Increasingly we hear references to the term “the Global South”. Nothing new, of course, except perspective and influence, particularly when we begin to understand that for the most part and for most of us in the Western world, the view of the world is from a Western perspective.

Nothing has made the stark difference of perspectives clearer than the present Gaza conflict and Israeli impunity with the aid of the United States and the Western alliance.

Only recently India’s president met Russian president Vladimir Putin. India is the largest democracy in the world but it has not forgotten its days of oppression under the Western thumb. China is a communist country with a similar history but it also has thrown its hand of solidarity behind the Palestinian cause and their right to self-determination.

When we combine Brazil, Africa and the Middle East, along with China, India and Russia, there is 85 per cent of the world’s population engaged in the Global South, leaving 15 per cent representing the West. During the last century, all that we consider the Global South’s centre of rule was Britain. The slogan goes “the sun never sets on the British Empire” — but today the sun can hardly find the British Empire.

All of that has changed except perspectives, which are eroding at a rapid pace.

After the collapse of the British Empire, for a period we lived in a bipolar world divided between the Soviet Union and the US. During the Ronald Reagan era, the Soviet Union collapsed and, rather than a more unified world, we ended up with a unipolar paradigm with one superpower — the United States of America.

Ideally, it would have been fantastic if the new superpower set the moral tone for law and order, and used the United Nations and international law as its beacon. Instead, as it has come to be seen, it operated under its own rules, often outside or even against international law.

The chickens have come home to roost on that issue as the Global South remembers its sufferings and sympathises with the sufferings of all people — now classically dramatised by events in Palestine and Gaza.

It appears as set that the axiom of a new world war will be the Middle East once again. The First World War was over the Ottoman Empire. Do not be deceived: make no mistake, this is not a religious war; rather, it’s a war to determine a new synthesis for a multipolar world where there is no exceptionalism. A world where international law is respected as the one law that fits all.

This is unfortunately a bloody truth and the fight to attain such a world will come at a huge price. The rationale for war is always hard to understand and at times never understood. People today are yet to understand the justification for the Vietnam War or the war in Iraq.

Propaganda will build around any new war but the provocations are clear and have been televised globally. The world now is not just Western media; it is also the Global South, plus more.

It is sufficiently clear that Israel is fixed on occupation and expansion and does not want peace on any terms other than its own. It is also sufficiently clear that the US will not demand or enforce peace and therefore will be led into what may be a protracted war in the region until the Palestinian question is resolved.

In the meantime, the global economy will shift decidedly towards China.