The best the U.S. could muster from the G20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month was what has been called a “watered-down” declaration that critics noted did not even identify Russia as the aggressor. 

The Global South refused to bend and call out Moscow, which was Washington’s dream. 

“It’s clear that the West overall has been surprised by the pretty widespread reluctance by many of the countries in the so-called Global South… to come on board,” Jan Techau of the consulting firm Eurasia Group, told The Wall Street Journal.

Andre Damon, an editor at WSWS, wrote that the summit “was widely seen as a humiliating failure” by the U.S. to “recruit developing countries for its war drive against Russia.”

Damon wrote that the diplomatic failure of the Biden administration was compounded by the fact that Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to make any major gains. 

The U.S., undeterred, continues to show a willingness to double down in its efforts in Ukraine and seems to have a willing government in Kyiv to fight Russia until they run out of Ukrainians. 

The WSJ reported on Friday that the Biden administration is moving closer to providing Ukraine with the Army’s Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which comes with a range of up to 190 miles and can be fired from a mobile launcher. 

Reuters also reported that missiles provided with these systems may contain cluster munitions and are designed for “deep attack of enemy second-echelon forces.”  

“From a military standpoint, we have relatively few ATACMS, we do have to make sure that we maintain our own munitions inventories, as well,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Defense One earlier this year, according to the paper. “And the range of the weapon—I think there’s a little bit of overstating of what an ATACMS can do and can’t do. You’re looking at a single shot, so think of a musket versus a repeating rifle.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited Kyiv last week, told ABC News that the decision will rest with Ukraine if it wants to use U.S.-provided weapons to strike deeper inside Russia, which AntiWar.com noted is a policy that “brings the U.S. and Russia closer to a direct clash.”

TRENDPOST: Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the world is witnessing a “tectonic change.” 

“It’s no coincidence that the West claims that its culture and worldview should be universal,” Putin said. “Even if they don’t say so directly, they behave this way. In fact, their approach insists that these values be unconditionally accepted by all other participants in international communication.”

Much of the world is waking up to the reality that the U.S. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, famously said: America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

Brazil has been a good example of how Washington cannot even influence major countries in its own sphere of influence. 

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s president, has been candid about his assessment of the Ukraine War and how the U.S. and Europe have been contributing to the chaos.

“The European Union needs to start talking about peace so that we can convince Putin and Zelensky that peace is in the interest of everyone and that war is only interesting, for now, to the two of them,” Lula said last year. (See “BRICS ON THE RISE: BRAZIL’S LULA WARMS UP TO CHINA, COOLS DOWN ON AMERICA” 18 Apr 2023, “BRAZIL’S LULA BLASTS U.S. OVER WEAPON TRANSFERS TO UKRAINE” 7 Jun 2022, “BRAZIL’S LULA SAYS UKRAINE’S COMEDIAN SHARES BLAME FOR WAR” 10 May 2022, and “IRANIAN WARSHIP’S VISIT TO BRAZIL DRAWS ISRAEL’S IRE” 24 Jan 2023.)

Putin addressed the BRICS summit last month in Johannesburg, and, once again, blamed the West for instigating the war.

“Our actions in Ukraine are guided by only one thing—to put an end to the war that was unleashed by the West,” he said, according to a translation by The New York Times.