EDITORIAL: The war of attrition in Ukraine and the shameless, torturous genocide in Gaza have exposed, perhaps decisively, the utter failure of the world’s elite countries to maintain even a semblance of order in the international community.
Blinded by its reckless obsession of expanding nato, decades after the death of the Soviet communist threat, as well as its free pass to Israel to do anything and everything, including naked barbarism against Gaza’s women and children, the world’s sole superpower is indeed guilty of dragging the whole world down the gutter.
It doesn’t get any more serious that a former Russian president – Dimitry Medvedev – warning, very seriously, about world war three if there is not a very serious de-escalation, on multiple fronts, very quickly.
Yet Washington is fast-tracking billions more to Ukraine and dispatching warships to the Arabian sea, besides bolstering its special forces units in Iraq and Syria, ensuring that more war not peace will be the way forward. Already, the information superhighway is abuzz with conspiracy theories about China exploiting the moment to tighten the screws on Taiwan. What will be next?
People have short memories, but markets do not. They are still recovering from the shock of the Covid shutdowns that rattled supply chains and played havoc with commodity prices. Now, the US and the EU economies struggling to avoid recession, emerging markets holding their breath because they will follow closely regardless of the direction, and China’s mammoth real estate and shadow banking sectors imploding, a war that lights up the Middle East and traumatises the oil market is the last thing they need.
There’s also the terrible humanitarian catastrophe to consider, of course. The world has seldom known, much less seen so vividly, such large-scale extermination of innocent civilians as the horrifying images from Gaza carve on its consciousness with every passing hour of Israel’s revenge.
The UN (United Nations) has called Gaza the “graveyard of children” on multiple occasions. Yet there’s nothing anybody can do because it is shielded by the so-called free world.
It is only natural, therefore, for the world to split into blocs once again; between countries that allow this sort of horrific bloodshed, even condone it, and those that are appalled by it. History also teaches us that cruelty, when institutionalised like this, only feeds more disruptive forces that perpetrators of this violence later call terrorism. And then another cycle begins, much like the Hamas surprise attack in Israel triggered this one.
There is a very urgent need to pull back from this insanity. But when the world’s leading countries are relentlessly pushing it into the abyss, and the only international body that gathers almost all nations on one platform – the United Nations – is so willingly impotent, there seems very little chance of good sense prevailing.
Countries, like Pakistan, that have opted for neutrality in the Ukraine war and called for an immediate end to the madness in Gaza, face stiff pressure from Washington to get in line about Ukraine and keep silent, at least, about Palestinians.
Faced with prompt sovereign default without IMF’s bailout, which will disappear without America’s backing, Islamabad is sticking to its principled position. Other countries, like Turkey, have been more active in sorting out the Ukraine issue and much more vocal about putting Israel in its place.
Even Russia has categorically rejected Israel’s official position about “defending its borders” as baseless, openly calling it an occupying power.
It is a shame that influential global leaders and leading countries are bent upon adding fuel to fire just when the world, as we know it, sits on a knife edge.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023