may have voted to condemn Russia’s actions at the UN, but its foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, was adamant about his country’s non-participation in the new sanctions push: “Argentina does not consider that they are a mechanism to generate peace and harmony, or generate a frank dialogue table that serves to save lives.” “We do not consider that concerns us,” said the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Latin America has been equally steadfast in its commitment to neutrality. “We will not blindly follow the steps taken by another country,” said Indonesia’s foreign ministry representative at a recent press conference. On the contrary, many of the world’s largest nations – including China, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and even Nato ally Turkey – have refused to join in. The US, the UK, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, the EU: beyond this fortified coalition, very few nations have chosen to take part in the economic warfare set against the Putin government. The contrast between these maps could not be more striking. And to do that, we should start with a very different map of the world – a map of global participation in the sanctions set against Russia by the United States and its allies. But to make sense of the geopolitical consequences of the Russian invasion, we must look beyond the diplomatic theater of the general assembly to examine how these nations are actually engaged with the war in this phase of rapid escalation. What exactly is that message? In recent days, many commentators have pointed to a global map of the UN resolution to demonstrate the unity of the west and the world in taking on the Putin government.
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