🧵Lots of great observations in this piece by @MohanCRaja:
Why Non-Alignment Is Dead and Won’t Return foreignpolicy.com
Why Non-Alignment Is Dead and Won’t Return foreignpolicy.com
“Take a closer look, and you will find the ideology of nonalignment was dead long ago. And while it may not be entirely buried, it poses little threat to the West and does not offer much salvation to the East.”
“the seeds of today’s developing world indifference to Russia’s war in Ukraine were sown in the post-Cold War era. Having vanquished the Soviet Union, a complacent West now saw little need to cultivate good relations with the ruling elites of the global south.”
“The new hubris was also reflected in policies that attempted to promote democracy and reengineer societies in the developing world as rich-world governments, organizations, and activist NGOs carpeted the global south with a vast apparatus of conditional aid.”
“Political hectoring on issues from democratic governance to climate policy became a habit. Sanctions and aid cutoffs became preferred instruments to discipline developing societies that fell short of the benchmarks set by the West.”
“The conviction that the West and its development elite were serving a higher cause—much like the Christian missionaries of the colonial era—was an intoxicating one. But it ignored the fact that the heathens might not want to convert.”
“Despite these repeated failures.. the presumption that the rest of the world will march to a Western drum endures. It is no surprise, then, that the Western strategic community was so surprised when the rest of the world did not simply stand up.. against the 🇷🇺 invasion of 🇺🇦.”
“The first step in that direction is to recognize that the West’s unfolding competition with the 🇨🇳-🇷🇺 alliance demands a return to classical forms of diplomacy—of winning friends... It would involve a decisive shift away from the Western preachiness of the last three decades.”
“Paradoxically, the people who will find this the most difficult are those in the West who consider themselves friends of the global south, yet have exerted the most pressure on developing countries on a whole gamut of issues.”
“The emergence of highly vocal single-issue groups in the West—along with their success in setting the agenda for governments and multilateral development institutions—has been toxic for relations with the developing world.”
“Western leaders should ignore the widespread rhetoric about a global south “unwilling to choose” & focus instead on the individual concerns, vulnerabilities, & interests of key states in the developing world.. did before ideological buccaneers hijacked Western foreign policies.”
“the developing world is not dying to reinvent the failed nonaligned movement. Third Worldism—with its offspring ideologies of pan-Asianism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Islamism—was a big failure… (Leaders) are much wiser now and more adept at pursuing individual national goals.”
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