FEB 24 is now the new Sept 11. Not a day goes by without Western leaders and opinion-makers warning the rest of the world of the dangers of not standing with democracies, as if their versions of political governance are the only legitimate models.
Their war cry of "either you are with us or against us" is back with the vengeance of old. And, like 20 years ago, it begins in the United States.
Start there, with US President Joe Biden's State of the Union address delivered six days after Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine (we know Russia will protest this label, having described the invasion as a "special military operation".
As Nicholas Goldberg points out in the Los Angeles Times, like America's description of the Korean War as "police action", this must go down as an exercise in obfuscation). Biden didn't make us wait too long to spot the divided globe as mapped by America: a world of freedom or tyranny. More words later, it was a world of light or darkness. A throwback to the war on terror?
Let's be clear. We are no Putin apologists. Whatever the motivation, Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. It is becoming more brutal by the day. Media reports are quoting thousands of Ukrainian lives lost.
Many Leaders ago, this newspaper called on Russia and Ukraine to seek peace through diplomacy. Russia's constant shelling of this and that city and the West's retaliatory supply of weapons to Ukraine are standing in the way of peace.
Liberalism-mongers like Francis Fukuyama are cheerleading the world into a war-for-long world. Little wonder, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher called his work, The End of History, the beginning of nonsense. It is time the West gave some serious thought to why so many countries are not with the West.
Two reasons stand out. One is offered by Pankaj Mishra, author-turned-political commentator in his op-ed piece in Bloomberg. The West's duplicity is the other. Start with the first. Mishra says the West misread the first cold war and its power to shape the world. Because of this misreading, not only the West but also the rest of the world had to pay a heavy price.
We are standing at another moment in history when the hastily reunited West is about to extract another heavy price from the world with its born-again freedom. Mishra is right. "Today's geopolitical realities are even messier than they were during the cold war, blurring any neat moral opposition between democracy and autocracy."
National interest can get messier with time. Now for duplicity, our second reason. Many non-Western nations have long witnessed the double-handedness of the US and European nations.
To them, if Russia is delusional, so is the West. Can't blame them for seeing Iraq or Afghanistan in every Western attempt to democratise the non-Western world.
As John Gray of the University of London once argued in his treatise on European thought, there is no logic in making the values of the West as the universal moral minimum for the rest of the world.
Because components of such a minimum are often at odds with one another. The West has often waded in blood to democratise the world. Yet there is no call by Washington or Brussels for its leaders to be charged with war crimes. Duplicity is made of this.