One withdrawal can hide another. Two years after the Americans left Afghanistan, another Western power is forced to withdraw its military forces from a country it was involved in. France is withdrawing from Niger, where it had hoped to find safe heavens for its troops already driven out of Mali. As a small comfort, Paris hopes to organize this withdrawal in an "orderly" fashion, in contrast to Kabul's disastrous evacuation in 2021.

Orderly or chaotic, and whatever its order of magnitude, the message sent by these withdrawals remains the same: Western power's retreat, a signal of the failure of its military interventions in southern countries.

This is not just a military pullout. On the diplomatic and political fronts, the West – the term used since the Cold War to call the democracies of the Atlantic Alliance (NATO), Japan and Australia – is also having to pull back.

2023 marks the year of a forced awareness that can no longer be ignored: The "big players in the South" no longer comply with the narrative of the "big players in the North," the US and Europe. Their narrative is in direct competition with that of the North, and it is increasingly asserting itself as a demand for power-sharing and a different way of organizing the world. "The West understands that its exclusive clubs can no longer solve all the world's problems," argued Happymon Jacob, a professor at Jawaharlal-Nehru University in New Delhi.

While this is not a new trend, it is being exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. Russia's aggression on February 24, 2022, came as such a shock to Western countries and such a deliberate violation of international order by one of the major UN Security Council powers tasked with enforcing it that they closed ranks and believed their stupor would be shared. It took them some time to come to terms with reality: Not only was their shock not universal, but their insistence on putting Ukraine at the forefront of the world's tragedies ended up backfiring.

The countries reluctant to embrace Western indignation don't necessarily approve of Russia's behavior, but many have seen it as a perfect example of Northern powers' double standards, given how utterly indifferent they have been to the wars in the South. It's also France's "double standard" in Africa when it comes to democratic requirements that have earned it criticisms, an argument exploited by Russia to great effect.

18 months on, the Western stance remains undermined by a South that has clearly asserted itself. This dynamic was evident at three international meetings in August and September: the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in Johannesburg, the G20 summit in New Delhi and the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

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