The West’s chance of winning the Global South has dimmed as the Gaza war rages
Narendra Modi. The Biden administration drew up various schemes involving India in alliances with Israel and rich Arab countries, aimed in part at stemming Chinese influence. A European Council on Foreign Relations report echoed the new Western consensus: The West needed to woo friendly members of the Global South such as India and Turkey if it was to build a new world order.
Now that the conflict in West Asia threatens to prematurely terminate this Western infatuation, it is worth asking what it was all about. Did the project of winning over emerging nations reflect wishful thinking and image-projection by Western elites? Certainly, the romancing seemed to ignore the reality that its object might have contradictory interests—the fact, for instance, that India could not swiftly wean itself off cheap oil from Russia and manufactured goods from China, even as it pursued military deals with Western powers. The West’s overnight interest in the Global South was rooted more in expedient self-interest than a sober understanding of its intricacies.
The phrase ‘Global South’ itself flourished only after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, driven by the awkward realization that non-cooperation from Asian, African and Latin American countries could doom the Western effort against Vladimir Putin. Putin’s war machine, indirectly funded by both India and China, appears to have withstood Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and support for Kyiv is likely to ebb even among its biggest Western supporters. Meanwhile, the Biden administration failed to enlist any major country of the Global South in its cause.
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