Who would have thought that most of the world prefers a uniform set of international rules to a U.S. rules-based order from which the U.S. is exempt? From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
The Global South – or perhaps more acutely, the Global Majority – is a loose club of countries who share growing confidence in their economic strength and in their ability to resist US hegemony in favour of working with multiple poles in pursuit of their own national interest instead of America’s interests. The US has been unable to recruit the Global South into its historically convenient portrayal of an unprovoked Russian invasion or to pressure it into its sanction regime against Russia. And this emerging trend in the Global South is being cemented by the US position in the two wars being fought in Ukraine and Gaza. The price of the position the US is taking could be the loss of the Global Majority.
The main issue is not the issue of right or wrong. The Global South is consistently aligned with the US in its condemnation of Hamas’ atrocious attack on Israel on October 7. The main issue is the consistent application of international law. The essence of international law grounded in the charter system and the UN is its universal application. The main issue for the Global South is that UN led international law not be replaced in global affairs by a US led rules-based order in which the unwritten rules are made up as you go along and in which the rules are invoked when they benefit the US and its partners and are not invoked when they don’t.
What is at risk for the Global South is the preservation of international law; what is at risk for the US in the positions it is taking in Ukraine and Gaza is the Global Majority’s trust. In the eyes of the Global South, the US is being exposed as the hypocritical hegemon that invokes international law unevenly in the service, not of global justice, but of American advantage that it has long accused the US of being.
