PARIS, September 2. /TASS/. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) summit showed a united Asia standing up against what it perceives as Western attempts to dictate to other countries, Le Figaro columnist Rene Girard wrote.
"The meeting between [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, and [Indian Prime Minister] Narendra Modi was a chance to put up an anti-West front," he wrote, noting that the Russian president was received warmly in China, despite the West’s attempts to push the "diplomatic and economic isolation of Russia" on the rest of the world.
"The reality is that developing countries in Asia used the Tianjin summit to show a huge gesture of disdain to the West. All of them refused to shun Russia as have Western countries," he stated. In his words, even if not all of them completely back Russia’s position on the conflict in Ukraine, their leaders listened to Putin attentively all the same. "They insist that the West has no right to tell Russia what to do," Girard noted, adding that Asian countries remember how the West tore Kosovo away from Serbia in violation of UN Security Council resolutions and its military operations in Iraq and Libya.
According to the journalist, US President Donald Trump’s attempt to ratchet up pressure on India by means of raising tariffs to make it halt Russian oil purchases became yet another irritant. This measure failed to get Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to change his position. Moreover, it only pushed India toward China, as Modi made a trip to that country for the first time in the past seven years. "Like all leaders of the ‘global South,’ Asian leaders refuse to tolerate the West’s desire to teach them what’s right and accompany these moral lessons with economic sanctions, pretending that it still controls global financial circles," he stated.
Ukrainian conflict
According to Girard, it is absolutely inapt of the Europeans, who are bogged down in the Ukrainian conflict, to moralize with Asian countries in a bid to get them to stop supporting Russia because this may have an opposite effect. "But on the other hand, they cannot afford to award victory to Russia after investing so much, both economically and politically, to defend Ukraine, which came under aggression," he noted.
It is critically important for Europe to uphold the strategic achievements of this conflict, with one of them being "turning the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake" following Finland and Sweden’s accession to the alliance. Apart from that, in his words, Europe wants to "avoid Ukraine’s military collapse" and ramp up its military presence in countries bordering Russia to secure itself against alleged Russian aggression. However, such a scenario is highly improbable, Girard argued.