My Take | Why the Global South is rising at the expense of Western powers

Being the world’s top dog with staying power means you must have both brains and brawn. No one doubts the United States has all the muscles it needs to beat any country or combination of countries. But the brain part is slipping, just like its ageing president. Joe Biden has shown the US empire run by liberal Democrats can be costly and dangerous as when it was run by conservative Republicans. Global dominance is a tough enterprise now of rapidly diminishing returns, and lately, one that has merely replaced Iraq and Afghanistan with Ukraine and Palestine.

The US has owned the two latter conflicts, so it must bear direct responsibility for their outcomes. But it is failing with their immediate war aims and larger geopolitical purposes. In contrast, the positions of what has come to be collectively called the Global South have shown that they are mostly not only on the right side of history, but also have greater political acumen than Western governments led by Washington. If there is any doubt about “the rise of the rest” at the expense of the West, one big reason is that the latter has squandered much credibility, both moral and material, first in Ukraine, now in Palestine.

The West’s sanctions regime against Russia has spooked many governments in developing countries about how supposedly neutral services of the global economy can be weaponised. Who wouldn’t worry if your US dollar-denominated assets can be seized or frozen, your shipping data turned against you, all your trade and financial transactions halted through a global messaging system, and your resource commodities, mostly denominated in US dollars, priced out of the global market? You may be on good terms with Washington today, but what if you no longer aren’t? One in five countries currently has some US sanctions or others against them.

Dedollarisation becomes a necessity, not just fantasy, for most of the world other than Washington’s closest allies and partners. They may be morally repelled by Russia’s invasion, but the unprecedented Western sanctions imposed, with the resultant economic and food crises transmitted through global economic channels, have simply scarred many weaker economies.

Poor nations have suffered especially, yet people were told it was a global moral crusade that everyone must get on board. No wonder most developing countries simply said no.

Just as governments outside the West are alarmed by the new economic warfare that can choke off their economies, so ordinary non-Western people around the world, and many in the West as well, are increasingly revolted by Israel’s scorched earth military response to Hamas’ terrorism. Whatever Hamas did on October 7, the slaughter of the innocents against the Palestinians cannot be justified or explained away by any amount of propaganda, censorship or gaslighting. Thanks to social media and freely available automatic machine translations, the world is getting to know what Israel’s real intentions are.