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As Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine initially floundered in 2022, Western decision makers predicted that they could break Russia economically and that a flood of funds and weapons would decisively turn the tide of the war, teaching a definitive lesson that hostile invasions always ended in disaster.

At the BRICS summit last week, the Russian president was anxious to send a riposte to the West: not only was he still in power, but he had also gathered a dozen world leaders around him, demonstrating that efforts at isolation had failed.

For Western policymakers, it was a lesson that should long ago have been obvious: when rogue actors are allowed to violate international law with impunity, states such as North Korea, Iran and Russia gradually begin acting as a bloc to subvert and undermine the global system.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the US and its European allies enjoyed uncontested supremacy, enabling them to impose their rules and values. But the American superpower refused to live by its own rules: engaging in illegal overseas wars, refusing to be accountable before international courts, and abusing its veto to protect its closest allies as they violated human rights with impunity.

The result was that as other states such as China, India and Russia sought to consolidate their superpower status, they felt no compulsion to even pretend to abide by international norms that had long-since ceased to function.

The latest BRICS summit was a manifestation of a truly multipolar world. In itself that is no bad thing: it is intuitively preferable to live among a community of nations, rather than........

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