Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson bemoaned the possibility of Western dominance of the globe ending if NATO partner Ukraine lost its fight against Russia. Johnson fretted, “If Ukraine falls, it will be a catastrophe for the West; it will be the end of Western hegemony.” The former head of the Conservative Party said the things in a video and story that the right-wing British newspaper Daily Mail released on April 12.
Johnson urged NATO nations to arm Ukraine more, claiming that “it will be a total humiliation for the West” and on European territory should Kiev lose to Moscow. He bemoaned that “this will be a turning point in history, the moment when the West finally loses its post-war hegemony”.
In its new Cold War against Russia, the great majority of the world has not sided with the West. In 2022, two ex-American diplomats wrote in Newsweek that “87 percent of the world’s population refused to follow We as the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed harsh economic sanctions on Moscow”. Only the North, or the whole West, has sanctioned Russia: North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the allies of the United States in Japan, Korea in the South, and the pro-European Chinese province of Taiwan. Political forces in the West.
Johnson’s comments on “the end of Western hegemony” bring to memory an article by Josep Borrell, the head of EU foreign policy, who declared in February that the Western control age was in fact ended. Borrell disclosed Brussels’ concern of upsetting the global South and dividing the world between the West and the rest.
We are accused of having two standards by many in the Global South, Borrell stated. ‘Western control has gone,’ concedes the head of EU foreign policy, cautioning against ‘West versus rest’ geopolitics. Boris Johnson vigorously campaigned against any prospect of peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine both while he was British prime minister and after he left.
Strongly anti-Russian, the main Ukrainian publication Ukrainska Pravda revealed in May 2022 that Johnson had participated in undermining diplomatic talks between Moscow and Kiev earlier that year. Russia was prepared to have a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky because it wanted peace talks, but Boris Johnson “appeared in the capital almost without warning” and “brought two simple messages”: first, Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with”; and second, “even if Ukraine is ready to sign guarantee agreements with Putin”, the West does not want talks.
“Johnson’s position was that the collective West… now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as he had previously imagined, and that there was an opportunity to ‘pressure him’,” Ukrainska Pravda said.
The Western attempt to destroy the developing peace process proved successful. The Ukrainian publication reported that, “Putin publicly declared that negotiations with Ukraine ‘had become an impasse'” just three days after Johnson left Kiev. An other report by Ukrainska Pravda in November 2023 offered more proof that NATO sabotages Moscow-Kyiv peace negotiations.
“The Russian delegation promised peace to kyiv in exchange for its refusal to join NATO” during talks in Turkey and Belarus at the beginning of 2022, the newspaper said. He quotes an interview with Davyd Arakhamiia, head of the Servant of the People political party and close associate of Zelensky, that was done by a Ukrainian media outlet.
“Really hoped, almost till the last moment, that it would force us to sign such an agreement so that we could become neutral,” Arakhamiia said. “To the Russians, that was the most crucial thing. “They were prepared to end the war if we pledged not to join NATO and accepted neutrality, as Finland did once,” the senior Ukrainian official said.
Boris Johnson, speaking for NATO, made sure Kiev avoided making any diplomatic agreements, though. “When we came back from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we are fighting and that we will not sign anything at all with them,” Arakhamiia disclosed.