Vestlig media kan faktisk være litt selvkritisk ja, the Economist deler ordene til ICG, International Crisis Group, om hvorfor mange ikke-vestlige land ikke er veldig aktive med å kritisere Russland:
A related objection is that the West is obsessing over a European conflict that is not a true global concern, while downplaying or ignoring conflicts and human-rights abuses elsewhere. To these critics, a self-righteous inconsistency on questions of international law is a hobgoblin of great powers. “There’s a good deal of what you might call geopolitical whataboutism,” says Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group (icg), a think-tank.
In recent years, the reluctance of rich countries to invest in mitigating climate change and the slow and uneven distribution of covid-19 vaccines had already reinvigorated the Non-Aligned Movement, the organisation of states that professed neutrality during the cold war. “There’s been an underlying trend that I’ve observed around the un in the last couple of years, which is that a lot of the countries from the global south have been increasingly co-ordinated in articulating criticisms of the West,” Mr Gowan says. These countries, he continues, “have been feeling more a sense of unity and common purpose than was the case in much of the post-cold war era.”
Particularly across the Middle East, and in Turkey, the West’s concern for Ukraine’s sovereignty is seen as self-serving and hypocritical, partly in light of America’s war in Iraq and the nato-led bombing of Libya in 2011, which toppled its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. The warm European welcome granted to Ukrainian refugees, compared to that accorded Syrian refugees, prompts eye-rolling. These sorts of concerns are of long standing among Arab states. What has been surprising is the degree to which even American clients have felt free to act on them.