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Dmitry Medvedev Is Right: The Global South Is Rising Up Against Neo-Colonialism

By Andrew Korybko | March 7, 2023

Former Russian President and incumbent Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev published a piece on the ruling party’s website about how the Global South is rising up against neo-colonialism. It’s in Russian but can easily be read using Google Translate. This influential official made some observations in support of his assessment such as Argentina’s recent scrapping of a pact with the UK and France’s military retreat from Africa, the latter of which is extremely meaningful.

The Ukrainian Conflict can therefore be seen in hindsight not just as the NATO-Russian proxy war that it’s since morphed into, but also as tipping point in terms of the Global South’s relations with the US-led West’s Golden Billion. Developing countries were inspired by President Vladimir Putin’s Global Revolutionary Manifesto and the damage Russia dealt to unipolarity over the past year to finally rise up against their former colonizers to fully break free from the latter’s modern-day shackles.

The New Cold War is therefore truly leading to the trifurcation of International Relations between the Golden Billion, the Sino-Russo Entente, and the Global South, the last-mentioned of which is much more closely aligned with the second than with the first. The objective national interests of many Global South states like India are most effectively advanced by adroitly balancing between those other two blocs, but all of them have a worldview that’s a lot closer to Russia and China’s multipolar one than to the US’.

There’s still a long way to go before neo-colonialism is dealt the death blow that it deserves, and this indirect form of hegemony can always be revived in different manifestations sometime in the future, but the trend that Medvedev touched upon is a pivotal one that’s radically reshaping International Relations. The Global South’s perspective of the global systemic transition aligns with the Sino-Russo Entente’s, not the Golden Billion’s, which therefore greatly complicates the latter’s plans.

This explains why no Global South state has followed the US in imposing illegal sanctions against Russia, which in turn prompted the New York Times to recently admit that those sanctions failed just like the US’ efforts to “isolate” Russia did too. The Golden Billion took for granted that its neo-colonial levers of influence over the Global South were still powerful enough to enable that bloc to indirectly control those countries’ foreign policies, which was obviously a completely mistaken assessment.

It could only have been made by those ideologically driven liberal–globalists that control the West and are convinced of their own “supremacy”. No rational actor, after all, would have ever made this assumption prior to provoking Russia into commencing its special operation last year. Matters of such importance like the expected stance of dozens of countries towards the most geostrategically significant conflict since World War II should never be left to chance by policymakers.

By making assumptions about how they’d react instead of taking action in advance to ensure their support for its proxy war, the Golden Billion committed a major mistake that accelerated the global systemic transition to multipolarity. Not only that, but instead of simply accepting their sovereign decision not to sanction and “isolate” Russia, the West made another major mistake by attempting to punish them for their pragmatic policies and thus reminding everyone about neo-colonialism.

This inadvertently served the purpose of reinforcing Russia’s framing of its proxy war with NATO as a struggle for sovereignty in the face of that armed bloc’s pressure that it unilaterally concedes on its objective national interests. The Global South states felt similar such pressure from the West, which their comparatively freer media reported on, thus leading to grassroots support for their leaders’ brave defiance of those demands to change their stance towards that conflict as well as Russia’s role within it.

While most of the Global South isn’t against the Golden Billion per se, it’s also no longer content with tolerating that bloc’s neo-colonialism, hence why these states are rising up in opposition to those practices. They sensed that the present moment is an historic one after Russia’s special operation exposed the limits of Western influence over the developing world, following which they rightly judged that now is the perfect time to break the Golden Billion’s remaining shackles and free themselves in full.

March 7, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Economics, Timeless or most popular | Africa, China, France, Latin America, Russia, UK, United States