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The downside is that renewed ascendancy of naked realpolitik after ~100y of at least lip service to ideology is that we’re back in 19th century zero-sum thinking with little room for unexpected breakthrough leaps of humanist progress
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Asia has largely decided to abstain from Europe's war, India's stance is rock solid, and in SEA there is a growing confidence among the leadership of places like Thailand. African leadership in the next generation must match this confidence. asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Sorry-
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Thinking through the appropriate posture for the non-European world calls for nuance and unfortunately the atmosphere is bad for nuance. Many things are going on here…
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1. Actual Realpolitik 2. Genuine non-white superpower ambitions (China) 3. Treatment of non-whites in Ukraine being taken as a natural experiment/test of Ukraine’s moral worth 4. Colonial era wariness of getting dragged into “colonizer wars” …
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5. A certain delight at it not being on the receiving end for once 6. Schadenfreude at America’s complete lack of credible moral authority… for the first time in 30y But what’s missing is any genuine concern for “what’s the right thing to do here?” Not just “right for us”
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Until that concern exists, Asian global leadership will lack a certain critical piece. You don’t earn moral authority from realpolitik strength alone. You earn it by championing an idealism, no matter how hypocritically, and *repeatedly putting it to the test*
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Arguably Nehru was kinda serious about developing an alt moral authority model (I think Tito and Sukarno were entirely cynical, Nasser slightly serious). But NAM was milquetoast third world idealism without teeth. 2022 posture is second-world pure cynicism with teeth. Kinda sad.
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For a major or minor (think Singapore) country to offer an idealistic frame of moral authority that it will almost certainly fail to itself live up to is an act of both vulnerability and optimism. That’s precisely why it’s worth doing. And neither China, nor India is doing so.
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The test of moral authority is not whether you can strut around feeling virtuous, but whether you do the right thing by your standards even when others aren’t doing so, and it maybe looks weak, and costs you… and you suck it up and do it anyway. Asian powers so far haven’t.
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