West’s Threats to African Countries Over Russian Oil Might Spark New Sanctions Against Moscow, by Martin Jay
The West got itself into this mess being wildly out of touch and delusional, with regards to its own so-called hegemony.
The emergence of Russia, China and India as emboldened new powers amid the Ukraine war is becoming more obvious each day. The West has really destroyed its last strand of credibility as the real power in a unipolar world, which, in reality is now multipolar with the East gaining and gaining.
Russia continues to garner more strength and influence seemingly without effort due to the colossal error of NATO and EU sanctions which continue to punish the citizens of those countries so much more than any Russian citizen – the most recent news just in that Spain is banning the use of air conditioning in parts of the country experiencing a heat wave!
And Russia acts more and more like a superpower on the world stage and so we shouldn’t be surprised, for example, that when only a matter of weeks of French troops pulling out of Mali a former colony of France’s, Russia rolls in with aircraft which it donates to the regime. That’s what superpowers do to keep their end of the bargain. Security support.
Yet the more the West whines and the more Putin gains influence with the Global South – which has stated clearly that it doesn’t want any part in the war in Ukraine – the more it looks like the loser. How else do you interpret the threat from a U.S. envoy who recently warned African countries against buying oil from Russia, which, they claimed, would result in punitive measures.
This is a lucid example of how the West got itself into this mess in the first place: being wildly out of touch and delusional, with regards to its own so-called hegemony. Does the U.S. really have the right – even legally – to impose secondary sanctions on African countries? And does it not realise that even if those countries, comply it will only be as a token. In other words, they will still find a surreptitious way to buy the oil via third parties. If the Biden administration could not sustain the secondary sanctions that Trump imposed on South Korea, India, China, Japan and Turkey who were buying oil from Iran, then how does it imagine it will enforce this on poor countries in the Global South, without losing them altogether as partners?
Of course, it’s already happening with the example of Mali, in Africa. And if the secondary sanctions threat is carried out then we can be certain that other countries in the region – especially former French colonies – will want to come over to Russia as a superpower which can assist them in development and sustainability as well as security. America has made a huge mistake in this threat and it is only a matter of time before Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Chad and others follow Mali.
Just recently, we saw the opening of the port of Odessa which the West fails to acknowledge as a move by Putin, following many leaders in Africa and the Middle East appealed to him to allow the ships to leave laden with wheat – a commodity in many of these countries which is part of a social program to provide subsidised bread for the poor. Removed, the lack of cheap bread could be the source of insurrection, growth of terror groups and new immigration flows to Europe and Zelensky would have no doubt wanted this to occur to throw the media spotlight more on the war, which the West is growing tired of on all levels. Putin decided not to give him the ace he wanted and allowed the port to operate and it will be Russia which will reap what it sows with those countries which receive the wheat.
But the question Moscow is asking now is, which wheat will they receive? Ukraine’s or Russia’s? Do geopolitics play a role now in who gets to choose which country their wheat comes from – or does the West get to determine this through the current tone of threats mentioned earlier? If the West was serious about feeding the poor in these countries it would not impose sanctions against the wheat which is in the seven other Black Sea ports which Russia controls in the Black Sea. Technically speaking it hasn’t. But what matters and what everyone will look for is whether Russia keeps its previous customers or some mysteriously jump the line and become new clients of Ukraine. If this were to happen, Russia would be within its rights to object and even threaten to withdraw its offer to leave Odessa port to operate. The Global South countries are just used as pawns in the bigger game but it should be noted that the West would have been happy for famines to have happened just to keep their war going with Russia. There is hardly a grain of truth in anything the Western media is reporting, it seems. Not even about the grain itself.
Source: Strategic Culture