The West vs. the Rest
Welcome to the 21st-century Cold War.
By Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres at the Kremlin in Moscow on April 26. VLADIMIR ASTAPKOVICH/SPUTNIK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
MAY 2, 2022, 2:33 PM
Russian President Vladimir Putin made four major miscalculations before he launched his invasion of Ukraine. He overestimated Russian military competence and effectiveness and underestimated the Ukrainians’ will to resist and determination to fight back. He was also wrong in his assumption that a distracted West would be unable to unite politically in the face of the Russian attack and that the Europeans and the United States’ Asian allies would never support far-reaching financial, trade, and energy sanctions against Russia.
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Putin’s War
How the world is dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But he did get one thing right: He correctly estimated that what I call “the Rest”—the non-Western world—would not condemn Russia or impose sanctions. On the day the war broke out, U.S. President Joe Biden said the West would make sure that Putin became a “pariah on the international stage”—but for much of the world, Putin is not a pariah.
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For the past decade, Russia has been cultivating ties with countries in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa—regions from which Russia withdrew after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. And the Kremlin has assiduously courted China since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. When the West sought to isolate Russia, Beijing stepped in to support Moscow, including by signing the massive “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline deal.
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