The US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine has been spun by the West’s Golden Billion as a supposed struggle in support of so-called “Western values”, yet these now include a curious addition to their subjective notions of “democracy” and “human rights”: celebrating terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure.  The Crimean Bridge was just damaged as a result of what video footage very strongly suggests was a suicide truck bomb terrorist attack, yet key influencers like Zelensky’s senior advisor Mikhail Podolyak and infamous Russiagate conspiracy theorist Adam Kinzinger have praised this provocation, not to mention their many minions in the media and associated trolls.

Their stance is that this civilian infrastructure was dual-use in the sense of having military applications related to logistically supporting Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, which thus makes it a “legitimate target”. They also cite Kiev’s opposition to its construction on territory that it still claims as its own despite not controlling it after the locals overwhelmingly voted to reunify with their historical Russian homeland in spring 2014. Since the “ends justify the means” in their Machiavellian calculations, even the Crimean Bridge’s damage as a result of a likely suicide truck bomb terrorist attack is worthy of celebration. This position totally discredits everything that the US’ “rules-based order” claims to uphold.

To explain, that concept has always been nothing but high-sounding rhetoric to disguise the arbitrary implementation of double standards intended to advance American interests at everyone else’s expense, especially its geostrategic rivals’ like Russia’s, China’s, and Iran’s. In this context, the hypocrisy is evidenced by condemning ISIS-like terrorist attacks against dual-use civilian infrastructure (which technically refers to every bridge in the world to various extents) whenever they occur within the declining unipolar hegemony’s “sphere of influence” while simultaneously praising – and possibly orchestrating or even directly carrying out – such attacks whenever they harm its rivals’ interests.

By contrast, the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, which includes the US’ aforementioned three geostrategic rivals) are united through their group’s charter through their shared principled opposition to terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Even in the event that the entered into hostilities with another state and decided to target its dual-use civilian infrastructure to advance their military-strategic aims, they’d thus do so through non-terrorist means such as conventional attacks or sabotage without stooping to the Golden Billion’s level of a suicide truck bomb terrorist attack like what video footage very strongly suggests was responsible for damaging the Crimean Bridge.

Exacerbating the moral divide between both sides, the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the BRICS-/SCO-led Global South, the first-mentioned’s key influencers and their supporters aren’t even attempting to claim “plausible deniability” over this terrorist attack but are proudly celebrating it on social media. Realistically speaking, it’s not surprising that their side resorted to these means out of desperation to inflict military, soft power, and strategic damage to their Russian opponent, but it wasn’t expected that they’d so openly praise what just happened. This observation shows that even they know that the “rules-based order” concept is hollow and self-interested rhetoric designed to gaslight naïve audiences.

Recognizing this, it becomes clear that the New Cold War between the unipolar and multipolar “camps” (for lack of a better description) is geostrategic at its core and not driven by “values” like the Golden Billion falsely claims. To be sure, the Global South still upholds its self-declared values in terms of how its members conduct themselves amidst this worldwide competition over the course of the global systemic transition to multipolarity, but their envisaged “ideological”/structural end game of a more democratic, equal, and just world order drives them much more than anything else. By publicly sacrificing their previously professed anti-terrorist values, the West showed that it doesn’t have any “moral superiority”.