With the international system stretched to the breaking point, one of the most fragile strategic assets that a state can amass is moral legitimacy. For European and U.S. governments shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is profoundly frustrating that societies in Asia, the Middle East and Africa—often grouped together as part of the Global South—do not share the same moral outrage over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression. As the world’s attention remains focused on Ukraine and Gaza, however, other conflicts are setting precedents that will further erode the moral and legal constraints on state and nonstate actors. Every major regional and global power has contributed in some way to the structural dysfunctions that have fueled Sudan’s plunge into conflict and Ethiopia’s into revisionism. Whether in the West or self-identifying with the Global South, states pursuing short-term interests colluded with brutal autocrats and vicious militia leaders who crushed efforts by civil society movements to defend the rule of law.
