How much is Russia spending on its invasion of Ukraine? Peanuts.

If it wasn’t so serious, it would be comical. Here’s what was meant to happen. After Russia fell upon Ukraine in February 2022, the international community – other than those the West has designated rogue and pariah states – would rally to condemn and resist the atrocity. The largest act of predation against a sovereign state in living memory was a great wrong that must be righted. Vladimir Putin’s attempted annexation was a security threat to all. It violated a precious, postwar global norm, the norm against conquest. This threatened the “Global South”, a condescending term of art for poor, postcolonial countries that lumps together everyone from Burundi, the poorest state on earth, to India, which has a space program.

The mantra was screamed: under the “global leadership” of the United States with its NATO and treaty allies in Asia, the peoples of South America, Africa, the Middle East and Oceania would come together to repudiate not only the invasion of Ukraine, but the old order of imperial aggression, sphere‐​of‐​influence prerogatives, genocidal expansionism and great power presumption. It was not just a collective effort to help Ukraine against an aggressor. It was a noble undertaking to rescue the world from the nineteenth century. For a time, it looked as though this might come true. As Russia recognised secessionist republics in Ukraine and mobilised on the border, Kenyan ambassador Martin Kimani made a celebrated speech at the United Nations Security Council. With moral clarity dialled up to “11”, he linked Putin’s despoilation of his neighbor with a past that should be left behind, warning against stirring the “embers of dead empires”.

Then, as Russia’s initial assault met unexpected resistance, Joe Biden, in his State of the Union address in March 2022 spoke of a world response. Putin “thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met a wall of strength he never imagined.” Large majorities of the UN General Assembly condemned the invasion and called for Russia’s unconditional and immediate withdrawal. Russia, observers enthused, was ever more “isolated”. Was the moment of Western unity also one of international solidarity?

No, it was not. Outside the Western orbit, the US and its treaty allies, countries have not put their money where their mouths are. Indeed, they are frequently cautious with their mouths. Kenya, whose envoy denounced empire, has since hedged on the question. Its UN vote aside, it did not condemn the invasion. As Patrick Porter noted (a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham in the UK and a brilliant read on real great power politics and the consequences of the West’s decline):

President William Ruto of Kenya needs to purchase Russian oil to steady local fuel prices, and fertilisers to help farmers against drought, just as Malawi accepts Moscow’s fertiliser donation as the Russian flag fluttered alongside Kenya’s in Lilongwe. A similar pattern of accommodation holds in many other places, as Russia launches its own scramble for Africa with exports of grain too. Larger, richer nations also stand aloof from the exhortations of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. India abstains in UN votes and raises its crude oil imports from Russia significantly, as does China, which purchases raw materials and energy at a discount. NATO member Turkey has played both sides, dealing as it must also with inflation, an earthquake and dependence on Russian energy.

Those eager to play up Russia’s “isolation” point to votes at the UN, but this is weak tea. Talk, and gestures that promise no further commitment, are cheap. Such votes are largely ceremonial and low‐​cost. Raising an arm to condemn an invasion without backing it up with hard coercion may look significant. But judge states, rather, by what they materially do. For “global norms” to be real, they must be non‐​expendable, going beyond in‐​principle abstractions. Countries must be willing to bleed for them. To be meaningful and effective, isolating Russia would not stop where a nation’s trade and arms begin.

Let us face the brutal facts. Russia is not “isolated”. Global norms are disposable. Most of the world does not crave any one state’s “leadership”. This past year has featured one large non‐​event, the worldwide rallying that wasn’t. So why are these countries hedging? And why can’t some informed observers in the West see this simple truth?

One answer on offer is a cultural‐​historical one, one noted in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Matias Spektor, a Professor of International Relations and founder of the School of International Relations at FGV in São Paulo, Brazil, who examines climate change politics, political violence, and international security in the Global South:

Countries are hedging out of anti‐​Western sentiments, such as grievances over European imperial legacies. East Africa journalist Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu has detailed the West’s oppressive behaviour in the past and present accounted for African countries’ reluctance to join the coalition behind the “good fight”. Similarly, you can see South Africa’s hedging flows from its historical non‐​alignment and fidelity to Russia’s friendship with the anti‐​apartheid movement. This general refusal to harken is a “protest” vote against Western misbehaviour, from vaccine hoarding to under‐​funding of climate mitigation measures. It flows from a general suspicion that Western moral talk is part of the old game of the strong pressuring and patronising the weak.

But who is being patronising, exactly? You can easily argue that these explanations, benign and well‐​intended, are also naïve and Western‐​centric. In a kind of reverse narcissism, they make the issue almost exclusively about “us” and our historical failures and crimes. The world in these litanies is little more than a morality play about Western error and redemption. Power politics in the “Global South” is missing in action. Those countries, in this account, exist and think almost entirely in the past.

That approach is profoundly mistaken. While the past haunts everyone, those in charge of countries that aren’t Western client states must live aggressively in the present. These regimes care more about their own survival, and/​or their peoples’ hunger and basic needs, than sacrificing for international principles. Against the grain of so much discussion, they do not act primarily as former colonial subjects. They are not enslaved to a resentful memory of empire or displeasure at the more recent hypocrisies of Washington or London. They act as ruthless nation‐​states, with all the traditional double standards and slipperiness that entails. If this patronising Western conceit were true, if such countries were primarily driven by historical allegiances and grievances, and not the reality of their situations, they would hardly pick and choose their commitments so adroitly. Yet in fact they willingly accept or seek out Western patronage as it suits. They buy Western weapons, accept Western development aid or undertake military exercises with NATO or the United States as it suits them. The West’s image in their eyes shifts between historical oppressor and contemporary partner as circumstances shift.

Or take Saudi Arabia, never shy of bringing up – and then overlooking – the suffering in Gaza or the West Bank, explaining the geography of the Gulf’s conciliatory stance with Russia as stressing not global norms but “regional security”. As for Beijing, its historical memory and propagandist centrepiece, the “Century of Humiliation”, that it suffered at the hands of European empires does not prevent it aligning increasingly with Russia even as Moscow speaks in nakedly imperial terms about Ukraine.

This is a complex issue and really beyond the scope of this post. This à la carte behavior is really all part of a larger pattern of energy diplomacy, whereby determined states pursue both resources and leverage, making sure their diplomatic stances are valuable bargaining chips. It needs a far fuller examination than I am giving it here.

I’ll finish with this. To expect a great global rallying against evil in which countries outside the Euro‐​Atlantic orbit join in and isolate Russia, is to try to sing a world into existence that simply does not exist, rather than observe the world as it is. As this episode has demonstrated, we do not live in a world that revolves around cosmopolitan solidarity or global norms. We live in a world of ultimate solitude. Countries tend to put the pursuit of harder interests closer to home first, and other things second. Those that don’t suffer penalties. It is because hunger and scarcity are real and motivate both us and our rulers. The first duty of any government is to look after its own citizens, a morally serious business, before committing to internationalist self‐​sacrifice. Try going without food and electricity for three days. That is just the way the world works.

And so it makes complete sense that countries value preserving a relationship with Moscow as they try to keep the lights on and the energy and food supply alive, or as they fear potential aggressors nearby. That we need reminding of this point is an indictment not of humanity, but of the Western foreign policy commentariat. Far too many of us are blinkered by not knowing true hunger. We have never known it, grazing on baguettes and cappuccinos as we hop from symposium to work conference to airport. We . are . spoiled.

Too many of us thinks the world is a shrunken place, where there are few trade‐​offs between pressing interests “over here” and more distant and less urgent ones “over there.” Too many of us spend too much time gathering to hymn ahistorical abstractions like the “rules‐​based order” (it does not exist) and declaring their “transnational allegiances”. Boys and girls: spend some time studying more prosaic things like raw materials, industrial capacity and supply chains.