A new world order

Last week we noted the extent to which Donald Trump’s supporters had been in denial about his hostility to Ukraine and support for Vladimir Putin. Any remaining doubts on the subject, however, were removed overnight when the United States voted with Russia at the United Nations General Assembly against a resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine.

The General Assembly has passed similar resolutions before – here’s my report on the one two years ago. Like that one, the current resolution repeats the demand “that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” But although the margin is still overwhelming, the ground has shifted: the 2023 resolution was passed 141 to seven; the current one, 93 to 18.

Seven countries switched all the way from voting “yes” to voting “no”: the United States and three of its virtual dependencies (Haiti, the Marshall Islands and Palau); Niger (which had a pro-Russian coup in 2023); and the two most Trumpist states among the former western democracies, Hungary and Israel. (See the voting record here.)

Another 41 countries that had previously voted “yes” either abstained or failed to vote. Most of them are American allies or American-influenced, including many in Latin America and the Middle East. The big ones are Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Five African countries switched from abstention or absence to voting “no”, and Syria (which overthrew its pro-Russian government last year) went the other way.

According to the Guardian’s report, “The US had sought to kill the Ukrainian co-sponsored resolution, and US diplomats had pressured EU and Ukrainian officials in foreign capitals this weekend to withdraw” it. But the majority of Ukraine’s supporters stood firm, including the whole of the European Union apart from Hungary, plus Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, New Zealand, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Even Serbia, a traditional Russian ally, stuck with Ukraine.

With the defection of the US, the world’s wealth is now divided much more evenly: Ukraine’s supporters in aggregate have GDP of about US$39 trillion per annum, as against about 28 trillion for the “no” voters and 33.5 trillion for the abstainers. In terms of population the abstainers (which include China and India) represent the large majority – more than five billion, with a bit over two billion in the “yes” camp and less than one billion for “no”.* But Ukraine’s supporters represent their populations in a much stronger sense, since most of them are democracies while their opponents are mostly autocracies or straight-out dictatorships.

Slowly, uncertainly but encouragingly, the democracies are rallying to resist the Trump/Putin axis. But they – we – should have seen this coming and been prepared. The Republicans at least had the excuse (feeble though it might be) that they were trying to win an election, so burying their heads in the sand was a necessary sacrifice for party unity. But what’s Europe’s excuse? Even if its leaders hoped (as many still do) that the worst would not actually come to pass, that was no reason not to prepare for it.

The problem is bigger than Trump and of longer standing. The twin project of tearing up the US constitution and the international rule book did not start with him; it started with George W Bush and the invasion of Iraq. Over three decades, something very disturbing has been happening to the Republican Party. Sarah Posner pointed to it six years ago:

Right-wing lawmakers, lobbyists, consultants, media outlets, and think tanks have worked for years to foment the Republican base’s opposition to “global elites.” … Today’s conservative leaders … have come of age under the conviction that U.S. policies supporting democracy, human rights, and a free press abroad are all essentially equivalent to their domestic enemy—liberalism—and therefore must be destroyed.

Ilya Somin in a suitably trenchant piece today says the betrayal of Ukraine “may well go down in history as one of the worst American foreign policy decisions, simultaneously evil and stupid.” But much the same could have been said twenty years ago about the Iraq war. And Republican domestic policy was on a par, undermining democracy (starting with the theft of the 2000 election) and weakening the constitutional safeguards that protected America and the world from an autocrat in the White House.

Many European leaders courageously opposed those policies. But evidently none of them drew the logical conclusion that the US was on the way to becoming a rogue state and therefore an unreliable ally, and that one day they might well be left in the lurch. Resources (both physical and moral) should have been put aside against the day when the democracies might have to fend for themselves.

Now it is late. Very late. Let’s hope it is not too late.

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* These figures are all based on the calculations I did two years ago and so will be slightly out of date, but you get the general idea.