[Prefatory Note: The post below is in two parts, both interviews published in the Italian weekly, Il Manifesto. The first addresses the Gaza dimension of the current Palestinian ordeal now extended to the West Bank and drawing worldwide negative attention by induced mass hunger and water scarcity. These severe civilian hardships resulting from Israeli criminality have given rise to a variety of protest activities, governmental denunciations, yet continue to gain unconditional support by the United States and the UK, while drawing some mild critical drawbacks from formerly supportive France, Canada, and Germany but without stoppage of trade or flows of vital supplies to Israel. The second part in the form of an early comment on the short Iran War, initiated by Israel, joined by the US to inflict maximum damage on Iran’s nuclear sites, dramatized by the US reliance on ‘blockbuster bombs’ of 30,000 pounds to destroy nuclear facilities built deep underground. Their initial US and Israeli claims of victorious results have been watered down by growing doubts of how much damage was actually done to Iran’s nuclear attacks. A further setback for the attackers is the widespread speculation that Iran might now decide to develop nuclear weapons unless Israel would agree, which seems highly doubtful, to dismantle their nuclear arsenal and agree to a nuclear-free monitored Middle East. These texts are slightly modified for updating and clarity.]
Patricia Lambroso Interview Questions, Richard Falk Responses, Il Manifesto (5/20/25)
1. The Gaza Peoples Tribunal (civil society tribunal) was launched in November of 2024 in London following the failure by ICJ and ICC, the international tribunals in the Hague, political leaders, governments, protest activism around the world to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza. The anti-war movement that arose during the Vietnam War and the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign against the racist South African government were your examples of civic mobilization that exerted pressure on governments to change their unlawful, criminal policies. Is this possible today in the setting of Gaza and with respect to the Palestinian people regarding the fulfillment of their right of self-determination?
Response: It is not entirely fair to conclude that the ICJ and ICC ‘failed’ to stop the genocidal attack on Gaza or the crimes against humanity alleged to have been extensively committed by Israel and endorsed by its political leaders and supported by the liberal democracies of the West. The ICJ accepted jurisdiction to address tje submission by South Africa alleging violations of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), and issued near unanimous interim rulings in January and May 2024 to the momentous effect that it was ‘plausible’ to regard the Israeli violence in Gaza after October 7 as amounting to genocide. The ICJ then also ordered Israel to cease altogether interfering with the international delivery to Gaza of humanitarian aid taking the forms of food, medical supplies, and fuel. Although Israel took part in the judicial proceedings, it refused to comply with these interim rulings and was supported in this non-compliant behavior by the main complicit governments, particularly the United States that blocked all UN enforcement and ceasefire efforts by exercising its right of veto. It is more accurate to speak of an ‘enforcement gap’ in this situation that seemed to nullify ICJ action after it was clear that Israel would not act in the spirit of membership in the UN by voluntarily complying with an adverse decision and that the UN was helpless in view of the clash between the judicial outcome and the geopolitical interests of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council each of whom was vested with authority to nullify ICJ rulings. The ICJ should not be blamed, it should instead be vested with enforcement powers to ensure the effectiveness of its pronouncements on matters of international law. Until then the failure of judicial approaches to global security and the protection of human rights should be associated with the design of the UN, and world order generally, controlled and shaped by the winners of World War II in 1945 to preserve their habitual entitlement that gave precedence to strategic interests when challenged by international law.
The ICJ also issued an historically significant Advisory Opinion on July 19, 2024 that also resulted in a near unanimous outcome in responding to a General Assembly Resolution seeking guidance as to objections to Israel’s role as Occupying Power in Gaza that is legally regulated by the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation.[‘Advisory Opinion on Occupied Palestinian Territory Including East Jerusalem, responding to request of General Assembly for guidance as to “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the OPT”’] The Advisory Opinion addressed various allegations of Israeli violations in Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The ICJ rendered an authoritative judgment, despite the misleading label of ‘Advisory,’ concluding that Israel’s pervasive pattern of unlawfulness in administering the Occupying Territories since the 1967 War justified terminating Israel’s administrative authority and physical presence as soon as practicable, including Gaza, and within no more than a year. Further that the UN and its member governments were put under legal obligations by the ICJ to implement this authoritative assessment, and not to view implementation with the ruling as merely ‘advisory.’ This legal evaluation of the Israeli obligation in the Occupied Palestinian territory did not extend specifically to the period of time elapsing since October 7 as the GA Resolution was adopted prior to the Hamas attack.
Of secondary significance is the issuance by the ICC of ‘arrest warrants’ for the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and the former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, for a variety of alleged crimes of Israel, although not genocide. As neither Israel nor the US are members of the ICC, and the ICC unlike the ICJ is not part of the UN System, the prospects for enforcement are almost nil.
Attention should also be given to an ‘Accountability Gap’ of impunity that is supplementary to the ‘Enforcement Gap.’ The US Government actually has imposed sanctions on the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC for advocating proceedings allegedly exceeding the lawful authority of the tribunal. It simultaneously imposed sanctions on the four ICC judges that facilitated the arrest of these Israeli leaders in accord with the arrest warrants. Beyond this the US officially threatened future action in the event of any new effort to take action contrary to the political and economic interests of the US, Israel, and other allies.
Also relevant for analyzing the UN disappointing response to Israel’s prolonged genocide is a ‘Complicity Gap’ in the behavior of the ICJ and ICC. These tribunals have thus far refrained from directly examining allegations of aiding and abetting the commission of international crimes by third party actors, especially governments and corporations. It is up to UN members and international law scholars to encourage increased ICJ attentiveness to the Complicity Gap, which as here, is integral to insulating the wrongdoing actors from enforcement. In early July 2025 the UN Special Rapporteur of Occupied Palestine, Francesco Albanese, was also sanctioned for her attribution of legal responsibility to corporations for continuing their profitable relations with Israel in the face of genocide. She accompanied this assessment with a recommendation that the ICC initiate investigations with an eye toward prosecutions. Known as a dedicated and brave human rights defender, the sanctions generated widespread protests, including calls for awarding Albanese the Nobel Peace Prize and demands that the sanctioning Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, resign. This is highly unlikely to happen so long as the US treats its alliance with Israel as superior to its obligations as a law-abiding member of international society.
It might seem that international law is indeed useless in view of these gaps and the inability to protect a people victimized by international criminal conduct and a settler colonial occupation making Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland. As here, even when the formal judicial outcomes are neither complied with nor enforceable, international law is important. It exerts often unacknowledged influences on many governments, the tone and substance of media coverage, and breadth and depth of civil society activism. In some settings these informal implementations of international law achieve some degree of justice even in the context of the prolonged commission of ‘the crime of crimes,’ genocide, as has been the experience of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza for more 21 months.
Disregarding international law because of these flaws in the global normative order would be a mistake. Even when not enforced, or its findings repudiated, the outcomes of legal controversy can exert a defining influence on public perceptions of legitimacy, that is, in the dynamics of configuring of the legal and moral high ground in an underlying political conflict. Contrary to the beliefs of ‘political realists’ who control the foreign policy processes of most governments, relative military capabilities are no longer reliable predictors of which side will prevail in an armed political struggle. This should have been the core message derived by the United States from the Vietnam War during which it militarily prevailed on the battlefield and yet went on to lose the war. This pattern was repeated in most colonial wars fought during the latter decades of the 20th century. The agency of military superiority has declined in relation to many 21st century conflict situations, especially in nationalist resistance to foreign intervention, regime change and state rebuilding projects, settler colonial stabilization repressive policies and practices.
The Gaza Peoples Tribunal was formed in2024 with this background in mind. It was conceived exclusively as an initiative of global civil society with the dual objectives of helping swing the balance in the Legitimacy War between Israel and the Palestine as well as encourage nonviolent solidarity initiative supportive of the Palestinian struggle. Israel’s violent assault on Gaza that started shortly after the attack on Israeli border villages on October 7, resisted in the months that followed repeated calls for an Israeli ceasefire. Israel also rejected the option of complying with international law defying ICJ and ICC rulings. Such postures amid an r extremely one-sided conflict gave rise to an intensifying moral outrage among the peoples of the world, and eventually among more and more governments, especially in the Global South. The GPT is gathering evidence and assessments from an assortment of qualified survivor witnesses, experts, as well as from three chambers each composed of about 10 specialists documenting the relevance of international law and world politics in its several dimensions bearing on the situation in Gaza. The compilation of testimony and documentation will be presented to a Jury of Conscience composed of persons of diverse experience reflecting prominence in law, political science, and cultural expression who are made responsible for the preparation of oral and written short substantive reports. The distinctiveness of the Gaza Peoples Tribunal (as compared to the ICJ and ICC) is premised on the primacy of justice rather than the primacy of law or the primacy of geopolitics. GPT makes no pretense of being a normal court of law bound to give the accused state and non-state actors of opportunities to mount a legal defense of their behavior. In past peoples tribunals when such a defendant actor is invited to present a defense, it has always been rejected, presumably because the overall outcome of the judicial process is predetermined.
The GPT does not attempt to mimic judicial tribunals that operate technically and over long durations of time. It is openly partisan although objective with respect to evidence, seeking to add leverage to those engaged in the Legitimacy War. GPT prides itself on being responsive to the urgency of the Gaza humanitarian emergency, and seeks above all to stimulate solidarity on the level of action. The GPT relies on a variety of civil society initiatives to exert pressures on governments to close the enforcement, accountability, and complicity gaps. It also supports a range of nonviolent solidarity initiatives by civil society, including boycotts of sporting and cultural events that have Israeli participants; arms, trade, and investment embargoes; protest activity of all varieties, including act of civil disobedience expressive of the conscience of engaged citizens.
2. The silence and complicity of Europe on this massacre for extinction of Gaza population today and beside hypocritical condemnation and people demonstrations in Italy and France Why? How the Holocaust is weaponized by some like Germany to be accused of antisemitism, but France and Italy have a different history (Vichy and Mussolini and Nazi fascism)?
Response: As your question suggests, history helps us understand and explain the complicity of democratic governments in Europe with Israel’s recourse to genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. There are two principal lines of explanation. The first, and most obvious, is embedded sentiments of guilt about the long tradition of European antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. Especially, Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy, are acutely sensitive to this allegation. The governments and citizenry of such countries have unfortunately adopted the view that to overcome the disgraces of their past it is better to stand with Israel than to side with the Palestinians who like the Jews of the Hitler period are enduring a horrific genocide. In other words, the ‘never again’ renunciation of genocide pertains exclusively to the past victimized people, the Jews, rather than to a repudiated pattern of behavior, genocide, regardless of the identity of the victim.
The second strand of explanation, implicit on the right end of the political spectrum in Europe, insists that the Nazi genocide was also a matter of racial purification and religion, not just Jewish identity. In this sense, the Jews in relation to the Islamic world of the Middle East are bearing the torch of white supremacy and Western civilizational superiority, a reenactment of the Crusades under different flags in the context of modernity. In this post-Cold War period Israel is situated on the Islamic containment fault line of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ in effect enacting ‘a second coming of Samuel Huntington.’ In this sense, the real ‘enemy’ of these European countries is Iran, a non-Arab country that manifests hostility to the regional encroachment of the white and secular West. For opposite reasons to the Western alliance with Israel, Iran regards Israel as its principal adversary.
3. Trump touring the Gulf States could have political consequences for Gaza?
Response: There is no doubt that Trump’s May visit to the Gulf States has had adverse consequences for Gaza, but their exact nature remains obscure beyond giving Israel further time to impose its will on the helpless Palestinian civilian population. On one side, it could have been the first stage of a more transactional US relationship with Israel than the kind of unconditional support given during the Biden presidency.
In this sense an altered posture toward regional war prevention might have resulted in a greater willingness to forego the dangerous attack on Iran, and a greater readiness to seek a negotiated solution to Western objections to their nuclear program. Such a course of action would been a challenge to Netanyahu’s Israel. It might even have shaken Israel confidence in receiving unlimited support for their preferred endgame scenarios in Gaza. It might also encourage Netanyahu to lend support, which he has recently done, to Trump’s patently surreal candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize, supposedly among his narcissistic phantasies, and concretely allow Israel to get on with the genocidal assault on Gaza, and bury once and for all the zombie two-state endgame that while delusional, subverts Israel’s manifest ambition to terminate the Zionist Project triumphalist solution with a single Israeli one-state incorporating the whole of mandate Palestine.
In retrospect, judging by what has happened since, the trip to the Middle East seems to have convinced Trump that he could combine positive relations with the Gulf monarchies and yet give Netanyahu all the support that he wants in Gaza. There is reason to believe that the main Arab leaders share Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas for the sake of their repressive stability. Many of these Arab regimes might in the future be persuaded to join hands with the US, and even Israel, by adopting a common counter-terrorism orientation. This posture might prove compatible with Israel’s coerced displacement of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, persons to be ideally to be dumped in a remote African country where the hope is that in time they will give up their dreams of liberating Palestine.
Israel has in recent months increasingly lost legitimacy by carrying their attack on the civilian population of Gaza to cruel extremes of starvation and by making aid distribution sites into death traps. Israel’s pariah identity will be hard to overcome with the peoples of the world, including an increasing proportion of citizenries of the once liberal democracies in the Europe and North America. Trump’s trip momentarily sidelining Israel diplomatically, and Netanyahu’s arrogant launch of Gideon’s Chariot, the name given Israel’s latest military operation in Gaza has not led to a more problematic phase in Israel/US relations. It is uncertain at this time whether maintaining harmony with Israel, despite the continuing genocide, strengthens or weakens the Trump agenda of the next few years. Given the singling out of Palestinian Support on American campuses as a target for the ultra-right agenda of Project 2025 I would still expect that these demeaning ties with Israel, including complicity with Israel’s resolve to control ‘the day after negotiations’ will continue come what may in Gaza, a sad commentary on the suppression of liberal values whenever upholding the rule of law and minimal morality stand in the way of ideological and strategic goals, including civilizational unity. With the political advent of MAGA Trumpism liberal pretensions within the US have been buried as deep underground as Iran’s nuclear sites and seemingly as indestructible.
R. Falk Comment for Il Manifesto on US Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Facilities 6/22/25, in response to request by Patricia Lombroso
Once again, the world is moving once again closer to the brink of major war in the Middle East, with Israel doing most of the dirty work relative to Western post-colonial imperialism under the joint Israel/US auspices. The US actively joined Israel’s unprovoked aggression to the extent that Israel needed its help to complete a military operation against Iran’s nuclear sites. The US and Europe keep continuing to evade scrutinizing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and give Israel a totally free hand of impunity to embark upon either the mass forced departure of Palestinian from the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. even from pre-1967 Israel itself, or a plan B of constructing death camps in the devastated city of Rafah to confine Palestinian survivors in Gaza. The immoral audacity of Israel is exhibited by naming such morbid arrangements as constituting ‘a humanitarian city.’
To complete the mission of destroying or significantly delaying the completion of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities, Israel needed more than US complicity as it lacked blockbuster bombs and B-2 bombers (alone capable of delivering such massive bombs) to destroy or heavily damage Iranian deep underground facilities at Fordow and Natanz, and its surface nuclear site at Isfahan. It remains undetermined whether Israel used the pretext of a nuclear threat posed by Iran as a justification for its post-October 7 policy of mounting devastating military attacks throughout the region to destroy hostile movements and weaken potential adversary states such as Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. In the Iran unprovoked attacks, part of the incentive for striking in June 2025 was undoubtedly to divert attention from the growing international opposition from its continuing genocidal policies in Gaza, most recently including luring starving Palestinians to supposed humanitarian food distribution sites, which acted as horrifying death traps.
An irony is that these June 21 US attacks on three main nuclear facilities gave Iran an airtight international law argument for the validation of claims to retaliate by relying upon its right of self-defense against the prior Israel and United States acts of aggression that violated Iran’s territorial sovereignty. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, vowed to retaliate and did so to a limited extent that penetrated Israel’s layered defenses sufficiently to discredit its claims of invulnerability to air and missile attack. It remains uncertain whether Khamenei’s warning will be fully carried out at some future time in the event that the present ceasefire arrangement lapses, Israel again provokes, and combat resumes.
As a result, the threat of war between Iran and Israel as supported strongly by the US and rather weakly by the European Union casts a dark shadow of potential war throughout the region at this time. The outbreak of war probably depends on whether Iran is perceived to possess deterrent capabilities taking the form of launching a sufficiently effective attack on US strategic assets, especially against its minimally defended numerous military bases spread around the region. Prior to the ceasefire the Iranian response was measured and cautious, designed to demonstrate that it possessed the military capabilities to inflict heave damage on any adversary in the future. Iran’s show of force was undertaken despite a near certain expectation of an even a more devastating US attack. Such a response would likely be accompanied by a direct and explicit promotion of regime change in Tehran promoted by mobilizing internal opposition forces, encouraged by pledges of substantial external material encouragement, and even carrying out an assassination of Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khamenei. It is quite possible that Israel will keep pushing tactics designed to promote Iranian regime change although on an ambiguous basis of deniability and covert support for the internal Iranian opposition.
A political complexity facing Iran from a legal perspective arises from the reality that US strategic targets in the region are concentrated in Arab countries currently at peace with Iran. The governments of such states would have a self-defense claim against Iran for forcibly violating their territorial sovereignty. It could also lead to questions in the US about the costs of maintaining its Middle Eastern force structure. It also could lead Arab government to question whether their security and stability is being reliably upheld by the acceptance of visible American military assets on their sovereign territory. Such questioning would almost certainly accompany a Second Arab Spring in the region should it take place.
Whether the world would continue to stand aside while the US and Israel, in apocalyptic interaction with Iran, plunge the world into a new world war is uncertain. This uncertainty exists despite the likely results of threats and even uses weapons of mass destruction. With Trump and Netanyahu calling the shots, there is the prospect of a dramatic further expansion of the combat zone, with few policy guard rails to discourage nuclear threats and their implementation. There is much public pressure in the US to wage wars of choice in a politically acceptable manner that avoids ‘boots on the ground’ so as to minimize American casualties, thereby weakening citizen opposition to wars disconnected with direct threats to national sovereignty. This option of relying on missiles, bombers, drones has made it tempting for the US/Israel leadership to gamble on mounting a credible threat to secure its desired outcome in Iran even, if necessary, by demonstrating the willingness to use nuclear weapons if needed to achieve its strategic objectives. Stumbling into an unwanted nuclear Armageddon may not be expected by war hawks, and certainly not wished for, but the stage is being set for such a catastrophic future. As scholarship has shown, the world was extremely lucky to escape nuclear war back in 1961 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It might not be as lucky this time when much less prudent leaders than Kennedy and Khruschev are in control of warmaking by the antagonistic governments of current geopolitical actors (US, China, Russia).
We should not forget that while this Iranian drama plays out, Israel is freed from media and governmental scrutiny as its war machine speeds up the Zionist master plan of completing the work of Palestinian erasure, Israeli leaders have been increasingly emboldened to proclaim their preferred solution to the conflict by way of a one supremist Jewish state that has now become a de facto political reality. It remains somewhat obscured by the remarkable continuing Palestinian resilience and resistance. Israel has made no secret of its priority as a sequel to genocide, which is the forced disposition of Palestinians living under occupation as a repetition of earlier instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Nakba, 1948; Naksa, 1967) or its grisly alternative of confining Palestinians to a so-called ‘humanitarian city’ currently under construction. The Trump presidency has given many blessings to this Israeli vision of victory over the struggle of Palestinians to sustain their struggle no matter the extremity of the human suffering.
Whether Israel has been decisively weakened by the steady erosion of its legitimacy through its defiance of the most basic norms of international law, by repeated condemnations in sharply worded UN General Assembly resolutions reflecting the views of a majority of the world’s people and governments, and by a hostile turn of world public opinion remains to be seen. It will also be reflected on how civil society in the West responds, facing at present repression at home and impunity-free defiance by Israel.
A decisive question for those seeking a denuclearized Middle East is when will the awkward issue of dismantling Israel’s long hidden nuclear weapons arsenal is at last put on the diplomatic agenda for all to see. It has been one of the geopolitical triumphs of the US and Europe to keep Israel’s opposition to a nuclear-free Middle East from affecting the approach to regional stability and world peace. The major Arab countries and Iran have long favored regional denuclearization, but such a goal has been effectively thwarted by Israel and its closest allies.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
A Gathering Global Storm
24 Oct[This is a longer than usual post. It is my chapter contribution to The Great Awakenkng: New Modes of Thinking Amid the Ruins of Capitalism (2020) edited by Anna Grear & Davd Bollier. My text is preoccupied with the decline of the state as an efficient problem-solving instrument in a period where global scale challenges are generating an ethical-ecological-bio crisis. The intensity of the crisis is magnified by the absence of globally oriented geopolitical leadership, which had previously been supplied by the United States. Restored liberal internationalism would likely give more time to devise more functional responses to the gathering storm, but would not address the underlying structural causes of the crisis: predatory capitalism, global military, apathetic empathy, materialism.
I urge reading The Great Awakening and bringing the book to the attention of friends. It is an undertaking of love and commitment by the editors.
Punctum Books is a progressive, independent publisher. To learn more about its vision and the book go to its website, and check out links below:
the official press release about The Great Awakening, published by Punctum Books:
https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/the-great-awakening-edited-by-anna-grear-and-david-bollier
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-great-awakening-new-modes-of-life-amidst-capitalist-ruins/
….and here is where you can download a (free) PDF of the book:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/42480]
Twilight of the Nation-State (at a Time of Resurgent Nationalism
The presence of systemic challenges in a world order reality that is sub-system dominant (that is, shaped by sovereign states, especially those that are dominant) has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. True, there is attention given to the advent of the Anthropocene, in recognition of the extent to which human activities are now principal drivers of important changes in the quality and even sustainability of the global habitat.[16] Yet problem-solving is still caught up in the structures, practices, and procedures of the Holocene, which dealt with habitat and security challenges by way of sub-systemic responses and policies that assume that crises could be devastating, but not threatening to the system as a whole.[17] In different ways, climate change and nuclear weapons are illustrative of the global challenges facing humanity in the age of the Anthropocene, but there are others— the protection of biodiversity, eradication of poverty, the prevention of hunger and malnutrition, and the control of pandemic disease.
From a conceptual perspective, climate change is a clear instance of the limits of statist problem-solving in circumstances where the global scope of the problem is acknowledged. The unevenness of state responsibility for the buildup of greenhouse gases, which is aggravated by the difficulty of establishing causal connections between emissions and harm, creates controversy and tensions. With a strong consensus within the community of climate scientists and among civil society activists, the governments of the world came together to negotiate an historic agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to minimize increasing harm from global warming. The result was a notable achievement: 193 governments signed onto the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015, and there resulted a celebration among the participating diplomats. Yet the success of the Paris Agreement, as measured by maximizing the cooperative potential of a statist problem-solving procedure, was, from another point of view, an ominous failure. The Agreement, although impressive as an exercise in inter-state lawmaking, was disappointing if the measure of success was prudently addressing the challenge. The Paris Agreement was neither responsive enough to the dangers nor sufficiently obligatory to provide a credible and responsible response to the dangers of global warming if measured against the limits on CO2 dissemination urged on governments by the overwhelming majority of climate specialists.
Until ten years ago, the idea of a statist twilight was seen mainly as a recognition that the state, as it had evolved in Europe since the seventeenth century, was being displaced transnationally by economic globalization and was newly threatened by transnational mega-terrorism and cyber attacks.[26] At the same time there was an emerging awareness that the most manifest threat to human wellbeing was being posed by the effects of global warming brought about by the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The recent confrontation between North Korea and the United States, which has featured apocalyptic threats from the leaders of both countries, has reawakened the world to the dangers of nuclear war and to the fragility of existing global security arrangements.
Overall, the increasingly global scope of policymaking and problem-solving was regarded as making it dysfunctional to rely on state-level governance and calculations of national interest. This is because the items on the political agenda most likely affect the totality of lives and the collective destiny of humanity—especially future generations—regardless of where one is situated on the planet.[27] Revealingly, these globalizing concerns have not led governments to create stronger structures of global governance. The dangerous inability to protect at-risk global and human interests might have been expected to induce more responsible governments and their citizens to work feverishly to establish a more independent and adequately-resourced United Nations, but this failed to happen. Addressing global challenges successfully seems impossible without augmented instututional capabilities backed up by the level political will required to generate and implement appropriate legal norms. [LR1] Whether and how these norms will be delimited is a major adaptive challenge to a fundamental realization that the Westphalian framework, even if responsibly reinforced by geopolitical leadership—which is presently at low ebb—cannot satisfy minimum requirements of world order. It is a disappointing part of these dire circumstances that there is such a weak popular mobilization around this twenty-first-century agenda of challenges. It is time to acknowledge that, despite the seriousness of global challenges, states separately and aggregately have shown little ability, and inadequate political will, to respond in a manner that is adaptive.[28] In effect, the non-decline of the state, or even its seeming resurgence as an exclusivist nation-state, is accentuating the weakness of global governance when it comes to global, systemic issues. In this respect, the state continues to bask in sunlight, as if awaiting twilight to subdue its anachronistic orientation and priorities.
Instead of a rational and convincing pattern of adaptation, this rendering of a radiant twilight has produced a series of institutional innovations that were supposed to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of multilateral cooperative arrangements on world affairs. This gave rise to such diverse arenas as the G-7, G-8, G-20, annual gatherings of the IMF and World Bank, BRIC meetings, Shanghai Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as to private sector initiatives such as the World Economic Forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Such constellations of institutional configurations contribute to the impression of organizational decline, as does the emergence of a variety of anti-capitalist initiatives associated with the World Social Forum, Non-Aligned Movement, including commoning in various forms.[29]
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States chose to constitute itself as the first “global state” in history, relying on a network of hundreds of foreign bases, navies in every ocean, and the militarization of space and even cyberspace, aiming to establish a global state that eclipsed the sovereignty of all other states, which are unwilling to dilute the traditional scope of their sovereign rights when it comes to national security (except to some extent China and Russia).[32] This American global state relies on the consent of many, and on coercion toward a few, in pursuit of its goals. This is most clearly evident in relation to the conduct of counterterrorist warfare and counter-proliferation diplomacy, using non-territorial innovations such as drones, cyber sabotage, special ops elite covert forces, as well as relying on traditional territorial instruments of hard power such as military intervention. Such a heavy investment in achieving globalized military control is also seen as supportive of neoliberal capitalism, it also tends to downgrade the relevance of the Westphalian state to either of its prime roles— in relation to development and to internal and external security.[33]
In addition to war, the dense causal complexity of global warming, in terms of the locus of greenhouse gas emissions being substantially disconnected from the locus of harm, offers another kind of deterritorializing in which ecological security depends on the behavior of the global whole as well as on that of certain national parts. Related issues of biodiversity pose analogous issues in relation to the global dependence on on diversity being out of sync with the territorial sovereignty relied upon to preserve the world’s most biologically diverse rainforests.
[1] Emblematic of this zeitgeist was the first World Forum organized by TRT World (a Turkish English-language radio and TV channel similar in format and intent to CNN or to Al Jazeera English) around the theme of “Inspiring Change in an Age of Uncertainty,” featuring several world leaders, prominent media personalities, government officials, and even a few academics, including myself. Hotel Conrad, Istanbul, October 18-19, 2017. No one took issue with this theme, which would never have been chosen in the last half of the twentieth century when the structure of international relations, at least, seemed stable, if not certain, and hardly worth problematizing.
[2] The linearity of the metaphor can also be questioned and subjected to doubt in this chapter. The degree of certainty that night will follow twilight does not pertain in the political domain where reversibility and stagnancy could persist, that is, the state could recover its salience or at least achieve a new stasis.
[3] This is the central argument of Richard Falk, Power Shift: On the New Global Order (London: Zed, 2016).
[4] On the U.S. providing a global leadership that achieves many of the positive goals associated with world government, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as a World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).
[5] For an understanding of the scale and scope of past catastrophic change see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
[6] Richard Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?” in Falk, Power Shift, 253-262.
[7] We perceive the future “through a glass, darkly” if at all, which provides ample reason to rely on an epistemology of humility to sustain hope. That is, since we cannot know the future, we should strive for what is necessary and desirable. This view is elaborated upon by Falk, “Horizons of Global Governance,” 101-128.
[8] Among recent instances, Scotland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Catalonia are of relevance. For an analysis of the international issues in the political and historical context of the 2017 encounter of Spain and Catalonia see John Dugard, Richard Falk, Ana Stanic, and Marc Weller, The Will of the People and Statehood (report at the request of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, 30 October 2017). For a focus on the conflictual aspects of internal struggles to reshape the dynamics of self-determination see Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 2012).
[9] See Richard Falk, “Ordering the World: Hedley Bull After 40 Years,” in The Anarchical Society at 40: Contemporary Challenges and Prospects , eds. Hidemi Suganami, Madeline Carr, and Adam Humphreys (Oxford, UK: Oxford Un iversity Press, 2017), 41-55, in geopolitical sequel to role of “Great Powers.” On role of Great Powers, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University, 1977).
[10] See Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy: Change and Persistence in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty: The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Hants, UK: Edward Elgar, 1992).
[11] Most extravagantly expressed by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Even Huntington’s far more accurate anticipation of renewed conflict was based on a new era of inter-civilizational rather than inter-state warfare, see: Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). Both of these influential formulations can be read as alternative expressions of the twilight hypothesis. For a negative assessment of economic globalization as shaped by neoliberal ideology see Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).
[12] For discussion see unpublished paper, Richard Falk, “After 9/11: The Toxic Interplay of Counterterrorism, Geopolitics, and World Order,” presented at a workshop on “Is there an After After 9/11?” Orfalea Center on Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, January 20-21, 2018.
[13] There was some thinking along this line, most explicitly by Robert D. Kaplan, Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Random House, 2000); also, Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, but Fukuyama’s twilight is followed by the presumed forever sunshine of globalized liberalism.
[14] Perhaps the most graphic assertions along these lines were made by the American president, George W. Bush, shortly after the 9/11 attacks: “We have the best chance since the rise of the nation state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Further, “[m]ore and more civilized nations find themselves on the same side, united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos:” Address to the Graduating Class, West Point, June 2002; also, in the cover letter to National Security Strategy of the United States, White House, Washington, D.C, September 2002.
[15] Most significantly argued by Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[16] See Richard Falk’s chapter, “The World Ahead: Entering the Anthropocene?” in Exploring Emergent Thresholds: Toward 2030, eds. Richard Falk, Manoranjan Mohanty, and Victor Faessel (Delhi, India: Orient Black Swan, 2017), 19-47.
[17] These terms used to classify geological eras are here used metaphorically to identify the scope of problems and problem solving in the context of global governance.
[18] See the text of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2015) to discern its essentially voluntary compliance framework. “Paris Agreement,” New York: United Nations, 2015.
[19] Trump has not yet formally expressed objections to the Paris Agreement beyond suggesting, in vague generalities, that it is “a very bad deal for America” and hurts the competitiveness of American business by raising costs of production via constraints on carbon emissions.
[20] The climate change policies of California are a dramatic example, accentuated by the anti-environmental posture of the Trump presidency. Individuals and communities may voluntarily adopt climate-friendly behavioral patterns including vegan diets, electric cars, solar power.
[21] See “nuclear famine” studies. There are also other indications of toxicity and disruption of ecological and social structures on a more or less permanent basis. For human impacts via food see the briefing paper by Ira Helfand, “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk: Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition,” Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2013.
[22] For elaboration see Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Path to Nuclear Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Danger (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012).
[23] Even when a cautious call for steps toward a world without nuclear weaponry is set forth, as by Barack Obama in his Prague Speech of 2009, nothing happens as the roots of nuclearism are too deep to challenge effectively.
[24] See Richard J. Barnet, Who Wants Disarmament? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) for a strong early critique of disarmament diplomacy that publicly advocated disarmament while bureaucratically opposing it. Over the decades, nuclearism has become entrenched in the governmental structures of the main nuclear weapons states that have been identified as the “deep state” or “military-industrial-complex.”
[25] See Richard Falk. “Challenging Nuclearism: The Nuclear BAN Treaty,” Global Justice in the 21st Century, July 14, 2017; “Nobel Peace Prize 2017: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)”, October 8, 2017, https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/nobel-peace-prize-2017-international-campaign-to-abolish-nuclear-weapons-ican/
[26] For speculation along these lines see Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2003).
[27] For stimulating conjecture along these lines, see Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen Gill, ed., Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[28] See Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”—raising the biopolitical question as to whether there is a sufficient species will to survive as distinct from individual, communal, and national wills to survive that are robust, and actually, part of the distinctive problem of superseding and complementing responses at lower levels of social integration by reliance on species and global scale responses.
[29] See also the networked adaptation to the new era as depicted by Anne-Marie Slaughter, The New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[30] The idea of nationality is purely juridical, given practical relevance by passport and international identity papers. In some countries, for example Israel, the state draws a distinction between citizenship and nationality, privileging the latter on the basis of Jewish ethnicity.
[31] The Trump presidency has illustrated the dynamic of the double coding of nationalism and love of country. For Trump’s white political base, the acclamation accorded to America is understood in a non-plural white-supremacist manner, which terrifies and angers those Americans who are non-white or socially vulnerable. It raises the critical question as to what is “America” as state and nation. Such interrogation should be directed at many states that are trying to build various forms of exclusionary governing structures. These issues are well explored in Mazen Masri, The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2017).
[32] This sense of establishing a global security system administered by Washington was most clearly put forward during the presidency of George W. Bush in the National Security Doctrine of the United States of America (2002): see advice to China to concentrate on trade, and not waste resources competing with the U.S. in the domain of security.
[33] The “Westphalian state” should be contrasted with the “global state” constructed by the United States, as well as with the concept of “empire.” See generally: Richard Falk, The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), especially 3-65; also Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”.
[34] For instance, overseeing the negotiation of several multinational agreements, including the Law of the Seas Treaty in 1982, and generally seeking to combine its national interests with sensitivity to the interests of others, but still largely within a state-centric imaginary.
[35] See Gill, Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership.
[36] See Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation State: Citizens, Tribalism, and the New World Disorder (London, UK: HarperCollins, 1994) somewhat prophetically arguing that the future will witness the decline of the state due to the rise of anti-internationalist values and political movements.
[37] Not explicitly formulated in Robert J. Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, rev. 2nd ed., 1991).
Tags: global leadership, global militarim, nuclearism, predatory capitaalism, state system, ultra-nationalism\