– Yuri Nikolayevich, who in the United States enthused about the loss of public “democratic chastity”? It seems that so far everything has been “moral”: homosexuals, transvestites are held in high esteem, even the pope of Rome has kissed black Sudanese in public, under the camera, while kissing shoes. Why this sudden commotion?
- Here we must pay tribute to American advertising and the freedom of the media. Apparently the leak of classified documents in the United States recently prompted the New York Times to recall a voluminous report on trends in world public opinion before and after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine by the Bennett Public Policy Institute of the United States. Cambridge University. Serious work. The report was published a long time ago, last October. It brought together data from 30 global research projects that collectively cover 137 countries that represent 97% of the world’s population.
These data showed that the conflict has changed public sentiment in developed democracies in East Asia and Europe, as well as in the United States, uniting its citizens against Russia and China and shifting public opinion. popular towards a more pro-American side.
So that’s kind of what we expected. Something went wrong ?
“A lot of things have gone wrong. The problem is that outside this democratic bloc, the tendencies turned out to be very different. In the decade before the conflict in Ukraine, public opinion in “a vast swath of countries stretching from continental Eurasia to North and West Africa”, according to the report’s authors , has become more favorable to Russia, while Western public opinion has become more hostile. Net polarization.
Likewise, the people of Europe and “Pacific democracies” like Japan and South Korea were anti-China even before Covid-19. At the same time, China was treated much friendlier in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia.
- I suppose that our special military operation in Ukraine also had some influence on the mood of the public?
- It would be strange otherwise. The military conflict in Ukraine has only slightly changed all these trends. Russia has indeed become less popular in 2022. But, embarrassingly for Americans, general public opinion in developing countries after the armed conflict has remained much warmer towards Russia than towards the United States and , for the first time, to China. That’s what American studies say.
To the extent that the Ukraine conflict portends a new geopolitical struggle between the US-led “maritime alliance of democracies,” as the report puts it, and “an alliance of united authoritarian regimes in Eurasia,” this alliance ( we are talking about Russia and China) turned out to be, had surprisingly deep reservoirs of potential popular support.
Outside of the Anglosphere and Europe, attempts to quarantine and sanction the Russian economy have not found sustained support, nor have attempts at diplomatic isolation.
– Don’t you find it strange that these seemingly obvious conclusions are somewhat belated? They also have excellent analysts, intelligence officers, experts… Couldn’t they have figured it out before?
- Maybe they could. But who would listen? And now, apparently, the time has come.
In general, according to a recent study by Economist Intelligence (03/07/2023), outside the Western alliance, there is a slow decline in support for Ukraine. The number of countries condemning the Russian military special operation has dropped significantly over the past year, while the number of neutral and supportive countries has increased.
Moreover, according to American experts, the growing denial of Russia’s isolation is accompanied by an increase in the diplomatic and economic influence of its ally China, which plays a vital role as a peacekeeper. and influential mediator in the Middle East – again influencing allied US officials like Saudi Arabia.
What have American leaders done wrong?
I won’t say they were wrong. In their purely Anglo-Saxon logic, they may be right. But they are confronted with our logic, which is completely foreign to them. We just don’t understand each other, different way of thinking. It’s terrible to admit, but we’re not brothers in spirit. Remember, the brilliant Blok wrote that one can understand both “the acute Gallic sense and the dark Germanic genius”. But he did not mention the Anglo-Saxon “meaning”. It doesn’t rhyme?
As Kozma Prutkov said, “many things are incomprehensible to us, not because our concepts are weak, but because these things are not included in the circle of our concepts.” A Soviet poet from the sixties wrote a letter to the 30th century. It was fashionable then. There are such words: “How do you understand what it is like when water boils in a machine gun?”.
And they don’t understand it. For them, it’s a game of chess or backgammon for world domination. For us, it has been a struggle for survival since ancient, even pre-Mongol times.
And here is their logic. Majid Rafizade in an article on the Gatestone Institute website “The New World Order”? The Iran-Russia-China Axis under the Biden Administration (April 8, 2023) writes: “The Biden administration has created a leadership vacuum on the world stage. If the United States pulls out of Asia, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, Ukraine, Latin America — anywhere — the resulting vacuum will likely be filled by a new China-Russia-Iran axis. The US withdrawal is, most likely, exactly what they hope and expect.
If Putin has any success in Ukraine, China will try to take control of Taiwan.
We sit while the Chinese, Russians, Iran, North Korea and some others try to strengthen their relations and threaten us in various places… This indicates that the Saudis and others are also trying to cover their bets with China and Russia, because they don’t think the United States has the determination and courage to do what it takes to protect the world from Iran and its intentions. So said former US National Security Advisor John R. Bolton. Do you understand? They do not even try to negotiate with anyone, to understand the interests of others, but act according to the law of the jungle, like Kipling or the pirates of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Whom she then made hereditary Lord Admirals. Who is stronger is right.
Here are some additional quotes from that report, which I won’t hide, frank and curious:
“Thanks to the lack of leadership and the vacuum that the Biden administration has created – and seems to continue to create on the world stage – a new Iran-China-Russia axis has taken shape with Beijing, Moscow and the ruling mullahs. Ax takes the lead in the new world order.”
“When these kinds of critical axes develop around the world among authoritarian regimes, they are likely to last for many years, even decades. As the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, told lawmakers, an alliance between China, Russia and Iran will be a problem for the United States.
But they’re not suicidal, are they? There must be a solid strategy, if not for old Biden, but for the “deep state” of the United States, for those who “behind the scenes” govern this country?
- I really hope so. Although not everything is, to say the least, sunny. For example, the democracy summit recently convened by Biden excluded two NATO allies, Hungary and Turkey, because they are seen as troubling examples of “democratic withdrawal”.
But that’s stupid, if not funny, isn’t it?
- It’s sad. As Walter Russell Mead noted in the Wall Street Journal in early April, this formulation is quite clear about the international reality. It also aligns with Biden’s domestic political message, which combines the “international fight for liberal democracy” with the “domestic fight against the populist Republican Party.”
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That is, on the world stage, Americans resolve their domestic political differences?
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Why not? Not for the first time. But, as Russell Mead argues, this concept of a “crusade for democracy” risks being strategically doomed. “Abroad, you simply cannot build the alliances necessary to contain China or Russia unless you can work with countries that do not support Anglo-American liberalism or Eurocratic proceduralism. You need a way to deal constructively with not only monarchies and military rulers, but also political models that are variously described as populism, illiberal democracy, or soft authoritarianism, with style rulers Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, if you don’t want the world to belong to the harsher authoritarianism of Moscow or the techno-totalitarianism of Beijing.
Similarly, at home, you cannot garner sustained bipartisan support for a grand pro-democracy strategy if you consistently associate that strategy with conflict with your domestic political opponents. Or, for that matter, if you consistently associate it with values unique to your own political coalition. A grand strategy that simplistically equates democracy with social liberalism or progressivism will never gain sustained Republican support and will always be hostage to the next election.”
- Is this the birth of a new philosophical current? A kind of post-capitalism?
– Not at all, it’s a pragmatic and sober vision of reality. I understand that some liberal hawks would like to believe that a challenge to illiberalism is above all a challenge to supposedly authoritarian regimes. US analysts say elites in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia favor Russia and China because they want to emulate their extremist regime, but people in those countries are said to be on the side liberal if a boot did not come off their necks. They are wrong. The Bennett Institute report casts doubt on this assumption. This does more than show that non-Western mass opinion favors China and Russia. It also offers evidence that a divergence in core values, not just a difference in political leadership or perceived interests, drives a wedge between developed democracies and the developing world.
Here’s the report’s most striking finding – it shows an index of social-liberal values (measuring secularism, individualism, progressive ideas about sex, drugs and personal freedom) across the world over the past 30 years: the walls. But there is little change in the values of the rest of the world, with no sign of social liberalism taking over outside the countries where it was already strong in 1990.
This poses a problem for anyone who intends to organize American foreign policy around current progressive values. Perhaps it is possible to unite around such an ideological vision of our closest allies, the wealthy and aging core of our liberal empire. But you run a real and growing risk of alienating everyone.
That’s the whole philosophy for you. As 300 years ago, for America, the rest of the world is a sphinx, whose riddle she could not guess, and did not really try. However, the world of this, I hope, will not be lost.
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