The Global South and a ‘new’ multipolar world, By Confidence MacHarry

As was the case during the Cold War, where lesser dictators fought other powers to secure their rule and maximize their profits, this will be the case now and in the future. Like the Cold War, one power in the East did not care about democracy and human rights. As a result, the least pretentious will sink deeper into less pretense in the years to come.

With the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, it becomes increasingly clear that this is most likely China’s century, and we all live in it as tenants. In almost every geopolitical trend, there is a loser. Nowhere is the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia clearer than two: Israel and the Uighurs.

The Trump Administration’s engineered Abraham Accords, for all their successes, failed to accomplish one major victory: over-the-top Saudi-Israeli normalization. This is not a problem for the White House, which feels that under-the-radar security cooperation between the two will naturally pave the way for full normalization in the coming years. Israel desperately wants it to happen because it needs to support the anti-Iranian coalition in the region.

Now China has pulled Riyadh and Tehran into a room and made them sing kumbaya, the Saudis will not be much interested in such an offer, at least for now. Although talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia have been going on for almost two years with the knowledge of Israel, the announcement last Friday still took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who was on an official trip to Italy – by surprise, and the Israelis did not take it well. . Benny Gantz’s criticism of Netanyahu’s coalition government’s attack on the country’s courts, in which he cited a deal mediated by China, was revealed. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Eli Cohen, was ordered to visit Riyadh on Sunday, but the lack of security assurances by his host made him cancel the visit. This means only one thing: the Saudis, in their desperate search for security, know for the first time that the US can no longer guarantee security to Iran and its proxies, and Israel may not be able to defeat Iran in the current situation. It is then in the best interest of Saudi Arabia to have an elephant in the room on its side, even in the most backhanded way.

Using the Uighurs as a case for the Global South: I was born five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I didn’t get to witness the politics of the Cold War, but I’ve been around long enough to see what I’ve read and learned behind the scenes. The latter surfaced: two centers of power emerged in the old pattern of East and West division.

For we are in the Global South, getting a multipolar world with various key power centers is almost impossible. Even with the Congress System, which began at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and ended in 1914, there were usually European affairs with sub-centers of power, which acted as a balance. What we are seeing today is a return to the post WWII era of two major power centers. The biggest losers in this context are the Uighurs – Muslims in China’s Northwest Xinjiang autonomous region whose rights have been suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party in its quest for cohesion. China’s decision to ask two of the three largest and most prominent centers of Islam to the room to ask them to work for Chinese interests (energy security) is a blow to the Uighurs, because it robs the key of international moral support. None of the major players in the Middle East will give a flying flamingo about their fate. The arrestee, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, has also shown that he is interested in all the problems of the Muslim world, except for the Uighurs.

Using the Uighurs as a case for the Global South: I was born five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I didn’t get to witness the politics of the Cold War, but I’ve been around long enough to see what I’ve read and learned behind the scenes. The latter surfaced: two centers of power emerged in the old pattern of East and West division. Both centers will shop for allies and neutrals. As a result, like the main centers of Muslim power facing the Uighurs in the agreement with China, as well as East and West, in search of allies and non-allies, will face violations of human rights and autocratic tendencies of the government. Global South.

As was the case during the Cold War, where lesser dictators fought other powers to secure their rule and maximize their profits, this will be the case now and in the future. Like the Cold War, one power in the East did not care about democracy and human rights. As a result, the least pretentious will sink deeper into less pretense in the years to come.

In the final analysis, the idea of ​​a bipolar or multipolar world where one balances the power of the other looks good on paper. However, a deeper look and understanding shows that the world is not necessarily better.

America has shown as much when in December 2018, Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton explained the doctrine of strategic competition with China and Russia as a fundamental component of US relations with Africa. Security-themed cooperation has given life to dictators like Yoweri Museveni. The same relationship has made President Ismail Omar Guelleh of Djibouti, one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world, has been in office since 1999. This also explains why not only the US has been soft in sanctioning the Buhari administration for its anti-democratic actions, but the Prime British Minister Rishi Sunak hastened to congratulate APC’s Bola Tinubu for being declared the winner of the obviously flawed election, which has barely passed the basic test of what representative democracy looks like.

In the final analysis, the idea of ​​a bipolar or multipolar world where one balances the power of the other looks good on paper. However, a deeper look and understanding shows that the world is not necessarily better.

Confidence MacHarry is an analyst at SBM Intelligence.