From the G7 summit, the Federal Chancellor brings back two solid pieces of news. The new: Both have to do with “KuK”: the fight for buddy. It’s about nothing less than a new world order, and countries suddenly play a role that the West in particular has neglected for years, if not decades. And that has massive consequences.
Message number one: The G7 countries are flying together to the next G20 summit at the invitation of Indonesia. There, in Bali, there will be a showdown, because on Monday Russian President Vladimir Putin also agreed. Scholz’ justification is “KuK”: the fight for new friends.
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It is being fought between two power blocs that also partially overlap: the G7, i.e. the West, led by the USA, and the Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), whose meanwhile undisputed leading power comes from Beijing . Whether Putin will attend personally is just as open as the answer to the question of whether all Western heads of state will actually fly there, including the Chancellor.
At any rate, at the end of the G7 meeting in Elmau, Scholz gave the official reason why the West, which was on the side of the victim who was attacked in the Ukraine war, would not heed Volodymyr Zelensky’s request to boycott the G20 meeting if Putin attended . Scholz said that one should not “drive the G20 apart”. And: You have to “give the thing a good drive”.
However, it is not a hard defeat for the President of Ukraine, because Selenskyj has managed to get the Western Allies to promise permanent military aid to Ukraine, albeit without the incantation that ECB President Mario Draghi once chose for the euro rescue: “Whatever it takes”.
Message number two is hidden behind just three letters in a basic sentence about the Chancellor’s energy transition. It reads: This energy transition will “only” happen with the emerging and developing countries.
This “only” of the Chancellor is likely to shape the German debate about the energy transition, the phase-out of fossil fuels. So far, the discussion has been conducted as if the world climate were hanging, so to speak, on the German efforts to phase out coal, nuclear power, oil and gas. This plays a major role in almost every federal debate. The core argument is that the Germans are now global pioneers in the energy transition, and the world can only be convinced of this course if this energy transition actually succeeds.
That is why Scholz’s “only” is so significant: Now the weal and woe of the world climate no longer depends on Germany alone, but above all on the emerging and developing countries.
This puts these countries in a key position, and in more ways than one. Most notably geopolitically: Western countries have been in for a bit of a shock since realizing they’ve slipped into a minority position globally in supporting Ukraine.
This extends the political “reach” of this war, so to speak, which is suddenly no longer “just” about Ukraine, Russia, the USA and Europe – as if that weren’t enough. A regional war is now becoming a conflict that affects the rest of the world.
Africa is affected because this continent is more dependent on Ukrainian grain supplies than Germany is on Russian gas. And Asia is on board because, firstly, it is also affected by the inflation that is galloping in Europe and the USA. And secondly, because the Ukraine war has long since led to a new “great game” about the division of power in the world.
And, to put it bluntly: If Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz were hoping to quickly win KuK with a simple invitation to influential emerging countries and a few financial and development-policy commitments, then: they were dealing in lemons.
The countries for which Russia and China on the one hand and the USA and Europe on the other are now vying are already making the best of this contest for themselves: lots of money and more power.
Example South Africa: In the spring, when the West applied for the Russians to be sentenced for the attack on Ukraine, the South Africans abstained – as did 25 (!) other African countries. There are several reasons for this, one of the most important: Putin’s Russians are quite popular in South Africa. Even the Soviet Union undauntedly supported the ANC, when it was not yet the head of government and was still a liberation movement against the apartheid regime of the whites.
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The result: the West is helping South Africa with billions of euros to phase out coal, the Chancellor speaks of the “climate club”. And the East, Russia and China, pledged to the South Africans at the Brics summit to campaign for a stronger role for Pretoria at the United Nations.
So the question is: why should South Africa give up its seesaw policy between West and East? Why should it choose between more climate protection and more power when it can get both?
Example India: Here it works according to the same pattern: the Indians get money from the West, weapons from the East. Of which India needs a lot – because of its internal conflicts on the one hand and because of the conflict with Pakistan on the other. 70 percent of India’s arms come from Russia, and India will remain dependent on these arms supplies for a long time – 10 to 20 years at least.
India will not switch to the western camp for that long, so Scholz and Co. can turn themselves on their heads.
In KuK, the fight for buddy, Scholz essentially argues in terms of identity politics, a remarkable greening of the social democrat. There is a good chance that countries like Indonesia, India, South Africa, Senegal or Argentina will join the western camp, because these are democracies. But: so what?
Scholz says about the view of the emerging countries in the Ukraine war: “No one (of them) has any doubts as to what caused this conflict”. Namely, the aggressive violation of international law by Russia. Only: That’s why these countries are far from getting into a clinch with the Russians. Here Scholz makes a – certainly well-intentioned – mistake:
Democracy doesn’t make a buddy a buddy. More important than the internal constitution and its underlying values are: national interests.
And the Africans had a full-blown interest in the West releasing the vaccine patents during the corona pandemic. But he hasn’t. For which there were reasons – such as the private constitution of the economy. In the Global South, however, what arrived was that the West is doing what it always does – it only takes care of itself.
Unfortunately, Putin’s story that the West is to blame for the food shortages that lead to famine also caught on in African countries. And not Russia. The attack is not to blame for the fact that Africans have to starve, but the sanctions of the West, which take no account of African interests.
We in the allied west might think that’s nonsense, but that’s the version that came across in the global south. The problem: You can’t get something like this out of the way with 600 billion euros.
That is the sum with which the West now wants to counter the Chinese Silk Road initiative. Only: The West is about ten years too late. Behind this, too, lay a fairly fundamental misunderstanding: aid does not necessarily create geostrategic allies. All German and European development aid has not resulted in Africa siding with the West in the Ukraine war. The Chinese obviously started smarter with their “belt and road initiative”.
They didn’t give money away, they gave loans. For huge infrastructure projects such as large connecting roads, large ports and large airports. They created a completely different lever than the West with its (pardon me): alms policy. Gifts do not create dependencies, loans do, because they last for decades and have to be repaid in the end.
Conclusion: The Western realization that neither climate protection nor the war in Ukraine can cope without large parts of the former “Third World”, which has become more self-confident, is now there. But:
That helps in the Ukraine war: absolutely nothing.
