We find that Russia and Iran continue recklessly seeking to overthrow the international order and the leadership of the United States.

In light of the increase in Houthi terrorist attacks against civilians and civilian facilities in Saudi Arabia, and in light of the Ukrainian crisis, we may highlight several points.

Many people believe mistakenly that the international order led by the US is a matter of tactical or strategic positions as if the US chose its role. No, it’s a matter of inevitableness, as the US did not choose to build or lead, but rather as a result of the two world wars.

With the current data, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Iran, combined, are unable to compete with the United States or overthrow the international order until the data changes.

Russian actions in Ukraine will undoubtedly affect the international order temporarily. Still, it is not in power to overthrow the international order, no matter how Russia insinuates otherwise.

The Russian moves in the military, energy, and currency matters are at best just an attempt to rise within the international order. Still, it may lead to results that contradict what the Russians planned in the first place.

We have two different approaches. The first includes China and Saudi Arabia, adopting a process that does not seek to challenge the international order or challenge the United States in its leadership.

On the other hand, we find that Russia and Iran continue recklessly seeking to overthrow the international order and the leadership of the United States.

The two approaches seek to create a new multipolar international order. The Chinese-Saudi approach plays within the laws of the international order. At the same time, the Russian-Iranian approach is reckless, as it does not allow to continue in the game in a targeted manner.

The truth is that the Chinese-Saudi approach is working on a sound understanding that the emergence or end of international order is linked to the inevitableness, not strategy, waiting for the opportunity, not recklessly trying to create it.

Iran is weak where its strength stems from practicing terrorism covered by the West and does not represent a dilemma for the US or the international order. Still, it is a dilemma for some US administrations that play recklessly against the inevitableness.

What threatens the US leadership in the world and its influence, is not the Chinese-Saudi axis or the Russian-Iranian axis, but it’s that some US administrations and politicians play against the inevitableness. It creates more loopholes that will undoubtedly be exploited.

The US policy of condoning or appeasing practiced by Obama-Biden administrations towards Iran against the strongest ally of the US in the Middle East is playing against the inevitableness, which led to the fall of at least three countries in the region under Russian influence.

The weak American stance towards the Iranian terrorist activities against the Saudis is eventually what gave Russia the strength to invade Ukraine and allowed the impressive achievement of OPEC+.

Turki al-Owerde is an independent Political Analyst and Commentator from Saudi Arabia. He tweets under @Turki_AlOwerde.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Twitter videos circulating online, accruing millions of views, have testified to the casual racism mainly of Western journalists in their coverage of the war.

Arab News published a thought-provoking article by Christopher Hamill-Stewart from London. The article speaks about the western biases, prejudices and double standards when it comes to Ukraine crisis.

Below is the extracted article.

The invasion of Ukraine has exposed anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias across European policymaking and news media. For hundreds of thousands of hounded, rejected or stranded refugees and asylum-seekers, the revelations of prejudice and favoritism must come as no surprise, though.

In the most recent incident — a textbook case of double standards — a Danish politician suggested that Ukrainian refugees could be exempt from laws that had allowed authorities to seize the assets of Syrian and Iranian refugees.

Rasmus Stoklund, immigration spokesman for Denmark’s Social Democratic government, told Danish paper Ekstra Bladet last week that the so-called jewelry law should not be applied to Ukrainians fleeing the conflict because they are from a “nearby region.”

Later, Stoklund said: “The jewelry law is made for if you leave the nearby region where you are safe, and travel through safe countries … but that is not the case for Ukrainians.”

The highly controversial laws meant incoming asylum-seekers were allowed to keep assets worth up to 10,000 Danish krone ($1,468), but anything valued above that figure could be seized by the state to pay for their stay in the country.

The potential exemption of Ukrainians from this law has highlighted the vastly different treatment that Ukrainians have received since their country was invaded, compared to what Syrians and other nationalities — most of them Middle Eastern and African — experienced while fleeing similar conflicts over the past decade.

“The 2016 law was largely symbolic, meant to send an unwelcoming, hostile message to people who might otherwise seek refuge in Denmark,” Judith Sunderland, associate director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division, told Arab News.

“Now the authorities want to send the opposite message of welcome, but only to Ukrainian refugees.

“Carving out an exemption for Ukrainian refugees is clearly discriminatory — if they don’t have to hand over their valuables, why should any refugee?”

The proposed change “crystallizes the stark contrast between the EU’s response to Ukrainian refugees and the bloc’s response to Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Eritreans … the list could go on.”

Sunderland added: “The empathy and generosity extended to Ukrainians should stretch further to all refugees, regardless of their nationality, religion or skin color.”

Her concerns are echoed by Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, who believes “the Danish law was wrong in the first place — no matter who it applied to.

“So, at one level, (I am) delighted if Denmark lifts this law for Ukrainian refugees,” he told Arab News. “But, as we are seeing in many countries, there is a completely different reaction to taking in and how people deal with, Ukrainian refugees than refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other areas.”

This, according to Doyle, “should not be the way countries concoct their refugee policies.”

Denmark’s London embassy did not respond to a request for comments by Arab News.

As of Tuesday, more than two million people had fled Ukraine, a country with a pre-war population of about 40 million. The vast majority of those displaced by the Russian invasion have poured into the EU.

Poland has been a key European voice amid the Ukraine crisis and has taken in the highest number of refugees — more than 1 million people in less than two weeks.

Likewise, as of Monday according to UN figures, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia had provided refuge to at least 180,000, 100,000 and 123,000 people, respectively.

“We will do everything to provide safe shelter in Poland for everyone who needs it,” Mariusz Kaminski, Poland’s interior minister, said last week, failing to mention that, during the Syrian war, Poland, as well as Hungary and the Czech Republic, had essentially refused to take in any Syrian refugees.

This outright refusal to shelter Syrians earned them a reprimand from the European Court of Justice for refusing to follow EU-wide laws on refugee intake. Slovakia, for its part, only accepted a minute number of Christian refugees during the Syrian crisis.

Kaminski also omitted to mention that, just months ago, his government erected a $380 million wall between Poland and neighboring Belarus to block thousands of non-European refugees seeking asylum in the EU.

As many as 19 of those refugees died in the months of that border crisis — now largely forgotten amid the Ukrainian furor — which displayed to the world, unequivocally, the Polish government’s hostility toward non-European refugees.

Doyle said: “There is an argument that geographic proximity can perhaps lead a country to take more numbers of refugees … but it certainly shouldn’t lead to discriminatory policies based on race, ethnicity and so forth.

“The world is watching. The world is seeing a very different set of standards being applied to Ukraine and conflicts in the developing world,” he said.

News of the proposed changes to Danish legislation follows a plethora of controversies online and in the media surrounding coverage of the Ukrainian conflict compared with other such conflicts and crises outside of Europe.

Twitter videos circulating online, accruing millions of views, have testified to the casual racism mainly of Western journalists in their coverage of the war.

For example, early in the conflict and live from Kyiv, Charlie D’Agata, CBS News senior foreign correspondent, said: “Now with the Russians marching in, it’s changed the calculus entirely. Tens of thousands of people have tried to flee the city. There will be many more, people are hiding out in bomb shelters.

“But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”

His “relatively civilized, relatively European” comment — for which he later issued an apology — drew widespread condemnation, with accusations of racism pouring in from Arab journalists, many of whom had been covering conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere for years.

In another case, a guest invited onto the BBC’s coverage said that the Ukrainian war was “very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed.”

But for Doyle, this kind of media discourse is not causing anti-Arab or anti-Middle Eastern bias; in fact, it is a “reflection of a broader, underlying racism,” he said.

Doyle added: “I think there is a public opinion issue here. We’ve seen for some time the growth of far right, anti-immigrant views and anti-refugee views.

“And that has confirmed what most of us came to realize: That they are anti-immigrant if they come from non-European countries, from Muslim majority countries — but they are not so anti-immigrant if they come from European countries like Ukraine.”

“There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,” a U.S. official told WSJ. “It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil]”.

It further stated that, Riyadh has signaled that its relationship with Washington has deteriorated due to Biden administration’s wrong policies towards the Gulf region. 

UAE also stands by the Saudi concerns about the restrained U.S. response to the recent missile strikes by Iran-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen against the interests of UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, both the monarchies are concerned about the revival of the Iran nuclear deal, which doesn’t address their security concerns, and has entered into the final states of negotiations in the recent weeks.

However, Biden is running after the two gulf allies to repair the relations as the oil prices surge over $130 per barrel, which is for the first time in the 14 years. Saudi Arabia and UAE are the two key oil producers in the region that can pump millions of more barrels of more oil if they wish to, so that the crude market prices can calm down.

The National Security Council’s Middle East Coordinator Brett McGurk, and the State Department’s Energy Envoy Amos Hochstein, both traveled to Saudi Arabia in February to mend the ties with the Kingdom. Later, McGurk met with Sheikh Mohammed in Abu Dhabi in a bid to address UAE’s anger over the U.S. response to the Houthi attacks.

A U.S. official said, “the Biden administration has worked diligently to strengthen Saudi and Emirati missile defenses, and that America would be doing more in the coming months to help the two Gulf nations protect themselves. However, it may not be everything the two countries want, but U.S. is trying hard to address their security concerns”.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and UAE have declined to pump more oil, while sticking to the production plan approved among the members of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The energy alliance with Russia has enhanced OPEC’s power and also brought the two gulf monarchies closer to Moscow.

Saudi Arabia and UAE started keeping away from United States after Biden publicly reprimanded Saudi Arabia’s legitimate action in aiding Yemen’s sovereignty against Iran-backed Houthi terrorism.

Biden also reversed the move taken by his predecessor Mr. Donald Trump, that put the Houthis on the America’s official list of global terrorists. Due to which, the efforts to broker a cease-fire deal between Yemeni forces and the Houthis were ruined.

UAE ambassador to United States Yousef Al-Otaiba said last week, that the relations between the two countries were strained. He said, “It is like any relationship. It has strong days where the relationship is very healthy and days where the relationship is under question. Today, we’re going through a stress test, but I am confident that we will get out of it and get to a better place”.

On the other hand, when Saudi Crown Prince was asked by The Atlantic magazine whether Biden misunderstood him or not. Prince responded, “Simply, I do not care”.