Only two global superpowers remain

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While the Russian ship Lady R Moored at the South African port of Simon’s Town last December, it was loaded with weapons intended to kill Ukrainians, according to the United States. For Europeans, the news was as disconcerting and upsetting as India consuming Russian oil or Brazil President Lula accuses Russia and Ukraine also for the war.

We are right to be upset. These Southern powers are silent about crimes committed outside their neighborhood. They watch the invasion of Russia with helpless nihilism, wondering only how they can profit from it. But then, the European states of today resemble each other. We have renounced distant crises. The ambitions of France, the United Kingdom and even Russia are reduced to the point that they are no longer anything more than neighborhood powers. It’s just that while the powers of the south accept that’s what they are, the fallen empires of Europe still pretend to be something more.

The powers of the South start from an understanding of Western hypocrisy. They know our habit of presenting our own problems as those of the world – for example, calling Ukraine “a war for global democracy”. They are just as lucid about Russia. They do not accept Vladimir Putin’s story that the West forced him to destroy Ukraine. An official from a Russian-friendly southern power told me that as Russia “falls apart,” its government is slowly slipping away. His country is neither pro-Russian nor anti-Western. It’s just pro-itself.

Southern powers tend to be insular: even their elites rarely travel abroad. They are barely heard in the global conversation. They do not wage foreign wars. They are overwhelmed with basic domestic problems: providing their fellow citizens with food, electricity and toilets. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa worries less about the Russian massacres than about rivals within his ruling party, the ANC.

Until very recently, the major European powers still had global ambitions. This often meant treating poor countries as their hunting ground. Britain sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, and France to West Africa. Together, in 2011, they overthrew the leader of Libya, Colonel Gaddafi. Russia has ventured everywhere, from Syria to mali.

But they all went too far. Since 2021, the United Kingdom and France abandoned their failed foreign missions. The British Army is the the smallest since Napoleonic times. Only 0.2% of the remaining troops are based in Asia or Oceania. Britain has reached the end of its “great game”, said former senior Foreign Office official Simon McDonald. New Statesman magazine this month. Similarly, Russia is so extended in Ukraine that it even loses control of its other neighborhood, Central Asia.

European powers always speak global – literally, in the case of “global Britain”. France, ridiculously, describes itself as “Indo-Pacific Power” based on having 1.5 million citizens scattered across various impoverished islands there. But the French naval chief of staff compared competition with other navies in the Pacific to “show up in a 2CV car for a Formula 1 race”. The Western military alliance, NATO, is now limited to Europe, where it has never fought before.

Russia aspires to be the bogeyman of the West, which is like a second division side imagining they are rivals to Manchester City. In fact, perhaps Europe’s most expansive neighborhood powerhouse is Turkey, which benefits from what estate agents call “location, location, location.” Its neighborhood covers Syria, grain exports via the Black Sea and the crossing of refugees from the Middle East.

But outside their neighborhood, the European powers display the same impotent nihilism that we deplore in others. When Sudan’s capital Khartoum erupted in fighting, the height of French ambition was to evacuate the Europeans; Saudi Arabia and the United States negotiated a peace agreement. Likewise, European powers have seen war criminal Bashar al-Assad win the civil war in Syria and begin to rehabilitate himself internationally. They sold weapons to Saudi Arabia who decimated Yemen. And they abandoned the Palestinians and the Ethiopian region of Tigray, where more people may have been killed than in Ukraine. Our powerlessness renders Putin’s fantasy that the West plans to invade and subjugate Russia absurd. We couldn’t even subdue the Taliban.

There is Global China and Global US (for now), but not Global anything else. If the two superpowers clash over Taiwan, each neighborhood power intends to watch from the public, although only Emmanuel Macron was rude enough to say so.

I am delighted that we support Ukraine. That’s what you should do. Secondarily, it helps the West: having a common enemy creates unity, reduces stupidity and reminds us that we do have values. But we only do it because Putin kills white people in our neighborhood. We care about Yemen as much as South Africa cares about Ukraine.

Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and send him an e-mail at simon.kuper@ft.com

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