Salman Rafi Sheikh

The recently concluded meeting of the Group of 77 (‘G77’) in Cuba saw some crucial developments at the global level. Comprising most of the countries in the Global South, the meeting endorsed the idea of a new, alternative global order led, not by one power center but multiple power centers, including from the Global South. China, while not a member of the G77, also endorsed the group’s position stated quite comprehensively by Cuban President, Miguel Diaz-Canel, at the opening of the summit. To quote him, “After all this time that the North has organized…

Washington’s newly found love for the Global South is hardly a strange development. Having seemingly ‘conquered’ Europe’s foreign policy in terms of forcing it to align with the US vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine, Washington is now keen to expand its influence to arrest the global political systems’ drift towards a multipolar world. A key reason contributing to Washington’s new approach is that the Ukraine conflict has fairly exposed the limits of the unipolar world insofar as sustaining this system requires military conflict. On the other hand, Russia’s resistance against unipolarity has created a global scenario in which countries outside of the developed world have become geopolitically very relevant insofar…

“There is a rapprochement [between Saudi Arabia and Israel] underway”, announced President Joe Biden in July. If the Biden administration can find a way for Saudi Arabia and Israel to develop relations officially, this will be a significant diplomatic breakthrough. Indeed, successive US presidents have tried – and failed – in ‘normalising’ the Middle East. The Trump administration, however, found an exceptional success when it got the UAE and Israel (and a couple of other Arab states) to sign The Abraham Accords in 2020. Ever since then, the US has been trying to expand the accords by including Saudi Arabia, which is arguably the most important Muslim…