Julien Barnes-Dacey
Live your true life, all the self-help books tell us. Embrace who you are, own your faults, become better by turning them into strengths. It’s cheap pop psychology, but it might be liberating for repressed individuals and, we would argue, for Western civilization. It is time for the West to finally own its truth and set itself free.
The horrific war in the Gaza Strip oddly represents an opportunity for this liberation. Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza is now forcing a reckoning, exposing Western claims about the sanctity of its loudly embraced global norms.
Rather than retreating into a defensive battle of narratives, the West should see this as an opportunity to move beyond a discourse that has never held water. The West will have a better hope of cementing global influence if it is more honest about this reality, offering global partnerships based on deal-making and shared interests rather than infantilizing the global south with hollow talk of international rules.
Since the intoxicating victory of the United States and its allies in the Cold War and the subsequent march of democracy through Eastern Europe and beyond, the West has embraced a comforting illusion about a liberal rules-based order. With the final triumph of liberalism over communism, the victorious armies of democracy told themselves that they could finally transfer their beautiful idea of rule of law to the international realm. International law could tame war, defend sovereignty, and protect human rights, all the same time.
It was a wonderful vision, but it never had a chance. The temptations of power meant that the West repeatedly violated its own rules. Western actors invaded countries when they felt the need (Iraq), hired fancy lawyers to exempt themselves from the laws they expected others to follow (Kosovo), preached human rights while cutting deals with authoritarian regimes (Saudi Arabia), and set up an International Criminal Court to try African leaders (including those from Sudan) while refusing to recognize its jurisdiction over themselves (the United States). For the less powerful countries, the rules-based order based was always little more than hypocrisy on a global scale.
All of this remained hidden for many years beneath the overwhelming global power of the West. Nobody outside the West ever really believed it, but staring down the barrel of U.S. military supremacy, many felt it was the better part of prudence to keep their doubts to themselves.
But since at least the global financial crisis in 2009, the rising powers of the global south, a set of countries that can be roughly defined as “those countries that think the rules-based order is bullshit” have become increasingly vocal in their frustration about the hypocrisy at the core of the global order.
They have taken particular issue with the West’s demand that they sacrifice core material interests in defense of this so-called order, a step that the West has always been wholly unwilling to do itself. So U.S. and European entreaties that global states cut financial and energy ties to Russia following the invasion of Ukraine have fallen on deaf ears, while Western attempts to rally international support behind Israel have faltered.
The charges of hypocrisy often came in the form of self-serving Russian or Chinese propaganda, two states that have often been brutal in their own violations of international rules. Nor have countries of the global south been principled in many of their own positions.
But this did not make the claim of Western hypocrisy any less true or resonant. At the end of day, it is hard to believe in a rules-based order whose rules you did not make; whose transgressions you do not get to police; and whose outcomes, coincidentally enough, always seems to align with the interests of the West.
For these reasons, the edifice of the rules-based order had already basically crumbled by the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Only the erstwhile liberal hegemonists of the United States and Europe had failed to notice.
Many of them were thus a bit taken aback when their efforts to rally support for Ukraine in the name of the rules-based order met with a certain amount of derision in the global south. Serious people across the Western world wondered why they were supposedly losing the global south. They hatched plans to win the so-called battle of the narratives by countering Russian and Chinese propaganda and sharing control of the rules-based with those countries that they could no longer exclude.
Now, the brutal Hamas attack on Israel and the even more brutal reprisals by the Israelis have once again exposed that Western attachment to its own rules is, at best, situational.
Some enlightened quarters fear that this will set back the Western counterattack in the battle of narratives in the global south. Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, for example, has made the case that the West’s global standing will be seriously damaged if it doesn’t also hold Israel’s conduct of the war to the standards of international law.
But that would be fighting the last war. The battle of narratives was lost years ago in the desert plains of Iraq, the alleys of Gaza, and the oil fields of the Niger Delta. Russian and Chinese counternarratives merely provided the vocabulary for countries of the global south to describe what they had long felt: that the rules-based order was merely a virtue shield for the Western power and control. The most recent war in Gaza, where Israel’s right to self-defense has involved holding 2 million people—more than 40 percent of whom are children—under collective punishment, has only made this defeat so self-evident that even the West can’t fail to notice.
Still, from defeat springs opportunity. The West can finally put the battle of narratives into its bin of lost wars and move on. The global south may never have bought what the West was selling, but there is little evidence that those nations are any more taken in by Russian or Chinese hypocrisy, which is even more naked in its ambition.
The countries of the global south have been very clear: They are not looking for a narrative from anyone. The global south is not the West’s to win or lose. As a recent European Council on Foreign Relations poll reveals, countries such as Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa want the freedom to deal with the United States, Russia, China, Europe, and anyone else on their terms. They are looking for geopolitical deals.
But the same poll revealed that the West has a lot to offer. Russia offers little more than mercenaries, and the Chinese seem to be following the Western historical model of geopolitical domination through debt. Only the West offers a model of a vibrant and free society. On issues such as human rights, control over the internet, and security cooperation, clear majorities in key countries such as Brazil, India and South Africa prefer to work with the West despite its hypocrisy. More tellingly, clearer majorities from many of these countries would prefer to live in the West than in Russia or China. There is a reason why the United States and Europe have migration crises and Russia and China do not.
Western geopolitical deals offer the hope of a development path toward Western standards of living and governance. Countries don’t want to be lectured by their Western partners about their various human rights failings, but they do want access to the Western concepts of governance, rule of law, and above all the living standards that those institutions enable. The West only needs to cease moralizing and focus on building out equitable partnerships, offering financial and technical assistance complemented by trade and investment opportunities, and they will be able to compete more than adequately with Russian and Chinese influence in most any part of the world.
This is not an excuse to abandon core Western values. On the contrary, these values not only form the West’s moral identity, but also constitute its strategic interests. More widespread democratic values, greater protection of human rights, and a more just international system are indeed what the West wants and needs to achieve to ensure its own security and stability.
But the hypocrisies and compromises the West has carried out regarding those values over recent decades mean that Western states now need to focus on the consistency of their own policies and demonstrate their willingness to pay a price for upholding proclaimed values. It will take considerable time and effort—and quite a few policy reversals—before the West can return to the battle of narratives.
In the meantime, the United States and Europe need to stop infantilizing the countries of the global south. Forget the narratives and treat them like the grown-up middle powers that they have become. Mutually beneficial geopolitical deals will transmit Western values across the globe better than paternalistic lectures.
The liberal powers can now own their truth: They are typical geopolitical hypocrites just like everyone else. So what? No one is expecting anything else. The truth shall set you free.
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