O Império se retrai na África: Rússia e China ocupam os espaços no Niger e em outros países - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email

The U.S. is in retreat in a crucial part of the world Protesters demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Agadez, Niger, on Sunday. (Issifou Djibo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) For boosters of U.S. security interests in Africa, the past few days carried grim tidings. At the end of last week, the United States informed the coup-plotting leadership of Niger that it would comply with its request to withdraw U.S. forces from the country, which had been operating in a counterterrorism role there for more than half a decade. Around the same time, reports emerged that authorities in Chad had sent a letter this month to the U.S. defense attaché based there, ordering the United States to cease activities at a base that also accommodates French troops. The potential withdrawal of a detachment of U.S. Special Forces based in Chad would mark yet another blow for the Western security presence in the Sahel — the vast arid region that stretches below the Sahara desert that has seen a wave of coups in recent years toppling fragile Central and West African governments. Chad is slated to stage elections in May, and the orders to the United States may amount to a bit of nationalist preening by the country’s vulnerable interim leadership. But elsewhere, the writing on the wall is more stark. Successive coup-plotting regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have ousted weak civilian-led governments; angrily railed against the presence of the former colonial power, France; and turned toward Russia and China for support. Before the coup last year, Niger was seen by Western diplomats as something of a democratic bulwark in a region where juntas and radical Islamist insurgencies were gaining ground. Now its regime has pivoted the impoverished country firmly away from the West, booting out French troops before it moved to end the significant U.S. footprint in the country’s desert uplands. “The agreement will spell the end of a U.S. troop presence that totaled more than 1,000 and throw into question the status of a $110 million U.S. air base that is only six years old,” my colleagues reported. “It is the culmination of a military coup last year that ousted the country’s democratically elected government and installed a junta that declared America’s military presence there ‘illegal.’” The U.S. exit in Niger follows the arrival of a detachment of Russian military trainers in the country this month. Le Monde sketched what had preceded this deployment of some 100 officers of the Africa Corps, the rebranded Russian paramilitary successor to the mercenary Wagner organization, which had a broad, murky presence in Africa before disbanding late last year. “Their official mission was to train Niger’s army, particularly in the use of a Russian-supplied anti-aircraft defense system,” the French newspaper noted. “Three months earlier, Niger’s PM had flown to Tehran to outline plans for closer cooperation with Iran, without providing any details of the nature of the envisioned contracts. This was a clear cause for concern for Western countries, particularly the U.S. The developments are “a blow to Western counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel and Libya,” Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank, told me. “Perhaps even worse, a U.S. pullout will further open the door for an expansion of Russia and Iran in the Sahel.” A mess of geopolitical intrigue courses through the region. “Like Libya, this part of Africa has become a playground for foreign powers, not least Russia, which provides security for coup regimes and orchestrates massive disinformation campaigns leading to the ousting of Western forces,” an editorial in Le Monde observed. “This is a major trend, of which Americans and Europeans have too belatedly become aware of its cost, without knowing how to respond.” The Wall Street Journal was more blunt in its own editorial: “In the new era of great power competition, Africa is one place where the U.S. is losing.” China, less conspicuous than the opportunistic Kremlin, has steadily shouldered its way into Niger. The country’s junta announced this week that a Chinese state oil company had made an advance $400 million payment for crude purchases from Niger’s Agadem field. The deal, structured with further interest payments to the Chinese company, would help Niger’s cash-strapped government reckon with mounting domestic debts. Some Nigeriens who spoke to my colleagues in the capital of Niamey see the junta exercising a new kind of sovereignty after years of overweening French interest. “Why is it a problem for the Americans and France that the Russians are helping us?” Abdoulaye Oussein, 51, said. “I think we’re free to make our own choices.” New polling from Gallup sees strong approval for Russia and China in many parts of the Sahel. “Last year, China recorded its highest approval rating in Africa in over a decade,” Julie Ray, managing editor for world news at Gallup, told me. “It picked up substantial support in countries in Western Africa — which helped nudge it ahead of the U.S. by two percentage points.” When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it lost significant support across the continent. But, Ray added, “Moscow’s image has recovered since then,” especially in the Sahel, where it scored high approval ratings in Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad. “Washington was seen in the region as a credible partner without the colonial baggage of France, which is on its way out in the region,” Laessing, who is based in Bamako, Mali’s capital, told me. But U.S. messaging to West African governments may have not been particularly effective, and U.S. officials have been faulted for perhaps bullying their African counterparts in private. “Washington has a lack of self-awareness about how it is coming across,” Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told my colleagues this month. “They have made Russia the boogeyman in all of this, like what the French have done, but that is a way to deflect responsibility and to avoid any kind of introspection about the policies the U.S. has pursued.”

Uma guerra civil esquecida: a do Sudão - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 

Today's WorldView

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email Sudan marks grim anniversary of civil war in shadow of other conflicts Sudanese refugees gather as teams from Doctors Without Borders assist the war-wounded from West Darfur, Sudan, in Adre hospital, Chad, in June. (Mohammad Ghannam/MSF/Reuters) Exactly a year ago, Sudan’s ruinous collapse began. Tensions between two powerful rival factions that had already carved out fiefdoms in the country — the Sudanese Armed Forces, headed by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), headed by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — exploded into open war. Airstrikes hit civilian centers; militiamen and vigilantes set up checkpoints and looted neighborhoods. The capital, Khartoum, transformed into a sprawling battlefield. The conflict flared elsewhere in the African nation of close to 50 million people, including the already war-ravaged region of Darfur. For a time, Sudan’s civil war attracted some global attention. President Biden and his European counterparts whirred into action to evacuate their embassies and hundreds of foreign citizens and dual nationals based mostly in Sudan’s big cities. International journalists met convoys of refugees in the Saudi port city of Jeddah to hear their desperate, harrowing journeys to escape the country. The conflict marked a sad turn of events: A fledgling transition toward democracy in the years prior had won Sudan closer ties to a host of Western governments, and some relief from decades of U.S. sanctions. Even after Burhan and Dagalo, known universally by his sobriquet Hemedti, collaborated in interrupting that transition in 2021, ousting a civilian-led government, Sudan remained the subject of eager diplomacy. A U.S.-led initiative hoped to add Khartoum to the list of Arab capitals that could normalize relations with Israel. But the war seems to have doomed all that. The Sudanese state has essentially collapsed in many parts of the country. In some areas, hospitals and health services barely function. Thousands of civilians have been killed, including in atrocities and massacres likely to be remembered as war crimes. Courageous civil rights groups are documenting myriad accounts of sexual violence and rape. Lackluster rounds of peace talks, convened in some instances by Arab governments that tacitly back one party or the other, have yielded failed cease-fires. And as destruction and death mounts, international awareness and interest in Sudan’s misery has waned. RSF soldiers on a motorbike drive by a destroyed tank belonging to the defeated Sudanese Armed Forces, on a main street in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, Sudan, on February 20. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Twelve months on, the humanitarian situation in Sudan is astonishingly grim. The country is the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than a fifth of its population forced out of their homes by the civil war, as well as earlier rounds of conflict. Nearly a third of the population is acutely food insecure, according to U.N. data. Some 19 million children are out of school; an estimated 3 million Sudanese children are malnourished. Humanitarian officials have been warning of hunger — and its attendant miseries, such as cholera and other diseases — gripping the country. “This is a huge, looming problem, and they are very close to famine,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, told my colleagues at the beginning of the month. “Kids are dying of starvation within Darfur and other parts of the country.” International organizations complain that it’s logistically impossible to service much of the country. “Constraints to humanitarian access are severely impeding the delivery of life-saving assistance, and humanitarian funding needs have gone largely unmet,” noted a reportby the International Rescue Committee. By February, food prices in Sudan had spiked by more than 110 percent since the war began. In ramshackle refugee camps in neighboring Chad and South Sudan, aid groups say a dearth of funding may see food distribution cease imminently. The World Food Program says the “roots of the hunger problem are twofold: access and funding,” explained my colleagues Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi and Katharine Houreld. “Within Sudan, WFP trucks have been blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted and detained. Outside Sudan, makeshift camps are swollen with hungry and sick arrivals — but there’s no money to feed them.” On Monday, international governments, humanitarians and donors will convene in Paris for a conference aimed at raising funds for Sudan. They meet at a time when a paltry 5 percent of the humanitarian requests put out for Sudan by U.N. agencies have been met. There’s no question that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — exacerbated furthermore by the recent escalation between Israel and Iran — have put Sudan’s tragedy in the shade. “As communities barrel toward famine, as cholera and measles spread, as violence continues to claim countless lives, the world has largely remained silent,” said U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, last week. That must change now, she added. “The international community must give more. It must do more, and it has to care more.” “For one year, the people of Sudan have been neglected and ignored as they bore the brunt of violent clashes” between the warring parties, said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa, in a statement. “Diplomatic efforts have so far failed to end violations, protect civilians, provide sufficient humanitarian aid, or hold the perpetrators of war crimes to account.” Women prepare a meager meal on Feb. 18 in the yard of a former primary school, one of the numerous sites where thousands displaced by the war are seeking shelter in Sirba, a town north of El Geneina. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Yet the warring parties are as likely to sharpen their hatchets as they are to bury them. The country is roughly split now between west and east, with the RSF ascendant in the former and Burhan and his allies better entrenched in the latter. In its Sudan briefing, the International Crisis Group, a think tank, urged countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to use more of their leverage to bring the feuding factions to heel, open up access for humanitarian relief and place Sudan back on a path to stability. “The alternative is grim to contemplate, as the country teeters on the brink of chaos, mass starvation and a war that could spread across its borders to a troubled region,” noted the Crisis Group. “Time is of the essence – particularly since the parties are inveigling new warlords to join the fight with promises that they will share in victory’s eventual spoils, which promises to make negotiations to end the war that much more difficult.”

A destruição da aliança atlântica por Trump - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 

Today's WorldView

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, Feb 13, 2024 The    As Trump spooks Europe, Biden stirs global anger over Gaza war Then-President Donald Trump with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, on July 7, 2017. (Evan Vucci/AP) Former president Donald Trump’s latest rhetorical grenade shook the West’s preeminent military alliance. Over the weekend, he said he would encourage Russia to attack U.S. allies in NATO if they failed to invest enough on their national defense. The remarks, as well as separate comments about ending U.S. aid to foreign countries, “set off fresh tremors across Washington and in European countries already worried about America’s reliability as an ally in a potential second Trump administration,” my colleagues reported. Trump has long grumbled about the United States' outsize role in NATO and casts President Biden’s support for Ukraine’s struggle to resist Russian invasion as a costly drag on the U.S. taxpayer. The sentiment has captured a segment of the Republican Party, which has blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to earmark some $61 billion in fresh funding for Ukraine. To European onlookers, Trump’s stated hostility is a line in the sand. “Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior German lawmaker and former chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the German parliament, wrote on his Facebook page. “We have to manage this because anything else would be surrender and self-abandonment!” Trump, in the eyes of some European critics, is an existential threat to the Western alliance and its political ethos. “The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude towards allies,” Marko Mihkelson, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian Parliament, told my colleagues. “Unfortunately, he is therefore a very convenient tool for Putin’s Russia, which is waging war against the West.” “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. During his term, Biden reinvigorated the transatlantic alliance, assuring European counterparts about U.S. commitments to their security while coordinating a robust, collective effort to support Kyiv. European diplomats in Washington barely disguise their confidence and trust in the Biden administration, and their apprehensions of what may come should Trump defeat him in November. But on the other key battlefront in the global conversation, Biden has unsettled myriad political elites with his perceived complicity in Israel’s relentless war against Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli campaign, which has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians, many of whom were children, took another deadly turn Monday with the expansion of operations in Rafah, a southern city along the territory’s border with Egypt that’s now hosting more than a million cornered Gazan refugees.

O impasse na Ucrânia: poucas armas, poucos avanços nas frentes de batalha: O Ocidente perdeu a vontade? - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, Jan 31, 2024 Email

Ukraine’s hopes for victory over Russia are slipping away A member of a Ukrainian air defense unit in the woods north of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post/FTWP) It’s hard to ignore the sense of desperation in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Nearing two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, authorities in Kyiv maintain their long-standing entreaty to partners in the West: Deliver us more arms, more aid, more political commitments. President Volodymyr Zelensky toured Western capitals at the end of last year, pleading for support amid growing international fatigue with the conflict and paralysis in U.S. Congress over new supplemental funding for Kyiv. Around the same time, his top general, Valery Zaluzhny, bemoaned the “stalemate” that had set into place after the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 failed to make strategic headway against Russia’s deep defensive lines. U.S. officials and their Western counterparts, as my colleagues reported over the weekend, anticipate a lean year ahead, where Ukraine’s increasingly exhausted forces focus more on consolidating their defense than chipping away at Russia’s land-grabs. The Kremlin controls roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s internationally-recognized territory — including Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014, and a broad sweep of Ukraine’s southeast. The U.S. view of the course of the conflict undercuts Zelensky’s stated ambition of driving Russia out by this October. Last week, Pentagon officials came empty-handed to a monthly 50-nation coordinating meeting for Ukraine, with future U.S. money for arms and aid snared by domestic politics. On the front lines, reports indicate stocks of ammunition and artillery shells are running low for many Ukrainian units. “We get asked what’s our plan, but we need to understand what resources we’re going to have,” Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko told my colleagues. “Right now, everything points to the possibility that we will have less than last year, when we tried to do a counteroffensive and it didn’t work out. … If we will have even less, then it’s clear what the plan will be. It will be defense.” Looming far away from the battlefield is the political drama in Washington. House Republicans have already stymied the latest tranche of funding that President Biden is trying to allocate for Kyiv. Analysts believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding out for a potential return to power of former president Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential candidate for the November election. Trump may scale back support for Ukraine and take a friendlier view of the Kremlin’s security concerns in Eastern Europe. As my colleagues reported, the Biden administration and European allies are working on a longer-term, multilateral plan aimed at warding against this scenario and future-proofing support for Ukraine. That includes pledges of economic and security assistance that stretch into the next decade, and may pave the way for Ukraine to get integrated into Western blocs like the European Union and NATO. Biden is set to unveil the U.S. plank of this strategy in the spring. “The policy holds risks, including political ones, if Ukrainians begin to blame their government for stagnant front lines,” my colleagues wrote. “Likewise, in Western capitals, officials are keenly aware that their citizens’ patience with funding Ukraine’s war is not infinite. Amid the planning, Washington also seems to be readying the argument that, even if Ukraine is not going to regain all of its territory in the near term, it needs significant ongoing assistance to be able to defend itself and become an integral part of the West.” But, in the near term, both the shortfalls on Ukraine’s front lines and divisions in Washington may cement the fate of the war. “While the first half of 2024 may bring few changes in control of Ukrainian territory, the materiel, personnel training, and casualties that each side accrues in the next few months will determine the long-term trajectory of the conflict,” wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. “The West in fact faces a crucial choice right now: support Ukraine so that its leaders can defend their territory and prepare for a 2025 offensive or cede an irrecoverable advantage to Russia.” The West may have already squandered its best chance to enable Ukraine to fully liberate its territory. In his new book, “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence,” Wall Street Journal international correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov outlines how Western governments slow-rolled military support to Ukraine out of fear of triggering a possible nuclear-armed escalation with Russia. The United States and its allies have sent Ukraine an unprecedented flow of aid, but critics say the overly careful calibration of that support undermined the Ukrainian war effort. “The United States and its partners held back from supplying Ukraine with Western-made capabilities at a time when they would have had the biggest effect, and prohibited Kyiv from using Western weapons to strike military targets on Russian soil,” Trofimov wrote, in an adapted excerpt from his book published in The Washington Post. “By the time many of these Western systems did arrive, in the second year of the war, Russia had built up defenses, mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and switched its industries to wartime footing. The best window of opportunity for a clear and quick Ukrainian victory had disappeared.” Other experts aren’t so sure, and contend that the Biden administration had a responsibility to avoid a spiraling confrontation with Russia. “More aid, sooner, would have been better — but there’s no guarantee it would have brought a decisive Ukrainian victory,” wrote Bloomberg Opinion columnist Hal Brands. “The best guarantee of that outcome would have been threatening direct military intervention, a strategy that virtually no one wanted to pursue because the risks were so obvious and, potentially, so severe. Indeed, it would have required Biden to more aggressively cross Russia’s red lines at the very moment when uncertainty about Putin’s response was at its peak.” Instead, Ukrainians and their boosters lament what could have been after Ukrainian forces surprised virtually everyone in repulsing Russia’s initial offensive on Kyiv and defiantly standing their ground in the early months of the war. “He opened his mouth like a python and thought that we’re just another bunny,” Zelensky told Trofimov in a 2022 interview, referring to Putin. “But we’re not a bunny and it turned out that he can’t swallow us — and is actually at risk of getting torn apart himself.” Russia, though, has also stood its ground, withstood international sanctions and is preparing for fresh offensives in Ukraine, on top of its incessant, indiscriminate missile barrages into Ukrainian cities. Kyiv knows its ability to resist hinges on foreign backing. “We wouldn’t survive without U.S. support, it’s a real fact,” Zelensky said in a television interview this month.

Angústias dos humanistas com respeito à resposta brutal de Israel contra Gaza - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

Para reflexão aprofundada... 

Israel’s bombing of Gaza undercuts the West’s Ukraine moralism

By Ishaan Tharoor
with Sammy Westfall 
The Washington Post, Oct 23, 2023

 

Last week, President Biden delivered an impassioned speechlinking the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel. Speaking from the Oval Office, Biden said both the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin and Islamist militant group Hamas “represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.” Extending support to Kyiv’s fight against Russian invasion and Israel’s campaign against Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip were essential, Biden insisted, in showing nations elsewhere that “American leadership is what holds the world together.”

The president made these remarks ahead of unveiling a new $106 billion funding proposal, chiefly in defense spending to back Ukraine and Israel. Biden argued that the world was at yet another “inflection point in history,” with the decisions made by global leaders now likely “to determine the future for decades to come.”

Politicians and diplomats elsewhere also recognize the fraught state of world affairs, but they aren’t all drawing the same conclusions as the White House. Some see an American greenlight in Israel’s pounding of Gaza, and call into question an apparent double standard that Biden’s rhetoric can’t mask.

There was universal revulsion and outrage in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 strike on southern Israel, which saw the brutal slaughter of some 1,400 Israelis and marked the bloodiest single day in the Jewish state’s history. But sixteen days of Israel’s campaign of reprisal in Gaza has already killed 4,651 Palestinians, according to local authorities, including close to 2,000 children. Whole neighborhoods in the crowded territory have been flattened, more than a million people are homeless and a humanitarian crisis veers from bad to worse with fuel stores close to running out. Israeli demands for the mass evacuation of parts of Gaza have raised the specter of ethnic cleansing.

Yet on Wednesday, a day before Biden’s speech, the United States deployed its veto at the United Nations Security Council to shoot down a mildly worded draft resolution put forward by Brazil calling for a humanitarian pause. It was the sole “no” vote on the table, with even allies including France voting in favor. The United States has long shielded Israel from censure at the United Nations, but the recent precedent of its scolding of Russia in the same forum makes the current moment more conspicuous.

U.S. and Western officials have decried the Russian invasion as a breach of international law, a shattering 0f the principles of the U.N. charter and a challenge to the global rules-based order writ large. Many governments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the so-called “Global South” have also condemned Russia’s aggression, but been more cautious to see Ukraine’s plight in the same moral frame as their Western counterparts. They point to the legacy of the United States’ 2003 “preemptive” invasion of Iraq, the West’s comparative indifference to hideous conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere and the hypocrisy of abetting the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories while cheering for the freedom of peoples elsewhere.

On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

While it seems the Biden administration is working behind the scenes to attempt to restrain Israel’s war cabinet, Gaza’s more-than 2 million people are living in a nightmare of airstrikes and explosions and are running out of food, water and places for safe sanctuary. In his speech, Biden stressed the gap between Hamas and the ordinary Palestinians in their midst. “We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity,” he said, pointing to the U.S. efforts to bring in humanitarian assistance — deliveries which aid groups say are staggeringly short of what’s required.

But that rhetoric rings hollow when set against the record of U.S. actions. “If the U.S. and other Western governments want to convince the rest of the world they are serious about human rights and the laws of war, principles they rightly apply to Russian atrocities in Ukraine and to Hamas atrocities in Israel, they also have to apply to Israel’s brutal disregard for civilian life in Gaza,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement after the U.S. veto.

A senior diplomat from a country in the Group of 20 major economies told me that “it’s this kind of behavior that had the Global South so cautious about what the West was doing” when they were cajoling foreign governments to follow their lead on Ukraine. The current U.S. role in blocking action on Gaza, the official added, speaking this weekend on condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to brief journalists, shows “how much of a double standard the U.S. or West’s strategy relies on.”

In Europe, there’s a growing recognition of this tension, too. “What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility,” a senior G-7 diplomat told the Financial Times. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”

It is also a reminder of the failure of the international community — but chiefly, the United States — to revive the dormant peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. “Today, Western governments are paying for their inability to find, or even to seek, a solution to the Palestinian question,” noted an editorial in French daily Le Monde. “In the current tense climate, their support for Israel — which is perceived as exclusive by the rest of the world — risks jeopardizing their efforts to convince Southern countries that international security is at stake in Ukraine.”

The diplomat speaking to the FT gloomily summed up the latest Gaza war’s impact: “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”