NO TO NATO’S ‘PROXY WAR’
ARECENT poll conducted by the Democracy Institute for online portal Express.co.uk found that some 56 per cent of likely voters disapproved of United States President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy, compared with 40 per cent who approved.
On Ukraine, only 38 per cent approved of Biden’s policies.
“Biden made these predictions at the outset — the ruble would be rubble, we were going to crash the Russian economy, people will rise up, Vladimir Putin will be out, the Russians will run away from Ukraine. [but] none of those things have happened,” Democracy Institute director Patrick Basham said.
According to Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, the US’ arms-and-sanctions approach may sound convincing in the echo chamber of US public opinion, but it doesn’t really work on the global stage.
“Developing countries, especially, have declined to join in the West’s campaign of isolation, as seen most recently in a US-led vote to remove Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
“It’s true 93 countries supported the move, but 100 countries did not (24 opposed, 58 abstained and 18 did not vote). Even more striking, those 100 countries are home to 76 per cent of the world’s population,” he said.
Also, most of the world do not believe in the sanctions and also do not take sides in the war.
If all of the countries and regions imposing sanctions on Russia were added up — the US, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and a handful of others — their combined population comes to just 14 per cent of the world’s population.
The boomerang effect in which sanctions hurt not just Russia but the entire world economy, while stoking supply-chain disruptions, inflation and food shortages is why many European countries are likely to continue to import gas and oil from Russia.
And why Hungary and perhaps some other European countries will agree to pay Russia in rubles.
It will also likely hurt Democrats in November’s midterm elections as inflation eats away at the real earnings of voters.
Despite the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (Nato) professed claim that it is a purely defensive alliance, many others think otherwise, as they looked to the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999; Nato forces in Afghanistan for 20 years after 9/11; and, the Nato bombing of Libya in 2011, which toppled Muammar Gaddafi.
Russian leaders have been objecting to Nato’s eastward enlargement since it began in the mid-1990s with the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
It is notable that when Putin called on Nato to stop its enlargement into Ukraine, all US presidents, including Biden, refused to negotiate with Russia over the issue.
In short, many countries will not back global pressures on Russia that could lead to Nato expansion, and that’s because the rest of the world wants peace, not a victory by the US or Nato in a proxy war with Russia.
JAMARI MOHTAR Editor of Let’s Talk! Kuala Lumpur