Yes, 141 countries voted in March 2022 to condemn Russia’s invasion. But a year later, 32 countries — including India and China — abstained on a resolution demanding an end to the war.
Third World leaders undoubtedly respect Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But they must also wonder: Why does Ukraine get all the attention, when the rest of the world is suffering, too. Why does Zelensky get all the applause? There’s surely some jealousy and rivalry in this arms-length approach to Ukraine. But we ignore the Global South’s demand for more attention at our peril.
Last September, President Biden delivered a General Assembly speech that rang all the usual bells. He promised “relentless diplomacy” and “unabashed” advocacy of global development. He touted a half-dozen U.S.-sponsored programs and initiatives for the world’s poor. But a year later, what have these promises produced? Apart from the daily diligence of good agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the answer is: Not much.
Biden will probably deliver a similar laundry list of good intentions this month. But don’t be surprised if the audience tunes out.
We need a more honest bargain this September: The United States will take the problems of the Global South more seriously — and actually deliver — if the recipient nations will do more to end a war in Ukraine that, among other things, is choking global grain supplies and making the developing world’s food insecurity much worse. Blunt as that might sound, it would be both a pragmatic deal, in terms of mutual self-interest, and an idealistic one.
An astute critic of the United States’ failure to address the needs of the Global South is Mark Malloch-Brown, the U.N.’s former deputy secretary general and now the president of the Open Society Foundations, the organization created by George Soros that funds projects in the developing world. Malloch-Brown recently shared with me some disturbing evidence of how badly the development agenda is going wrong.
He noted that the United Nations is planning to hold a summit this month, before the General Assembly, on the “sustainable development goals” that were set in 2016. By his count, of the 140 metrics for achieving these goals, “half are not on the desired trajectory and about one third have stalled or gone into reverse.”
This global reversal of progress is evident in other measures, Malloch-Brown says. The U.N.’s Human Development Index has now fallen for the second straight year, all the way back to 2016 levels — the first such decline since the agency began compiling statistics. Global food insecurity is affecting over 345 million people — more than double the 2020 level. And Malloch-Brown says about 60 percent of low-income countries face debt distress.
Polls indicate that the global public wants action. The Open Society Foundations will soon publish a survey sampling more than 36,000 respondents in 30 countries, representing 5.6 billion people. The details aren’t public yet, but it appears that big majorities believe that lenders should help indebted countries, fear that climate change could harm them in the next year, want a greater say on international financial decisions and believe that high-income countries should increase the World Bank’s resources.
Russia survives politically by convincing the developing world that its problems are created by the wealthy nations of the West — even when the damage is directly attributable to Moscow’s own actions. A case in point is Russia’s decision to withdraw in July from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which had been painstakingly negotiated last year by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres. The International Monetary Fund warned in July that Russia’s move to scuttle the deal could boost food prices 10 to 15 percent.
Support for Ukraine and the Global South are sometimes juxtaposed, but, in truth, they converge. This simple fact is that there won’t be a just peace to end this terrible conflict without support from the fence-sitters. To put it in stark terms: The United States won’t achieve its national security interests without becoming more involved in global development issues.
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