Key Global South middle powers India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates declined to sign the joint communique at a summit in Switzerland on resolving the Ukraine war. (Another key middle power Brazil had decided to attend only as an observer.)
These Global South middle powers did not endorse the communique despite the text’s recitation of the importance of “sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity” and food security, both of which are key points of concern and consensus across developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Some of these states have previously voted for U.S.-backed resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly that criticized the violations of territorial integrity by Russia and also cited food security.
These middle powers are skeptical that a summit that excluded Russia, the biggest combatant in the conflict, could achieve a peace deal to end the war. The Indian representative at the summit explained his country’s stance by stating that “only those options acceptable to both parties can lead to abiding peace.” Many of these powers, including India, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia, also have strong economic and/or security relations with Russia, which they will not easily put at risk.
U.S. and Western actions in the Middle East and elsewhere have done serious harm to the task of holding Moscow to account in what was clearly an illegal invasion of Ukraine. Many in the Global South are keenly aware of the double standards at work, and do not wish to be used instrumentally to settle Western scores with Russia.
The gap between the United States and key Global South states will likely persist unless Washington and its allies make a major course correction on two fronts. The first is to address serious deficits and violations in their vaunted “rules-based order” that will make American messaging more credible. The contrasts between the U.S. approach to transgressions of international law in Ukraine and Gaza are too glaring to wish away.
The second is to better take into account the Global South’s interests. While Washington has moved to an extent in this direction through its infrastructure and other initiatives, there is still much ground to cover to get to a more productive, non-zero sum policy toward the Global South.
Sarang Shidore is Director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, and member of the adjunct faculty at George Washington University. He has published in Foreign Affairs and The New York times, among others. Sarang was previously a senior research scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and senior global analyst at the geopolitical risk firm Stratfor Inc.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (C) attends a joint press conference during the Peace Summit in Bürgenstock, Switzerland on June 16, 2024.( The Yomiuri Shimbun via REUTERS )
In an op-ed today for the Detroit Free Press, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) blasted her colleagues who voted to increase Pentagon spending while owning stock in weapons manufacturing companies.
“Our elected officials should not be able to profit off death,” she wrote. “They should not be able to use their positions of power to get rich from defense contractors while voting to pass more funding to bomb people.”
Tlaib also touted her Stop Politicians Profiting from War Act, which she introduced in the House early last year. The law would ban all members of Congress and their immediate families from owning stock in defense contractors.
If passed, the law would hamper dozens of congressional portfolios. A recent data analysis by the Quincy Institute’s Nick Cleveland Stout at Responsible Statecraft found that 37 members of Congress traded between $24 million and $113 million in defense stocks last year.
At the top of that list is Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), who traded a staggering $22 million in defense-related stocks despite claiming that he has “no idea” where his money is invested. Gottheimer sits on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the National Security subcommittee in the Committee on Financial Services.
While congressional representatives are often accused of using privileged government information to guide their trades, the military industrial complex is so profitable that even mainstream investment newsletters are urging their readers to get in on the action.
“The defense sector outlook remains strong as geopolitical conflict persists,” reads a U.S. News and World Report tagline for a January article titled “7 Best Defense Stocks to Buy Now.”
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Top Photo: In this image from United States Senate television, this is the scene in the US Senate Chamber during debate concerning an amendment to US Senate Resolution 483, during the impeachment trial of US President Donald J. Trump in the US Senate in the US Capitol in Washington, DC on Tuesday, January 21, 2020. Mandatory Credit: US Senate Television via CNP
The Senate voted Tuesday against advancing H.R. 23, which would impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), to the Senate floor. This follows the successful passage of the same bill in the House — by a 243 to 140 vote — earlier this month.
The legislation is primarily a rebuke of the court for warrants issued in November for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for their alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Palestinians in Gaza.
But it turns out the Republican sponsors could not rally the 60 votes to advance the bill to the Senate floor. Only one Democrat, Pennsylvania's John Fetterman, voted with them, resulting in a final tally of 54-45.
Some Democrats have expressed support for legislation sanctioning the ICC but believe the current bill is too broad or, as Minority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated, “poorly crafted and deeply problematic."
New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spearheaded negotiations with Republicans over some of the bill’s broad language and provisions. She and other Democrats were worried that the legislation, as written, could harm American tech contractors and companies that do business with the ICC and that the Senate should amend the legislation to protect these actors.
Humanitarian agencies have also expressed concern over the bill's potentially broad implications. Over 130 organizations sent a letter to Congress and the incoming administration urging “other governments, Members of Congress, and advocates for victims everywhere to raise their voices to oppose attacks on the independence and autonomy of international judicial institutions like the ICC.”
The letter points out that dismissing the ICC authority would undermine attempts to curb crimes against humanity in other countries where the United States has sided with the court, such as in cases against Putin in Russia and Sudan.
“(ICC) Sanctions send a signal that could embolden authoritarian regimes and others with reason to fear accountability who seek to evade justice,” claim the letter’s signatories."
Experts have also warned that sanctions could inhibit current investigations into other governments allied with the United States. In the Philippines, for example, the ICC is investigating extrajudicial killings that took place under former President Rodrigo Duterte and are allegedly occurring to this day as a consequence of Duterte’s harsh war on drugs.
“In the Philippines, reported extrajudicial drug war killings still number about one per day, and threats to the lives of people working to bring the perpetrators to justice are very real,” says David Borden, Executive Director at Stop the War on Drugs. “Sanctions have the potential to make the ICC unable to operate any of its programs, including those which provide protection to witnesses, and at a minimum would make things much more difficult.”
It is unclear if Republicans and Democrats in the Senate will work to amend the language of the ICC sanctions bill or if Republicans will opt to drop the issue for now.
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Top image credit: Belarusian President and presidential candidate Alexander Lukashenko casts his ballot at a polling station during the presidential election in Minsk, Belarus January 26, 2025. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina
It’s that time again — a new Belarusian presidential election, accompanied by an all too familiar cavalcade of denunciations by Western officials and politicians.
Belarus’ strongman President Aleksandr Lukashenko secured his seventh term with an expected 87.6% of the vote, extending his three decades-long rule by another five years. European leaders are all but certain to repair to their time-honored tradition of demanding Lukashenko’s ouster while imposing fresh sanctions on Belarus. Minsk will predictably respond by doubling down on its ties to Russia and China, perpetuating a cycle of hostility between Belarus and its neighbors that continues to destabilize Eastern Europe.
It needn’t be this way. President Trump has a unique opportunity to course-correct relations between Belarus and the West by building on policies pursued during his first term. Doing so would not only advance core U.S. interests but bolster European security and prosperity over the long term.
U.S. policy toward Belarus has swirled for the last three decades in a miasma of neoconservative wishful thinking. Lukashenko, according to this guiding impulse, is an illegitimate usurper who must be made to leave in order for a democratic, pro-Western Belarusian state to emerge in his stead. This dream of removing Lukashenko from power is to be accomplished by a policy of sustained maximum pressure and diplomatic isolation, kicked into high gear following widespread Western refusal to acknowledge the results of the 2020 Belarusian presidential election.
Belarus’ role in providing passage and logistical support to Russian troops in the Ukraine invasion’s early days imbued these punitive measures with a newfound sense of urgency, leading to the development of “mirrored” sanctions packages simultaneously imposed on Moscow and Minsk.
All this sloganeering and bureaucratic posturing has progressively obscured the reality of the situation: there is no viable pathway to regime change in Minsk, at least not at a cost that any European or U.S. leader is prepared to bear. Lukashenko continues to maintain a firm grip over the country’s security apparatus, rendering moot any prospects of a successful Western-backed military mutiny or mass protests that can fatally destabilize his rule.
Then there is Lukashenko’s external failsafe: Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that Moscow will not allow any such regime change scenario to unfold in Belarus. There is every reason to believe that, if Lukashenko’s rule truly comes under exigent threat, Russian forces will move to occupy Belarus, and they wouldn’t be inclined to leave. The possible, indeed, likely outcome would be exactly what the West is seeking to prevent: Russia’s de facto or official annexation of Belarus.
But what of Syria, one may interject. Surely the Assad regime’s sudden collapse last month, and Putin’s refusal to intervene, offers the West a blueprint for dealing with Lukashenko? The analogy falls flat. For one, Syria is nowhere near a critical security interest for Russia. Moscow could afford to cut the Assad regime loose by bolstering its military presence in Libya while diplomatically engaging the Syrian successor government and its major backer, Turkey, to protect its portfolio of strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond.
No such triangulation is possible with Belarus. Moscow sees the emergence of a Belarus that is militarily and geopolitically aligned with the West as an existential threat and is prepared to use military force, like it did in Ukraine, to foreclose this development. Secondly, Lukashenko does not suffer from the same structural weaknesses and vulnerabilities as Assad. Over one-third of Belarus is not carved up between hostile factions militarily supported by powerful external forces, nor are Belarusian security structures so emaciated and brittle that a rebel force can simply move in and seize control of the capital with little to no resistance, as was the case in Syria.
The Western maximum-pressure campaign against Belarus has not produced any positive domestic changes inside the country, nor has it meaningfully weakened Lukashenko’s rule. Its only tangible effect has been to render Belarus increasingly dependent on Russia and China to a degree that Lukashenko himself has always sought to avoid.
As I explained in a QI brief on Belarus, it has been a cornerstone of Lukashenko’s “multivector” foreign policy for the past several decades to pursue closer ties with the U.S. and EU as a counterweight to what would otherwise be his one-sided reliance on Russia and, increasingly, China. Lukashenko’s strong drift toward Russia since 2020 is purely a product of Belarus’ desire to insulate itself from costs inflicted by a Western economic and diplomatic maximum pressure campaign against Minsk.
To the extent that the purpose of the European and Biden administration’s effort to oust Lukashenko is to achieve a Belarus that is friendly to the West, we are kicking in a wide open door. But if, as one suspects, the real goal is to force Belarus’ complete military, economic, and political divestment from Russia, then it is long past time to acknowledge that this objective is not only unachievable but unnecessary and counterproductive.
Insisting on this type of clean break with Russia compromises Belarus’ longstanding policy of maneuvering between East and West rather than fully committing itself to either of these poles, and invites a wide range of Russian retaliatory moves against Minsk that the West is ill-prepared to counter.
To put a finer point on it, Russian military intervention in response to a Western-backed revolution in Belarus would precipitate a new crisis on NATO’s eastern flank at a moment when Russia-West relations are already at an all-time low. Eastern European leaders may find themselves tempted to respond to Moscow’s intervention by blockading or at least threatening to choke off Russia’s Central European exclave of Kaliningrad, pitting Russia and NATO on a direct path to military confrontation.
There is no, and has never been, a reason to accept such risks. President Trump forged ahead during his first term with a bold vision to re-engage Belarus. There is ample reason for doing so. As the Ukraine war has shown, Belarus is a key component in Eastern European stability. It is a geostrategic crossroads between NATO’s eastern flank and Eurasia, making it valuable not just as a military staging ground but as a transit hub between EU states and the post-Soviet sphere.
The new administration is ideally positioned to pivot away from the failed policy of maximum pressure toward a format for soft normalization with Belarus. Minsk has signaled for the past several years that it seeks a rapprochement with the West. Indeed, Lukashenko’s decision to release detained U.S. citizen Anastasia Nufer on the eve of the Belarusian election cannot be interpreted as anything other than a gesture of goodwill toward Washington.
While the full range of diplomatic possibilities can only be ascertained by engaging Lukashenko directly, it is possible to paint in broad brushstrokes what a deal may look like. The current scope of Belarusian-Russian defense cooperation cannot realistically be rolled back, but Minsk should pledge not to expand its military partnership with Russia beyond its current levels. Minsk would be expected to commit itself not to undertake any hybrid actions against its neighbors, such as facilitating migrant inflows into neighboring countries or hosting paramilitary troops that can conduct low–intensity cross–border operations against Belarus’ neighbors.
It should also pledge not only not to deepen its involvement in the Russian war effort but to play a constructive role in the Trump administration’s effort to end the Ukraine war through a negotiated settlement.
Finally, the two sides would agree to establish continuous dialogue on human rights issues in the spirit of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. In return, the U.S. would provide assurances that it is not seeking regime change in Belarus. It would lift sanctions to a degree required to reestablish economic ties, including energy exports, Western investment inside Belarus, tourism opportunities, as well as education and work arrangements for Belarusians in the West. The U.S. should further add that it is open to removing its other Belarus sanctions on a mutually agreed timeline pending a durable end to the Ukraine war.
This framework for normalization is readily feasible because it is both in Western and Belarusian interests, nor does it demand any real strategic concessions from the U.S. To the contrary, it advances the Trump administration’s larger goal of working toward a stable architecture of peace and prosperity in Europe.
The prior approach to Belarus was a relic of tired establishment shibboleths, trapped in its lack of geostrategic imagination and kept alive solely by weight of bureaucratic inertia. President Trump rightly seeks to renegotiate the terms on which America engages with Europe. Our Belarus posture provides a clear window of opportunity to apply this new thinking.
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