Minister of External Affairs (MEA) Jaishankar reaffirmed his credentials as one of the world’s top multipolar conservative-sovereigntists (MCS) after reminding the West during an event on Friday that the world doesn’t revolve around it. He was speaking at the Slovakian GLOBSEC think tank and responding to questions about his civilization-state’s foreign policy in the New Cold War when he said that “Europe has to get out of the mindset that Europe’s problem is the world’s problem but the world’s problem is not Europe’s problem.” For as simple as that statement might be, it was extremely powerful coming from a rising Global South Great Power like India, which has proudly refused to submit to US-led Western pressure to publicly condemn Russia for its ongoing special military operation in Ukraine and subsequently sanction it.

As MEA Jaishankar explained it, “I am one-fifth of the world’s population. I am what today is the 5th or 6th largest economy in the world. Forget the history and civilisation bit; everybody knows that. I feel I am entitled to have my own side. I am entitled to weigh my own interests, and make my own choices. My choices will not be cynical and transactional. They will be a balance of my values and my interests. There is no country in the world which disregards its interests.” He couldn’t have put it more clearly since it should be obvious to all that India is too large, influential, and powerful of a country to allow itself to be pushed around by others. Its Neo-Realist foreign policy is aligned with the global zeitgeist, but unlike the US-led West, India isn’t going to gaslight by pretending that it’s solely driven by so-called “values” and doesn’t put its own interests first.

By calling a spade a spade and publicly discussing the open secret that all countries are primarily driven by the pursuit of what their leaderships sincerely regard as their objective national interests, MEA Jaishankar is doing a global service by removing the taboo that’s informally surrounded any talk about this fact. With this observation in mind, it also becomes apparent that everything that the US-led West says about so-called “morals”, “ethics”, “principles”, and the “rules-based order” is nothing more than rhetoric intended for public consumption as part of the global cognitive warfare campaign for winning hearts and minds. A recent survey from the “Alliance for Democracies”, which has inherent ideological reasons to manipulate its results, confirmed to its credit that it’s pretty much only those in the US-led West that have a negative view about Russia since few across the Global South share this perception.

This result adds credence to MEA Jaishankar’s statement that “Europe has to get out of the mindset that Europe’s problem is the world’s problem but the world’s problem is not Europe’s problem.” One of the only reasons why the US-led West has such negative views about Russia is because its people are the captive audience of elite-controlled media after their governments either censored publicly financed Russian media or made it impossible for them to operate in those countries. If average folks there had equal access to information like the vast majority of the people in the Global South do, then it’s probable that they’d have better perceptions about Russia, but that’s precisely why their authorities have censored those platforms in order to cultivate groupthink among their citizens with the expectation that they’ll unquestionably support whatever their governments do to “contain” Russia.

For instance, while many Americans decried their government giving a whopping $40 billion to Ukraine amidst one of the worst economic crises in recent memory that’s also shockingly resulted in a baby formula shortage throughout their country, practically none did anything tangible about it like protesting in front of the White House (even though that probably wouldn’t have changed anything anyhow). They simply grumbled, moved on, and will passively accept their government inevitably giving even more in the coming future. This stands in stark contrast to the Global South where most people passionately support their governments’ principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Crisis, so much so that quite a lot of them would be expected to protest – possibly even in an unruly fashion – if their leaders publicly condemned Russia in solidarity with the US-led West and subsequently sanctioned it.

It’s the West that’s isolated from the rest of the world, not the rest of the world that’s isolated from the West, exactly as former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi recently opined in an article for his country’s media. The US-led West’s solidarity in the face of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine is actually artificial and thus very fragile since it was forged as a result of America manipulating perceptions about that conflict in order to reassert its declining unipolar hegemony over that civilization. This makes it the opposite of the Global South’s solidarity in support of Russia, which is genuinely grassroots and thus reflects the will of those countries’ people. Nevertheless, many in the West are ignorant of these facts because they’re held hostage by their elite-controlled media that censors and misportrays events across the world, especially those connected with the Ukrainian Conflict.

It’s therefore understandable to an extent why their masses sincerely believe that the world revolves around them, though their leaders obviously know better, which is why they manipulate their people’s perceptions in the first place as was earlier explained. By speaking so openly about this, however, MEA Jaishankar made it acceptable for everyone to publicly discuss this objectively existing and easily verifiable fact. That in turn shatters the “Great Wall” of censorship that the US-led West constructed and might hopefully get some of its de facto media hostages to question why they weren’t informed of countries like India – which symbolically describes itself as the world’s largest democracy – taking such a proudly independent stance towards the Ukrainian Conflict. They’d been misled into thinking that the whole world also condemns Russia when in reality most of humanity supports it.