[jltsiren]

"The West" is not a unified entity, and the interests of Western countries almost never align.

Remember how mainstream media was reporting in 2003 that Powell is obviously lying? How the whole debacle about Iraqi WMDs was little more than a thinly veiled excuse to finish the war Bush Sr had started? Maybe that didn't happen in your country, but it was the reality in many Western countries.

Consider the business as usual in the EU. Whatever the EU is trying to do, there are always some countries that oppose it. Then there are negotiations, and some kind of compromise is ultimately reached, but nobody is truly happy about it. That's what decentralization does to you.

Or maybe consider Russia just before the invasion of Ukraine. Some countries and factions in the West considered Russia an important trading partners, while others saw it as an adversary and wanted to cut ties with it. There was no unified Western policy on anything related to Russia.