Last week’s contrasts could not be more stark. While the United States, Europe and the Western media pushed the Ukraine war off the front pages to focus on the atrocities occurring in Israel and the Gaza Strip, dozens of leaders from the Global South gathered at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing to join President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin to focus on trade, investment, economic development and infrastructure.
In the West, the short-termism and overriding obsession with national security was palpable, with all calculations focused on hard-stretched military budgets and supplies. In Beijing, the focus was on long-term economic development, reducing poverty and multilateral cooperation. It reflected a sharp global decoupling, but not as many in the West have conceived it. Both were “de-risking”, but they reflected sharply differing conceptions of risk and…
