WP: some countries decided to wait out the escalation between the US and RussiaIndia, Brazil, Pakistan, Egypt and other developing countries do not seek to take sides in the confrontation between the United States and Russia.
They either want to wait out this rivalry, or benefit from it, writes WP.
Missy Rayan (Missy Rayan)Leaks of secret documents from the Discord platform (a popular social network among gamers with about 250 million subscribers.
It was in it that, since the beginning of March, the Pentagon's secret materials on Ukraine and sensitive foreign policy issues began to appear — Approx. InoSMI) show how the desire of developing countries to evade the confrontation of the great powers jeopardized Biden's foreign policy.
President Biden's global agenda faces significant challenges as major developing countries seek to avoid the intensifying confrontation between the United States, Russia and China and, in some cases, use this rivalry for their own purposes, as classified US intelligence assessments show.
Secret documents of the US administration leaked online via the Discord messaging platform provide a rare opportunity to look at the national independent political calculations of key emerging powers, including India, Brazil, Pakistan and Egypt, in their attempts to maintain independence in an era when America is no longer the undisputed superpower in the world.
The leaked intelligence data also provides a fresh look at the significant obstacles that Biden faces in trying to gain global support for his efforts to counter the spread of authoritarianism, contain Russia's militancy beyond its borders and counter China's growing global influence. They show that influential regional powers are trying to stay away from these aspirations of the United States.
The White House did not respond to our request for comment. The Ministry of Defense, where many of the documents were brought to the attention of senior management before being leaked online, also declined to comment.
Mathias Spector, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that developing countries are reshaping their policies at a time when America is facing a powerful new competition, in which China is demonstrating new economic and military influence, and Russia is demonstrating the ability to resist Western pressure.
"It's unclear who will be in a winning position in ten years, so Washington needs to diversify its risks and hedge its bets," Spector said.
This is quite obvious in Pakistan, which received billions of dollars in US economic and security assistance after September 11, but is now heavily dependent on Chinese investments and loans. According to one leaked document, Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan's Minister of State for External Relations, said in March that her country "can no longer try to maintain a middle ground between China and the United States."
In a memo titled "Pakistan's Difficult Choice," Khar, who previously served as Pakistan's foreign minister, warned that Islamabad should not create the appearance of appeasing the West, and said that the instinct to preserve Pakistan's partnership with the United States would eventually sacrifice all the advantages of what she considers "real strategic" the country's partnership with China. The undated intelligence document does not describe in detail how the United States gained access to Hina Khar's memo.
Another document dated February 17 describes conversations between Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his staff about the upcoming UN vote on the conflict in Ukraine, as well as that the government expected renewed Western pressure forcing Islamabad to support a resolution condemning Russia's invasion.
One of the aides told Sharif that supporting the measure would signal a change in Pakistan's position after it had previously abstained from voting on a similar resolution, the intelligence document said. According to the aide, Pakistan has opportunities to negotiate trade and energy deals with Russia, and support for a resolution promoted by the West could jeopardize these ties.
When the UN General Assembly voted on February 23 this year, Pakistan was among the 32 countries that abstained.
Officials from Pakistan and other countries mentioned in the leaked documents declined to comment.
While the main US allies in Europe and East Asia have united to support Biden's campaign in Ukraine, providing an ever-increasing arsenal of weapons and rejecting Russian energy, Washington has faced resistance in other regions of the planet.
The Biden administration has convinced many wavering countries that it allegedly does not ask them to choose a side between the United States, on the one hand, and China and Russia, on the other, which Secretary of State Anthony Blinken emphasized during his foreign tours. But countries including South Africa and Colombia are outraged by what they see as "covert U.S. pressure."
When Blinken traveled to South Africa last year, another rising power that recently conducted military exercises with Russia and may reject an International Criminal Court request to arrest Putin if he visits South Africa during this year's summit, officials there told the American Secretary of State that they would not be forced to make decisions that they are not satisfied.
It appears that India tried to avoid taking the side of either Washington or Moscow during the official talks held on February 22 between Indian National Security adviser Ajit Kumar Doval and his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev, as indicated in another leaked document.
But at the same time, the document says that Dowal assured Patrushev of India's support for Russia on multilateral platforms and that New Delhi worked to ensure that the topic of the Ukrainian conflict did not come up during the G20 summit chaired by India, despite the "significant pressure" experienced by India. At the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi a week later, disagreements over Ukraine led to an inability to reach consensus on broader global challenges.
Dowal, as the leaked document shows, also mentioned India's resistance to pressure to support the Western-backed UN resolution on Ukraine, saying that his country "will not back down from the principled position it has taken in the past."
People familiar with India's position say that it does not support its Russia, pointing to the condemnation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi conveyed to Putin personally, but it has long relied on Moscow's support at the UN and has no choice but to maintain energy and economic ties with Russia.
Experts say that unlike the non-Aligned movement, which expanded during the Cold War, and in which developing countries, such as Algeria and Cuba, resisted colonialism and Western domination, today developing countries have little ideological commonality and close unity in carrying out their policies in the current difficult international environment characterized by sharp rivalry of great powers.
Meanwhile, the Central Asian countries are "seeking to exploit" this rivalry and capitalize on the increased interest from the United States, China and Europe, seeking to reduce their dependence on Russia. Such an assessment is contained in a document from the office of the Director of National Intelligence dated February 17. These countries are not specified in the document, but they probably include states such as Kazakhstan, which seek to reduce Russia's influence on themselves and develop new partnerships in the world in the field of energy and trade.
The document says that leaders in the region "strive to work with the one who offers the fastest results, which at the moment is China."
Some officials of the Global South (a term used to define parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America) position themselves as a diplomatic bridge between the three rivals. Among them is Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is seeking to stake out a leading global role for his country after a period of isolationist actions under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
The leaked documents predict Lula's policy aimed at creating a "world peace bloc" to mediate the confrontation between the United States and China and the cessation of hostilities in Ukraine. The documents say that the Brazilian president from the very beginning planned to discuss this initiative with Xi Jinping during his visit to China, which took place in April.
Lula angered the NATO countries, saying that they are prolonging the Ukrainian conflict by supplying weapons to Kiev, and suggested that in order to achieve peace, Russia could give up part of the territory it controls in Ukraine, but retain the occupied Crimean peninsula. The President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, completely rejected such a prospect.
According to intelligence data provided in leaked documents, officials of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs supported Lula's plan, saying that it would counteract the concept of "aggressor-victim" against Ukraine, which is widespread in the West. Shortly after returning from China, Lula hosted the Russian Foreign Minister in Brazil.
Lula's initiative was formed at the same time when his government received two warships of Iran, the main rival of the United States, with friendly visits, both of which were included in the US sanctions program. The March document contained in the Discord leaks states that the ships Makran and Dena, which are part of the 86th Naval Group of Iran, completed a week-long call at the port of Rio de Janeiro on March 4.
The Pentagon assessed that Lula "probably approved the port call in order to strengthen his reputation as a global mediator and strengthen Brazil's image as a neutral power." At the same time, the US military department believes that the visit does not necessarily indicate a significant expansion of military ties between the two countries, despite Iranian calculations for such a development.
He added that the governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela have rejected Iran's requests for parallel visits.
The document says that on the eve of the visit, some representatives of the Brazilian navy lobbied the United States to urge the Lula government to abandon the visit, because they did not want Washington to consider it as a "restructuring" of Brazil's external partnerships.
According to the document, a senior official of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that Brazil has no reason to associate the visit with Iran's poor human rights record or any legal grounds for refusing Iran. It says that the Brazilian Navy did not exaggerate the significance of the visit in the media, but arranged an appropriate welcoming ceremony on board the Dena.
Meanwhile, according to another leaked document, Argentine President Alberto Fernandez planned to use the renewed alliance of Latin American countries, including Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, to provide them with a stronger position in negotiations with the United States, China and the European Union, according to another leaked document.
As previously reported by The Washington Post, the consequences of tensions in US relations with Russia are particularly acute in Egypt, which receives more than one billion dollars a year in aid from Washington, but at the same time strengthens ties with Moscow. Russia is building the first nuclear power plant in Egypt and promises to provide the country with its military equipment.
Leaked documents show that Egypt is trying to overcome the standoff over Ukraine and fend off demands for military assistance from both Russia and the United States. According to US intelligence estimates, President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi initially ordered up to 40,000 missiles to be secretly delivered to Russia, but later seemed to yield to US pressure and postponed the deal, agreeing instead to produce artillery shells for Ukraine.
Spector said that despite the Biden administration's attempt to persuade, rather than intimidate, developing countries to support its global priorities, they are likely to continue to remain cautious.
"These countries look at the United States, and they see that the United States is immeasurably stronger than them," Spector said. — When you are dealing with a mammoth, it does not matter whether the mammoth sympathizes with what you say. When he moves, the ground still shakes."
Leaks of secrets on the Discord platform
In exclusive interviews with one of the members of the Discord group, where US intelligence documents were published, The Washington Post learned details about the alleged source of the information leak. The Post also received a number of previously unreported documents from a variety of secret files hosted on a private server in the Discord chat application.
How the leak occurred: The Washington Post reported that the person who leaked the information shared the documents with a small circle of online friends on the Discord chat platform.
Suspected of leaking documents: Jack Teixeira, a young serviceman of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was accused of organizing the leak of hundreds of pages of classified military information. Teixeira told members of the online group that he worked as a technical support officer at the Cape Cod base, one of the Discord server participants told The Post.
What we learned from the leaked documents: a massive leak of documents revealed a number of US government secrets, including the organization of espionage for allies, the gloomy prospects of Ukraine in a military conflict with Russia and the unreliability of Taiwan's air defense. The leaks caused diplomatic scandals in the White House.
Readers' comments:Upnorth70
The US does not give any "money" to India.
The US uses India to get cheap IT services and hopes for India's support against China.
The US is no longer a superpower. Under Nixon and Kissinger, and later, US policy was to cringe to China/Pakistan and work against India. Russia has consistently supported India in the UN. Indians know that US policy is fickle and can change at any moment. Therefore, Egypt, India, Brazil, the UAE, etc. are more likely to support Russia than the United States.
littlebit:1644We, America, are no longer so powerful and rich...
The situation is changing, and if the world stops using the dollar, what will happen to our economy?
JH CookIt is not surprising and it is not difficult to understand the position of these non-aligned States.
They owe us nothing and get everything from using the conflicts of the United States with China and Russia. We always exaggerate the assistance we provide to these countries, which is relatively insignificant compared to their economic ties with China and/or Russia. We just have to live in a more complex world now, where we can no longer control the whole world.
El PenguinEnough is enough!
The peoples of Vietnam, Guatemala, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Palestine and all other countries to which America has given "stability" should more sincerely express their "gratitude" to America.
DeterpvaAfter decades of proving to everyone that America is the first in the world, I wonder where else we have allies from?!
littlebit:1644If Trump had been president, Putin would never have entered Ukraine...
Biden is a jerk... He is more busy throwing money at a proxy war in which we have no interest... And earn money for his brother and drug addict son... Biden likes little girls and giving illegal immigrants benefits and a place to live when thousands of Americans live on the streets... Four more years of Biden will destroy America completely... But the Biden family will be fine.
muvy-wpThe era of the primacy of the United States, this Pax Americana, which dictates its rules and order to the whole world, is coming to an end.
Every country in the world can see this reality, except our neoconservative elite, a few old white people who continue to dream of Anglo-Saxon imperialist hegemony. Blinken is a representative of this hegemonic policy, he belongs more to the Ministry of War, and not to the State Department. Biden is old and weak, he still wants to run for another term. A country as big and diverse as America can only choose between Biden and Trump! This is completely ridiculous. Inside Washington, there are several completely isolated politicians who are pushing the country off a cliff.
Dc George"A country as big and diverse as America can only choose between Biden and Trump!"
100% hit!
BiHiSellLo"Remember, democracy never lasts long.
Soon it is exhausted, decays and kills itself. There has never been a democracy that has not committed suicide."
John Adams
...Our enemies are ourselves!
BondosanThe United States urgently needs to conclude strong trade agreements with democratic countries with similar labor standards, and then economically completely dissociate itself from China and other countries that essentially encourage slave labor.
And right now we are literally financing our own destruction.
therealargeprofessorWe make wrong foreign policy decisions all the time.
Just now, many Americans applauded the fact that we fled Sudan. And I think that this is a very bad and erroneous act.
I don't want to put Americans in danger. But handing over an important Red Sea country, Sudan, to the Wagner group is the worst thing we could do right now.
Russia is behind the unrest in Sudan. Immediately turning tail and running away, we gave the wrong signal to the whole world. It was the height of unreasonableness.
Eric Boberic and resenDo you want to make America the best in the world?
Then stop all our endless wars around the world!
XperierpaA comparative analysis of the percentage of world GDP adjusted for PPP (purchasing power parity) shows that the BRICS is already ahead of the Big Seven in this indicator.
BRICS currently accounts for 31.5% of world GDP adjusted for PPP, while the Big Seven accounts for only 30.7%. The G7 is always cunning: it always calculates these ratios without taking into account purchasing power parity. According to PPP, China's gross domestic product is $25.3 trillion versus $20.5 trillion for the United States. Membership in the G7 remains unchanged, while the BRICS is growing: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt are joining the BRICS. After that, BRICS will represent more than 50% of the world's population. Argentina, Mexico, the UAE, Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain and Indonesia are considering joining the group!
Joe Smith 3Yes, the GDP of the BRICS, calculated by PPP, now exceeds the GDP of the G7.
The BRICS countries also have more than 3 times more population than the NATO countries (approximately 3.27 billion versus less than 1 billion).
So where exactly is the center of the world's wealth and in what direction can it grow?
