With Us or With Them? In a New Cold War, How About Neither.

"BANGKOK — As the bonds of traditional alliances fray across the globe, the Royal Thai Army, the United States’ oldest treaty partner in Asia, has cast a wide net.

This year Thai soldiers hosted American troops for Cobra Gold, annual military exercises that are one of the largest shows of force in the Asia Pacific. A few months before, they participated in Shared Destiny, peacekeeping drills run by the People’s Liberation Army of China.

And in 2020, the Thais hedged their bets further, signing an agreement for their cadets to receive training at a defense academy in Moscow.

The geopolitical landscape has often been likened to that of a new Cold War. While the main antagonists may be the same — the United States, Russia and, increasingly, China — the roles played by much of the rest of the world have changed, reshaping a global order that held for more than three-quarters of a century.

Governments representing more than half of humanity have refused to take a side, avoiding the binary accounting of us-versus-them that characterized most of the post-World War II era. In a United Nations General Assembly vote this month to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council, dozens of countries abstained, including Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and Singapore. (The resolution succeeded anyway.)

Once proxy battlegrounds for superpowers, swaths of Africa, Asia and Latin America are staking their independence. The return of a bloc of nonaligned nations harks back to a period in which leaders of the post-colonial movement resisted having their destinies shaped by imperialism. It also points to the confidence of smaller countries, no longer dependent on a single ideological or economic patron, to go their own way.

“Without a doubt, the countries of Southeast Asia don’t want to be pulled into a new Cold War or be forced to take sides in any great power competition,” said Zachary Abuza, a security specialist at the National War College in Washington. “As they say in Southeast Asia, when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.”

Having to align themselves with one power or another, Mr. Abuza added, left many nations around the world “desperately poor and underdeveloped at the end of the Cold War.”

As a result, even the United States, the Cold War’s victor, cannot count on the support of some of its traditional partners in vocally condemning Russia. The NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 have only heightened mistrust of the West. Both military actions left countries in those regions struggling with the political fallout for years after.

“The crux of the matter is that African countries feel infantilized and neglected by Western countries, which are also accused of not living up to their soaring moral rhetoric on sovereignty and territorial sanctity,” said Ebenezer Obadare, senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Indonesia, a sprawling democracy once ruled by a dictator favored by the United States for his anti-communist stance, has said that it will welcome President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia when the country hosts the Group of 20 meetings this year. It, too, abstained in the U.N. vote to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council.

Other U.S. allies have characterized their decision to diversify as a function of American absenteeism. Last year, as China spread its vaccine diplomacy around the world, the United States was seen initially as hoarding its pandemic supplies.

Before that, during Donald J. Trump’s presidency, the United States pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an expansive trade pact that was meant to counter China’s way of doing business. Countries like Vietnam that had staked their reputations on joining felt betrayed, once again, by Washington.

Mexico, a longtime U.S. ally, has emphasized its neutrality, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has rejected sanctions on Russia.

About one-third of American ambassadorships in Latin America and the Caribbean remain unfilled. The vacancies include Brazil, the largest regional economy, and the Organization of American States.

 “Many Latin Americans were realizing that the United States was abandoning them,” said Vladimir Rouvinski, a professor at Icesi University in Cali, Colombia.

Russia cannot count on automatic allegiance from its historical allies, either. Apart from a sense of autocratic camaraderie, ideology is no longer part of Moscow’s allure. Russia has neither the patronage cash nor the geopolitical clout of the Soviet Union.

Venezuela, Russia’s staunchest supporter in Latin America, received a high-level American delegation. Nicaragua, which became one of the first countries to back Russia’s recognition of separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, has since tempered its enthusiasm.

During a March U.N. vote condemning Russia, Cuba abstained, rather than backing Moscow, although it and Nicaragua later rejected the effort to kick Russia off the Human Rights Council.

The most noticeable hedging has come from Africa, which accounted for nearly half the countries that abstained in the March U.N. vote.

For Thailand, the decision to train with the American, Russian and Chinese militaries, as well as to buy weaponry from each country, is part of its long history of balancing between great powers. Deft diplomacy allowed Thailand to emerge as the only nation in the region not to be colonized.

The current drift away from the United States, which used Thailand as a staging ground for the Vietnam War, also stems from the political pedigree of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who came to power in a military coup eight years ago.

“Though Thailand may currently appear as a democracy, it is at heart an autocracy,” said Paul Chambers, a lecturer in international affairs at Naresuan University in Thailand. “A regime such as this will have autocratic bedfellows, including in Moscow.”

The same holds in Uganda, which receives almost a billion dollars in American aid and is a key Western ally in the fight against regional militancy. Yet the government of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has been criticized by the United States and the European Union for a pattern of human rights violations.

Mr. Museveni has responded by assailing the West’s interference in Libya and Iraq. The president’s son, who also commands the country’s land forces, tweeted that a “majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia’s stand in Ukraine.”

Uganda, like dozens of other countries, can afford to speak up because of a new top trading partner: China. This economic reality, even if Beijing promises more than it delivers, has shielded nations once dependent on other superpowers from stark geopolitical choices.

Strategically located countries like Djibouti, host to Camp Lemonnier, the largest permanent U.S. base on the African continent, have diversified. A few years ago, after President Ismail Omar Guelleh’s invitation, Beijing established its first overseas military outpost in Djibouti. Mr. Guelleh also secured loans from the Chinese to help develop ports, free trade zones and a railway.

Growing Chinese engagement has provided African countries with “alternative investment, alternative markets and alternative ideas of development,” said Cobus van Staden, at the South African Institute of International Affairs.

But if the world feels more comfortably multipolar these days, the ripple effects of the East – West conflict are a reminder that globalization quickly links far-flung nations.

Escalating global prices for fuel, food and fertilizer, all a result of this conflict, have heightened hardship in Africa and Asia. Already contending with a devastating drought, East Africa now has at least 13 million people facing severe hunger.

And populations outside of Europe know too well that their refugees — such as Syrians, Venezuelans, Afghans, South Sudanese and the Rohingya of Myanmar — cannot expect the welcome given to displaced Ukrainians. In a race for finite reserves of care, aid groups have warned of the perils of donor fatigue for the world’s most vulnerable."

What does it all mean? The countries of the world are not committed. In the world of interdependent and not committed countries, if China decides to cancel and to sanction the West, applying secondary sanctions to the rest of the world, it will mean, that China is canceling and sanctioning itself. The same goes for the West. Sanctions and cancel culture have limited reach, despite all our moral outrage.