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China may present the single most compelling factor. There is an increasing awareness that to deal with the challenge of China’s rapidly growing economy, Europe and the United States will have to learn to cooperate better

European leaders, including Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, have been pushing for a trade deal as a low-cost way of stimulating their struggling economies. The United States Chamber of Commerce and large companies like General Electric have also lobbied for an agreement

Potentially more important than abolishing tariffs, but also much more complicated, would be a deal that harmonized regulations on products like food, cars, toys and pharmaceuticals. Automobile manufacturers would like to see agreement on safety and emissions standards for cars, reducing or eliminating the need to build different versions for the American and European markets. Matthias Wissmann, head of the German Association of the Automotive Industry, said that harmonizing safety features would save several hundred dollars per automobile. Mr. De Gucht, who is expected to lead the talks on the European side, said that a deal could provide vital leverage over emerging powerhouses like China

Much of the global economy is operating free of artificial enhancements. Lower-skilled workers confront bleak opportunities and intense competition, especially in the United States. Even as recent data shows middle-class Americans are finally starting to share in the gains from the recovery, incomes for many remain below where they were a decade ago

technological disruption and economic upheaval are now at work in an era of scarcity

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression has left banks from Europe to the United States reluctant to lend. Real estate bonanzas from Spain to Southern California gave way to a disastrous wave of foreclosures, eliminating construction jobs. China’s slowdown has diminished its appetite for raw materials, sowing unemployment from the iron ore mines of Brazil to the coal pits of Indonesia.

Trade did not cause the breakdown in economic growth. Indeed, trade has helped generate what growth remains. But the pervasive stagnation has left little cover for those set back by globalization.

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 unleashed a far larger shock, but a construction boom absorbed many laid-off workers.

“We do need to have these trade agreements,” Mr. Bown said, “but we do need to be cognizant that there are going to be losers and we need to have policies to address them.”

Corporations that used China to cut costs raised their value, enriching executives and ordinary investors. Today’s Headlines Wake up each morning to the day’s top news, analysis and opinion delivered to your inbox. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. Sign Up Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. You are already subscribed to this email. View all New York Times newsletters. See Sample Manage Email Preferences Not you? Privacy Policy The casualties of China’s exports are far fewer, but they are concentrated. The rugged country of western North Carolina suffered mass unemployment as Chinese-made wooden furniture put local plants out of business. So did glassmakers in Toledo, Ohio, and auto parts manufacturers across the Midwest.

Even among those who support trade, doubts are growing about its ability to deliver on crucial promises. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of people in 44 countries found that only 45 percent of respondents believed trade raises wages. Only 26 percent believed that trade lowers prices.

Workers employed in major export industries earn higher wages than those in domestically focused sectors.Americans saw their choice of products expand by one-third in recent decades, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found. Trade is how raspberries appear on store shelves in the dead of winter.

In the fallout, the United States maintained limits on unemployment benefits, leaving American workers vulnerable to plummeting fortunes. Social welfare systems have limited the toll in Europe, but economic growth has been weak, so jobs are scarce.

automation has grown in sophistication and reach. Between 2000 and 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government’s calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. The rest were casualties of automation or the result of tweaks to factory operations that enabled more production with less labor.

if robots are a more significant threat to paychecks, they are also harder to blame than hordes of low-wage workers in overseas factories.“We have a public policy toward trade,” said Douglas A. Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College. “We don’t have a public policy on automation.”

China’s relentless development was turning farmland into factories, accelerated by a landmark in the history of trade: the country’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization.The W.T.O. was born out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a compact forged in 1947 that lowered barriers to international commerce in an effort to prevent a repeat of global hostilities.In the first four decades, tariffs on manufactured wares plunged from about 35 percent to nearly 6 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. By 2000, the volume of trade among members had swelled to 25 times that of a half-century earlier.

Mexico — home to about 123 million people — was not big enough to refashion the terms of trade. When China joined the W.T.O. in 2001, that added a country of 1.3 billion people to the global trading system

The anti-trade backlash, building for years, has become explosive because the global economy has arrived at a sobering period of reckoning. Years of investment manias and financial machinations that juiced the job market have lost potency, exposing longstanding downsides of trade that had previously been masked by illusive prosperity.

Chinese imports eliminated nearly one million American manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011. Add in suppliers and other related industries, and the total job losses reach 2.4 million.

Mr. Trump vows to slap punitive tariffs on Chinese goods. But that would very likely just shift production to other low-wage countries like Vietnam and Mexico. It would not turn the lights on at shuttered textile plants in the Carolinas. (Even if it did, robots would probably capture most of the jobs.)

Trade Adjustment Assistance, a government program started in 1962 and expanded significantly a dozen years later, is supposed to support workers whose jobs are casualties of overseas competition. The program pays for job training.But Mr. Simmons rolls his eyes at mention of the program. Training has almost become a joke. Skills often do not translate from old jobs to new. Many workers just draw a check while they attend training and then remain jobless.

European workers have fared better. In wealthier countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and government-provided health care are far more generous than in the United States.In the five years after a job loss, an American family of four that is eligible for housing assistance receives average benefits equal to 25 percent of the unemployed person’s previous wages, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For a similar family in the Netherlands, benefits reach 70 percent.

Yet in Europe, too, the impacts of trade have been uneven, in part because of the quirks of the European Union. Trade deals are cut by Brussels, setting the terms for the 28 member nations. Social programs are left to national governments.

In China, farmers whose land has been turned into factories are making more steel than the world needs. Advertisement Continue reading the main story In America, idled steel workers are contemplating how to live off the land.

a provision that would enable multinational companies to sue governments for compensation when regulations dent their profits.Esso, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, the American petroleum company, has operations in the Netherlands. Suppose the government went ahead with plans to limit drilling to protect the environment?“They could sue the Dutch state,” he fumed. “We are not so sure in the Netherlands whether we want to give the multinationals so much power. We are a trading country, but it’s not always that trade should prevail against quality of life.”

the longshoremen fret about robots

Now, many longshoremen sit in glass-fronted offices set back from the docks, controlling robotic arms via computer terminals.

The robots will win in the end, because robots never strike. Robots improve with time.

Trade deals, immigrant labor, automation: As Mr. Arkenbout sees it, these are all just instruments wielded in pursuit of the same goal — paying him less so corporations can keep more.“When they don’t need me anymore,” he said, “I’m nothing.”

Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers

Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments via his international network of hotels and resorts, including the one located directly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, where a Saudi-funded lobbyist rented 500 rooms in the month after the 2016 election. His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. And of course there’s the small matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election; as the limited information known so far from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirms, Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome.

the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation. From the pervasive influence of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies over think tanks and media organizations to virtually the entire U.S. government kowtowing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to China’s warm relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and with the heads of some of the most powerful U.S. companies to the funneling of foreign money through the real estate industries of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities—the U.S. government is for sale.

The complete deregulation of campaign finance and the subsequent legalization of corruption in Washington, on a scale unheard of in other developed countries, have resulted in a capital where the distinction between foreign and domestic monied interests is harder and harder to parse. The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy.

While Rhodes and Obama also faced pressure from within the Washington establishment, they found their agenda for the Middle East repeatedly hijacked by foreign allies—the same governments that also lobbied, with varying success, for U.S. military operations from Syria to Yemen. American power, however mighty, means nothing if it’s being used for the ends of the highest bidders

what we’re seeing is neither a considered, responsible withdrawal from empire in order to invest in urgent needs at home nor a revolt against empire by the world’s wretched. Rather, it’s a drawn-out, decadent collapse recognizable to any student of Rome or Constantinople. America is the sick man of the 21st century, and anyone who has watched its president bumble through a gathering of bemused, pitying world leaders knows it.

surveillance techniques taught by the NSA were central to the UAE’s efforts to monitor opponents

Various reports have highlighted the ongoing cyber arms race in the Middle East, as the Emirates and other nations attempt to sweep up hacking weapons and personnel faster than their rivals. The Reuters investigation is the first to reveal the existence of Project Raven, providing a rare inside account of state hacking operations usually shrouded in secrecy and denials.

While this activity raises ethical dilemmas, U.S. national security lawyers say the laws guiding what American intelligence contractors can do abroad are murky. Though it’s illegal to share classified information, there is no specific law that bars contractors from sharing more general spycraft knowhow, such as how to bait a target with a virus-laden email.

The hacking of Americans was a tightly held secret even within Raven, with those operations led by Emiratis instead. Stroud’s account of the targeting of Americans was confirmed by four other former operatives and in emails reviewed by Reuters.

Stroud had already made the switch from government employee to Booz Allen contractor, essentially performing the same NSA job at higher pay. Taking a job with CyberPoint would fulfill a lifelong dream of deploying to the Middle East and doing so at a lucrative salary. Many analysts, like Stroud, were paid more than $200,000 a year, and some managers received salaries and compensation above $400,000.

Providing sensitive defense technologies or services to a foreign government generally requires special licenses from the U.S. State and Commerce Departments. Both agencies declined to comment on whether they issued such licenses to CyberPoint for its operations in the UAE. They added that human rights considerations figure into any such approvals.

“Some days it was hard to swallow, like [when you target] a 16-year-old kid on Twitter,” she said. “But it’s an intelligence mission, you are an intelligence operative. I never made it personal.”

the program took aim not just at terrorists and foreign government agencies, but also dissidents and human rights activists. The Emiratis categorized them as national security targets

the UAE has been accused of suppressing free speech, detaining dissidents and other abuses by groups such as Human Rights Watch. The UAE says it is working closely with Washington to fight extremism “beyond the battlefield” and is promoting efforts to counter the “root causes” of radical violence. Raven’s targets eventually would include militants in Yemen, foreign adversaries such as Iran, Qatar and Turkey, and individuals who criticized the monarchy, said Stroud and eight other former Raven operatives. Their accounts were confirmed by hundreds of Raven program documents reviewed by Reuters.

Reached by phone in London, Donaghy, now a graduate student pursuing Arab studies, expressed surprise he was considered a top national security target for five years. Donaghy confirmed he was targeted using the techniques described in the documents. “I’m glad my partner is sitting here as I talk on the phone because she wouldn’t believe it,” he said. Told the hackers were American mercenaries working for the UAE, Donaghy, a British citizen, expressed surprise and disgust. “It feels like a betrayal of the alliance we have,” he said.

Mansoor was convicted in a secret trial in 2017 of damaging the country’s unity and sentenced to 10 years in jail. He is now held in solitary confinement, his health declining, a person familiar with the matter said. Mansoor’s wife, Nadia, has lived in social isolation in Abu Dhabi. Neighbors are avoiding her out of fear security forces are watching. They are correct. By June 2017 Raven had tapped into her mobile device and given her the code name Purple Egret, program documents reviewed by Reuters show. To do so, Raven utilized a powerful new hacking tool called Karma, which allowed operatives to break into the iPhones of users around the world.

Karma was particularly potent because it did not require a target to click on any link to download malicious software. The operatives understood the hacking tool to rely on an undisclosed vulnerability in Apple’s iMessage text messaging software. In 2016 and 2017, it would be used against hundreds of targets across the Middle East and Europe, including governments of Qatar, Yemen, Iran and Turkey, documents show. Raven used Karma to hack an iPhone used by the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, as well as the phones of close associates and his brother.

Emirati security forces viewed human rights advocates as a major threat to “national stability,”

But a 2014 State Department agreement with CyberPoint showed Washington understood the contractors were helping launch cyber surveillance operations for the UAE. The approval document explains CyberPoint’s contract is to work alongside NESA in the “protection of UAE sovereignty” through “collection of information from communications systems inside and outside the UAE” and “surveillance analysis.”

“It was incredible because there weren’t these limitations like there was at the NSA. There wasn’t that bullshit red tape,”

Under DarkMatter, Project Raven continued to operate in Abu Dhabi from the Villa, but pressure escalated for the program to become more aggressive. Before long, senior NESA officers were given more control over daily functions, former Raven operatives said, often leaving American managers out of the loop. By mid-2016, the Emirates had begun making an increasing number of sections of Raven hidden from the Americans still managing day-to-day operations. Soon, an “Emirate-eyes only” designation appeared for some hacking targets.

Stroud began searching a targeting request list usually limited to Raven’s Emirati staff, which she was still able to access because of her role as lead analyst. She saw that security forces had sought surveillance against two other Americans. When she questioned the apparent targeting of Americans, she received a rebuke from an Emirati colleague for accessing the targeting list, the emails show. The target requests she viewed were to be processed by “certain people. You are not one of them,” the Emirati officer wrote.

Days later, Stroud said she came upon three more American names on the hidden targeting queue.

occupations were listed: journalist

When Stroud kept raising questions, she said, she was put on leave by superiors, her phones and passport were taken, and she was escorted from the building. Stroud said it all happened so quickly she was unable to recall the names of the three U.S. journalists or other Americans she came across in the files. “I felt like one of those national security targets,” she said. “I’m stuck in the country, I’m being surveilled, I can’t leave.” After two months, Stroud was allowed to return to America. Soon after, she fished out the business card of the FBI agents who had confronted her at the airport. “I don’t think Americans should be doing this to other Americans,” she told Reuters. “I’m a spy, I get that. I’m an intelligence officer, but I’m not a bad one.”

It would also aim to bring more transparency to purchases of high-end real estate, which many foreign nationals use to launder money into the U.S. And it would require that the State Department and the Intelligence Community report to Congress every 90 days on whether or not the Kremlin is meddling in U.S. elections. 

Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, have also raised concerns about the bill

a wide array of initiatives have emerged as a direct response to China’s Belt and Road to undermine and dilute China’s infrastructural prowess: the U.S. International Finance and Development Corporation, the EU’s “Asia Connectivity Initiative,” the EU-Japan “Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure,” the U.S.-Japan-Australia “Blue Dot Network,” the India-Japan “connectivity corridors” and myriad other coalitions. None of these existed even three years ago. Roads have always been the pathways of conquest; now they are the battlefield of competitive connectivity. 

A repeat of the Cold War would surely not play out as favorably for the U.S. as the last one. America is politically polarized and is the world’s largest debtor nation. Its most recent major wars have been disasters and its military needs time to rebuild and adjust to new adversaries and tactics. And many of its erstwhile allies from Europe to Asia are far more vested in China than America is and don’t trust it to lead a consensus-based global coalition.

Bogging down the adversary while moving stealthily towards one’s objective has been an axiom of Chinese diplomacy for generations. But there is little stealth anymore in China’s land grabs, island-building and wolf-warrior diplomacy

With China’s suppression of information about the coronavirus painting it into a corner, Beijing no longer feels it has anything to lose and is going for broke: moving on Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Senkaku Islands, India’s borders and other disputes while the rest of the world is off-kilter, girding itself for a new Cold War with America. China’s leadership has convinced itself that West-leaning powers seek to encircle it militarily, splinter it internally and destabilize the Communist Party. This is the classical psychological spiral at the heart of any security dilemma in which each action taken by one side elevates the perceived insecurity of the other. 

in dozens of visits to Beijing, I have found my interlocutors unable to grasp this basic psychological fact. While many societies admire China’s success and are grateful for China’s role in their development, none want to be like China, nor be subservient to it. It’s an argument that’s fallen on deaf ears in Washington, too. And as with America’s experience of benevolent nation-building, China’s policy of intimidating neighbors into feebly muting their own interests has predictably backfired

American strategists have been far more fixated on China’s presence in Africa and South America rather than developing a comprehensive strategy for reassuring China’s neighbors and supporting their own efforts to stand up to it.

What the U.S. and Europe do have in their favor is that they are territorially secure while China is not. China has 14 neighbors, all of which harbor deep suspicions of its motives even as many (especially Russia) cooperate with it.

Despite the immense economic leverage China has accrued vis-a-vis the many states along its perimeter, it is the complexity of having so many neighbors that constrains China more than its increasingly sophisticated military arsenal suggests. Maintaining global influence is much harder when you are fighting a 14-front war in your own neighborhood. 

From Malabar to Pearl Harbor, the U.S., Japan, Australia, India and numerous other countries have been deepening their coordination in the Indo-Pacific maritime domain. The “quad” coalition features joint strategic patrols and hardware support for the navies of Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia in the South China Sea. This summer, ASEAN foreign ministers finally graduated from their usually limp communiques watered down by Chinese pressure and reaffirmed that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea must be the basis for arbitrating maritime disputes. 

Boundary agreements are rarely perceived as fair by both sides, yet such settlements have the virtue of enabling counties to mature towards functional cooperation.  

Precisely because the U.S. and EU have imposed such stiff restrictions on Chinese investment, China has redirected its outbound capital portfolio ever more towards its more proximate Asian domain. And in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, once fast-growing countries face capital outflows and weak global demand amid ruptured supply chains. The West may be squeezing China out of some markets, but China’s balloon is inflating across Asia as it lowers tariffs on all its Belt and Road trading partners

Laos and Cambodia, two of Asia’s poorest countries, have become all but wholly owned subsidiaries of China, even as China’s Mekong River dams have ravaged their agriculture through volatile water flows and chemical pesticides. With stronger technical and diplomatic assistance, these countries could demand that Chinese investments reinforce their sustainability and local businesses. 

It was always going to be an uphill battle for China to be perceived as a benevolent superpower. Unlike America or the European Union, China is wholly unconvincing as a multiethnic empire. It systematically squelches diverse identities rather than elevating them. Furthermore, though China is an ancient and rich civilization, it coexists with other Asian civilizations with equally respectable glory. None will ever bow to the others, as Japan learned the hard way in the 20th century. Every time China gains an inch of territory, it loses a yard of credibility. The essence of geopolitical stability is equilibrium, and the pathway to it follows the logic of reciprocity. 

China’s assertiveness signals neither an inevitable new Cold War nor a new unipolar hegemony. Rather, it is one phase in Asia’s collective story and the global shift towards multipolarity.

Never has Eurasia been ruled by a single hegemon. The Mongols came closest 700 years ago, but the 14th-century Black Death fractured its disparate khanates, and the Silk Road fell idle. Today again, a pandemic has emerged from China, but rather than shut down the Silk Road, we should build many more of them among dozens of Eurasian nations rather than in and out of China alone. All roads need not lead to Beijing.

Beijing’s opposition to U.S. coalition building and expansion of military cooperation with Indo-Pacific countries. Overall, Beijing’s instinct is to understand the Ukraine crisis largely through the lens of its confrontation with Washington.

Beijing will want to ensure its position is not overly exposed to Western criticism and to safeguard its moral standing in the eyes of developing countries

Khan returned home with little to show from the trip, the first by a Pakistani prime minister in over two decades. He signed no agreements or memoranda of understanding with his Russian counterpart. Widening Western sanctions on Russia have also sunk Pakistani hopes of energy cooperation with Moscow, casting particular doubt on the fate of a proposed multi-billion-dollar gas pipeline project.

“military-technical cooperation”, which has resulted in more than 60 per cent of India’s arms and defence systems being of Russian origin

India also depends on Russia to counterbalance China, which has become its primary security and foreign policy concern, especially given its unresolved border tensions with Beijing. With Pakistan, India’s main rival, already close to China and cosying up to Russia, India’s worst fear is that China, Pakistan and Russia will come together

Relations with Washington are already strained largely because of Islamabad’s seemingly unconditional support for the Afghan Taliban. To give his government diplomatic space, Khan has sought to forge closer ties with Moscow. Those efforts could not have come at a less opportune time.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, India immediately came under the spotlight as at once a consequential friend of Moscow and a country traditionally keen to portray itself as the world’s largest democracy and a champion of peace. The U.S. and European countries pressured India not to side with Moscow and the Ukrainian ambassador in New Delhi pleaded for India to halt its political support for Russia. Yet under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has responded to the invasion with the blunt realism of a rising, aspirational power that does not want to get caught between Russia and what Modi calls the “NATO group”. India chose the well-trodden non-alignment path and hid behind diplomatic language with a not-so-subtle tilt toward Russia.

concerned that the fallout from the war could lead Putin to increase arms sales to anti-Western proxies along its borders, chiefly Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon, or step up electronic measures to disrupt NATO operations in the Mediterranean Sea, affecting Israel’s own navigation systems. Thus far, Russia has assured Israel that it will continue coordination on Syria, though reiterating that it does not recognise Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and later annexed

The Gulf Arab countries have so far adopted an ambiguous position on the Russian aggression in Ukraine. As close U.S. partners that also have increasing ties to Russia, they sit between a rock and a hard place, unwilling to openly antagonise either side. They have landed in this conundrum because of what they perceive as a growing U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East. In response, they embarked on an effort to diversify their security relations, moving away from sole reliance on Washington. Russia is one of these new partners.

No Gulf power wants to give the impression of siding with the Kremlin, for fear of aggravating the U.S. – their primary security guarantor. But as international support for Ukraine and anger at those seen to support (or at least not publicly oppose) Russia grows, the damage may already have been done: the U.S. and its European allies were appalled at the Gulf states’ reticence to get in line with immediate condemnations of the Russian invasion

despite Iran’s own experience of losing large swaths of territory to Czarist Russia in the nineteenth century and facing Soviet occupation during and immediately after World War II, the Islamic Republic today can claim few major allies beyond Russia. Tehran sees few upsides in breaking ranks with Moscow. In comparison to the possible results of provoking the Kremlin with anything less than fulsome support, the diplomatic opprobrium it may receive from the U.S. and Europe is of little consequence.

Israel has substantive relations with both Russia and Ukraine: Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has spoken to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since the war began, and has offered to act as mediator; Israel sees itself as, in effect, sharing a border with Russia to its north east in Syria, relying on Putin’s continued tacit approval of its airstrikes on Iranian targets there; large Jewish and Israeli populations reside in both Russia and Ukraine and over 1.5 million Russian and Ukrainian expatriates live in Israel; and Israel is a major U.S. ally and beneficiary that identifies with the Western “liberal democratic order”.

Israel has offered humanitarian aid to Ukraine but has refused to sell it arms or provide it with military assistance.

African leaders and elites generally oppose sanctions, seeing them as blunt tools that tend to punish the general population more than national leaders. In the meantime, African officials are concerned that the war will have a deleterious impact on the continent’s economies and food security, both by driving up energy prices and by restricting grain supplies from Russia and Ukraine (a particular concern after a period of poor rainfall and weak harvests in parts of the continent). These shocks are liable to be severe in African countries that are still only beginning to recover from the downturn prompted by COVID-19, although oil producers such as Nigeria, Congo and Equatorial Guinea may benefit from a hike in energy prices.

President Zelenskyy is the only elected Jewish head of state outside Israel. He lost family in the Holocaust. As such, Israel’s silence on Putin’s antisemitic rhetoric, such as his claim to be “denazifying” Ukraine with the invasion, is noteworthy. That said, Israel has some track record – vis-à-vis Hungary and Poland, for example – of placing what its leaders view as national security or foreign relations concerns above taking a strong stand against antisemitism.

In contrast to Russia, with which Pakistan’s commerce is miniscule, the U.S. and EU states are its main trading partners. The war in Ukraine could further undermine Pakistan’s economy. The rise in global fuel prices is already fuelling record-high inflation and putting food security at risk, since before the invasion Ukraine provided Pakistan with more than 39 per cent of its wheat imports. With a trade deficit estimated by one analyst at around $40 billion, Islamabad’s reliance on external sources of funding will inevitably grow. A Russia under heavy sanctions will be in no position to assist. In such a scenario, Pakistan’s powerful military, which Khan depends on for his own political survival, could question his foreign posture.

Since 2014, Turkish defence companies have been increasingly engaged in Ukraine, and in 2019 they sold the country drones that Ukrainians see as significant in slowing the Russian advance.

On 27 February, Ankara announced that it would block warships from Russia and other littoral states from entering the Black Sea via the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits as long as the war continues, in line with the Montreux Convention (though Russian vessels normally based in Black Sea ports are exempt from the restriction, under the convention’s terms). But it also requested other states, implicitly including NATO members, to avoid sending their ships through the straits, in an apparent effort to limit the risks of escalation and maintain a balanced approach to the conflict.

Some fear, for instance, that Russia and its Syrian regime ally will ratchet up pressure on Idlib, the rebel-held enclave in Syria’s north west, forcing large numbers of refugees into Turkey, from where they might try to proceed to Europe. This worry persists though it is unclear that Russia would want to heat up the Syrian front while facing resilient Ukrainian resistance.

A prolonged war will only exacerbate Turkey’s security and economic concerns, and if Russia consolidates control of Ukraine’s coastline, it will also deal a significant blow to Turkey in terms of the naval balance of power in the Black Sea. It is likely that Turkey will draw closer to NATO as a result of this war, and less likely that Turkey will buy a second batch of S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia

Kenya, currently a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, has taken a more strident stance in opposition to Russia’s invasion than most non-NATO members of the Council. This position springs in part from the country’s history. Nairobi was one of the strongest supporters of a founding principle of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) prescribing respect for territorial integrity and the inviolability of member states’ colonial-era borders.

As in many African countries, a deep current of public opinion is critical of Western behaviour in the post-Cold War era, emphasising the disastrous interventions in Iraq and Libya, as well as the double standards that many Kenyans perceive in Washington’s democracy promotion on the continent.

What Nairobi saw as Washington’s endorsement of the 2013 coup in Egypt particularly rankled Kenyan authorities, who took an especially vocal public position against that putsch

Kenya will also push for the strengthening of multilateralism in Africa to confront what many expect to be difficult days ahead in the international arena. “We are entering an age of global disorder”, Peter Kagwanja, a political scientist and adviser to successive Kenyan presidents, told Crisis Group. “The African Union must band together or we will all hang separately”.

longstanding solidarity between South Africa and Russia. In the Soviet era, Moscow offered South Africans support in the anti-apartheid struggle and actively backed liberation movements across southern Africa.

Although just over half of African states backed the UN General Assembly resolution on Ukraine, many governments in the region have responded to the war with caution. Few have voiced open support for Russia, with the exception of Eritrea. But many have avoided taking strong public positions on the crisis, and some have explicitly declared themselves neutral.

Ghana, which joined the UN Security Council in January, has consistently backed the government in Kyiv. The West African bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), released a statement condemning Russia’s actions. Nonetheless, not all ECOWAS members voted for the General Assembly resolution. Mali, which has drawn closer to Russia as France pulled its military forces out of the country, abstained. Burkina Faso did not vote, perhaps reflecting the fact that Russia watered down a Security Council statement condemning the January coup in Ouagadougou.

Russia has many friends in Africa due in part to the Soviet Union’s support for liberation movements during the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. Many also appreciated Moscow’s strident opposition to the more recent disastrous Western interventions in Iraq and Libya. Furthermore, a number of African leaders studied in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries and Moscow has done a good job of maintaining these ties over the years. Numerous African security figures also received their training in Russia.

The Ukraine conflict is a major problem for Turkey. It threatens not only to damage Ankara’s relations with Moscow, but also to hurt the Turkish economy, pushing up energy costs and stopping Russian and Ukrainian tourists from visiting Turkey. Some analysts estimate that a decline in tourism could mean up to $6 billion in lost revenue.

Since the invasion began, Bolsonaro’s affinities with Moscow have exposed the divisions within his hard-right government. From the outset, Brazil’s foreign ministry has vowed to maintain a position of neutrality, urging a diplomatic solution. But a day after the invasion, Hamilton Mourão, the vice president and a retired army general, said “there must be a real use of force to support Ukraine”, arguing that “if the Western countries let Ukraine fall, then it will be Bulgaria, then the Baltic states and so on”, drawing an analogy to the conquests of Nazi Germany. Hours later, Bolsonaro said only he could speak about the crisis, declaring that Mourão had no authority to comment on the issue.

Calls for neutrality nevertheless enjoy traction in Brazil. Within the government, there is concern that Western sanctions against Moscow will harm the economy, in particular its agricultural sector, which relies heavily on imports of Russian-made fertilisers. Brazil’s soya production, one of the country’s main sources of income, would suffer considerably from a sanctioned Russia.

Mexico depends on the U.S for its natural gas supply, and the prospect of rising prices is spurring the government to consider other means of generating electricity

Relations between Russia and Venezuela flourished under the late president, Hugo Chávez, who set the relationship with Washington on an antagonistic course. Under Maduro, Venezuela’s links to Russia have intensified, especially through the provision of technical military assistance as well as diplomatic backing from Moscow after Maduro faced a major challenge from the U.S.-linked opposition in early 2019.