YouOne withdrawal can hide another withdrawal. Two years after America’s departure from Afghanistan, other Western powers were forced to withdraw their military forces from the country in which they were involved. France disengaged from Niger, because they thought they would find refuge for their troops who had been expelled from Mali. A little comfort, Paris hopes to organize this withdrawal in a good way “orderly”different from the evacuation disaster in Kabul in 2021.

Orderly or chaotic, and whatever the magnitude, the message of this troop withdrawal remains the same: namely the retreat of the Western powers, signaling the failure of their military intervention in the countries of the South.

The withdrawal was not only carried out militarily. In the diplomatic and political fields, Western countries – a term used since the Cold War to refer to the democracies of the Atlantic Alliance (NATO), Japan and Australia – were also forced to surrender.

The year 2023 marks a forced realization, an observation that is no longer possible to ignore: the “main actors in the South” no longer conform to the narrative of the “main actors in the North”, the United States and Europe. Their stories compete directly with those of the North. This increasingly imposes itself as a demand for a different division of power and world organization. “The West understands that its exclusive clubs are no longer capable of solving all the world’s problems”Justice Happymon Jacob, professor at Jawaharlal-Nehru University, New Delhi.

The West’s posture is weakening

This trend is nothing new, but the war in Ukraine has exacerbated it. The aggression carried out by Russia on February 24, 2022 so shocked Western countries, a violation of the international order by one of the powers accused, at the UN Security Council, of deliberately doing so, that they closed their doors. ratings and trust that their astonishment will be shared. It took some time for them to accept the reality: not only was their shock not universal, but their insistence on placing Ukraine at the forefront of the global drama sparked a backlash.

Countries reluctant to accept Western anger do not necessarily approve of Russia’s behavior, but many see it as a perfect example of the dualistic statements of northern states so indifferent to the war in the South. It is also the “double standards” that France criticizes in Africa regarding the terms of democracy, an argument goes which Russia exploited extravagantly.

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