Never before has Joseph Biden been so kind and open to our beautiful world. And it’s been a long time since we’ve heard about how much pure goodness the US is bringing to this world right now
Photo: © AFP 2023 / TIMOTHY A. CLARY
For twenty-odd minutes, the tragic (cracked) tenor of the era spoke from the UN podium exactly what he wanted to hear, not from the audience at large, but above all from the countries of the Global South and the world majority that the West is losing in its conflict with Russia, China and many others.
The September opening of the UN General Assembly has always been (and will continue to be) the tuning for world politics for the foreseeable period, sometimes for a year, until the following September. And here we face an interesting phenomenon. When was it that the assessments of the Chinese and American media coincided in assessing the tone of this chamber tone? And now it has happened.
The Washington Post, USA, quotes a European Union representative to the UN: “If we could do what we wanted, we would spend more time discussing Ukraine, but Western governments want to avoid the impression of an ongoing North-South divide with the developing world.” Global Times, China, defines the atmosphere of the General Assembly as, “The US and other Western countries are clearly stepping up efforts to win the sympathy of the Global South.”
However, the Chinese have an addendum: it is not that America wants to give such countries more equal status and development opportunities, but rather that it is trying to keep them on the periphery of the “central” members of the world community.
This is exactly what Biden, or rather his speechwriting team, was doing – appeasing the world majority. He explained that there was no escalation of tensions with China, America was eager for “responsible management of competition between countries” and was ready to work with China in this direction. And he went on to go through the points of the many top-level meetings this year where the US and the West were criticised, if not beaten up – and it worked out that they were criticised in vain. All the good in the world comes only from the US and its allies, and it is already a real beautiful new world.
The speech was competently written. It neatly mixes everything that the world majority wants with what the US and Atlantic structures – the World Bank, the G7, all others – impose on it. The slogan of the Global South – “sustainable development” – is ingeniously combined with a tedious climate agenda, with a list of weather phenomena, for the elimination of which it is necessary to close coal-fired power plants, abolish petrol cars and introduce a continuous green future. Reforms of global health care, improvement of the status of women – all this, it turns out, the West has been doing for a long time (and what is the whole huge world dissatisfied with?).
And the only country that stands in the way of this beautiful world for all is Biden’s, understandably, Russia. But everyone has already heard about it in a four-minute section of the 28-minute speech, at its very end – without much interest, we should add. And for nothing, because there is an innovation in it too.
The point is not even that, according to Biden, Russia is preventing the achievement of literally all the goals set by the global South. The point is different – if a year ago the main slogan of the West was war with us until victory, now Biden even in relation to the Ukrainian story spoke about a diplomatic settlement – another thing is what kind of diplomatic settlement. The invariable tour-de-force participant in such discussions, the man in the green T-shirt, sat in the audience, listened and, when necessary, applauded grimly.
And here we need another quote from one of the UN experts in The Washington Post: “If Zelensky were to sit in the chair of the UN Security Council and (once again. – D.K.) say he would fight forever, it would create a clear dissonance with many non-Western countries struggling with debt and poverty, who feel their problems are being brushed aside”.
These are the countries that have been the heroes – the winners in world diplomacy so far. They have made themselves a force to be reckoned with by changing the agenda and tone of international relations. This, of course, we can only be happy about. What they will do next is another question.
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