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Decoding Trump’s Deadly Geopolitics

4 Mar

Trump’s Perverse Dualism: Contra Benevolent Internationalism and Pro Geopolitical Internationalism

[Prefatory Note: I write with a sense of urgency, a time when the human species is in great peril. The Second Iran War moves us closer to an abyss of unknowable depth. It is a time when the peoples of the world are our best hope, with neither the geopolitical actors, nor the UN, nor respect for law, morality, and decency are capable of resolving the multi dimensional global crisis and promoting a justife-driven future for humanity. The alternative to struggle is depaor. As the future is unknowable we owe to those we love and all humanity to carry bright torches that light the way forward.}

An Unlawful War

On February 28 Trump embarked on a war against Iran, deliberating targeting its Supreme Leader, a girls school and calling openly for regime change. This aggression has been sanitized as a ‘war of choice’ in the mainstream press as if such an option exists in the domain of international law. This sugar-coating language seeks to divert attention from the massive breach in international law.  The UN Charter couldn’t be clearer. Its core and most vital norm is set forth in Article 2(4), which without any qualification prohibits all uses of international force except in the exercise of self-defense against a prior armed attack.

In shallow efforts to legal justifications, pro-war hawks have called this unprovoked attack on Iran amid negotiations to end the threat of war ‘a war against Iranian terrorism,’ ‘a preventive war against an imminent Iranian threat to U.S. national security,’ and ‘a regime-changing humanitarian intervention.’ These are polemical talking points but not serious attempts to offer a rationale that remotely attaches a reputable argument as to the ‘legality’ of recourse to war.

Somehow Trump gave the game away when he declared that he supports international law so long as he is the final arbiter of what is lawful or not. The precedent being set by the U.S. in launching this war of aggression against Iran will long live in infamy, and not only for its victims, but for any hope of a sane, peaceful, law-abiding future for international relations. The Iran War coming after the Venezuelan military operation is a further sign that America’s support for internationalism has been replaced by a 21st century variant of imperial geopolitics.

Withdrawing from Benevolent Internationalism

I

In the first week of the New Year the White House released a largely neglected memorandum announcing U.S. withdrawal from 66 ‘international organizations’, 31 of which are situated within the UN System. Another 35 were independent of the UN dedicated to the functional tasks of global scope. In addition to ending participation, this withdrawal also means no more U.S. funding. This would disastrously limit the capabilities and performances of these organizations, whose work is vital in so many areas of international life. Such an initiative, although unprecedented, should come as no surprise. Donald Trump has never made a secret of his hostility to internationally cooperative arrangements established to address practical global concerns, whether it be climate change, disease control, cultural heritage, economic development, human rights, enforcing piracy on international waters and most of all, the management of global security and international conflicts.

The White House alleged that these organizations “operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty.” An accompanying memo elaborated on “bringing to an end..American taxpayer funding” and how such actions contributing to the wider Trump effort to “restore American sovereignty.” These misleading abstractions hide the true motivation behind this regressive series of moves.

The veil of deception surrounding this deliberately dramatic move against what might be called ‘global wokism,’ (the liberal extensions of domestic commitments to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ + reliance on cooperative international arrangements + support for the UN and human rights).  The Orwellian double-speak of the Trump Memorandum was somewhat clarified in a statement issued on the same day by the ever-dutiful Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. It had this candid heading, “Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations.” In the text Rubio elaborates that these organizations favor global governance and are “often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests.” In other words, this anti-internationalism should not be sugarcoated as a revival of outmoded traditional U.S. isolationism. It is a matter of clearing the path that impedes Trump’s brand of narcissistic imperialism as set forth in the National Strategy of the United States, which was released in November 2025.

The concluding words from Rubio also express the Trump ethos that this wholesale withdrawal from internationalism is an unmistakable message that the US Government rejects any international entanglement that requires funding or dilution of American sovereignty:

“We will not continue expending resources, diplomatic capital, and the legitimizing weight of our participation in institutions that are irrelevant to or in conflict with our interests. We reject inertia and ideology in favor of prudence and purpose. We seek cooperation where it serves our people and will stand firm where it does not.”

Trump’s Geopolitical Internationalism

What the Trump leadership does not tell the world is that the U.S. has its own preferred manner of dealing with threats to its economic and political interests as amply illustrated by the recent Venezuela military intervention, the threats to unleash an unprovoked military aggression against Iran, and the Greenland gambit best interpreted as a menacing new form of territorial piracy.

In effect, these MAGA moves are rationalized as a repudiation of the woke liberal ‘global leadership’ style of American foreign policy that exerted influence by its participation in and funding of bipartisan internationalism. The argument, not without certain merits, is that the Obama/Biden geopolitics should not be romanticized as global benevolence, the virtues of ‘a rule-governed international order,’ or an embrace of fiscal conservatism. In this spirit it is responsible to recall that U.S. pre-Trump military spending was ten times greater than the next ten states, and devoted in large part to maintaining U.S. global dominance rather than national security as traditionally understood. To be sure, it is a glaring example of MAGA hypocrisy exposed by Trump’s seeking and obtaining from Congress a 50% increase in the US peacetime military appropriation, to a staggering total of $1.5 trillion.

A considerable amount of the bloated military budget will be used to pay the high maintenance costs of 850 military bases all over the world, a posture hardly consistent with the Trump claim to reduce American foreign policy ambitions to their earlier hemispheric dimensions, which itself overlooked U.S. colonizing adventures in the Pacific region that peaked at the end of the 19th century. The smaller pre-Trump military budgets proved sufficient to finance regime changing interventions and costly failed state-building and market-oriented undertakings most visibly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Trump predecessor Joe Biden’s  Cold War nostalgia was not restrained by military budget constraints. He most revealingly chose war rather than diplomacy in the context of the Russian attack on Ukraine, and like Trump could find even less to criticize in Netanyahu’s genocidal approach to Gaza.

Trump’s refusal to expend US dollars to fund cooperative approaches to global issues, whether involving bettering economic and social conditions of others or working to control disease, food security and climate in ways that benefit the U.S. exhibits an extremely shortsighted and dysfunctional view of national interests. True such international activities go against Trump’s electoral pledge to contract the role of the state or to curtail the dangerously expanding national debt and certainly not to reduce militarist geopolitics. While defunding internationalism the Trump military budget is the highest instance ever of peacetime military spending. It can neither be justified by national security nor of benefit to the lives of the great majority of Americans.

As the National Security Strategy released by the White House in November 2025 explained, American foreign policy would henceforth reembrace the discarded Monroe Doctrine as expanded by the addition of the Trump Corollary. This bundle of initiatives was immediately dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, giving Trump’s brand of narcissistic geopolitics its due. This formal statement served as a clumsy doctrinal prelude to the attack on Venezuela as well as added threats directed at Cuba and Colombia to expect similar treatment if they don’t do what Washington demands. Even more radical in its implications were strong assertions that non-hemispheric actors were expected to refrain in the future from economic and infrastructure involvements in Latin America. Obviously, this was a thinly veiled warning to China to downsize, if not eliminate, its extensive investment and trade relations throughout Latin America. The message to non-hemispheric actors was henceforth to avoid economic, social, and political Latin involvements or else expect hostile pushback from Washington’s commitment to ‘hemispheric preeminence.’ Time will tell whether this grandiose claim of control over Latin America will spark a new cycle of national resistance to such a brazen contraction of the right of self-determination of these countries as conferred by Article I of the Human Rights Covenant of Political Civil Rights. It is also remains to be seen how China and other countries will respond to this outright interference with their freedom to engage in peaceful relations with Latin America.

This mass withdrawal from international cooperative problem-solving also is a virtual admission in this Trump Era that the U.S. has opted for ‘transactionalism’ and post-colonial imperialism. The most salient feature of this tectonic shift away from Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America as brazenly announced to the world, and especially to the Hemisphere, including more shockingly to Canada, is that the U.S. is giving priority to its strategic ambitions free from discarded liberal pretenses of respect for international law and the United Nations. It seems to be telling the world that its only guide when it comes to foreign policy in the future will be the warped and personalist amorality of Donald Trump. In the future, Latin America can expect to be treated as an exclusive U.S.  ‘sphere of influence,’ perhaps more accurately known as ‘a sphere of dominance.’ If such is the case, the closest recent resemblance is to the Soviet relationship to Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

A Second Look at U.S. Withdrawal from Internationalism and Pre-Trump Resistance to Latin Economic Nationalism

In this sense the withdrawal from the 66 organizations is a gigantic step away from the U.S. engagement with the liberal approach that served as a bipartisan guide to American foreign policy and the projection of its blend of hard and soft power ever since 1945. The previous posture of American foreign policy avoided the arrogant Trumpian language of ‘preeminence,’ adopting as an alternative approach to the bipartisan post-Cold War euphemistic language of ‘global leadership.’  This earlier terminology also did not play by the rules of respect for the sovereign rights of states. It too was guilty of geopolitical disregard of legal constraints when it served strategic national interests. It resorted to regime change by covert interventions throughout the Cold War on behalf of its free market ideology and in opposition to economic nationalism by elected leaders or in the aftermath of popular revolution. This pattern of covert intervention in Guatemala in 1954 generated and orchestrated A coup against a democratically elected government that was alleged to have Communist leanings, and more concretely threatened the interests of United Fruit Company, nationalizing some unused land owned by this powerful corporate investor.

This pattern of a more overt justification for promoting regime change that combined an ideological rationale with underlying hostility to economic nationalism shaped the U.S. response to the Cuban Revolution a few years later. The U.S relied for many years on harsh economic sanctions while lending mar support to counterrevolutionary Cuban exile proxies in a series of failed attempts to duplicate its earlier success in Guatemala. Castro’s leadership in Cuba was delegitimized by liberal American leaders at the time as ‘incompatible’ with ideals and values of the hemisphere yet seemed more directly motivated by a toxic opposition to economic nationalism taking the principal form of nationalizing Cuba’s sugar industry by a mixture of hardline foreign policy hawks and coup-minded Cuban exiles. In a shameful continuing display of heartless foreign policy annual one-sided votes in the UN General Assembly favor ending sanctions against Cuba that have persisted for more that 60 years after the Castro ascent to power, causing severe economic hardship for the population.

The U.S. also lent covert encouragement to the 1973 anti-Allende Pinochet coup in Chile. It also carried out in 1989 a lawless intervention in Panama centering on the kidnapping of the de facto head of state Manuel Noriega and forcibly bringing him to the US to face criminal charges of drug trafficking. The self-serving code name for the intervention was Operation Just Cause officially defended as needed for the protection of U.S. economic interests, enforcement of drug trafficking, and for the security of the Panama Canal.

These were peculiar ways of expressing neighborly good will, to say the least, covertly carried out or ideologically asserted as elements of Cold War ‘containment’ geopolitics. This anti-communist veneer masked accompanying economic motivations to crush Latin nationalism and thereby promote the interests of US corporations to uphold the security of private sector investments that had long exploited Latin resources.  This pre-Trump strategic militarism was never limited to the Western Hemisphere as many American regime changing and state-building ventures were carried out in Asia and the Middle East.  The arc of US interventionism after 1945 stretches from the CIA engineered overthrow in 1953 of Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in Iran and its replacement by the authoritarian Pahlavi Dynasty to the Venezuelan undertaking in 2026. In both cases the common strategic stakes were to ensure that the vast oil reserves of these two countries were managed for profit by U.S. corporate energy giants.

Before Trump US foreign aid, support of the UN, and assorted initiatives such as the Peace Corps were in fact idealistic features of American foreign policy. Yet all along such policies had a hybrid character. They served also as PR ploys to pursue covertly the warrior and economistic sides of U.S. ‘global leadership,’ that is, covert means to prevent countries in the non-Western world from moving toward either socialism or economic nationalism. Unlike the Monroe Doctrine Era, which was preoccupied with resisting European intervention, the Cold War period and its aftermath represented a geopolitical reset that was rooted in Atlanticism, pitting the West against the non-West in alliance with Europe, as given salient expression in the NATO alliance.

This alliance originated as a collective defense arrangement designed to deter alleged Soviet expansionist ambitions toward Europe but revealingly has limped along for more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was its original justifying rationale. It should not be overlooked that principally the main NATO members after 1993 joined in their complicity toward Israel’s genocidal policies in Occupied Palestine. This was convincing testimony that the Atlanticist coalition that existed during the Cold War broadened its agenda to encompass Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, redesigning containment to validate the post-Soviet civilizational containment of Islam. Such policies fulfilled Samuel Huntington’s prophetic expectations that the Soviet collapse would produce a ‘clash of civilizations’ rather than ‘an end of history.’

Beyond Hemispheric Preeminence

Atlanticism is currently being redefined by Trump as okay so long as it submits to his efforts to control coercively ongoing confrontations with the non-West shifting their ideational locus from Communism to Islam, with Iran currently in the U.S. gunsights. As mentioned, the distinctive features of Trump’s overtly nihilistic geopolitics, despite its declared intentions, will not be confined to the Western Hemisphere. As metaphor, and sign of political pathology, Trump’s absurd fantasy that if the Bureau of Peace administering Gaza is ‘successful,’ whatever that might come to mean, it will emerge as the peace-building center of yet another ‘new international order.’ In that event, the UN will be cast aside as weak, wasteful, and ineffectual, a relic of the old order that will be replaced by the strong, efficient, and effective Bureau of Peace as administered from Washington. This outlandish project can be understood as an institutional equivalent to Trump’s anger that he was robbed of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize that he alone richly deserved.

Looked upon more objectively, if a Nobel War Prize existed, Trump would surely deserve to be the leading candidate, and likely recipient.

Where is Trump’s Foreign Policy Headed?

In effect, Trump’s anti-internationalism should be reinterpreted. The U.S. is certainly retreating these days from the Atlanticist neoliberal globalist model of world order. This disappoints and worries those who continue to value the U.S. global leadership role, however blurry its nature, as the only feasible alternative to chaos, economic crisis, and Western decline. In contrast, what Trump seems to be now proposing is undisguised American unipolarity as qualified by transactional calculations of national advantage. This is the message to Europeans as evident in the leveraging of tariffs as a policy instruments to punish and reward, most recently softened somewhat by Rubio’s ‘breadcrumb diplomacy’ speech that seemed to delight the European audience attending the Munich Security Conference in mid-February. Rubio’s well-chosen words were received as reassurance that after all Europe would not be cut loose to fend for itself and could still rely on partnering with the U.S. so long as it let Trump run the show. The standing ovation given to Rubio at the end of his speech seem best understood as an unexpectedly servile display of fealty by the leadership of Europe to U.S. global imperialism

My suspicion is that, despite such appearances to the contrary, the Trump worldview might be slouching toward a ‘beautiful’ geopolitical bargain with America’s two geopolitical rivals: China and Russia. Its enactment would involve enlarged spheres of influence reciprocally accepted, and a trilateral management of global security. The UN would be diminished, if not relegated to the status of serving minor functional issues, a kind of ‘petty internationalism’ with tight budgetary constraints. It would be naïve to suppose that such a world order arrangement would benefit the majority of the world’s peoples or address the global public good as specified in general terms by the Preamble of the UN Charter, but we should all know by now that these goals were never endorsed by Trump.

A preferable alternative architecture for a new order exists but is hampered by the inter-civilizational rivalries now flourishing to block suitable attention to the agenda of benign internationalism focusing on nuclear weaponry, climate change, xenophobia, developmental equity, racism, human rights, fashioning regulatory frameworks for weapons, AI, robotics. Such a future is also treated as irrelevant by the ‘political realists’ who wield influence in the inner sanctums of the reigning geopolitical actors.  Such thinking, however outmoded, continues to dominate the foreign policy elites of almost all major countries undermining any present prospects for generating a new world order animated by promoting the global public good. The most that can be hoped for in the near future is a more prudent and responsible realism that becomes sensitive to the limitations of militarist geopolitics. Thus, adaptation to the changing global setting is confined to rearrangements of ill-fitting and often antagonistic ‘parts’ rather than finally affirming the politics of the planet as an organic ‘whole,’ which seems alone capable of preserving a humane and resilient future.

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The Epstein Entrapment Network: revelations of crime and the predatory erotic lives of the rich and powerful

27 Feb


[Preliminary Note: Responses to Qs addressed to me by a Turkish journalist, Murat Sofuoğlu, affiliated with TRT World. My responses have been modified.]

  1. What do Epstein’s ties with the high and mighty say about Western ‘elite’ structures?

These ties reveal networks of power and influence that has long been shielded from legal accountability, and even moral scrutiny. Epstein’s network of friends and associates gives to the wider public some sense of the lure of decadence with regard to sexual gratification. After Epstein’s first conviction of criminal abuse revealed in graphic detail in the batch of documents so far released. The dimensions of predatory sexuality, victimizing young women and old men, are convincingly confirmed in a documentary film titled Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. The film also reveals a total absence of empathy for the helpless victims of these unlawful and despicable forms of sexual gratification with teen-age innocent girls drawn by money and deception from poor and vulnerable families. Exposure to these patterns of behavior by those who sit comfortably atop skyscrapers of corporate, financial, and political power influence enjoy an almost automatic entitlement to back alleys of collective narcissism apparently treated as if normal, an ethos that appears common among economic and political elites. Even when the shielding fails, as it did in the Palm Beach Epstein operation of his sanctuary for upper class pedophile. It was only the uncommonly conscientious investigations of the high and mighty that local law enforcement and dutiful police officials built a criminal case against Epstein. Even then the wheels of justice barely turned. Rather than the right to mount a defense during ‘a day in court’ such gilded perpetrators are generally able to intimidate, bribe, and threaten those representing the state as prosecutors and judges face hurdles that evidence alone cannot overcome. One lesson to be learned is that money and class often speak louder than law in such high-profile situations, even in the United States where the rule of law is sanctified in public discourse.

In an interesting presumably coincidental preview of the Epstein saga was the mainstream movie, Eyes Wide Shut,  starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise illustrating a tamer more religiously framed hideaway for rich and powerful sexual predators. Significantly, the sexually abused women were adults, compensated as if prostitutes, and without any political linked agenda as underlying Epstein’s habitual escapades on his provate Caribbean island and New York and Palm Beach mansions. Yet a suggestive similarity is the coercive suppression of any divulgence of such goings on in public space. Whereas Epstein equipped his various homes with sophisticated surveillance systems to ensure confidentiality by blackmail evidence to disgrace any informer or insider, the film relied on outright thuggery as threat and violence as needed. Confidentiality was achieved by keeping the guest list to a trusted coterie of carefully vetted rich and powerful had every social and material incentive to keep the events securely under wraps.  

2. Why do so many rich and powerful people need underage girls for their sexual satisfaction? What does this say about these powerful people?

As suggested, it is less the illicit need than a carefree demonstration of impunity for what occurs in the collective privacy and confidentiality provided by Epstein’s supposedly secure and luxurious playgrounds. It comes to an abrupt end at the undisclosed cost of surveillance, which created a different set of vulnerabilities to blackmail than the risks of being exposed held accountable for the criminal exploitation of underage girls, who often are scarred for life by the experiences of pleasuring older men, and have no off ramp by way of resignation from high visibility career positions. Epstein’s fastidious management pf the predatory sexual behavior of guests, as is now well-established. was monitored by a sophisticated network of cameras apparently installed and even managed by Mossad agents. In effect, a punitive system to safeguard privacy and confidentiality, perhaps further reinforced by threats of physical retaliation to anyone daring to expose linkages between sexual gratification oblivious to law with the exertion of political influence among the rich and powerful augmenting Israel’s leverage in the United States. As yet, there is no reliable information on whether Epstein’s extraordinary wealth was owed in part to these Israeli ties, but the frequency with his interactions with the former Israel Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, is to say the least, suggestive of a principal/agent relationship.

3. Does this show something is profoundly wrong in Western political and financial power networks?

More investigative work is needed to disclose whether there are equivalent non-Western outlets for the sexual appetites and political maneuvers of the rich and powerful. In one sense, Epstein’s files do not indict the West as such. It seems primarily an American class phenomenon, with exceptions made for such transnational Western elite public figures as Prince Andrew and Ehud Barak, Israel’s former Prime Minister, and unlikely prominent intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Stephen Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, and even Stephen Hawkins whose associations did not necessarily involve participation or even knowledge of the lurid sides of what I call Epstein’s entrapment network. The participation by Americans was more salient than the involvement of Europeans, and certainly than non-Western upper echelons. This is tentatively confirmed by the contents of some leaked and unredacted files detailing the multiple, as yet unspecified involvements of the Epstein network with such eminent public figures as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.


4. How do many ordinary people, who want to have a quiet family life with their partners and kids, perceive Epstein’s links with big politicians and rich people?

I suspect there is great diversity of response, although the public majority culture is portrayed by the media as one of moral outrage. In a few high-profile instances, the disclosures to date have resulted in some prominent resignations and disavowals by such academic celebrities, as the former Harvard President, Larry Summers, and the wild-eyed ultra-Zionist controversial professor and lawyer for controversial criminal defendants, Alan Dershowitz, and by corporate billionaires and celebrity lawyers. It appears that those who identify as Republicans overwhelmingly are in denial or minimize the engagement, especially of Trump with the Epstein phenomenon. This minimization is reinforced by the selective release and redaction of files that might incriminate Trump or MAGA adherents. So far there has been a bureaucratic coverup that has limited the impact of the release of what should be in political culture that still upheld the rule of law on ‘ordinary people’ as shaped by partisan party politics, with Democrats far more appalled than either Independents or Republicans.

Epstein was an unusual figure for such a dark role, harboring seemingly genuine interests in higher education and technological innovations along with his strong, yet still vague and shadowy attachments to Israel. He befriended and managed to somewhat implicate Noam Chomsky, a critic of Israel and bitter adversary of Dershowitz. Chomsky’s image the most admired and influential public intellectual of our time has been tarnished by his murky connections with Epstein who seemed a financial advisor and friend of Chomsky and his wife. What remains blurry is the extent to which Chomsky was deliberately attracted to be a friend or to be rendered vulnerable a high-value target of Israeli intelligence.

There is also an element of governmental power at play in this unfolding Epstein affair. The fact of Trump is America’s most unabashedly autocratic president further bolstered by a Republican grip on Congress and the Supreme Court, and of course, the Executive Branch has so far led to the shielding of some, the exposure of and would have been handled somewhat differently if a liberal, upstanding president was in the White House such as Barack Obama, although even Obama refrained from any legal scrutiny of highly controversial behavior of his predecessor, George W. Bush, widely believed to have authorized interrogation practices in Iraq and elsewhere, that violated human rights and the International Convention on Torture (1984), ratified by the U.S. in 1988, and at least 173 countries..

In concluding it may be the highly relevant to note the degree of moral hypocrisy on matters of family loyalty and sexual mores that exist in the U.S. as distinguished from its European soulmate states, which seem more comfortable acknowledging the frailties of human nature. By no means is this meant directly or indirectly as a partial exoneration of those who conspired in their own entrapment within ‘Epstein’s World.’ Nor does this whitewash ordinary people who brush morals and law aside in favor of loyalty to a political party or national leaders. The loudest chant of American constitutionalists has long been that we are ‘a country of laws, not men’ now only overheard as a dissident whisper.

5. Do these ordinary people question the legitimacy of the system they are living under these powerful people’s influence? If so, would you project a significant popular challenge against the existing political/financial system?

A growing number of ordinary citizens in the United States are shocked by the ugly spectacle of the Epstein disclosures, but this may lead in the short-run, at least, to greater repressiveness of independent media and oppositional critics rather than to significant reforms, must less a systemic challenge to the deep roots of the Epstein crisis in the inequalities currently wrought by wealth and political power. There are various forms of corruption evident in most countries of the world, and this is accompanied by moral hypocrisy that effectively shields private behavior from public scrutiny. In the U.S. context the present declining popularity of Trump’s second term leadership may embroil him and other establishment figures in belated attempts to impose criminal accountability for ‘statutory rape’ of underage girls, a crime that in the U.S. has no statute of limitations.

So far, the Republican Party has privileged party loyalty to moral and legal accountability with respect to Trump and his friends and associates. Whether the widening cracks in this support structure will withstand further disclosures is of course uncertain. We can expect that Trump will do his best to divert attention even if this means a costly and dangerous second attack on Iran even more unprovoked that the first attack of a year ago.

What we do know with some confidence is that the Epstein files will continue to preoccupy both elites and ordinary citizens for some time to come, at least in the United States. It should also have the international effect of casting additional doubts about the U.S. attachment to liberal values of human rights and democracy, and of course about the claims of moral superiority associated the creed of American Exceptionalism, persuasive as a public philosophy in the US yet dismissed with increasing cynicism elsewhere in the world.

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Whither World Order: The Lamentable Present, The Unknowable Future

22 Feb

[Prefatory Note: My Responses to An Egyptian Journalist, Muhamed Abd Elaziz 15 Qs on International Law, Gaza, Personal Experience, and many other topics. My most comprehensive interview on current international maladies, 2/20/2026}



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1- Throughout your long career in international law, what was the moment when you felt your work made a real difference?

It is hard to say what qualifies as ‘a real difference.’ In my opposition to the Vietnam War as a scholar of international law I think that I made some difference in the public discourse, especially after years of unexpected resistance by the Vietnamese people inspired by their charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh. On my return to the USA from my first of two wartime visits to North Vietnam in 1968, I conveyed to the US Government peace proposals more favorable to US interests than what was negotiated by Henry Kissinger several years later. The media gave my trip and proposals prominent attention.

Similarly with respect to the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 that brought the Islamic Republic of Iran into power, especially as a result of media quotations of my generally supportive opinion of the popularity and legitimacy of the anti-Shah movement.

After I became active in promoting solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for their basic rights my views were excluded from mainstream thinking in the media, Congress, and even in academic circles, although it did not prevent me from being active on oppositional media platforms and among peace/justice civil society groups. My activism climaxed with an unexpected appointment by the UN Human Rights Council to be the Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine (2008-2014), which gave me an important venue to advance my views, although it was accompanied by defamatory campaigns to discredit my role as an independent expert reporting on Israel’s systemic violations of International Humanitarian Law and commission of Crimes Against Humanity.

I continued to write books and opinion pieces that expressed my commitment to progressive causes within the US and the world, with abiding efforts to promote denuclearization of international relations, ecological resilience, and anti-colonial/anti-imperial geopolitics, as well as the promotion of US foreign policy position more compatible with the global public good and greater sensitivity to moral imperatives.



2- Which international conflicts do you think were mishandled?

This is a big topic, and I can only give a short response. In my view the peace diplomacy in 1945 and after the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks, the Ukraine War, and the October 7 Palestinian attack on Israel’s villages close to the Gaza border were handled particularly poorly from the perspective of sustainable peace, human rights, and the pursuit of world order and global governance reform..

After 1945, the US gave up on a crucial treaty effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons, it oversaw the design of the UN in ways that kept the management of global security under the control of geopolitics rather than Rule of Law, and at first took a non-committal stand against European colonialism. After the Vietnam War, it failed to appreciate that in most instances the legitimacy of anti-colonial warfare prevails in wars overcoming the possession of military superiority by the colonial side and its allies. Its foreign policy elites dedicated themselves to eliminating the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ by which public opinion in the US opposed intervention and wars fought with no perceived or convincing national security justification; it is generally believed that the Vietnam Syndrome was overcome by the rapid, casualty-light and inexpensive Iraq War of 1991.

After 1945, the Global West, led by the US was far more concerned with preparing for conflict with the Soviet Union than it was with creating a world order respectful of international law and devoted to the global public good. The result was to identify national interests with militarized geopolitics, an expensive and risky arms race, an ideological conflict between market economics and socialism, and producing internal repression of political dissent. After the Cold War, positive modifications with respect to nuclear weapons, climate change, UN reform could have been undertaken, but was effectively resisted by Kissingerian realism premised on beliefs associated with hard power historical agency,

After 9/11 the US without any consideration opted for a global war of terror rather than seeking a more stable framework resting on respect for the sovereignty of states in the Global South, a stronger UN, and cooperative frameworks for the enforcement of criminal law. Instead the US resorted to high tech tactics killing many innocent civilians, displaying no respect for territorial sovereignty in its reliance on drones, shock and awe tactics, with the goal of stricter management of security subject to US global dominance of a unipolar world order.

After the Ukraine War, rather than recourse to diplomacy and a negotiated compromise, to which Russia was receptive, the US-NATO led response chose to wage a geopolitical war against Moscow at the expense of Ukraine and its people. Now four years later the various parties seem unwilling to negotiate in good faith, allowing the killing to continue. It seems likely the war will end as it might have four years earlier by an exchange of negotiated concessions and security reassurances.

After the October 7 attack on Israel launched from Gaza, Israel initiateded a genocidal assault with the backing of leading Western countries, with spillovers to the West Bank and region. The genocidal strikes continued killing at least 80,000 Palestinians and were implicitly linked to the Israeli quest for ‘Greater Israel’ that called for the erasure of any Palestinian resistance, either by ethnic cleansing or total victimization. The nature of the alignments on either side of this conflict exposed the Islamophobic reflex of the leading Western liberal democracies and the heartless quest for Jewish primacy in Israel even if meant institutionalizing a harsh version of apartheid. 

3- How do you see the state of human rights internationally today?

The observance of human rights has declined in recent years, especially in the liberal democracies of the West, but also reflecting authoritarian and xenophobic trends throughout the world, and in virtually all leading sovereign states. The voluntary adherence to the norms of international law with respect to human rights has also been negatively affected by the failure to address Israeli apartheid and genocide, and the widespread repression of pro-Palestinian solidarity protests and policy initiatives. The internal curtailments of human rights in the leading liberal democracies has also set back all efforts to increase compliance with human rights legal stardards.


4- How would you assess the current role of the United Nations in resolving existing conflicts, such as those in the Middle East or Palestine?

The UN is weaker than it has ever been since ir was established in 1945. This partially the result of the UN’s inability to protect the Palestinian people, and others, from Israel’s defiance of international law, highlighted by the refusal to respect Palestinian basic rights, above all, the right of self-determination, related rights of resistance to its denial in this kind of settler colonial context, and reaction to Israeli uses of force against several neighboring countries. This has been dramatized by allowing Israel and the United States to oversee in a manipulative manner the current ceasefire arrangements and control the future of Gaza, institutionalized in the shameful Board of Peace, which rewards the perpetrators of genocide and severely punishes its victims.

5- If you could change one previous international decision, which one would it be and why?

It was the decision back in 1945 to entrust the management of global security to non-accountable geopolitical actors, accorded an exemption from a legal duty to comply with the UN Charter. A closely related decision, important symbolically and substantively, was to impose accountability for war crimes only on civilian, military, and corporate leaders of the losers in World War II, coupled with the refusal to allow legal scrutiny of the crimes of the winners. The winners were expected by the American prosecutor, Justice Jackson to adhere in the future to the standards imposed on the losers at Nuremberg but consistently failed to do so with impunity.

6- Is it possible for the Iran nuclear deal to be revived and for Iran, the US, and Israel to live in peace?

It seems doubtful so long as the US steadfastly supports Israel’s patterns of hegemonic security policies applied not only to the Palestinian people, but to neighbors that either are sympathetic with the Palestinian ordeal, most notably Iran, or are perceived by Israel’s leaders to pose future obstacles to its goals of hegemonic regionalism. Peace in the region also depends on the West giving up its ideas about prevailing in an inter-civilizational struggle between the Islamic Middle East and the Christian West, a current struggle whose deep psycho-political and economistic roots can be traced back to the Christian Crusades of earlier centuries.

For regional peace to prevail in the Middle East to six interrelated steps must be taken: self-determination for Palestine, Israeli renunciation or drastic revision of Zionist ideology seeking ‘Greater Israel’ and regional hegemony; ending all US sanctions imposed on Iran; Israel’s giving up its nuclear weapons capability coupled with a monitored treaty to make the Middle East a nuclear free zone; the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that critically examines the various versions of the Israeli and Palestinian narratives from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 forward to the present; s negotiated cap on military spending and sales by Israel; a Declaration of Coexistence based on ethnic equality, and signed by both Heads of State and reinforced by a pledge of Permanent Members of the Security Council to suspend. any use of the veto in connection with any recurrences of the Israel/Palestine conflict. .

7- In your opinion, did the US and Israeli strikes succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Of course, it is impossible to know with any precision, but all signs suggest that Iran has restored its enrichment facilities, which may both enhance its defensive capabilities and make it more vulnerable to further (unlawful) attacks by Israel and/or the United States. There is no justification in contemporary international law with respect to preventive war, including to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

8- Do you think the current Iranian regime is facing an existential challenge, and how do you see the future of the Islamic Republic?

The Islamic Republic has proved remarkably successful over the decades in opposing external and internal opposition to the stability of national governance and to the protection of its rights as a sovereign state. Iran has been unfairly dealt with respecting its nuclear program, given Israel’s and the US hostility, threats, and uses of force since 1979. It is the core example of the doctrinal application of the clash of civilizations hypothesis that assumed policy relevance throughout Atlanticist region in the post-Cold War global setting. Trump’s pro-Israeli diplomacy has intensified the challenge of military attack and regime-changing interventions, but his transactualism could also lead to some kind of pragmatic agreements that would include a long-deferred normalization of relations with the Islamic Republic. Trump’s brand of narcissistic geopolitics includes a willingness to make abrupt and unexpected policy shifts.  

9- Did the IAEA play a secret role in revealing the uranium enrichment levels to Israel and the US?

It seems the IAEA was the victim of Western geopolitical manipulations, but it is difficult to set forth reliably the fully story without access to the classified inner activity  that led to these irresponsible IAEA reports on the restoration of Iranian enrichment capabilities.


10- What do “ICC” and “ICJ” need to have stronger enforcement mechanisms?

The ICJ to be stronger at the stage of enforcement would benefit from a curtailment of the P5 right of veto in all instances where the issue is one of ICJ enforcement. The GA could also urge compliance or even the imposition of sanctions, not with the force of a legal obligation, but as a moral duty.

The ICC, which unlike the ICJ, is not part of the UN System and relies on the treaty framework of the Rome Statute for its operations has currently no means of enforcement beyond the voluntary compliance of non-parties, which include the three leading geopolitical actors of our time, Russia, China, and the United States. A strong GA resolution might produce various kinds of pushback by sovereign governments and civil society actors that could increase pressure for both compliance and success. An alternative would be a UN Charter amendment giving the GA authority to enforce the judgments of both international tribunals. Such an innovation would depend on the P5 to recommend unanimously that such an amendment be adopted..

In the end, the political will of major states would be decisive in many instances, either to induce compliance or to support non-compliance. At present, most governments are resistant to obligations that encroach on national sovereignty, but in this setting of enforcing ICJ (including Advisory Opinions) and ICC decisions have a greater formal claim if the state in question is a member of the UN or a party to the Rome Statute.



11- Did Israel try to win you over to its side during your time as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestine?

No, they made no attempt after losing their opposition to my appointment as Special Rapporteur at the Human Rights Council. Their entire effort during the six years I served as an unpaid UN appointee was to discredit me as an objective observer, accusing me of ethnic bias in repeated defamatory smears. Sadly, the UN exhibited little support even when I was detained in an Israeli airport prison facility while on a UN mission seemingly responsive to inflammatory comments from UN Watch, an NGO that devotes its energies and resources to the aggressive and often unscrupulous   defense of Israel against critics, resorting to lies and insults. It is a sign of UN weakness that UNW is neither disciplined in its behavior or more appropriately delisted by the UNOSOC as possessing UN representational credentials.

12- How do you see the changes in Gaza and the entire Middle East since 7 October?

Although the future is unknowable, especially given a variety of factors, and hopeful possibilities should not be excluded from the political imagination although the present circumstances make the near future looks dark from perspectives that favor constructive responses to Palestinian grievances, greatly aggravated by Israel’s recourse to genocide for more than two years, flagrantly violating the Genocide Convention. The entire world witnessed in real time the horrifying daily images of the cruelty of the genocide, as well as Israel’s defiant posture, and the shocking civilizational support Israel received from the white Christian world on the first few months after October 7.  At the same time, Trump is mercurial leader capable of making abrupt changes in the US role, already somewhat evident clinging to a two-state solution contrary to Israel’s wishes, although vaguely promised, and then only to be realized at some distant point in the future. It does appear to counter Israel’s present drive to establish Greater Israel as soon as possible. However, such a pledge is not without its contradictions. These are mainly shown by the absence of US criticism of Israel’s  indulgence, if not encouragement of settler violence in the West Bank, an approach more consistent with de facto annexation than of any serious effort to demand that Israel policies meet the preconditions for establishing a viable Palestinian state. At present, without even the courtesies of deception, Israel seems more determined than ever to make any form of Palestinian statehood less and less feasible or desirable.

Besides this, Israel and the US pay no attention to the 2024 ICJ Advisory Opinion clearly obligating to withdraw from all three Occupied Palestinian Territories, a judicial outcome endorsed overwhelmingly by a GA resolution.

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13- Do you see President Trump’s plan as an American occupation of Gaza?

It is a somewhat original joint colonizing vision to be implemented by a multi-state ‘Board of Peace, advantageous for Israel, punitive for the Palestinians, and under the uncontested partisan leadership of Donald Trump. It is in my view a disgrace that the UN Security Council unanimously endorsed the Trump Plan in SC Res 1803, which is a symbolic vindication of Israel’s genocide and a further punitive framework for the indefinite subjugation of Palestinians to a blend of ethnic cleansing and a harsh version of apartheid. Whether the outrageous Trump idea of supervising the reconstruction of Gaza to be the Riviera of the Middle East is situated somewhere on a policy spectrum linking predatory disaster capitalism to imperial geopolitics, and hopefully it is the imperial fantasy of a displaced realtor, and like many such flights of fancy, never to be realized. .

14- During your meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini, what exactly took place between you? How would you describe the impact of that encounter on you?

In Jannuary 1979 I was accompanied by Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General, and Donald Luce, an anti-war religious leader, accepting an invitation from Mehdi Bazargan, the Interim President of the Islamic Republic, asking me to form a small delegation to visit Iran so as to have direct contact with the revolution and its leaders during the climactic days that were on the verge of producing victory for the popular movement of opposition to the Shah. During our time in Iran the Shah abdicated as his downfall as Iran’s leader became the only unfinished business of the victorious revolution. It was a perfect moment to have this conversation with symbolic leader of this revolution that surprised the world by its successful resistance to the Shah’s repressive apparatus.

While we were still in Iran, just prior to Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran, we were told that because our visit was viewed as a success we were told that as a surprise reward we were being offered the opportunity to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini on our way back to the United States at his exile residence in a suburb of Paris/.

We had rhe meeting sitting in a circle within a large tent on the lawn of his residence. We covered many topic of lasting significance, but the one that remains uppermost in my memory was Ayatollah Khomeini’s initial questions to us as to whether, unlike in 1953, the United States would accept the will of the Iranian people and be open to normal diplomatic relations, which was his preferred future provided it was not a ruse to induce the new leadership to drop its guard.

We also inquired about the wellbeing of the Jewish minority, and his response was reassuring: “Judaism is an authentic religion, and if Jews do not involve themselves as agents of Israel, it would be a tragedy for us if they left Iran.” I came away from our several hours sitting on the ground in the tent with the distinct impression that Ayatollah Khomeini’s had a distinct preference for a peaceful diplomatic future with the West. Unfortunately, due to a number of factors, this has remained ‘the road not taken’ and to quote the renowned American poet, Robert Frost’s final line of the poem,.’and that has made all the difference.’

There is much else of interest that transpired at that meeting, including our impressions of this charismatic historic religious leader, but that would unduly lengthen my response, and will be saved for another occasion.  

15- Why did you receive death threats for several years after your New York Times article titled “Trusting Khomeini,” and how did you deal with it?

Of course, I do not know the true motivations of those who transmitted death threats. It was more than disagreement with my assessments. I suspect it was to make me fear the consequences if I did not remain silent in the future. These threats did not alter my strong conviction that the US Government should at least test the willingness of Iran’s new leadership to act in accord with this stated desire for normal diplomatic relations based on mutual respect and shared benefits. It was an opportunity missed to demonstrate that the US was ready to grant legitimacy to the outcome of internal national struggles to shape the political identity of a sovereign state, an essential feature of the right of self-determination.

Because the road taken by all US leaders was one of confrontation and hostility toward the Islamic Republic, not in keeping with a rational assessment of US national interests,, it challenged the new leadership in Iran to give the highest priority to regime security and territorial defense. Whether these preoccupations were responsible for the harsh and seemingly intolerant policies of theocratic governance is impossible to discern. Interpreting whether the decades that followed might have been different if the US and Israel had not constantly Iranian historical anxieties about the past  is a matter of pure speculatiom. Perhaps, a more convincing picture will emerge if Iranian policy insiders offer a careful analysis of how the security threats and destabilizing policies spearheaded by Israel, backed by the main members of the Atlanticist political community that emerged after World War II, turned governance into an understandable obsession with national security and regime stability.

16- Do you believe the George W. Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks? Do you possess any information that you haven’t previously published?

I am not an expert on the ongoing debates about what really happened on 9/11, but I do know that there are many loose ends and unanswered questions in the official version of the alleged Al Qaeda attacks. There is no present receptivity in Washington to opening the issue to objective scrutiny by an independent international commission of inquiry.

I have not seen any convincing evidence of active complicitly by George W. Bush beyond the well-established facts of complacency in the face of warnings of some kind of terrorist attack. The immediate launch of the Great Terror War was a regressive response, but consistent with the policy impulses of the ‘foreign policy elites’ that control the shaping of US national interests. An additional source of suspicion arose because the US was being pushed by Israel to adopt an anti-Iraq position in the Middle East. It is doubtful that the 2003 Iraq War would have been launched without the camouflage of the 9/11 attacks, which provided a falsely constructed rationale for engaging aggressively against any adversary of the United States, especially in the Middle East. It is worth revisiting ‘the clean break’ neo-con manifesto drawn up with encouragement from Israeli leaders in the 1990s.

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The Courage to Be: Adapting to Unknowability in a Dangerous World

17 Feb

[Prefatory Note: This short essay previously published as an editorial in TransMediaService on February 16, 2026. The text below has been modified slightly]

As human beings we share deep emotional impulses to foretell the future, whether to foresee action on the basis of dread as to what the future will bring or to offer oneself and others reassurance that the future will deliver us from an ominous catastrophe or bring us the gifts of life that we most covet. From pre-modern times humans have sought this reassurance, resorting to magicians or religious seers and texts as necessary.

Diverse civilizations throughout history have thirsted after knowledge of their future as individuals or in relation to diverse collective identities as members of tribes, nations, states, religions, ethnicities, and gender identities, and more recently as a species. Fortune telling, astrology, and divining rods have all tried to foretell the future, without waiting for it to unfold. This kind of epistemological denialism has been somewhat disguised in modern sensibilities by recourse to experts, futurists, and forecasters who translate data into policy preferences and predictions that earns respect as if ‘knowledge.’ It is also us bound up with gambling and extreme sports, as if we can defy the fog clouding the future and subjugate the future to our appetites/

This passion to know the future has even penetrated sophisticated scientific circles. A prominent example is the Doomsday Clock administered for the since 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who select a group of scientists, weapons specialists, nuclear experts, and public figures to assess how close the world is to the midnight omega point of nuclear war. This year it was a major news item when the clock was moved four seconds closer to midnight, from 89 seconds to 85, a pseudo-precise way of anticipating the risks of an apocalyptic future for humanity. As with pre-scientific ways of relieving persons and communities of the anxieties and impatience associated with the core uncertainties of life as bearing upon prospects feared or desired. In modernity this demand for something as definite as possible about the future tends to be more comfortable relying on statistics, graphs, and data, still functioning as ways to cover up the unknowability of the future, and ultimately performs a disservice to humanity by encouraging fatalism, passivity, or sedation on one side and cynicism and complacency on the other.

Why act or struggle for the future if we know what lies ahead? Thereby arises ‘false consciousness’? This is what the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, famously warned us about calling it ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.’ He considered this widespread fallacy induced false consciousness about the real. My purpose is more modest. It is to criticize the impact of negativity to the extent that it flourishes even among solutions-oriented peace activists in the tradition of Johan Galtung, and to energize progressive activism without the palliative of false consciousness. Unknowability about the future, starting with the precariousness of our own mortality, is never comfortable, yet it is real. It should not diminish efforts to reduce dangers or risks, but motivate us to adjust behavior on the basis of present knowledge. The Titanic would not have struck an iceberg if it had not ventured so close to Arctic waters. I would feel safer and more secure if denuclearizing initiatives were embraced by the nuclear weapons states such as by entering into a nuclear disarmament treaty process with a resolve to make it work. Even so, I would be overreaching by claiming 100% certainty that my line of advocacy was assured of being best course for humanity to take? Claiming to know the future is a mixture of dogmatism and hubris, leading in worst case scenarios to extremism of a destructive kind.

These dangers disfigure behavior in potentially destructive ways. Zionist ideology roots its justifications for apartheid, genocide, and ecocide in the biblical promise of ‘the promised land,’ taking no account of the wellbeing and attachments of the majority population in modern day Palestine. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, a confirmed secularist, opportunistically invoked this sacrosanct method of foretelling of the future by saying ‘let the Bible be our weapon,’ and further evaluating any choice by the simple question, ‘is it good for the Jews?’ Not only is the future assured and hence knowable, but its inevitability tends to relieve those so falsely enlightened of all moral constraints. This kind of manipulative futurism corrupts as exemplified by Christian Zionists who read the Book of Revelations that comes at the end of the New Testament as validating unconditional support of Israel joined with a mission to induce Jews to emigrate to Israel as the necessary prelude to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. And then, when the initial forecast is fulfilled, Jews are to be given the choice of conversion or eternal damnation.

The most notable substitution of hope for knowledge when it comes to the future derives its strongest affirmation from the great late 18th century German philosopher of rationality, Immanuel Kant (1724-1805), who put articulated in solemn inspirational language that has cheered the best of activists for more than two centuries: “The moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King, Jr, famously invoked this sentiment, although he tied it to struggle more than treated it as a foolproof prediction of the future. A reading of the present can be interpreted as vindicating Kant’s confidence in the future of humanity, as in his essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) or an expression of premature optimism or even as a selective blindness toward the human condition as it is currently being exhibited. The evidence is equivocal and premature, at best, and if I had to pronounce upon it, I would prefer to regard such a predisposition as an ultra-humanistic version of false consciousness about the human future.

From these perspectives, I want to encourage peace activism of all kinds, to accept the challenges associated with a refusal to indulge delusions about ‘knowable futures’ in favor of rooting their beliefs in the unknowability of the future, and to ground their activism in an ethos of humanistic struggle based on visions of desirable futures without depending on false claims about the certainties of doom or of a guarantee that their dedicated responses to such assaults on humanity as arise from warfare, climate change, poverty, racism, and imperialism will with certainty overcome such shortcomings in the human condition.

As a species we must abandon a worldview based on parts rather  than the whole. As long as we speak only or primarily from the present particularities of nationality, gender, ethnicity, civilizational, and religious identity we should awaken in the present that this is not a path to a peaceful, just, and resilient path to the future. With urgency we must learn to think and act as engaged citizens of the planetary ecosystemic whole, and more expansively of the cosmos as our unavoidable shared foundation of life and spirituality.

Overall, this involves an acceptance of unknowability when it comes to the future and to struggle on behalf of our beliefs in the present, with a posture of prudence toward perceived dangers and wrongdoing. Such a reorientation of outlook and engagement entails profound changes in education, citizenship, and notions of the public good.  I try to remain engaged with the help of my former mentor/teacher, Paul Tillich, and especially his book Courage to Be (1952), whose message counsels rootedness in the deep soil of present reality.

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Geopolitical Obstcles to International Law Enforcement: Deficiencies in the Management of Global Security

9 Feb

[Prefatory Note: Ressponse of Richard Falk to Questions posed by the Iranian journalist Asgar Ghahramanpour, 9. February 2026]

1. **In light of the rise and consolidation of far-right and nationalist movements—such as the Trump phenomenon in the United States and similar trends in Europe and elsewhere—how do you assess the current status of international law within the emerging global order?**

   Would you say that international law is increasingly retreating in the face of power politics?

International law is definitely being marginalized in contemporary international relations by the rise of ultra-nationalist political leaders and authoritarian governments. This negative trend is making a severe impact on political consciousness as a result of the adoption and revival of an imperial foreign policy by the U.S. under Trump, although the pragmatic use or neglect of international law in the management of global security preceded Trump, and can be traced back to 1945 when the winners of World War II became self-anointed as the architects of ‘a new world order,’ a role most prominently associated with the design and establishment of the United Nations.

It is notable that the UN Charter designated the Security Council as the only political organ of the new Organization that was provided with the legal authority to reach obligatory decisions binding on sovereign states. Most significantly it refused to allow international law or ensure democratic representation of the non-West to control outcomes in the Security Council in the face of opposition of even one of five winners of World War II given permanent representation while other member states were selected on a term basis. The role of international law was curtailed by according these five winners in 1945 not only permanent SC membership but more significantly a right of veto. This meant that if a breach of international law was to be dealt with even by a majority vote of 14-1, it would still fail, and have no legal effect if the lone dissenting vote was one the P5, which not only crippled the role of the SC in relation to geopolitical rivalry, as during the Cold War, but was highly undemocratic if evaluated from demographic perspectives. This absence of democracy also was present in the internal makeup of the P5 giving the US, France, and the UK great power status in the form of SC permanent membership and the veto, and excluding such Global South great powers as India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil, creating an everlasting Western dominance in the SC, including a right of each P5 member to block any effort to reform the SC because all amendments of the Charter were nullified unless the support of all five.

The net result of this extensive role of the SC in UN affairs has been to make the Organization submissive to the P5, and to confer geopolitical primacy with respect to the management of global security, including war prevention and resistance to genocide as well as subordinate to the strategic interests of the powerful rather than responsive to the regulative principles of law that should possess universal applicability, and governs the strong and weak alike.

It is a mistake to think that the whole enterprise of international law is failing. International law works effectively in any substantive setting in which there exists a mutual interest in its applicability. The routines of international life, including most commerce and trade relations, air and maritime safety, communications, tourism, and diplomatic representation are complied with because the logic of reciprocity is operative. This is not true in domains of behavior such as armed conflict in which differentials of hard power determine political outcomes and uphold strategic interests and reflect the ambitions of the powerful. In these latter contexts international law has long been marginalized by design leaving the management of global security to the discretion of the geopolitical actors for any given issue involving the implementation of international law as the disappointing UN response to the recent Gaza genocide illustrated.

2. **Do you believe that the era in which international law functioned as a normative framework capable of restraining state power is coming to an end?**

   If so, what kind of alternative global order appears to be taking shape?

It is a fiction embraced by naïve legalists to suppose that international law ever controlled the management of global security or inhibited the strategic priorities of dominant states. There were eras of greater peacefulness when Great Powers acted prudently with respect to militarization and conflict resolution. The idea of a rule-governed international order applied selectively and within the limits set by those domains of international life where reciprocity prevailed, and differentials in power and wealth were minimized as in international trade and investment as compared to the colonial era.

The experience with nuclear weapons is illustrative of this pattern of marginalizing international law despite the risks of leaving the use of this apocalyptic weaponry of mass destruction entirely under the control of the most dangerous geopolitical actors. Rather than favoring denuclearization and disarmament, the same five winners in 1945 continued to leave this weaponry essentially unregulated except to the extent of seeking maximum control over the spread of the weapons to other states. The result has been costly arms races, dangerous crises, abetted by a scheme of deterrence + nonproliferation, with a resulting nuclear hegemony. If ever there was a basis for universal rule governance it was with respect to nuclear weaponry, but it could not overcome the ideology of ‘political realism’ that dominated the thinking of foreign policy elites of the major states, and was systemically opposed to accept any arrangements that restricted their hard power capabilities.

Whether this discouraging character of international relations will change in light of the Gaza Genocide, aggressive uses of forces, extreme violations of human rights, ecological instability is impossible to predict, although it seems unlikely in the present atmosphere. The antics of Trump’s narcissistic geopolitics are generating a tidal wave of anxiety about the human future, as well as bearing witness to the devastating consequences of unchecked lawlessness. We can only hope that civil society activism and more responsible political leadership will emerge to create a more viable international legal order than was framed in 1945.

3. **Based on your experience as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, to what extent does this case illustrate the gap between the principles of international law and the political will of powerful states?**

   What are the broader implications of this gap for the credibility of the international system?

There is no doubt that this gap between law and politics exists in relation to the management of global security, including war prevention, conflict resolution, genocide, apartheid, and ecocide. This should not confuse us about the reliance on compliance with international law by all sovereign states, including those most powerful, whether labeled as Great Powers or in the UN context as the five permanent members of the Security Council or P5. As suggested in my prior responses where the logic of reciprocity applies to the behavior of sovereign states, international law provides a stable and convenient basis for the myriad of interactions that make routine international interactions trustworthy. For the agenda of global security and strategic ambition the design of the UN itself recognized the lack of political will to close the gap between international law and its dependence for implementation on political will and capabilities, epitomized by the right of veto conferred upon the winners of World War II, arguably at the time the most dangerous political actors in the world.

At present, despite the widespread disappointment and tension arising from this gap, there is still the absence of political will among the leading geopolitical actors (U.S., Russia, and China) to close the gap. From a legal perspective, this gap is insulated from remedy by each of the P5 possessing an unrestricted right to veto any proposed amendment of the UN Charter. The most that can be realistically envisioned in the near future is more prudent or responsible behavior by these dominant geopolitical actors and by secondary geopolitical actors of limited geographic scope to restrict their lawlessness to the security agendas of. regional geopolitical configurations of power, although U.S. imperial geopolitics and Russian and Chinese spheres of influence geopolitics ensures that the harmful gap between what international law requires and what international politics determines will continue to cause immeasurable harm, especially to vulnerable peoples and nations, or states that have resources coveted by geopolitical actors.

4. **Some argue that international law has always been subordinate to politics rather than an independent constraint upon it.**

   From your perspective, is the relationship between politics and international law inherently conflictual, or is there still room for a constructive and mutually reinforcing relationship?

To avoid confusion and repetition, please consider the relevance of my responses to earlier questions. In sum, with respect to all aspects of global security international law, in practice and design, has long been subordinated to politics, but only for regional and global political actors. And then only since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 when Europe gave birth to a self-serving format for an international normative order that legitimated coercion in the course of colonizing projects in the Global South.

A deficient version of symbolic international law enforcement occurs at the conclusion of major wars ending in victory for one side. As in the aftermath of World War II the winners prosecuted the war crimes alleged to be committed by surviving German and Japanese individuals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, which critics persuasively derided as ‘victors’ justice.

As also suggested in previous responses, where reciprocal benefits result from compliance, international law has long provided a reliable framework guiding the behavior of individuals, corporations and financial institutions, and governments in many international interactions, although even here there are important subtle

encroachments by the rich and powerful on the rights of the poor that escape from the discipline of a legal order administered on the basis of equality of all

5. **At a time when powerful states increasingly disregard or actively undermine multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the global human rights regime, how do you envision the future of multilateralism? **

There is little doubt that this is a bad time for internationalism, given global trends toward ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, which tend to devalue cooperative multinationalism. These trends are accentuated by the intense US hostility to internationalism given Trump’s diplomacy on behalf of the United States, which continues to be the most influential world state, although in danger of losing this status due to China’s continuing rising star. Early in 2026 the U.S. Government, by executive order, withdrew and stopped funding for no less that 66 international institutional arrangements, 31 of which were within the UN System.

The global scope of ecological challenges as well as the complexities of digital age communications, global migration flow, vulnerabilities to disease epidemics makes it likely that a new cycle of functional pressures will in the years ahead restore and even expand dependence upon multilateralism. This seems probable, although the signature reality of the present global setting is radical uncertainty, or put differently, the unknowability of the future.

6. **Can global civil society, academics, and human rights institutions play a meaningful role in restoring the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law, or are such efforts structurally constrained by the current global power configuration?**

In line with unknowability of the future, an initial response is to underscore unknowability, together with an awareness that there are many historical examples of surprising happenings in international life that were not anticipated by relevant experts or public opinion. Among notable recent examples is the victory of Vietnamese nationalism in opposing the militarily superior US intervention in the Vietnam War. Other important examples are the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peaceful transition of the apartheid regime in South Africa into a multiethnic constitutional democracy, and the Arab Spring attacking dictatorial rule in several Arab majority countries at least briefly. In light of this defining feature of  unknowability, it is appropriate to struggle for a desirable future. This suggest that civil society activism is worth supporting as strongly as possible in the hope of both restoring and enhancing the role of legitimacy and withit, the effectiveness of international law in relation to global security and human rights priorities.

Of course, resistance from current geopolitical configurations, statism, and predatory capitalism is to be expected, and current prospects for a successful transformation of irresponsible patterns of geopolitics seem low, this may change over time in unpredictable ways. The struggle for law and justice is imperative, even without any assurance that it will be successful in the short term, but neither is it doomed to failure.

7. **Finally, what advice would you offer to the new generation of international lawyers and policymakers seeking to defend and advance international law in a world moving toward unilateralism, authoritarianism, and weakened global governance?**

My first advice would be directed at teachers and commentators on law and global politics to adopt a paradigm of international law pedagogy that emphasizes the importance of justice-driven law in relation to global security, human rights, and ecological policy agendas. My second advice would be to urge all students of international relations and law to be required to study international law within a framework that is less vocational and more humanistic as integral to engaged citizenship in democratic societies. This educational commitments needs to be supplemented by societal beliefs that such moral literacy is expect to be present in all phases of the professionalism of law, lawyers, and judges, as well as of foreign policy advisors.  

This reorientation of pedagogy would also necessitate a prior critique of prevailing versions of ‘political realism’ that continue to dominate foreign policy decision-making, especially in the governments and ‘think tanks’ of geopolitical actors in a manner, which among elements would downgrade the historic agency of militarism. This would include studying the record of defeat of the militarily superior side in most anti-colonial wars since 1945. The link between international law and international legitimacy would also be stressed to make the key point that if international law is not implemented by governments and inter-governmental institutions it still legitimates civil society secondary enforcement capabilities in the form of solidarity initiatives and informal pressures by protests and boycotts, mounted to promote national and international sanctions.

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World Order After 1945, After Vietnam War, and After Second Coming of Trump

3 Feb

[Prefatory Note: This post elaborates upon a lecture of mine on Janurary 26, 2026 at a webinar in a series convened and moderated by the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, which has kept alive the relevance of the Vietnam experience to current struggles. The invitation to me proposed the topic of ‘World Order After Vietnam.’ In this modified text I devote attention to the relevance of world order after 1945, as well as the Vietnam War itself, and subsequent developments.

One point of clarification: We speak of the Vietnam War rather glibly, which glides over the crucial reality that tragic abuse of power is better understood as ‘America’s War in Vietnam.’ Having noted this, I will stick by the standard terminology for the sake of convenience.

Feedback is particularly welcome as I intend to work further on this theme.

I welcome this occasion to be at virtually together with comrades in the Vietnam anti-war movement, and grateful to John McAiliff & Doug Hofsteter for this invitation, as well as Chris Appy who heads the Ellsberg Initiative at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for illuminating and lucid comments in his role as discussant. I had my doubts as to whether I could meet such a challenge. Part of my predicament in this talk recalled T.S. Eliot’s words to a NYC audience at the start of a poetry reading that I attended over 60 years ago: ‘I am reluctant to make any comments about my poems to an audience that knows more about them than I do.’ In that vein, I realize that there are many with us who have experienced the Vietnam and its aftermath with deeper experience and knowledge than I bring to this challenging topic.]

We are now living through a period of radical uncertainty with respect to the future of world order, an atmosphere agitated by the Gaza Genocide and Trumpism, the resurgence of geopolitical primacy and rivalry, prospects for radical modifications of modernity due to AI and related technological innovations, a transactional and narcissistic US leadership, a discredited  and weakened UN coupled with the emergence of cooperative international frameworks, a divided US versus a resurgent China, and a threatening conflict reality that is stimulating increased military spending, new modes of warfare, danger of warfare fought with nuclear weapons. A time of world order transition or rupture, from the end of the Cold War & US dominated unipolarity to a yet unknown future—What does this Trump phenomenon and the Chinese rise portend for the human future?

I think a few brief bullet points on world order before Vietnam would be helpful in giving some background to both changes and continuities relative to world order after Vietnam:

–World Order after WWII was designed by the winners, which defeated hopes for a peace system restraining hard power militarism, in accord with the precepts of political realism that understand international history as largely the story of military superiority and economic inequality as expressed  a favorite quote of hyper-realist through the ages, and recently by Henry Kissinger, and now Stephen Miller: “the weak do what they must, the strong do what they will.” Thucydides has been typically interpreted wrongly endorsing this cynical outlaw whereas more careful reading of the context of this adage suggests it is a prophetic warning that such Athenian corrupt behavior with respect to morality will lead to its downfall. The intention, contrary to the amorality of post-Machiavellian realism, was a counsel of moral self-constraint to those with power at a time when the prohibitions of international law did not yet exist.

 –the design of the UN could have worked had the winners of World War II acted with moral and now legal self-restraint: permanent veto rights for the winners, criminal accountability for the losers at Nuremberg, Tokyo; it is true that international law seems never to have been intended to displace the geopolitical management of global security by the architects of world order after 1945, but neither was its existence denied; the hope then was that at least the liberal democracies of the West (US, UK, and France) and their allies, would voluntarily exhibit respect for the contemporary code of law and morality as embodied in the UN Charter, and thus comply with international law and morality without burdening the Organization with enforcement duties that would have required a superior military capability even in relation to nuclear superpowers, which would have caused a different set of problems that have been identified by criticisms of world federalism as the solution to peacebuilding challenges.

–In retrospect, we should realize that even the leadership of liberal democracies could not be trusted to comply with international law or observe moral values if in tension with the pursuit of strategic ambitions or the supposed requirements of national security. As a result, it is understandable to blame the leading members of the UN, and not the UN, for its disappointing performance in relation to global security, genocide and ecocide prevention, human rights generally, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts. 

–Cold War excesses from the outset suggest wartime trust was dissipated even prior to the surrender of Germany and Japan: covert regime-changing interventions displacing elected leaders: Mosaddeq in Iran (1953); Arbenz in Guatemala (1954); political assassinations Lumumba, Castro Ché Guevera, attempts for both ideological and economic reasons; Soviet failure to hold elections in Eastern Europe and interventions to uphold the pro-Soviet status quo; see James Douglass, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK (2025) interpreting the corrupting impact of these violent killings on progressive politics in the US.

–death rattle of European colonialism but not delegitimized by the UN Charter or among conservative elite circles. The emergence of predatory globalization as legitimized by Clinton, Bush presidencies, neo-con influence favoring Huntington view of Cold War Islamic threat demonized as ‘terrorism’ and associated with Israel’s frontline struggle against suicide bombing reaching a climax in response to Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

The Pedagogy of the Vietnam War

         –Lessons learned by US foreign policy establishment (militarized bureaucracy; Think tanks)—avoid ground warfare & minimize US casualties, abolish the draft, manage media discourse; technological innovations; proxy war option (Ukraine: Biden-fight Russia by arming Uk & discouraging diplomatic compromise); pacify citizen activism; overcame ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ in Iraq War (1991)

         –Peace Movement failures: sedated by the ‘Vietnam Syndrome into ‘game over’ delusions, overlooking systemic character of the partnering of militarism, nuclear hegemony, capitalism and political leaders’ short-termism

Major Developments in World Order Since the Vietnam War:

         –Vital turning points: end of Cold War; 9/11, Al Qaeda, & Osama bin Laden; Great Terror War; Iraq War and occupation, 2003; rise of & rivalry with China; Ukraine War; Israel’s response to October 7; anti-woke, anti-immigrant politics in liberal West; Abraham Accords and geopolitical deference of Muslim-majority countries to US hegemony; reelection of Trump, 2024; inauguration of Zorhan Mamdani, 2026, ICE rampage, ecological and climate change neglect; global rise of authoritarianism, xenophobia and ultra-right nationalism; transformative technological innovations- AI, robotics, hybrid warfare.   

         –formal defeat of European colonialism, but not of colonial mentality, generating economic and security residual colonialism in Africa, imperial encroachments elsewhere

         –US reliance on economic warfare, principally through sanctions broadly applied and political destabilization; the current Iran Protest Movement

         –end of Cold War, Berlin Wall, the Gorbachev vision of a new world order & Russia’s decline, temporary withdrawal from geopolitical rivalry; neoliberal globalization and the deindustrialization of the US, heavy indebtedness, precarious finance-oriented hegemony through dollar after abandoning the gold standard;

         –Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ reliance on Israel to fight US proxy wars in the ME; Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilization’ hypothesis- containing Islam rather than USSR and left ideologies; Israel given a free hand in the region, as well as with Palestine (liberal societies swallow severe legal/moral wrongs of apartheid, genocide, ecocide); containing Islam—Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Muslim Brotherhood,  Egyptian coup; Huntington validated by 9/11 attack, Taliban, ISIS, Hamas.

         –US state-building ‘democratizing,’ containment p.us projects: Libya, Iraq (after 2003), Afghanistan, and now Venezuela; chaos, not democracy, state-destroying;

         –The anti-apartheid campaign contra South African racism, UN support and global solidarity via boycotts, divestments, sanctions;

         –The world order deficiencies as Israel intensifies repressive apartheid policies by recourse to  Gaza genocide, with West Bank spillover; discrediting of UN as weak, geopolitically neutralized, and most shamefully, a unanimous endorser of the Trump Plan in the SC 1803 (Nov. 17, 2025), given approval by SG, formation of Board of Peace at World Economic Forum, 2025;

         –US withdrawal from and hostility toward ‘internationalism’; started the year by withdrawing participation and funding from 66 international institutional arrangements-31 from within the UN System. These include the Climate Change Framework Convention, WHO, UNESCO; Board of Peace as shift toward what might be called ‘imperial internationalism;’

         –Rise and spread of authoritarianism, decline of rule of law internal to the state, from the Orban model to the rightest recent victory in Chile (some friction, Brazil: Lula over Bolsonaro; Trumpism; hard borders; realignment prospects.

         –US National Security Strategy 2025: Declaration of Imperial Internationalism

                  //Venezuelan attack

                  //US Western Hemisphere preeminence (challenging China’s trade and infrastructure diplomacy of mutual interests

                  //rejects liberal post-Cold War  

What Prospects for New Order

         –Spheres of Influence trilateralism 

        –Imperial Internationalism

         –End of NATO and alliance diplomacy; hard and soft power transactionalism; Europe as marginalized; a new state-centric world order

         –Rise of Regionalism and Civilizationalism (clash and alliance models)

–UN Reform or Collapse: a reset to moderate geopolitical influence, and restore confidence

–Functional Internationalism: cooperative global problem-solving mechanisms

–Polycentric Balance: Bandung-revived NAM; BRICS; Chinese Development Collective Framework

–Revolt against international payments system as tied to dollar: failure or success

–Extending US Imperialism: Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Cuba, Iran; and reactions- European realignment, heightened geopolitical rivalry

–Important global challenges: climate change, ecological instabilities; heightened risk of major wars

–key national challenges: reviving democracy and human rights; demilitarization and domestic investment in infrastructures, restored respect for truth and rationality, internationalism, prudent geopolitics; more equitable distributions of wealth and income, defeating the economics and politics of inequality

Concluding Remarks

–a time of radical uncertainty and unparalleled complexity; humility about forecasting the future;

–present world order precarious, unjust, militarized

–nuclear hegemony as geopolitical core of managing global security

–transactional statism versus civilizationalism

–hope, struggle, and the unknowable future

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Is a Non-UN Conflict Resolution Framework Feasible, Desirable? Trump’s Board of Peace is an Obstacle and Warning

29 Jan

[Prefatory Note: Initially framed as questions responding to Middle East journalist, Mohamed Abd Elaziz, raising question about Stage II of the Trump Plan for Gaza, inaugurating the Board of Peace at the Davos World Economic Forum this January. The questions raises some key issues. My assessment is that the Board of Peace deserves to fail. It insults the Palestinian people, is blind to flagrant violations of the Genocide Convention, and indirectly further undermines international law and UN authority with respect to global security.]


1- How do you view the legitimacy of establishing an independent peace council to intervene in international conflicts, compared to the traditional mechanisms of the United Nations?

The mechanism may work in certain situation, but not if as in the Trump Plan it is

slanted in favor of the wrongdoers and is prejudicial to the legal rights of the aggrieved and victimized party. The idea of an independent peace council could only achieve legitimacy if it is mindful of the imperative of equality with respect to the parties when addressing conflicts and its activities are professionally shaped by their joint participation, with an eye toward determining whether part of the peace council’s writ  covers potential accountability of one or both parties in the form of reparation or recommendations of investigation and possible prosecution for individuals seemingly involved in wrongdoing in relation to law, morality, and human rights. Given the present structure of international relations, it seems highly unlikely that leading states would participate and fund such an independent peace council with a mission of conflict resolution as it would encroach upon the traditional sovereign prerogatives with respect to strategic national interests.

2– Do you believe that such initiatives could serve as leverage for UN reform?

It could in principle, but not in the setting of Israel/Palestine, where the partisan nature of the interactive process is one that by its composition, framework, and agenda rewards the perpetrators of genocide and further victimizes those who continue to suffer from severe and cruel wrongdoing by Israel, the U.S, and complicit enabling states. To the extent that UN affirms such an unjust initiative it brings shame to the Organization as it did by the unanimous endorsement of the Trump Plan in UNCR RES 2803 on January 17, 2026, and further stigmatized of the Organization by the show of support for the resolution expressed by the Secretary General, which included encouragement for the establishment of the misnamed Board of Peace that can be more accurately identified as the Settler Colonial Peace Council.

At this time, it is hard to say whether the Trump Plan, especially the Board of Peace by its apparent intention of marginalizing the UN, dramatized by situated its inauguration at the Davos World Economic Forum rather than within the UN System might generate a strong effort to engage in UN reform. This would require a considerable mobilization of pressure and is risky in that might lead to the US exit, which would actually play into Trump’s anti-internationalism approach that seeks to heighten US transactionalism as well as geopolitical outreach.

3- What are the potential risks if a peace council were to assume a larger role than the United Nations in managing global crises?

I have no confidence that such an independent peace council could work unless free from geopolitical manipulation by the US, Russia, China, and above all the US. It would need to be funded independently, and its executive members determined by some process that assured selection would take account of geographical, civilizational, ideological, gender diversities and maybe even strived to obtain an inter-generational balance. If, and this is a big if. such a peace council could become truly independent of the narcissistic geopolitics of Trump it might pose a constructive challenge to transform the UN as now constituted. The UN has performed disappointingly over the decades when it comes to conflict resolution, the enforcement of international law, the accountability of wrongdoers. This is not an accident. It should be remembered that the UN was set up in a manner that protected the strategic interests of the winners of World War II, as exemplified by conferring the right of veto and permanent membership in the SC as a way to ensure that the UN would act in a manner hostile to their perceived priorities. If a IPC could be based, staffed, and funded on the primacy of justice rather than currently as a reflection of the primacy of geopolitics it might displace the UN in the vital policy sphere of the management of global security. It is with respect to global security that the UN has most consistently failed the peoples of the world. This was illustrated dramatically, grotesquely, and fundamentally, by the recent pathetic efforts of the UN to oppose the Israel/US genocidal partnership that has produced the ongoing acute Palestinian ordeal.

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The US Military Operation in Venezuela and the Management of Global Security

23 Jan

[Prefatory Note: A revised, modified, and updated text of my opinion piece published by Al Jazeera on January 21, 2026 with a different title. A longer version will be published shortly on social media platforms.]

The United States attack on Venezuela on January 3 should be understood not simply as an unlawful use of force, but as part of a broader shift towards nihilistic geopolitics in which international law is openly subordinated to the imperial management of global security. What is at stake is not only Venezuela’s sovereignty, but the collapse of any remaining confidence in the capacity of the United Nations system, and particularly the permanent members of the Security Council, to restrain aggression, prevent genocide, or uphold the core legal norms the UN was established 81 years ago to defend and promote, and while not succeeding in the past has now abandoned all efforts to encourage geopolitical restraint and responded complacently to Trump-led assault on the very idea of humane forms of world order.

The multi-dimensional Venezuelan intervention, its political prelude and aftermath, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of US leadership together expose a system in which legality is invoked selectively if at all, veto power substitutes for accountability, and coercion replaces consent. Venezuela thus becomes a scary metaphor, a case study, and a warning: not of the failure of international law as such, but of its deliberate marginalization by those states with geopolitical pretensions, states deliberately entrusted with managing global security after achieving victory in World War II. To discourage the wholesale dismissal of international law it should be appreciated that international law continues to work for most non-security related interactions across international boundaries. Issues of violation, non-implementation, and impunity relative to global security are where the difficulties of achieving respect for international law are concentrated. This is not new in the history of international relations, but since 1945 and the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals has been disguised by pretensions that a new world order emerged when the UN was established. Closer scrutiny of the UN framework reveals that international law was designed to be subordinated to geopolitics whenever serious challenges to global security emerged. Why else confer an unrestricted right of veto on the five principal winners of the war against fascism, which emerged from the struggle as the most powerful and dangerous states, whose power most needed curbing rather than preserving in the Security Council, the only organ in the UN System that could render obligatory decisions. Of course, as it was assumed and piously hoped in 1945 that countries that cooperated so effectively in the just completed war, massively costly in lives, expense, devastation, and human suffering, would continue to work together in peacetime by acting responsibly within the frame of the Charter.

If the Venezuela intervention and subsequent  ‘occupation’  is considered purely from the perspective of international law, this action constitutes a crude, brazen, unlawful and unprovoked recourse to aggressive force, in clear violation of the core norm of the UN Charter, Article 2(4), which reads: “All Members of the United Nations shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” The only qualification to this prohibition is set out in Article 51: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” This flagrant violation of Venezuelan territorial sovereignty and political independence was preceded by years of US sanctions, weeks of explicit threats, and days of lethal attacks on vessels allegedly transporting drugs, as well as seizures of oil tankers carrying to and from Venezuela.

This unilateral action was further aggravated by the capture of Venezuela’s head of state, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, by US Special Forces, reportedly guided on their sordid mission by CIA operatives. Once seized they were transported to the US in a humiliating fashion to face assorted charges of “narco-terrorism” and unlawful encroachments on foreign property rights in a US federal court, in apparent violation of sovereign immunity. This imperialist mission, openly flaunting the immunity of foreign leaders  and political independence of a sovereign state, was underscored and magnified by President Trump’s declared intentions. Trump openly plans to direct personally Venezuelan policymaking for an indefinite period, ostensibly until the country was “stabilized” sufficiently to restore oil production facilities. This was to done in a manner responsive to goals of maximizing the profitability of major US energy corporations, including Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. When asked who was in charge of Venezuela’s governance, Trump responded impatiently, “We are in charge.” This use of ‘We’ is more adequately comprehended by substituting ‘I.’

There is more politically at stake in this drastic reversal of the US Good Neighbor Policy, associated with US Latin American diplomacy since 1933 and the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt, than initially meets even the most discerning eye. Of course, this commitment to cooperative relations was not upheld. It was periodically undermined in relation to Guatemala’s radical nationalism, Castro’s revolutionary victory in Cuba, Salvador Allende’s electoral triumph in Chile. These and other bumps in the road of a more neighborly atmosphere of mutuality were rationalized as Cold War efforts to preclude ideological footholds being acquired by socialist regimes receptive to developing positive relations with the Soviet Union. More discerning observers also took account of post-1945 US foreign policy agendas that accorded priority to the protection of the profitability of US corporate interests threatened by the rise of Latin American economic nationalism that had for decades been kept in check by ‘gunboat diplomacy.’ In a deeper sense the differences between now and then are the absence of a Cold War veneer that obscured the degree to which US interventions were motivated by economic national interests associated with maintaining high rates of profitability for foreign investors. It is also meant holding the line against advocates of economic nationalism that the UN General Assembly blessed by resolutions on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources [UNGA Res 1803( 1962) and the Declaration on the Right to Development [UNGA Res 41/128].

Initially, informed observers assumed that the attack on Venezuela aimed at achieving some variant of traditional regime change. It was presumed that Maria Corina Machado would be installed and anointed as Venezuela’s new president. She was a veteran far right opposition leader, even a strident proponent of US intervention, and a surprise 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Her ceremonial acceptance speech in Oslo lavishly praised, and rather absurdly insisted that Trump was a more deserving candidate than she, which was also a graceless slap at the Nobel selection process.

The most unexpected development of the intervention in Venezuela has been the bypassing of Machado despite her demeaning flattery that so often paves the way to power and profits in the Trump era. Instead of Machado, the U.S. opted for the installation of Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as Venezuela’s new president. Washington claimed confidence in Rodriguez, apparently having reason to believe that she was ready to accept US demands, particularly in relation to the rehabilitation of the oil industry together with a willingness to accommodate U.S. foreign investors intent on the exploitation of other valuable natural resources that awaited development. She was also believed to possess the governing capacity and popular support to achieve stability on terms compatible with these US economic priorities.

More quixotically Trump declared that had Machado declined the Nobel Prize on the grounds that he was the most deserving candidate, she would now be Venezuela’s president. In other words, inflated flattery only attains its goals if it meets Trump’s transactional expectations!  To be sure, we face an unsolvable puzzle when trying to distinguish Trump’s narcissistic indulgences from the occasional truthful disclosure of his real intentions.

Despite this caveat it seems a more plausible explanation is that Machado lacked sufficient domestic support to stabilize the country, whereas Rodriguez appeared willing and able to accommodate US economic demands, particularly those relating to control over Venezuela’s resource wealth, while enjoying sufficient popular support that included the loyalty of the armed forces to allay the stability concerns of the American oil companies. The pre-attack “pro-democracy” narrative promoted by US state propaganda perhaps gained a limited credibility by opting for this continuity of leadership, rather than would have followed a humiliating march into Caracas headed by Trump and Machado leading the way arm in arm to an inaugural event certifying her as Venezuela’s new puppet leader.

It is entirely plausible that Trump paid attention to cautionary advice about showing the American flag in Caracas. It was reported that after meeting Trump on January 9 in the White House, executives of major US oil corporations, widely assumed to be the principal beneficiaries of the intervention, expressed their reservations about resuming operations as well as making needed new investments in the country, citing concerns over instability in the economic and political climate, and perhaps implicitly, in the reliability of Trump support, given his on again/off again style of governance.

Clarifying relations between international law and global security

This military operation in Venezuela, together with its political aftermath, clearly violates international law governing the use of force, as authoritatively codified in the UN Charter. Yet even this apparently straightforward assessment contains ambiguity. The Charter’s institutional design, as noted, privileges the five victorious powers of the second world war, granting them permanent membership of the Security Council and an unrestricted veto, which offers an assurance that none of the Permanent Five or their partners and allies would be subject to sanctions or accountability procedures. In effect, responsibility for managing global security was deliberately left in the hands of these states, which also became the first nuclear weapons powers, enabling any one of them to block Security Council action even when supported by a 14–1 majority.

The Security Council is the only political organ of the UN authorized to issue binding decisions, aside from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ, however, operates under voluntary jurisdiction, as states may withhold consent to what is known as “compulsory jurisdiction.” The ICJ is effective only to the extent that states comply with its judgements. It does possess a secondary impact to the extent that its judicial pronouncements influence public discourse or motivate civic activism. Over time the general profile has emerged that the management of global security has in practice been left to the discretion of the Permanent Five, usually dominated by the US or paralyzed by vetoes. Turkish President Erdoğan critically summarized this state of affairs by telling the General Assembly that “the world is greater than five.” At this time, a more descriptive geopolitical slogan would be ‘the world is not greater than three.’

In this sense, the Venezuelan operation should be understood less as signaling the collapse of international law than as an expression of nihilistic geopolitical management. If so, the appropriate remedy is not simply to strengthen international law, but to strip geopolitical actors of their self-assigned managerial role in global security. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022 can be viewed similarly: a geopolitical failure, incited by irresponsible NATO provocations, culminating in Russia’s own provoked yet egregious breach of Article 2(4). Many have advocated UN reforms that would make Security Council representation less tied to the outcome of World War II and its authority tied to a super-majority of 2/3s rather than unanimity.

The Venezuelan operation further erodes any residual confidence in the capacity of the Permanent Five, and especially Trump’s United States, to manage peace, security or genocide prevention in a prudent and responsible manner. It therefore reinforces the need to consider alternative frameworks, either by curtailing the veto or by shifting security governance beyond the UN to counter-hegemonic mechanisms, including BRICS, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and emerging South–South development frameworks, and bizarrely in the grandiose pretensions of the Gaza Board of Peace. To date, however, there are no signs that the political will exists to obtain such a transformative adjustment in the relationship between geopolitical ambition and international law.

It must nevertheless be emphasized that despite this negativity, international law remains indispensable and effective in most areas of cross-border interaction. In domains such as diplomatic immunity, maritime and aviation safety, tourism and communications, negotiated legal standards are generally respected and disputes resolved peacefully. International law functions reliably where reciprocity prevails but has never throughout the history of international relations constrained great-power ambition in the domain of global security, where asymmetries of hard power dominate now dominate more than effort, given the course technological innovation.

The 2025 US National Security Strategy: Nihilistic Geopolitics

To understand Venezuela’s place within Trump’s worldview, it is essential to examine the National Security Strategy of the United States, released in November 2025. Trump’s cover letter introducing the document is suffused with narcissism and contempt for internationalism, including international law, multilateral institutions, and the UN. He proclaims: “America is strong and respected again — and because of that, we are making peace all over the world.” Such misleading rhetoric would be treated as pathological if put forward by an ordinary individual, but so far Trump gets away with it.  This language becomes alarming when habitually used by a leader who has absolute control over the use of nuclear weapons. Trump concludes by promising to make America “safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before”.

The NSS repeatedly invokes “preeminence” as the central objective of US foreign policy, to be pursued by any means necessary. The Venezuelan intervention should be viewed as a sordid sequel to US complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and a seeming prelude to further projects, including exerting control over Greenland and posing renewed military threats against Iran. Yet the document’s primary focus is Latin America, framed through a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, now reinforced by the explicitly named “Trump Corollary,” colloquially dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine.” This is a robust reenactment of President Theodore Roosevelts broadening of the Monroe Doctrine in 2004 to include commitments to intervene with force in Latin American countries, not only to oppose European incursions, but to assure that the governments in the region respected their obligations to repay public debts and handle national governance in an orderly manner. The assertion of these policy goals became known as ‘the Roosevelt Corollary,’ and heralded a period of US hemispheric dominance more than a century before Trump assumed the presidency.   

Trump’s hemispheric focus abandons the post–Cold War ambition of exercising global US leadership in the spirit of Obama and Biden, which wasted vast resources in failed state-building ventures in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, it prioritizes resource extraction, securing oil, rare earths, and minerals with immense benefits for US corporations and its militarized bureaucracy, while marginalizing NATO and abandoning multilateralism. These moves coupled with their focus on obtaining sovereign rights in Greenland and the Board of Peace presiding over the future of Gaza, as well as determining the future of the Palestinian people, and threatening intervention in Iran confirm the reality and grandiose character of Trump’s extra-hemispheric strategic ambitions, centering on achieving ‘A  Greater America.’ This is vaguely comparable to Israel’s regional aspirations for ‘Greater Israel,’ but on a larger scale and less limited scope.

These assertive foreign policy moves should also be interpreted as Trump’s alternative to the ‘liberal internationalism’ criticized at the outset of NSS for its pretensions to assert ‘global leadership’ in the aftermath of the Cold War. This criticism is directed at the foreign policies of recent Democratic Party presidencies, which are held by Trump responsible for the lack of focus on fair burden-sharing and the pursuit of policies truly beneficial to the U.S.. This is translated by iTrump’s transactional mentality into policies of direct economic benefit and relevant to the maintaining military superiority in over China and Russia, its main rivals. If not by intention, it also expresses Trump’s skeptical views about alliance relations, especially with Europe, which are associated with bad deals in which the U.S. allegedly gives far more than it receives. It proposes a warped view of national interests, which discounts the benefits to the U.S. of international cooperation and indeed all forms of multilateralism including anachronistic dishing of every international institution,  even the UN.   

This hyper-nationalism was given tangible expression at the start of 2026 by Trump’s wholesale withdrawal from participation in and funding for 66 international institutional entities, including the climate change framework treaty and WHO. Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves, strategic location and authoritarian left populist government, provided an ideal launching pad for this fusion of statism and unrestrained imperial ambition— besides, its domestic side effect of conveniently diverting attention from Trump’s personal entanglements with Jeffrey Epstein and the dwindling domestic approval of the unwavering backing of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza camouflaged by a one-sided, cruelly imposed and interpreted ‘ceasefire.’

The Venezuela intervention from its inception displayed aggressive regional goals. From its inception it was accompanied by an explicit demand that the new leadership in Caracus take orders from Washington as the price of its political survival. Trump and his  reactionary Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, openly linked Venezuela to future regime-change efforts in Colombia and Cuba, with Trump issuing a crude threat to topple the outspoken Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, and US Special Forces reportedly killing 32 Cuban members of Maduro’s Presidential Guard in carrying out their kidnapping mission. Venezuela has been under U.S. orders to terminate all shipments of oil to Cuba, which had been dependent on oil imports to meet its energy needs.

Implications

It remains uncertain whether Delcy Rodriguez’s government will negotiate an arrangement that preserves formal sovereignty for Venezuela while surrendering substantive control over internal governance to Washington for an indefinite period. Such an outcome would signal a full embrace of digital-age gunboat diplomacy, a dramatic rejection of the UN endorsement of the entitlement of all distinct nations to exercise the right of self-determination, with particular reference to territorial sovereignty, political independence, and an inalienable right to economic development. Trump’s outlandish expansionist visions even contemplates a coercive territorial incorporation of Canada into the United States, a move that has predictably produced an anti-American reassessment of Canadian national security in Ottawa, give an eloquent response by Prime Minister Mark Carney at the recent meeting of World Economic Forum.

International reactions to the assault on Venezuela have been so far mostly muted, reflecting fear, confusion, and perceived futility. Meanwhile, geopolitical rivalry intensifies, particularly with Russia and China, raising the specter of a new Cold War or nuclear conflict. The NSS makes clear that US preeminence requires excluding all extra-hemispheric powers from the region, by its repeated referencing of “our Hemisphere.” Such a commitment challenges China’s hemispheric presence that has been quietly engaged in extending its infrastructure diplomacy throughout Latin America. A dangerous flashpoint with China could occur in relation to its role in providing Peru with the largest port in the region or its role in Panama given the country’s proximity to and sovereignty over the Panama Canal. Some Trump critics think this may be a preliminary effort to legitimize hegemonic spheres of influence for the three geopolitical actors, with implicit concessions of Ukraine to Russia and Taiwan to China. Of course, if such a grand deal is ever consummated it will complete the process of sidelining or even eliminating the UN as a failed experiment in a peace-building world order and consign the peoples of the world to the paleo-realist wisdom of Thucydides in his Melian Dialogue, ‘the weak do what they must, the strong do what they will.’

It would be an oversight not to acknowledge Trump’s unacknowledged affinity with such America First thinking associated with his more diplomatically sophisticated forebears as Kissinger and Brzezinski. They were far more prudent and grounded in diplomatic protocol, but not much less blind to the benefits of global humanism and the urgencies of demilitarization and ecological adaptations to mounting global challenges. Only China seems currently attuned to the internationalist imperatives of a ‘live and let live world order’ that connects its visions of the future with reciprocity, restraint, economic and technologic mastery, and ecological resilience. Such a recognition of China’s pedagogical leadership should not be read as an endorsement of China’s internal ethnic and political pattern of state/society relations that leaves much to be done in the domain of human rights.   

I fear what might be presently called ‘Trump’s  World’ will be a curse  taking its toll on future generations, not only elsewhere on the planet but in its almost certain boomerang effects on the quality of life in the United States. Hyper-nationalism fused with nihilistic geopolitics poses the most profound threat to species sustainability in human history both by what is does, as well as what it proposes to do and not doing.

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Shame on The UN: Ratifying Genocide, Legitimating the Trump Plan

12 Jan

[Prefatory Note; This essay in modified form was published on December 29, 2025 in CounterPunch. The January 3 acts of US aggression against Venezuela and kidnapping of its elected President followed by an indictment in US Federal Court on charges of narco-terrorism. Rationalized as a ‘law enforcement’ undertaking by apologists rather than viewed as ‘aggression’ by critics. It is a geopolitical expression of extra-legal prerogatives shielded from UN censure and sanctions by the veto power of the P5, and in that sense reflects the same mentality underlying the complicity with Gaza genocide. What the UN did by unanimously endorsing the Trump Plan is to lend an aura of legitimacy to the US earlier role that was alarmingly veto-free and a tacit acknowledgement that ‘peacemaking’ is also within the domain of geopolitical discretion, regardless of values at stake, including basic human rights. In the Venezuela context the UN is more responsive to the international law dimension because states regard their national economic interests and sovereignty endangered by US imperial disregard for borders, political independence, and sovereignty over natural resources. Israel in contrast is subconsciously perceived as falling within a non-spatially defined sphere of interests geopolitics, and less threatening as systemic challenge to the statist character of world order. ]

After October 7 Attack: Genocide as Retaliation

Throughout this period of challenging the adequacy of the UN in the face of genocide, there were reasons to redeem its reputation, including an awareness that the refusal of Israel and the liberal West to respect judgments of the leading international tribunals (International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court), which have exposed core deficiencies in the architecture of world order created in 1945. It needs to be better understood that when the UN was established 80 years ago the Charter design gave the last word on the management of global security to the five winning states in World War, and not to international law or the UN guardian of peace and justice as believed by the most ardent champions of a meta-state rule governed world order. In my judgment their disappointment was misdirected. Nor rule governed sense that Antony Blinken kept lecture his Chinese counterparts about during his time as Biden’s Secretary of State.

 By clear intention despite the priority accorded war prevention in the Preamble to the Charter, the capabilities of the UN to act coercively against aggression, apartheid, and genocide were withheld from the Organization. Instead, the winners (that is, the five permanent members of the Security Council or P5) of the recently concluded war against fascism were also the recipient of a right of veto that amounted to a limitless entitlement of any one of the five in the only UN political organ with the authority to make binding decisions to block action. This provision meant not only an opting out of decisions contrary to their will but of preventing Security Council from acting even when the other 14 members were united in voting for a decision. In practice, the UN treated prospects for peace and security in major conflict situations as subject to the non-revoewable geopolitical calculations and alignments of these five most powerful and dangerous members of the new world organization supposedly entrusted with ultimate responsibility for peace, justice, human rights, and ecological stabbility, but not really.

During the Cold War, which prevailed globally between 1945-1991 the paralysis of the UN in relation to the management of global security was mainly due to the discretion given to the opposed alliances of the US-led NATO forces on the Western side of the ideological divide and strategic rivalry. On the other side was the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces. The UN contented itself with being a spectator with respect to geopolitical disregard of the UN Charter. It became at most the site of opposing propaganda denunciations during the years of the Vietnam War and Western covert actions, Moscow’s interventions in Eastern Europe, and other settings of violent conflict involving the strategic interests of the P5.

This was partly due to the constitutional framework of the UN, but it also reflected the unwillingness of many leading countries to dilute sovereignty when it came to their national security agendas. This refusal was most dramatically illustrated by the governmental rejections of nuclear disarmament proposals and the preferred reliance on discretionary doctrines deterrence, exhibiting the militarist orientations of foreign policy elites in leading governments, including all of the P5 states with the partial exception of China, a Great Power consensus augmented by others. This blends a militarized hard power version of global security and world history with P5 strategic ambitions focused on a reinvention of Western domination in a period of collapsing European colonialism. It is also reflected priorities attached to internal issues of policy urgency connected with development and national security. In effect, unless civil society becomes mobilized around the world, at least as prominently as in relation to European colonialism and South African racism, internationalism lacked the political will and clout by way of material capabilities to act effectively in relation to local (non-systemic) war prevention and even in response to the most severe encroachments on human rights, as illustrated by the tepid responses to the Gaza Genocide.

Against this background, the role of the UN while disappointing was not surprising to informed observers given the strong civilizational ties between the white West and Israel in this inter-civilizational encounter with a Muslim majority Palestine in the strategically important Middle East, considering the geopolitical regional priorities of the West and its allies. This lent the Israel/Palestine struggle an inter-civilizational dimension while also posing a potential challenge to Western hegemony in relation to energy reserves, arms sales, and more generally, trade and investment. Additionally it exhibited ‘a clash of civilizations’ in the sense meant by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War.

This line of interpretation was accenratuated by the anti-Western religiously oriented Hamas, a non-state entity that was (mis)characterized in Western media and state propaganda as nothing other than a terrorist organization. Such a posture ignored the 2006 political victory in Gaza of Hamas in an internationally monitored election, its role as the center of legally grounded Palestinian resistance to an Israeli occupation that consistently violated international humanitarian legal standards as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 governing ‘belligerent occupation,’ while Israel showed no signs of withdrawing as expected to its 1967 borders, which were themselves far in excess of the partition arrangement proposed in 1947 by the UN in GA Resolution 181.  Several UN members complicit with Israel overtly supported the genocide in Gaza for two years, finally stepping back publicly from support in reaction to the rise of civil society protest activity in their countries as it became evident that Israel was defiantly exceeding all constraints of law and morality by persisting with its extremist genocidal campaign. As well, many other states, including among Muslim majority countries while opposing Israel’s conduct in Gaza rhetorically, continued quietly to maintain and even pursue mutually favorable economic relationships vital for sustaining Israel’s genocidal campaign.

It needs to be appreciated that the ICJ by a near unanimous vote on July 19, 2024 declared continuing Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and even East Jerusalem) to be unlawful, decreeing its timely withdrawal, an outcome that the General Assembly formally supported while Israel and its support group ignored or dismissed. It is important to appreciate that the ICJ, the judicial arm of the UN, performed professionally, upholding international law, although failing to secure Israeli compliance or the material and diplomatic backing of its support group of enabler countries.Such a pattern underscored an interpretation of the failure of the UN as not attributable to international law as such, but to the design of an Organization that vested enforcement authority in the Security Council, and residually in the General Assembly. In that regard the SC was paralyzed by the veto, and the GA by the weakness of its political will, and by its primary regard for a pragmatic pursuit of national interests

This political agenda explains the six ceasefire initiatives that were vetoed in the Security Council combined with the failure of complicit states, above all, the United States, to use its soft power leverage to induce Israel to stop its assault on Gaza and satisfy the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. Such an exercise of responsible statecraft is inhibited by adhering to the political realism of the pre-nuclear age and the special interests of the arms industries and a long militarized governmental bureaucracy. There was a further distinctive feature of the Israeli reality that drew upon the lingering guilt of the liberal West as a consequence of its feeble response to Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust. In effect, Israel enjoyed a positive status by being situated within a unique Western sphere of influenced, reinforced further by the global network of Zionist influence dedicated to ensuring a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy (well analyzed by John J. Mersheimer & Stephen M. Walt in their book on the Israel lobby in the United States, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007).]

The Disgraceful UN Response to the Trump Plan

Against this background, the 15 members of the Security Council, disgracefully voted unanimously in favor of the US draft resolution, adopted as SC Resolution 2803 on November 17, 2025, endorsing the Trump Plan for the stabilization of Gaza. The plan emerged with the approval and substantive inputs of Israel, significantly unveiled during a Netanyahu visit to the White House at a joint press conference. The core feature of the plan was to reward the perpetrator and chief enabler of prolonged genocide. This was further aggravated and preceded in occupied Palestine by apartheid and by combat tactics designed to make a total wasteland of Gaza. Shockingly, there are no references in the resolution to Israel’s defiance of rulings of the International Court of Justice, resolutions of the General Assembly, or the incriminating assessments of independent genocide scholars and international law experts. Neither Israel nor the United States, nor the other complicit states were obliged, or even encouraged, to pay reparations for the unlawful devastation caused in Gaza. Instead, the payment of the immense costs of reconstruction were left to be sorted out by the combined forces of vulture capitalism operating freely as if Gaza reconstruction should be treated as a juicy real estate profit-and-loss venture with the monetary contributions, more accurately viewed as business opportunities, expected to be made available by wealthy Arab governments.

In this process, not only was an alien diplomatic framework imposed on the Palestinians, but the US was outrageously accepted, without even a whimper of protest, as the legitimate ‘peacemaker’ although overtly collaborating with Israel throughout the genocide and in drafting the plan that pointedly excluding Palestinian participation, thereby suppressing the bedrock Palestinian right of self-determination. Indeed, the US Government went so far as to deny visas to any Palestinian Authority delegate who sought to attend the 2025 General Assembly meeting of the UN or to otherwise take part in UN and other proceedings shaping Palestine as a political entity. What makes the resolution a step backward if the objective had been what it should have been, arrangements for a peaceful and just future crafted with the participation of Palestinian representation as determined by an open and internationally monitored referendum with a presumed goal of dedication to a just and durable peace as agreed upon by legitimate representative of the two peoples and moderated by a neutral intermediary.

Instead, SC Resolution 2803 if considered as a whole, indirectly exonerates the culprits for their past behavior carrying impunity to an extreme, perverse UN validation. Beyond this 2803 openly acknowledges and gives its approval to US total control of recent diplomatic efforts to replace unrestrained Israeli violence with a ceasefire that Israel freely ignores and is comforted by steadfast US indulgence. The bloody result has been hundreds of lethal violations of the ceasefire killing up to now of hundreds of Palestinians by estimates of the Gaza Health Ministry, without Israel even being reprimanded by Washington for so abusing a ceasefire deal. Why Hamas accepts this Israeli practice of accepting ceasefire arrangements while Israel simultaneously persists in carrying out its genocide campaign, although at a decelerated intensity, This latest phase of ‘ceasefire genocide’ is causing widespread severe suffering among the entire Gazan population of an estimated two million Palestinian survivors previously traumatized and homeless after two plus years of genocidal assault.

 As to the future, 2803 endorses a colonialist transitional arrangement given operational reality by a Board of Peace, to be chaired by none other than Donald Trump and given stability in Gaza by the formation of an International Stabilization Force to be formed UN members endorsing the plan and making military personnel available. The US has brazenly acknowledged its own transactional goals by pledging $112 billion to rebuild Gaza with the goal of establishing a global hub for trade, investment, and tourism. Governance in Gaza is left in part to Israel that seems to be claiming a permanent, unilaterally enlarged security presence in northern Gaza above and beyond the original yellow line.

Given this highly dubious manner of recovering from the Gaza catastrophe at this late stage, how can we explain this show of widespread international support along with the disappearance of opposition in the Security Council? The five SC members from the Global South (Algeria, Somalia, Guyana, Sierra Leone, and Panama), made some critical comments about 2803 during the formal discussion that preceded the vote, centering on its vagueness as to crucial details and dared even to mentions the one-sidedness of the Trump Plan, yet all ended up voting in its favor. Did such a vote reflect genuine agreement, or more likely, was it a vote that willingly deferred to geopolitical primacy when it came to the management of global security? And why would Indonesia and Pakistan, Muslim majority countries, even if not members of SC, go out of their way to express approval of the 2803 path to the future? More predictably, yet nevertheless disappointing, was the approval expressed by the European Union. Such a diplomatic display served as a cynical reminder that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is best understood as a part of Judeo-Christian civilizational long game of sustaining Middle Eastern hegemony.

As troubling was the gratuitous endorsement of 2803 given by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who not only welcomed the resolution but expressed the hope that its momentum would be converted into “concrete action.”Thankfully, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, expressed “serious concern with the Security Council’s adoption of resolution 2803, warning that it runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination, consolidates Israël’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including ongoing unlawful policies and practices, and therefore risks legitimating ongoing mass violence.”  Revealingly, Albanese spoke these words of truth to power, after herself enduring punitive sanctions imposed on July 9 in reaction to her courageous willingness to bear official witness to what was becoming all too clear to the eyes and ears of the peoples of the world. It is ironic that the UN’s response to 2803 was somewhat rescued from taints of complicity by an unpaid appointee not subject to UN discipline. Her words are congruent with those of Craig Mokhiber who resigned from a senior position at the UN because of its failure to deal responsibly with Palestinian grievances. Mokhiber in the last couple of years has emerged as the most informed and lucid critic of the UN approach, reinforcing Albanese’s forthrightness on behalf of law and justice with respect to Palestinian grievances and rights, but the Organization’s own transactional approach privileged geopolitical imperatives over compliance with the UN Charter.

It additionally seems strange and cynical that Russia and China, although voicing some criticisms during the discussion prior to the vote on the resolutiona, did not use their right of veto to block passage of 2803, especially given the frequent use of the veto on Israel’s behalf by the US and considering the principles at stake. It is likely that these two geopolitical rivals of the US were impressed by Hamas’ acceptance of the overall approach and did not want to be seen as spoilers held responsible for a breakdown of the Trump Plan that would have undoubtedly have produced produce a total breakdown of the already tarnished ceasefire. Additionally, China and Russia both seem to believe that global stability is best preserved by extending a degree of geopolitical reciprocity to their trilateral relations. In this limited sense, Trump seems more in accord with how cooperative relations with these two countries would bring stability and transactional gains than did the Biden approach of fighting Russia by way of Ukraine to preserve US post-Cold War global dominance, a path that irresponsibly increased the risk of a third world war fought with nuclear weapons, and leading to a lengthening of the Ukraine War with heave casualties on both sides. Trump’s approach, although itself fragile because of his mercurial style, stressed geopolitical stability, including an acceptance of spheres of influence as compromising the sovereignty and wellbeing of smaller states and even, as here, at the cost of overlooking genocide.

For these reasons the rejection of 2803’s endorsement of the Trump Plan by Hamas was no surprise. It does not entirely explain why Hamas ever accepted the Trump diplomacy at its outset except for its ceasefire and IDF withdrawal prospects. Hamas’ acceptance extended to the whole of the Trump plan, but with this stand against 2803 and its announced refusal to disarm it may now be either the basis of a better compromise or at least a stalemate as to further implementation. Hamas, and Iran, the other vocal critic of the SC resolution, also undoubtedly are reacting to the absence on Israel’s part of any willingness to show signs of embracing a politics of reconciliation, even to the extent of conscientiously upholding the early ceasefire, partial withdrawal, and an end to the rigid constraints on humanitarian aid. For Israel to have show no mercy to a population living without heat, secure shelter, and adequate food and medical supplies is to send the chilling message that Israel has not even considered abandoning its expansionist ambitions that include further ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a surge of settlement growth on the West Bank leading to de facto annexation probably serving as a prelude to formal annexation and incorporation of the West Bank into sovereign Israel in the course of fulfilling the Greater Israel endgame. From its inception more than a century ago, the Zionist Movement has employed ‘salami tactics’ to obtain what was politically possible at a given moment, and waiting to satisfy other goals until the political climate made it feasible.   

  •  

The US representative in the SC, Amb. Mike Waltz, insisted that “[a] vote against this resolution is a vote to return to war” was part of the ‘take it or leave it’ Trump approach. Nor is it surprising that Netanyahu hailed the endorsement of 2803 by declaring “that President Trump’s plan will lead to peace and prosperity because it insists upon full demilitarization, disarmament, and the deradicalization of Gaza.”[15] Or that France and the UK sugarcoated their endorsements of the Trump Plan by verbal statements of conditional support for eventual Palestinian statehood as affirmed in its sponsorship of the New York Declaration, envisioning future Palestinian representation under the authority of a reconstituted Palestinian Authority (PA), itself a creature of US/Israel dominated diplomacy that has circumvented Palestinian self-determination. Under present conditioned the PA is being repurposed to implement the Trump Plan. The PA announced its support for 2803 in a move calculated to convince Israel and the US that it can be counted upon to go along with their stabilization scenario despite its rejection of Palestinian grievances and denial of Palestine’s right of self-determination. Such a PA position, undoubtedly motivated by cynical opportunism, should be treated as discrediting the PA from representing the interests of the Palestinian people, but one wonders. Offering such ‘breadcrumb’ rewards to the PA, while disqualifying Hamas from any role in representing the Palestinian people is emblematic of the next phase of the Zionist end game intent on achieving a political surrender of Palestine and the elimination of Hamas and Palestinian resistance, limiting ambitions for ‘playing nice’ to nominal statehood masking an Israeli/US protectorate.

Concluding Remarks

The maneuvers of states, following their interests rather than supposedly shared values associated with the UN Charter and the international rule of law, is to be expected given the history of international relations and the political realist orientation of most foreign policy elites. Nevertheless, it is regrettable, given the gross disregard of justice and rights, which pervades the Trump Plan and the diplomatic and hard power muscle at the disposal of the US. It does not augur well for meeting other world order challenges including climate change, migratory flows, ecological stability, less inequitable distributions of wealth and income to individuals, states, and regions, as well as a more robust commitment to peaceful modes of conflict resolution.

This saga of 2803 is particularly unfortunate because it shows that the geopolitical management of global security extends beyond the veto power of the P5. For the sake of stability, the UN venue implicitly swallows the Israeli genocide to an unseemly extent of unanimously endorsing a neo-colonialist future for Gaza and impunity plus for Israel and its complicit supporters. Symbolic of this unseemly submission by the UN and its membership is the endorsement of 2803 by the UN leader, Antonio Guterres, an individual declared persona non grata by Israel more than a year ago. Israel’s insulting dismissal of the UN as ‘a cesspool of antisemitism’ and the like should have at least led the Organization’s Secretary General to respond with stony silence to 2803 rather than cynically kneel in submission. sending a shameful message to the world that from the perspective of the UN that genocide does not disqualify a state from receiving diplomatic and territorial rewards as long as the geopolitical actors or P5 remain on board or at least silent. In effect, the dynamics of power politics is still making history, despite the disastrous consequences. One takeaway from this 2803 experience is a realization that the Global South is not sufficiently ready to seek geopolitical symmetry in what is often interpreted as the hopeful interpretation of the emergence of a multipolar world order. By geopolitical symmetry is meant an historic embrace of polycentric balance that increasingly challenges the P5 asymmetry that has dominated the UN for the past 80 years.   

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Shame on The UN: Ratifying Genocide, Legitimating the Trump Plan

7 Jan

[Prefatory Note; This essay in modified form was published on December 29, 2025 in CounterPunch. The January 3 acts of US aggression against Venezuela and kidnapping of its elected President followed by an indictment in US Federal Court on charges of narco-terrorism. Rationalized as a ‘law enforcement’ undertaking by apologists rather than viewed as ‘aggression’ by critics. It is a geopolitical expression of extra-legal prerogatives shielded from UN censure and sanctions by the veto power of the P5, and in that sense reflects the same mentality underlying the complicity with Gaza genocide. What the UN did by unanimously endorsing the Trump Plan is to lend an aura of legitimacy to the US earlier role that was alarmingly veto-free and a tacit acknowledgement that ‘peacemaking’ is also within the domain of geopolitical discretion, regardless of values at stake, including basic human rights. In the Venezuela context the UN is more responsive to the international law dimension because states regard their national economic interests and sovereignty endangered by US imperial disregard for borders, political independence, and sovereignty over natural resources. Israel in contrast is subconsciously perceived as falling within a non-spatially defined sphere of interests geopolitics, and less threatening as systemic challenge to the statist character of world order. ]

After October 7 Attack: Genocide as Retaliation

Throughout this period of challenging the adequacy of the UN in the face of genocide, there were reasons to redeem its reputation, including an awareness that the refusal of Israel and the liberal West to respect judgments of the leading international tribunals (International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court), which have exposed core deficiencies in the architecture of world order created in 1945. It needs to be better understood that when the UN was established 80 years ago the Charter design gave the last word on the management of global security to the five winning states in World War, and not to international law or the UN guardian of peace and justice as believed by the most ardent champions of a meta-state rule governed world order. In my judgment their disappointment was misdirected. Nor rule governed sense that Antony Blinken kept lecture his Chinese counterparts about during his time as Biden’s Secretary of State.

 By clear intention despite the priority accorded war prevention in the Preamble to the Charter, the capabilities of the UN to act coercively against aggression, apartheid, and genocide were withheld from the Organization. Instead, the winners (that is, the five permanent members of the Security Council or P5) of the recently concluded war against fascism were also the recipient of a right of veto that amounted to a limitless entitlement of any one of the five in the only UN political organ with the authority to make binding decisions to block action. This provision meant not only an opting out of decisions contrary to their will but of preventing Security Council from acting even when the other 14 members were united in voting for a decision. In practice, the UN treated prospects for peace and security in major conflict situations as subject to the non-revoewable geopolitical calculations and alignments of these five most powerful and dangerous members of the new world organization supposedly entrusted with ultimate responsibility for peace, justice, human rights, and ecological stabbility, but not really.

During the Cold War, which prevailed globally between 1945-1991 the paralysis of the UN in relation to the management of global security was mainly due to the discretion given to the opposed alliances of the US-led NATO forces on the Western side of the ideological divide and strategic rivalry. On the other side was the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces. The UN contented itself with being a spectator with respect to geopolitical disregard of the UN Charter. It became at most the site of opposing propaganda denunciations during the years of the Vietnam War and Western covert actions, Moscow’s interventions in Eastern Europe, and other settings of violent conflict involving the strategic interests of the P5.

This was partly due to the constitutional framework of the UN, but it also reflected the unwillingness of many leading countries to dilute sovereignty when it came to their national security agendas. This refusal was most dramatically illustrated by the governmental rejections of nuclear disarmament proposals and the preferred reliance on discretionary doctrines deterrence, exhibiting the militarist orientations of foreign policy elites in leading governments, including all of the P5 states with the partial exception of China, a Great Power consensus augmented by others. This blends a militarized hard power version of global security and world history with P5 strategic ambitions focused on a reinvention of Western domination in a period of collapsing European colonialism. It is also reflected priorities attached to internal issues of policy urgency connected with development and national security. In effect, unless civil society becomes mobilized around the world, at least as prominently as in relation to European colonialism and South African racism, internationalism lacked the political will and clout by way of material capabilities to act effectively in relation to local (non-systemic) war prevention and even in response to the most severe encroachments on human rights, as illustrated by the tepid responses to the Gaza Genocide.

Against this background, the role of the UN while disappointing was not surprising to informed observers given the strong civilizational ties between the white West and Israel in this inter-civilizational encounter with a Muslim majority Palestine in the strategically important Middle East, considering the geopolitical regional priorities of the West and its allies. This lent the Israel/Palestine struggle an inter-civilizational dimension while also posing a potential challenge to Western hegemony in relation to energy reserves, arms sales, and more generally, trade and investment. Additionally it exhibited ‘a clash of civilizations’ in the sense meant by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War.

This line of interpretation was accenratuated by the anti-Western religiously oriented Hamas, a non-state entity that was (mis)characterized in Western media and state propaganda as nothing other than a terrorist organization. Such a posture ignored the 2006 political victory in Gaza of Hamas in an internationally monitored election, its role as the center of legally grounded Palestinian resistance to an Israeli occupation that consistently violated international humanitarian legal standards as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 governing ‘belligerent occupation,’ while Israel showed no signs of withdrawing as expected to its 1967 borders, which were themselves far in excess of the partition arrangement proposed in 1947 by the UN in GA Resolution 181.  Several UN members complicit with Israel overtly supported the genocide in Gaza for two years, finally stepping back publicly from support in reaction to the rise of civil society protest activity in their countries as it became evident that Israel was defiantly exceeding all constraints of law and morality by persisting with its extremist genocidal campaign. As well, many other states, including among Muslim majority countries while opposing Israel’s conduct in Gaza rhetorically, continued quietly to maintain and even pursue mutually favorable economic relationships vital for sustaining Israel’s genocidal campaign.

It needs to be appreciated that the ICJ by a near unanimous vote on July 19, 2024 declared continuing Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and even East Jerusalem) to be unlawful, decreeing its timely withdrawal, an outcome that the General Assembly formally supported while Israel and its support group ignored or dismissed. It is important to appreciate that the ICJ, the judicial arm of the UN, performed professionally, upholding international law, although failing to secure Israeli compliance or the material and diplomatic backing of its support group of enabler countries.Such a pattern underscored an interpretation of the failure of the UN as not attributable to international law as such, but to the design of an Organization that vested enforcement authority in the Security Council, and residually in the General Assembly. In that regard the SC was paralyzed by the veto, and the GA by the weakness of its political will, and by its primary regard for a pragmatic pursuit of national interests

This political agenda explains the six ceasefire initiatives that were vetoed in the Security Council combined with the failure of complicit states, above all, the United States, to use its soft power leverage to induce Israel to stop its assault on Gaza and satisfy the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. Such an exercise of responsible statecraft is inhibited by adhering to the political realism of the pre-nuclear age and the special interests of the arms industries and a long militarized governmental bureaucracy. There was a further distinctive feature of the Israeli reality that drew upon the lingering guilt of the liberal West as a consequence of its feeble response to Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust. In effect, Israel enjoyed a positive status by being situated within a unique Western sphere of influenced, reinforced further by the global network of Zionist influence dedicated to ensuring a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy (well analyzed by John J. Mersheimer & Stephen M. Walt in their book on the Israel lobby in the United States, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007).]

The Disgraceful UN Response to the Trump Plan

Against this background, the 15 members of the Security Council, disgracefully voted unanimously in favor of the US draft resolution, adopted as SC Resolution 2803 on November 17, 2025, endorsing the Trump Plan for the stabilization of Gaza. The plan emerged with the approval and substantive inputs of Israel, significantly unveiled during a Netanyahu visit to the White House at a joint press conference. The core feature of the plan was to reward the perpetrator and chief enabler of prolonged genocide. This was further aggravated and preceded in occupied Palestine by apartheid and by combat tactics designed to make a total wasteland of Gaza. Shockingly, there are no references in the resolution to Israel’s defiance of rulings of the International Court of Justice, resolutions of the General Assembly, or the incriminating assessments of independent genocide scholars and international law experts. Neither Israel nor the United States, nor the other complicit states were obliged, or even encouraged, to pay reparations for the unlawful devastation caused in Gaza. Instead, the payment of the immense costs of reconstruction were left to be sorted out by the combined forces of vulture capitalism operating freely as if Gaza reconstruction should be treated as a juicy real estate profit-and-loss venture with the monetary contributions, more accurately viewed as business opportunities, expected to be made available by wealthy Arab governments.

In this process, not only was an alien diplomatic framework imposed on the Palestinians, but the US was outrageously accepted, without even a whimper of protest, as the legitimate ‘peacemaker’ although overtly collaborating with Israel throughout the genocide and in drafting the plan that pointedly excluding Palestinian participation, thereby suppressing the bedrock Palestinian right of self-determination. Indeed, the US Government went so far as to deny visas to any Palestinian Authority delegate who sought to attend the 2025 General Assembly meeting of the UN or to otherwise take part in UN and other proceedings shaping Palestine as a political entity. What makes the resolution a step backward if the objective had been what it should have been, arrangements for a peaceful and just future crafted with the participation of Palestinian representation as determined by an open and internationally monitored referendum with a presumed goal of dedication to a just and durable peace as agreed upon by legitimate representative of the two peoples and moderated by a neutral intermediary.

Instead, SC Resolution 2803 if considered as a whole, indirectly exonerates the culprits for their past behavior carrying impunity to an extreme, perverse UN validation. Beyond this 2803 openly acknowledges and gives its approval to US total control of recent diplomatic efforts to replace unrestrained Israeli violence with a ceasefire that Israel freely ignores and is comforted by steadfast US indulgence. The bloody result has been hundreds of lethal violations of the ceasefire killing up to now of hundreds of Palestinians by estimates of the Gaza Health Ministry, without Israel even being reprimanded by Washington for so abusing a ceasefire deal. Why Hamas accepts this Israeli practice of accepting ceasefire arrangements while Israel simultaneously persists in carrying out its genocide campaign, although at a decelerated intensity, This latest phase of ‘ceasefire genocide’ is causing widespread severe suffering among the entire Gazan population of an estimated two million Palestinian survivors previously traumatized and homeless after two plus years of genocidal assault.

 As to the future, 2803 endorses a colonialist transitional arrangement given operational reality by a Board of Peace, to be chaired by none other than Donald Trump and given stability in Gaza by the formation of an International Stabilization Force to be formed UN members endorsing the plan and making military personnel available. The US has brazenly acknowledged its own transactional goals by pledging $112 billion to rebuild Gaza with the goal of establishing a global hub for trade, investment, and tourism. Governance in Gaza is left in part to Israel that seems to be claiming a permanent, unilaterally enlarged security presence in northern Gaza above and beyond the original yellow line.

Given this highly dubious manner of recovering from the Gaza catastrophe at this late stage, how can we explain this show of widespread international support along with the disappearance of opposition in the Security Council? The five SC members from the Global South (Algeria, Somalia, Guyana, Sierra Leone, and Panama), made some critical comments about 2803 during the formal discussion that preceded the vote, centering on its vagueness as to crucial details and dared even to mentions the one-sidedness of the Trump Plan, yet all ended up voting in its favor. Did such a vote reflect genuine agreement, or more likely, was it a vote that willingly deferred to geopolitical primacy when it came to the management of global security? And why would Indonesia and Pakistan, Muslim majority countries, even if not members of SC, go out of their way to express approval of the 2803 path to the future? More predictably, yet nevertheless disappointing, was the approval expressed by the European Union. Such a diplomatic display served as a cynical reminder that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is best understood as a part of Judeo-Christian civilizational long game of sustaining Middle Eastern hegemony.

As troubling was the gratuitous endorsement of 2803 given by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who not only welcomed the resolution but expressed the hope that its momentum would be converted into “concrete action.”Thankfully, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, expressed “serious concern with the Security Council’s adoption of resolution 2803, warning that it runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination, consolidates Israël’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including ongoing unlawful policies and practices, and therefore risks legitimating ongoing mass violence.”  Revealingly, Albanese spoke these words of truth to power, after herself enduring punitive sanctions imposed on July 9 in reaction to her courageous willingness to bear official witness to what was becoming all too clear to the eyes and ears of the peoples of the world. It is ironic that the UN’s response to 2803 was somewhat rescued from taints of complicity by an unpaid appointee not subject to UN discipline. Her words are congruent with those of Craig Mokhiber who resigned from a senior position at the UN because of its failure to deal responsibly with Palestinian grievances. Mokhiber in the last couple of years has emerged as the most informed and lucid critic of the UN approach, reinforcing Albanese’s forthrightness on behalf of law and justice with respect to Palestinian grievances and rights, but the Organization’s own transactional approach privileged geopolitical imperatives over compliance with the UN Charter.

It additionally seems strange and cynical that Russia and China, although voicing some criticisms during the discussion prior to the vote on the resolutiona, did not use their right of veto to block passage of 2803, especially given the frequent use of the veto on Israel’s behalf by the US and considering the principles at stake. It is likely that these two geopolitical rivals of the US were impressed by Hamas’ acceptance of the overall approach and did not want to be seen as spoilers held responsible for a breakdown of the Trump Plan that would have undoubtedly have produced produce a total breakdown of the already tarnished ceasefire. Additionally, China and Russia both seem to believe that global stability is best preserved by extending a degree of geopolitical reciprocity to their trilateral relations. In this limited sense, Trump seems more in accord with how cooperative relations with these two countries would bring stability and transactional gains than did the Biden approach of fighting Russia by way of Ukraine to preserve US post-Cold War global dominance, a path that irresponsibly increased the risk of a third world war fought with nuclear weapons, and leading to a lengthening of the Ukraine War with heave casualties on both sides. Trump’s approach, although itself fragile because of his mercurial style, stressed geopolitical stability, including an acceptance of spheres of influence as compromising the sovereignty and wellbeing of smaller states and even, as here, at the cost of overlooking genocide.

For these reasons the rejection of 2803’s endorsement of the Trump Plan by Hamas was no surprise. It does not entirely explain why Hamas ever accepted the Trump diplomacy at its outset except for its ceasefire and IDF withdrawal prospects. Hamas’ acceptance extended to the whole of the Trump plan, but with this stand against 2803 and its announced refusal to disarm it may now be either the basis of a better compromise or at least a stalemate as to further implementation. Hamas, and Iran, the other vocal critic of the SC resolution, also undoubtedly are reacting to the absence on Israel’s part of any willingness to show signs of embracing a politics of reconciliation, even to the extent of conscientiously upholding the early ceasefire, partial withdrawal, and an end to the rigid constraints on humanitarian aid. For Israel to have show no mercy to a population living without heat, secure shelter, and adequate food and medical supplies is to send the chilling message that Israel has not even considered abandoning its expansionist ambitions that include further ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a surge of settlement growth on the West Bank leading to de facto annexation probably serving as a prelude to formal annexation and incorporation of the West Bank into sovereign Israel in the course of fulfilling the Greater Israel endgame. From its inception more than a century ago, the Zionist Movement has employed ‘salami tactics’ to obtain what was politically possible at a given moment, and waiting to satisfy other goals until the political climate made it feasible.   

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The US representative in the SC, Amb. Mike Waltz, insisted that “[a] vote against this resolution is a vote to return to war” was part of the ‘take it or leave it’ Trump approach. Nor is it surprising that Netanyahu hailed the endorsement of 2803 by declaring “that President Trump’s plan will lead to peace and prosperity because it insists upon full demilitarization, disarmament, and the deradicalization of Gaza.”[15] Or that France and the UK sugarcoated their endorsements of the Trump Plan by verbal statements of conditional support for eventual Palestinian statehood as affirmed in its sponsorship of the New York Declaration, envisioning future Palestinian representation under the authority of a reconstituted Palestinian Authority (PA), itself a creature of US/Israel dominated diplomacy that has circumvented Palestinian self-determination. Under present conditioned the PA is being repurposed to implement the Trump Plan. The PA announced its support for 2803 in a move calculated to convince Israel and the US that it can be counted upon to go along with their stabilization scenario despite its rejection of Palestinian grievances and denial of Palestine’s right of self-determination. Such a PA position, undoubtedly motivated by cynical opportunism, should be treated as discrediting the PA from representing the interests of the Palestinian people, but one wonders. Offering such ‘breadcrumb’ rewards to the PA, while disqualifying Hamas from any role in representing the Palestinian people is emblematic of the next phase of the Zionist end game intent on achieving a political surrender of Palestine and the elimination of Hamas and Palestinian resistance, limiting ambitions for ‘playing nice’ to nominal statehood masking an Israeli/US protectorate.

Concluding Remarks

The maneuvers of states, following their interests rather than supposedly shared values associated with the UN Charter and the international rule of law, is to be expected given the history of international relations and the political realist orientation of most foreign policy elites. Nevertheless, it is regrettable, given the gross disregard of justice and rights, which pervades the Trump Plan and the diplomatic and hard power muscle at the disposal of the US. It does not augur well for meeting other world order challenges including climate change, migratory flows, ecological stability, less inequitable distributions of wealth and income to individuals, states, and regions, as well as a more robust commitment to peaceful modes of conflict resolution.

This saga of 2803 is particularly unfortunate because it shows that the geopolitical management of global security extends beyond the veto power of the P5. For the sake of stability, the UN venue implicitly swallows the Israeli genocide to an unseemly extent of unanimously endorsing a neo-colonialist future for Gaza and impunity plus for Israel and its complicit supporters. Symbolic of this unseemly submission by the UN and its membership is the endorsement of 2803 by the UN leader, Antonio Guterres, an individual declared persona non grata by Israel more than a year ago. Israel’s insulting dismissal of the UN as ‘a cesspool of antisemitism’ and the like should have at least led the Organization’s Secretary General to respond with stony silence to 2803 rather than cynically kneel in submission. sending a shameful message to the world that from the perspective of the UN that genocide does not disqualify a state from receiving diplomatic and territorial rewards as long as the geopolitical actors or P5 remain on board or at least silent. In effect, the dynamics of power politics is still making history, despite the disastrous consequences. One takeaway from this 2803 experience is a realization that the Global South is not sufficiently ready to seek geopolitical symmetry in what is often interpreted as the hopeful interpretation of the emergence of a multipolar world order. By geopolitical symmetry is meant an historic embrace of polycentric balance that increasingly challenges the P5 asymmetry that has dominated the UN for the past 80 years.   

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