Editor's note: John Wight is a writer and political commentator. He is the author of Edinburgh Trilogy. He has also written a memoir "Dreams That Die," telling his experience in Hollywood and participation in the U.S. anti-war movement in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.

The unconditional support for Ukraine in the West in its conflict with Russia is being driven by Western imperialism, not democracy, as claimed. It is being driven by a desperate effort to maintain the unipolarity and hegemony that rests on the foundations of "might is right."

The result is Ukraine being turned into a U.S.-NATO dependency in all but name, recruited as a convenient proxy, regardless of the cost, paid by both the taxpayers in those countries whose governments have been shoveling billions of dollars worth of economic and military aid into Ukraine since the conflict began, and the people of Ukraine, who've seen large parts of their country devastated.

Accompanied by an unhinged and all-encompassing anti-Russia hysteria, the world has over these past few months been provided with an invaluable insight into the hypocrisy that underpins Western foreign policy. One major political figure who is in no doubt of the fact is Pakistan's former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

In a recent interview with German state media, DW News, Khan was repeatedly invited to condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine but repeatedly refused to, making another salient point that the West has very little, if anything, to say with regard to the plight of the people in Yemen or Palestine. Meanwhile, he took a well-deserved swipe at the plight of Afghanistan and its people after two decades of U.S.-NATO occupation.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, in an interview with Lebanon's Mayadeen TV on June 20, went further than Khan in describing the conflict in Ukraine as part of "a war against Russia" with the goal "to destroy Russia."

The point is that the conflict in Ukraine looks very different from outside of the circle of human worth erected in the collective mind of Western ideologues, and is far more complex than the reductive narrative which holds that it is being contested by the absolute good and innocence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Ukraine and the absolute evil and criminality of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Returning to the issue of "might is right;" this has been the driver of Western colonialism and imperialism for centuries and continues to sustain a misplaced sense of Western exceptionalism today. In the process, emerging powers such as Russia, China, and India, along with regional poles of resistance to the West such as Iran and Venezuela, are excoriated and demonized as outliers, the barbarian "other" whose very existence is a direct challenge to the sanctity of Western civilization.

The wholesale denunciation of Russia's military campaign in Ukraine has less to do with morality and more to do with indignation that Moscow should take it upon itself to assert the right to make decisions with respect to its security.

That the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has seen it fit to describe Russia as "today the most direct threat to the world order with the barbaric war against Ukraine, and its worrying pact with China," this only confirms the alarming extent to which Western colonial tropes have been internalized in Brussels and other Western capitals.

In London, meanwhile, we have UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who has embraced wholeheartedly the malign path of escalation when it comes to Ukraine. In April, she bombastically declared Putin to be a "desperate rogue operator with no interest in international norms."

Just as an aside, it was the same Liz Truss who encouraged British nationals to travel to Ukraine to fight the Russians just after the conflict began. As it stands, two such British citizens, Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, are currently facing execution, having been tried and convicted on charges of terrorism by Donetsk.

The prolonged conflict in Ukraine, and the depiction of the country's leader Zelenslyy as a Marvel comic book superhero, will both rightly be condemned in the court of history as the fruits of magical thinking. Further still, the billions in military aid devoted to what is clearly a losing struggle, the primacy of escalation over diplomacy, and the obdurate refusal to countenance Russia's point of view, or even the right to have one, bespeaks a crisis of leadership in the West.

Not until Western ideologues cease to view themselves citizens of a latter-day Rome and Russia as a latter-day Carthage will progress be made.

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