The New Cold War Is Here

Russian President Vladimir Putin made four major miscalculations before invading Ukraine. He overestimated Russian military competence and effectiveness and underestimated the Ukrainians’ will to fight back. He assumed a distracted West would be unable to unite politically in the face of the Russian attack and that the Europeans and Washington’s Asian allies would never support far-reaching financial, trade, and energy sanctions against Russia.

But he did get one thing right: He correctly estimated that the non-Western world—what I call “the Rest”—would not condemn Russia or impose sanctions. The day the war broke out, U.S. President Joe Biden said the West would make Putin a “pariah on the international stage”—but for much of the world, Putin is not a pariah.

For the past decade, Russia has cultivated ties with countries in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa—regions from which Russia withdrew after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. And the Kremlin has assiduously courted China since annexing Crimea in 2014. When the West sought to isolate Russia, Beijing stepped in to support Moscow, including by signing the “Power