Writing on world affairs from the Global South

In a recent edition of The Economist, the Foreign Minister of Oman, Badr Albusaidi, wrote an evocative article criticising the U.S. and Israel’s rash actions in launching unlawful military strikes against Iran. He lamented how Iran’s retaliation against Israel and U.S. targets in neighbouring territory, while “deeply regrettable and completely unacceptable”, was “probably the only rational option available to [its] leadership”, and how the war had threatened West Asia’s “present security and future prosperity”. This was a remarkable article by an Omani official who played a role in mediating nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran, before the attacks plunged the world into a new crisis. Mr. Albusaidi’s lament was a call to end the madness of the war even as sites in Oman were hit in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

Yet in the same issue of The Economist, an unsigned article on U.S. actions in cutting off Cuba’s fuel imports struck a very different tone — quite an endorsement of Washington’s actions, it argued that since the Trump administration is “in a position to negotiate an opening up [of Cuba’s economy]”, it should “enforce compliance to a far greater extent”. The publication urged the U.S. to seize shadow fleet tankers used by the socialist island nation, demand political liberalisation, and keep sanctions in place “with licences being used to allow investment”.

The journal had little to say about how the U.S. has asphyxiated Cuba’s economy which led to three nationwide electric grid shutdowns this month alone, exacerbated a food crisis and made millions of lives miserable. Anything seems kosher against a government that is avowedly socialist, poses no threat to the U.S., but is still ludicrously marked by Washington as a “sponsor of terror”.

The Economist’s view on Cuba stands in sharp contrast to how it denounced the U.S.’s designs on Greenland, calling it “dangerous nonsense” that could weaken the post-war international order. That order, it would appear, deserves defending only when it protects European sovereignty, not when it pertains to Cuba’s economy or Venezuela’s self-determination.

This double standard is not new. In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, The New York Times carried Judith Miller’s explosive but fabricated accounts of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes; Bush administration officials cited the Times’s reporting as independent validation of their war cause. The paper’s belated apology in 2004 admitted its coverage had not been “as rigorous as it should have been”. By then, Iraq lay in ruins. More recently, The Washington Post’s editorial board hailed the Trump administration’s military seizure of Venezuela’s sitting president as “a major victory for American interests”, even as Mr. Trump declared the U.S. would “run” the country and its oil.

Editorial writers in the Global South must recognise this hypocrisy, despite the constraints we face. We depend a lot on Western reporting when it comes to world affairs, as this is, many a time, the only available source to understand events in distant hemispheres where we do not have correspondents. Publications cited above have dozens of reporters and bureaus spanning the globe while most newspapers in Asia, Africa and Latin America barely have any in other regions. The editorial writer’s dependence must be qualified with the ability to read accounts in the Western press critically, extracting only the reportable substance while discarding the imperial frame of reference.

Our task is also to be critical of anti-democratic impulses in our own backyards as much as elsewhere, while taking firm positions against the assertion that sovereignty is a privilege only for the powerful. Governments in the Global South derive their legitimacy through diverse ways, some through liberal-democratic mandates, and others through genuine revolutionary histories; that legitimacy is not for Washington or London to adjudicate on.