NATO And West — Rest Of The World Look Away

A paradigm shift is quietly taking place as global geopolitics rearranges itself around the Russian military operation in Ukraine.

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the G7, which set the agenda for the world after 1945, are no longer viewed by the rest of the world (ROW) with much enthusiasm.

It might be argued that they never were. But there used to be a sense of awe of “the West” (also known as the “Developed World”) and a tendency to take at face value, at least partially, their proclamations about freedom, democracy, free trade, and human rights.

It is no longer so, after obvious violations by the collective West of these principles over the last quarter century.

The public in ROW have watched with unease and alarm as Iraq was ravaged, Libya was dismantled and as Syria continues to be plundered. Times have changed.

The ROW has taken a wait-and-see attitude towards the confrontation between NATO and Russia. It is clear that many non-Western governments recognise that the primary contribution by Ukraine to this confrontation is bodies, battlefields, and buffoonery on social media.

The weapons, the aid and war guidance come from NATO.

The organisation has gotten itself into such a quagmire in Ukraine that every possible off-ramp rolls downhill. The G7 economies are virtually all in the doldrums.

Edward Luttwak, advisor of governments for nearly half a century, recently stated that both the US and Russia are keen to end the ongoing confrontation.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has zero chance of returning to status quo ante 24 February 2022 — as predicted in Swarajya as early as May 2022. This reality is now being articulated increasingly in Western capitals.

Its leader Vladimir Zelensky will be regarded in time as a geo-politically manufactured puppet who destroyed his country in what is likely his final acting performance.

NATO itself seems confused, partly because it has been since the Cold War ended. It is expanding membership and geography (to the Indo-Pacific).

Yet it is unable to fashion a coherent response in Europe, that will extract it from the slippery slope to World War-III.

Tellingly, the only strategy — if one can call it that — NATO seems to have at present, is to throw more Ukrainians into the killing fields. This is also clear to the general public not just in ROW but also in their own countries.

Trust in the mainstream media was at an all time low in the US, even in 2021, and the picture is not very different in Europe.

Nor is anyone buying the “rules-based order” that the West is pushing as the way forward for the world.

The ROW know it means the end of the system based on international law that guided, however poorly, global conduct between 1945 and 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia into non-existence without a United Nations vote.

When thinking of the “the West”, it is often overlooked that Europeans were slaughtering each other for religious, ethnic and other reasons throughout the second millennium.

The half-century long interval of peace between the end of World War-II and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia is an exception, not the rule.

That interval of peace may be over for good, unless continental Europeans recognise that the reality of “the West” today is not quite what they were comfortable with, during the Cold War.

The gorilla in the room is that the West itself is deeply divided but few are prepared to talk about this in the open. There is a sense that the Anglosphere (the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is benefiting from the Ukraine conflict at the expense of the European Union.

This is a view that is not uncommon among the European public. And EU officials were not shy in pointing this out to the US in late 2022. By then it had become clear enough that the expectations of regime change in Moscow, the collapse of the Russian economy and its defeat on the battlefield were not on the horizon.

The mood of the public in the West, as a cursory scan through social media will show, is gloomy and resentful. Unsurprisingly, the so-called “right-wing” has been rising slowly but steadily for over a decade.

Ethno-religious tensions blend into socio-economic riots across Europe with a rather uncomfortable predictability. It will not stop until the illegal migrant invasion of Europe by young males from the non-West is ended.

That will require measures which leave the West more open to criticisms on human rights, diversity and democracy — precisely the pressure points they leverage against ROW.

In this global context, NATO's claims of liberty and rights being the foundation of its principles appear beyond hypocritical.

Consider the expectations of the Anglosphere-directed West immediately after the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine. The ROW was not only to accept the unilateral sanctions imposed against Russia, the tightest in world history, but to suffer the drastic economic consequences without complaint.

That is what the EU did, and the outcomes are clear for all to see.

Since the sanctions, aimed at crushing the Russian economy, were pre-packaged in consultation with the European members of NATO, one could argue that they should have seen what was coming. But they had overestimated their strengths and underestimated Russian capabilities.

The ROW was not even consulted on sanctions, but were expected to proclaim support with public statements. Their reluctance to do this — in view of NATO’s role in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2002), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), and Libya (2014) — can be attributed at least partly to their own fears of being targeted in future if the organisation succeeds in weakening Russia.

NATO is no longer seen as a force for good, and given the role it has played in the world over the last two decades there is plenty of evidence to substantiate that perception.

Attitudes in ROW, certainly among the public and more discreetly among government officials, are not likely to change soon.

For change to happen, the leading countries of the world will have to sit down and reconfigure the current global decision-making superstructure to reflect 21st Century realities.

That too will not occur anytime soon. We live in very uncertain times.