On social media, some disturbing maps have circulated showing the globe in terms of which nations have sanctioned Russia over her invasion of Ukraine. Bolivian writer Ollie Vargas posted this map, which makes clear that sanctions in Russia are seen as an absolute must in Europe, the English-speaking world, Japan, and South Korea. Everywhere else, President Biden’s requests for economic war against Russia have been rejected.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently claimed that we have “basically crushed” Russia’s economy through sanctions, but is this true? The sanctions can’t work in crushing the Russian economy and forcing the ouster of Putin if only a small percentage of the globe is really sanctioning Moscow. Despite how important the United States and her allies are, Russia still has a huge playing field in which to recover trade.
Domestically, the Democrats have prided themselves on being the party of inclusion. They spent half a decade convincing all of us that Trump was racist; Republicans were despised white supremacists; and people of color everywhere would embrace the liberal diversity gestures of Walt Disney, the Clinton Global Initiative, Twitter, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and Harvard University. It seems black, brown, yellow, and otherwise non-white people have told Biden’s progressive party to take a hike.
Perhaps they see in Biden everything that the Democrats condemned Trump for; they just happen to think Trump does a better job at being Trump than Biden does. Trump never tried to bully them into starving their citizens of Russian wheat, petrochemicals, fertilizer, barley, rye, gas, and oil. Apparently this little detail matters a lot more than rumors that Trump once talked about s-hole countries.
It is hard to interpret events as anything other than a massive blow to American credibility abroad. Around the world, people sympathize with innocent civilians harmed in Ukraine. But there’s a difference in how people moralize and assign blame. Europeans, Anglophone nations, Japan, and South Korea take America’s claims and promises seriously mostly because their experience with American credibility has been rather helpful.
On the other hand, now would be a good time for all those Critical Race theorists in New York and California to update their antiquated assumptions. People outside the tidy U.S. sphere of influence don’t see the Ukraine invasion as a simple bad/good dichotomy. Many recognize that the 2014 coup d’état that put the current Ukrainian regime in power as a typical Western intelligence operation, something they can recognize from their own histories. Therefore, they aren’t swayed simply by the idea that Zelensky is naturally the good guy by virtue of being the one holding power before the war started. A lot of them look at Zelensky and see a puppet, an agent of Western infiltration and subversion, not very different from the countless phonies that the CIA has installed in the four corners of the globe.
Most depressing is the fact that a lot of the world just doesn’t believe us. They don’t have a lot of reason to believe us because the Biden administration got caught in quite a few recent lies. Our reason for taking such keen interest in a dispute between Russia and Ukraine looks suspicious, given how many hotspots exist on the globe, which the United States all but ignores.
Americans think the rest of the world sees a nation leading the charge for freedom, democracy, prosperity, and human kindness. The rest of the world sees some of that glowing idealism, mixed with a great deal of cynicism and hypocrisy. It used to be Republicans who didn’t want to concede that people abroad had some reason for distrusting the U.S. Now the Democrats are incapable of considering whether their fascination with green energy, LGBT rights, feminism, race, and Big Tech persuades people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America or just creeps a lot of people out.
Who are the countries that said no?
That Africa and the Middle East would shrug off Biden’s calls is not that surprising, given that the United States has never treated issues in Africa as a high priority.
After the War on Terror, we did not expect Middle Eastern countries to jump on Biden’s bandwagon, especially since Biden voted in favor of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
The high-profile refusals of China and India are disconcerting, to say the least, given their enormous populations (together nearly eight times the population of the U.S.) and the prospects that their continued commerce with Russia could create an alternate world economy from which the United States will have effectively exiled herself.
But perhaps the most underreported, and indeed most dangerous defections from U.S. dominance have taken place in Latin America. Mexico’s president hails from the Party of the Democratic Revolution and has been celebrated for being the first truly indigenous leader of the tenth most populous country in the world (close to 130 million people). You would think a man with such lefty credentials would be positively thrilled to work with a Democrat after four years of Trump…but you would be wrong.
