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""The West insists that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. Of course, Ukraine never attacked Russia, but the West’s policies toward Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union helped precipitate the crisis. Many leading Western thinkers, including the American diplomat George Kennan and the Australian intellectual Owen Harries, had warned decades ago that the eastward expansion of NATO would eventually provoke a Russian backlash. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva captured a more nuanced view on the war in Ukraine when he said, in May 2022, “Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The United States and the EU are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the United States and Europe should have said: ‘Ukraine won’t join NATO.’ That would have solved the problem.” A 2015 video in which the American political scientist John Mearsheimer explains how the West provoked Russian aggression, drawing from his 2014 essay in these pages, has been watched over 30 million times on YouTube—and widely shared in the global South.

Some Western leaders dismiss these views as amoral and as anathema to the principles that Western democracies seek to uphold in the world. Here, the simultaneous fighting in Ukraine and Gaza in 2024 and 2025 undermined Europe’s moral standing. Europeans have rightfully expressed horror over the killings of innocent civilians in Ukraine, but EU leaders remained mostly silent as Israel destroyed Gaza. Not only have many more civilians died in Gaza than in Ukraine, but Israeli military actions, according to estimates published in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, may have led to the deaths of five to ten percent of Gaza’s prewar population—a staggering figure, exponentially higher than the toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine. No one respects an adulterous priest who preaches marital fidelity in church. But this is how European leaders are seen in the global South."