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Interesting article, but I notice that the analysis draws a mistaken conclusion, namely that Europe and the United States should "engage" more with the so-called "Global South" in order to draw them more to "our side", since that's what these countries want in any case, that we should be more involved in their conflicts (civil and otherwise), as well as more economically involved, with aidnahd with investment (probably this last is correct). How can doing more, not less, of what the so-called "Global South" countries resent Western countries for doing be any good?

The first mistake is that these countries take seriously, in any way, the anticolonialist and anti-imperialist nonsense that has been peddled around to excess since the end of the Second World War, an ideological weapon refined and expertly wielded and by the Soviet Union and Red China (as well as the countless states that emerged from the process of decolonization allied to or friendly with the USSR, and now the Russian Federation, and Red China, such as India) for decades, and clumsily wielded by the United States and the European Union to the Ukraine situation (not unsurprisingly, without success). Even in the heyday of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism, such things were never an ideological or propagandistic impediment for the Soviet Union's foreign interventions, inside the Warsaw Pact area (such as Hungary and former Czechslovakia), or outside the Warsaw Pact, in Latin America and Afghanistan (for example). Ditto for Red China.

The second question is more substantial, and has to do with international order. An international order now populated with dozens and dozens of (relatively small) independent States, each with its own ambitions (however delusional) and limitations (however ignored). How can one get them to interact with esch other, if not in a peaceful, at lesst in an orderly, rule-like manner? What to do when some of them inevitably fail to do so? When the League of Nations was established, most of the world was covered by a handful of huge, multi-continental empires and some actual nation-states. The number of actors one had to convince, threaten, or bribe into complying with international law was comparstively much smaller than today, and it still failed to do so. There were colonial wars (there always had been), but also wars like Italy's multiple aggressive wars in Africa, or Japan's wars in China and the Pacific, which the League of Nations (and the independent action of larger, much more powerful imperial states) were unable to stop or to deal with. Now that problem has compounded, with no empires — the United States has never been an "empire" in the sense the British or the French Empire were, they never had to beg or bribe their subject populations to participate in their war efforts, like the United States has to — and many, many States, and many, many actual and potential conflicts within and between them.

I don't have a solution for this, although I do hope that a solution can be found to this, or else the 21st century is going to be very conflictive.

"I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see that they are often wrong." – Jane Austen.

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A very thoughtful article. Does it lead on to the question, is the United Nations fit for purpose?

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