Advertisement
US Politics
Opinion
Robert Delaney
Robert Delaney

On Balance | West cheers for democracy in Ukraine while ignoring its slow demise at home

  • While the US and its allies are united in supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russian authoritarianism, cracks below the surface are spreading
  • Right-wing attacks on minority groups such as the passing of Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill are a sobering reminder that democracy must be fought for at home too

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
19
A demonstrator wearing a rainbow-colour face mask takes part in a protest as Disney’s employees demonstrate against Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, in Glendale, California, on March 22. Photo: Reuters
Robert Delaney
The Western world is cheering the fortitude of a Ukrainian population that has remained defiant in the face of continued Russian aggression, encouraged by another US-led rebuke of Moscow at the UN General Assembly last week.
Even countries that abstained or rejected the proposal to oust Russia from the UN Human Rights Council padded their rationales with calls for full investigations into the carnage that Russian troops unleashed in Bucha. These were acts that only the world’s most brainwashed could believe were staged by the Ukrainian government, as Moscow would have us think.
Putin’s admirers on the American right, including Fox News commentator and chief US promoter of propaganda used by the Kremlin Tucker Carlson, have dispensed with their praise for the leader who showed the world again what kind of twisted mind he has when his troops sent a missile spray painted with the words “for our children” into a railway station where refugees were fleeing Moscow’s onslaught.
A plastic sheet covers a mass grave with civilians killed during the war against Russia in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 10. Photo: AP
A plastic sheet covers a mass grave with civilians killed during the war against Russia in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 10. Photo: AP

Even former secretary of state Mike Pompeo flipped from his assessment in a January Fox News interview that Putin “is a very talented statesman”, whom the US should respect, to this shocker in a Nixon Seminar discussion on national security: “We knew Vladimir Putin was a bad guy”.

Advertisement

But the champions of democracy and a rules-based global order might well pay as much attention to the rapidly spreading cracks in the substructure upon which that order rests.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s electoral win on a political platform that is openly hostile to immigrants and the LGBT community represents another loss for the kind of values that Moscow and Beijing have been fighting against for years.

Advertisement
As if to underscore the extent to which an alignment of the world’s autocratic leaders is coalescing, China’s foreign Minister Wang Yi made the first post-election phone call, his Hungarian counterpart Peter Szijjarto was quoted as saying by a Chinese government statement.
We need to stop thinking of Russia’s war against Ukraine as a stand-off between Western democracies and the “no limits” partnership of Beijing and Moscow, along with a multitude of authoritarian countries like Myanmar and Venezuela.
Advertisement
Select Voice
Choose your listening speed
Get through articles 2x faster
1.25x
250 WPM
Slow
Average
Fast
1.25x