As the west is wrestling with Russia and China to maintain the ‘rule-based international order’, maintaining neutral positions on both fronts is difficult for Ethiopia and other developing countries.

On 22 October 2022, the United States introduced a national security strategy which reads “The most pressing challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy. Russia and [the Peoples republic of China (PRC)] pose different challenges. Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown. The PRC, by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”