This text comes from Federico Rampini’s Global newsletter, reserved for Corriere subscribers: you can receive it free for 30 days by clicking here
In two weeks the world has changed a lot, to our detriment, if by “us” we mean the West. Or at least our perception of the world, its geopolitical balances and balance of power, has drastically deteriorated.
Hamas’ fierce attack on Israeli civilians (live news here) triggered a series of cascading responses: counteroffensive by Israeli forces; Pro-Hamas demonstrations from the squares of Europe to American campuses to all Islamic nations; Terrorist attacks in France and Belgium. One consequence is the sudden weakening of the more pro-Western or less anti-Israel Arab or Islamic leaderships (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Emirates). Within the West itself, the most dangerous political divisions manifest themselves precisely in the leading power, America.
In the background, another event of recent days is significant: the summit in Beijing, at which Xi Jinping celebrated the tenth anniversary of his Belt and Road Initiative (the Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the New Silk Roads). In addition to another embrace between Xi and Vladimir Putin, this summit brought together a large group of leaders from the Global South, underscoring the new division of the world into blocs: the attitude towards Hamas helps to provide the ideological glue in the anti-party to strengthen -Western orientation. An American historian and key geopolitical theorist, Walter Russell Mead, recalls a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s novel Fiesta (1926) about the last two weeks. It is the exchange between two characters in the novel in which Bill Gorton asks Mike Campbell: “How did you go bankrupt?” The answer: “In two ways. Gradually and then all at once.”
As a result, the United States’ deterrence capacity has diminished
It is the metaphor for what Russell Mead says is happening to the American empire, or the Pax Americana, or, in any case, to the deterrent power of the United States.
At first and over many years it gradually worsened. Then his weakness is revealed in a brutal way, through a chain of very close events. America’s enemies are emboldened, they support each other, they emulate each other.
Putin’s repeated offensives, to which there was no effective response (from the Georgian War in 2008 to the annexation of Crimea in 2014), led to aggression against Ukraine in 2022; The prices paid by Putin are significant, but so far not fatal thanks to China’s support; This in turn gave others the idea that the West could be challenged with impunity. In the Middle East, there were various signs of American withdrawal: the famous “red line” that Barack Obama announced to the Syrian dictator Assad (the ultimatum against the use of chemical weapons to massacre civilians) was violated without consequences; Iraq’s slide into Iran’s orbit; the handover of Afghanistan to the Taliban. According to some (the US Republicans), this series of failures and weaknesses also includes Obama’s desired nuclear deal with Iran: it gave the Ayatollah regime evidence that it wanted to convince the West with an ambiguous slowdown in the nuclear program in return for large Economic advantages can deceive advantages; A mistake Biden is still repeating with the recent $6 billion deal in exchange for the release of American hostages.
To the list of mistakes made by the entire West – including Israel – it must be added that since 2005 it has thought of channeling humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people by handing it over to the leadership of Hamas, which promptly turned them into rockets and their subjects left misery behind.
In the Far East, China has received some Western conformity: for example, on a purely military level, when it violated international agreements and laws without paying consequences, with the occupation and militarization of various islands in dispute with its neighbors. The escalation of military threats against Taiwan, the border incidents with India, Vietnam and the Philippines are many other signs that the aggression has not met with strong backlash or resulted in significant disadvantages. Recent events include the rebirth of a harmonious agreement between Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang – as at the beginning of the Cold War in 1950 – in violation of UN resolutions against North Korea that imposed sanctions adopted by China and Russia themselves.
What connects Ukraine and Israel
By asking Congress for new funding to support both Ukraine and Israel (an additional $74 billion immediately and growing), Joe Biden has united these two conflicts under a common theme of defending freedom and democracy. If Ukraine is indeed a democratic and sovereign state, the fall of which would be a blow to Western values, Israel, on the other hand, is the only democracy in the Middle East (whether we like its current prime minister or not). America can afford to fight on two fronts, Biden said, and that statement is beyond doubt. This is all the more true since these are conflicts in which the United States is not directly involved, does not send troops, or engage aircraft or ships in hostilities (at least for the moment). The economic burden is very low compared to previous wars such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The vulnerabilities of the US and the West are completely different: they concern the stability of their alliances; and the stability of the internal front.
What a mistake to underestimate Iran
As for the alliances remaining in the Middle East, it is striking that neither the United States, nor Israel, nor their Arab-African friends have understood how Iran has “sworn death” to the thaw and détente that was changing the geopolitical maps of this region ” had .
After the Abraham Accords (2020), which brought the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan closer to Israel, the grand finale was expected to involve Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia. An era that had lasted since 1947 would have come to an end. An era marked by the desire of many Middle Eastern leaders to destroy Israel while using Israel (and its protector America) as an alibi and scapegoat to direct the wrath of peoples whose futures the ruling classes themselves had ruined . If MBS’s new Saudi course had been successful, Iran would have found itself surrounded and encircled by an Israeli-Arab cordon… like Putin by the cordon of the European Union and NATO countries.
Neither Biden nor Netanyahu nor MbS understood that Iran was willing to shed massive amounts of blood in this area to prevent the scenario that would have relegated the Ayatollahs to the losing side. This political mistake is at least as serious as the Israeli intelligence debacle regarding Hamas’s military preparations. Now all the enemies of the West are openly rejoicing. China joins Russia in avoiding any condemnation of Hamas in order to cement ties with an Islamic world that turns a blind eye to the treatment Beijing inflicts on its Muslims (the Uyghurs, who have Islam eradicated from their minds).
Xi Putin and the Great South embrace
The Beijing summit to mark the tenth anniversary of the New Silk Roads happened to take place on the same day as the tragedy in the Middle East. This summit had many meanings. It was overrun by the Europeans for the first time, with the exception of Hungary’s Orban, confirming that the climate of the new Cold War dictates clear field choices. It was a summit at which little was said about the economy, investment and infrastructure, partly because in these areas the balance of the trillions invested or, more often, lent by China is less exciting than one would like. There was much more talk about foreign policy, always in the tone of a lawsuit against the West, against its leading nation, the United States, and against the still too American-centric world order that the People’s Republic wants to dismantle and replace. The meeting of the Global South in Beijing was a kind of “counting” of governments that share hostility to the West, its history and its values.
Our places compete with us, so do theirs
During the first Cold War, the non-aligned movement, also called the Third World, was launched at an international conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 because they officially sided with neither the First (the West) nor the Third World wanted the second (the communist bloc commanded by the Soviet Union). In reality, however, the most influential leaders of this Third World resembled India’s Nehru: they were more sympathetic to Soviet socialism.
The summit in Beijing in 2023 could be remembered as a similar event: many African and South American leaders profess non-alignment but engage in plenty of anti-Western propaganda. The asymmetry in comparison confirms the difficulties the West is facing. The squares of London and Berlin, as well as some Italian squares, as well as many US cities and most American university campuses, were dominated by pro-Palestinian demonstrations, often openly pro-Hamas. In these demonstrations, condemnation of Israel was mixed with condemnation of America and the entire West. In the other area? In Arab capitals, in Africa, in Russia and in China, there were no expressions of solidarity with the killed Israeli children; No protests against the Hamas massacre.
In Brussels or Paris, we did not see local Islamic communities take to the streets to express condolences to the French and Swedish victims of jihadist terrorism. This asymmetry, as I recall in the next section, is one of Biden’s (many) problems.