US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Munich on Friday. WOLFGANG RATTAY (Portal)
The news of Alexei Navalny's death broke on Friday like an ominous, dramatic lightning strike in the rooms of the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, the traditional headquarters of the Munich Security Conference, just at the time of the forum, which gathers in the hundreds every year in the Bavarian capital Political and political conferences meeting military leaders from much of the world were preparing to begin. Many have since thought what the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, said on the main stage the next day: “Putin wanted to send a message to all of us.” A message of complete confrontation with the West, whose leaders have in the past respected the physical Navalny's integrity and the complete disregard for democracy.
Putin is not alone in this confrontation. Iran supplies it with drones. North Korea, ammunition. As far as we know, China does not supply weapons, but provides economic oxygen through trade, including technological products essential to Russia's war economy; and political oxygen, through several high-level meetings and joint declarations calling for a new world order while reaffirming that democracy and human rights are relative concepts. Ukraine complains that Beijing is helping Moscow with its cyber attacks.
And of course the confrontation in question is not just about Ukraine. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, put it this way in her speech on Saturday at the Munich conference: “It's not just about Ukraine, but about sending a signal to others.” The question is whether democracy will survive in the world and whether we can defend our values. The answer has to be yes,” he said.
“Putin’s war is a war against a rules-based world,” Zelensky said. “I hope it doesn’t become yesterday’s world,” he added, with a sad reference to Zweig’s memoirs.
What is clear is that the whole world is watching today to see what fate Putin's invasion will suffer, what resistance the fifty democracies that support Ukraine will offer – the reaction Von der Leyen speaks of. €”. Each individual will draw conclusions, and of course these will be heavily influenced by whether or not Donald Trump wins the November presidential election in the United States.
A pulse beyond Ukraine
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Putin himself has made it clear that the fight is not just about Ukraine. “This is not a territorial conflict and it is not an attempt to achieve regional geopolitical balance. “This question is broader and more fundamental and concerns the basic principles of the new international order,” the Russian president said at the last Valdai Forum.
Putin traveled to Munich in 2007 to warn that the current world order was not working for him and that he rejected the primacy of the United States. And he made it clear that he was ready to question this situation. Bush's USA, having illegally invaded Iraq, decided to open NATO's door to Ukraine and Georgia. Putin did not respect the freedom of the countries he considers his sphere of influence to decide their future and, in view of the West's largely passivity, de facto resorted to measures against both countries. And it continued even further, leading to today's unbridled conflict.
Amid the challenge launched by Putin, the solidarity between autocratic regimes is evident, but this does not mean that they form a seamless unity. The much more connected European pole is also not present.
Wang Yi, China's most important foreign policy representative, tried in Munich to portray his country as a stabilizing force in a turbulent environment. “The most important message I bring is that China is a responsible actor and will act as a strong stabilizing force. This will be achieved by promoting cooperation between major powers,” Wang said. Beijing has a keen interest in the stability of a system that allows it to thrive. At the same time, the country has become more confident under Xi Jinping's longer rule, bolstered by its new prosperity.
Don't marginalize China
Beyond the reassuring message, Wang's intervention revealed worrying cracks. “Anyone who tries to marginalize China in the name of risk reduction policy will be making a historic mistake,” he said emphatically. Meanwhile, both the US and the EU are actively working to reduce their dependence on China. However, when asked by conference president Christoph Heusgen whether it would be appropriate for Beijing to increase pressure on Moscow to contain its invasion, Wang replied dryly that he rejected “any attempt to blame China for this.” Meanwhile, bilateral trade between the two countries is breaking records, exceeding $200 billion in 2023.
The harmony is obvious. “We are experiencing a phase of change that is unparalleled in 100 years. “When we are together, we lead this change,” Xi told Putin as he left after a meeting last March, probably not realizing that the brief conversation was being recorded before he got into the official car.
Amid this struggle between democracies and authoritarian regimes, the West is having great difficulty recruiting new partners. The Munich Security Conference has made it clear that its position in the Middle East conflict puts it at risk of projecting a disastrous image of double standards at the global level that is damaging to it.
Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, spoke of “a more urgent need than ever to establish a Palestinian state that guarantees the security of Israel.” The head of American diplomacy has reiterated in recent weeks that Israel's response to the Hamas attack is causing excessive suffering for Palestinian civilians. But the world is fully aware that the United States has done nothing in the past to ensure the establishment of this state. And while he mourns the civilian deaths today, he continues to arm Israel with weapons. In a statement, the EU called on Israel not to continue the Rafah offensive in the southern Gaza Strip. However, it does not review the terms of its relations with the country led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Of course, Putin's offensive war, which lacks any justification, is different from Israel's reactionary war after the Hamas attack. But the West's inaction in the face of decades of oppression, occupation and illegal colonization of lands, and in the face of the brutality of the Israeli response, leaves it completely open to criticism of hypocrisy. The illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 doesn't help either.
A large group of countries, the so-called Global South, largely refuses to join. These include full-fledged democracies, fragile or authoritarian regimes. Many of them regret the ongoing confrontation in the Northern Hemisphere, which is having a negative impact on them, while at the same time they are trying to exploit the competition between powers to achieve better returns.
This competition, this confrontation is underway. It does not have the ideological component of the Cold War, but, as then, is clearly an impulse of power that is now being articulated between a group of authoritarian regimes that are demanding an order more favorable to them and the democracies that have done so a prominent position since the Second World War.
Navalny's death is a symbol of this pulse, widening the gap between those in the democratic world who regret him and those who prefer to look the other way. Incidentally, China declined to comment, pointing out that this was an “internal matter” for Russia.
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