Tag Archives: Trump

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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2025: Amid the Darkness, Glimmers of Light

25 Dec

[Prefatory Note: This attempt to cast a critical gaze at the year ahead was published as an opinion piece Anadalu News Agency in Turkey. It is republished here without modification.]   

ISTANBUL 

Rarely has the crystal ball used to divine the near future seemed so clouded by uncertainties. The year 2024 was dominated by disappointments, disturbing surprises, and continuing devastation in Ukraine and Gaza. It was also a year that underscored the inability of the UN to stop the most transparent genocide ever in Gaza, a senseless war in Ukraine, and mass slaughter in Sudan.  

Is 2024 a turning point?

There were a variety of multilateral efforts in 2024 to escape from US international dominance after the Cold War. This dominance had fueled a global politics of resentment and a search for an alternative world order that is law-governed and not subject to the geopolitical maneuvers of the five winners of World War II. These powers were granted unrestricted veto rights in the UN Security Council under the UN Charter, which has long paralyzed efforts to ensure compliance with international law. This produces a deep contradiction in the way the world is organized, allowing the most powerful and dangerous countries, all five being nuclear-armed states, to be legally free of any obligation to respect international law.

The question in many thoughtful minds is whether these developments in the prior year will continue in the year ahead. One near certain development is the rightward turn of internal politics in the West, given a dramatic twist by the prospects of radical change associated with the second coming of Donald Trump as US president. Trump has already appointed highly controversial political figures to his Cabinet, with the expectation of implementing an ultra-right domestic agenda. However, what is his approach to foreign policy? As well, the leading governments of Europe, including Germany, France, and Italy, all exhibit signs of leaning further toward authoritarianism.  

Crisis areas in the world

There are some hopeful signs. Trump seems likely to push for a negotiated peace in Ukraine and bring to a close US President Joe Biden’s “geopolitical war,” involving fighting Moscow by supplying and funding Kyiv with ever more provocative weaponry while turning his back on diplomacy and urging NATO to join in the fight with Rusi to the last Ukrainian. Such a posture raised risks of a confrontation with Russia that could also result in catastrophic nuclear warfare. Trump wants to cut spending on distant and expensive foreign adventures with no genuine American security interest and stand before the world as a peacemaker. Ukraine was a war that never should have been, as a diplomatic compromise between Russia and Ukraine was from its inception in the interest of Ukraine and world peace, as well as being attainable by responsible statecraft.

In contrast to Ukraine, the context of Israel/Palestine is far bleaker. There is every indication that Trump intends to outdo Biden by being an even more unconditional ally of Israel, fully supportive of the Netanyahu-led project entailing the establishment of Greater Israel. This is a plan to erase the Palestinian challenge through the annexation of the West Bank, parts of Gaza, and to support Israel in extending its “buffer zones” in Syria and Lebanon. The plan also includes intensified efforts to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and promote regime change in Tehran by force. The rightward turn of major governments in the West is likely to repress civil society opposition to the continuation of Israeli genocide and expansionism.  

Militarism versus symbolic victories: The calculus of legitimacy wars

The efforts by countries in the Global South to have recourse to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC) are a notable expression on the part of non-Western states to invoke international law to serve the causes of peace with justice. And the ICJ has responded in an encouraging professional manner, ruling in favor of provisional measures in response to South Africa’s submission and issuing a separate opinion invalidating Israel’s continuing occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in an authoritative near-unanimous exposition of applicable international law. Of course, it is expected that Israel will defy these developments, as it has consistently done in the face of adverse rulings by international tribunals. Nevertheless, such rulings sympathetic with Palestinian grievances are symbolically important, delegitimizing Israel and mobilizing civil society activism that gives rise to global solidarity initiatives of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) variety.

The fate of the arrest warrants issued by the ICC, ordering the arrest and transfer to The Hague for prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after a long delay is highly uncertain. Israel has mounted a legal challenge, and its government has made clear that the arrest warrants for the Israeli leaders are antisemitic outrages, and any implementation would be denounced and disrupted no matter what the ICC might decide. As with the ICJ genocide and occupation cases, the mere issuance of arrest warrants by the ICC was a significant symbolic Palestinian victory in the Legitimacy War, which may yet surprise the world in 2025 or shortly thereafter, by its overall impact on the viability of the Israeli state as now operative. It should be appreciated that the anti-colonial wars of the past 50 years were won by the weaker side militarily that managed to prevail on the symbolic battlefields of the Legitimacy War, which gives decisive weight to law, morality, and perseverance of a repressed people. The establishment of the civil society Gaza Tribunal in November of 2024 is a further legitimizing development in the Palestinian struggle for basic rights that seeks to activate global solidarity initiatives that shifted the balance in the global movement against South African apartheid, and before that of the global anti-war movement that nullified US military superiority in the Vietnam War.  

The rise of multipolarity in 2025?

At the same time, global society is experiencing a surge of multilateral initiatives. Strengthening the impulse to create autonomous multipolar networks of the sort modeled by the BRICS, and especially to mount challenges to dollarization of trade and finance, which, to the extent successful, will produce a backlash in the form of high tariffs and the economic menace of a trade war, aggravated by an increase in the tendency to replace workers with digitally sophisticated substitutes for human labor to promote profitability and efficiency.

Above all, 2025 will witness growing tensions between the unified governance of global security by continued US hegemony and a resurgent challenge mounted by the Global South in the ongoing Legitimacy War with the West. 

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On Loving Trump: A CounterPunch Dialogue on the Grand Flirtation with Fascism

9 Nov

[Prefatory Note: This converssation with Daniel Warner and Matthew Stevenson was published online by CounterPunch on October 8, 2023. It dealls with the interrplay between Trump the person and Trumpism the phenomenon, a right-wing populist ursurge in the US and also many other places. The conversation took place a month before the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel and Israeli onslaught that has followed. This direct attack on the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza has sent shockwaves around the world, and brought severe tensions to the state/society relations in the Global West. It is a time when the most powerful country on earth, at least militarily deserves a better choice than looming presidential campaign pitting Biden against Trump. It gives a certain attractiveness to independent candidates. Cornel West is the person mosst qualified to be the next president of the US, but is given no chance. Such is life in 2020s putting the human future in jeopardy as never before.]

BY RICHARD FALK, DANIEL WARNER AND MATTHEW STEVENSON

This is an edited transcript of the latest CounterPunch podcast featuring Matthew Steveson, Daniel Warner and Richard Falk. You can listen to it here.

Matthew Stevenson: The three amigos are back together, but only in the same world. Richard, you’re in Turkey. Daniel, you’re in Geneva, and I’m in Slovakia, of all places.

For this episode, we wanted to discuss the rubric: “On Loving Trump”. Richard, you’re the coiner of the phrase “On Loving Trump.” What did you have in mind when you came up with such a title?

Richard Falk: Well, I think principally what to me is mystifying about the continuing popularity that Trump enjoys, despite all the heinous things that he has done while president and since being president, and the degree to which he challenges the constitutional consensus that had always, at least since the Civil War, kept the U.S. together as a country and as a citizenry.

He’s a radical figure who comes out of an opportunistic extreme right that has a frightening fascist lineage. Let me add one point: which is that Trump is an exaggeration, in my view, of a global phenomenon observed recently in a variety of cultural settings, the emergence of autocratic leaders that enjoy widespread support from their population. So we could have chosen to focus on alternate themes to highlight something analogous to the passion gripping the U.S. : “On Loving Modi” or “On Loving Orbán or “On Loving Putin”. All of these leaders engendered a level of popular support that defied the political imagination that supposedly emerged out of the Enlightenment’s insistence on rationality in all spheres of public life.

Daniel Warner: I think Richard has made an excellent point. I would develop it along the following line. President Biden talks about a historical moment, an inflection point where democracies versus autocracies compete around the world. One of the things to look at is not only the growth of autocracies or the extreme right-wing in the United States, but why democracies are failing. I include in this, obviously, the United States, which is supposed to be the leader of the free world. Why is it that the Democratic Party, for example, or in other countries, left-wing socialist parties, are not doing better?

Part of the success of Trump and the autocratic governments around the world is the failure of other forms of government at this time in history, especially those that are self-proclaimed democracies. On the one hand, we can say we’re mystified by Trump’s success. On the other hand, we can lament why democracies are failing and losing popular support.

“…demagogues are dominating the political space…”

Richard Falk: I think that what Danny has said about the loss of support on the part of the left and for the governing process is correct. But I think there’s also something missing, if we don’t acknowledge that this is not just a matter of normal political support—there is some kind of emotional underpinning that makes Trump invulnerable to the normal pitfalls of a political leader. And that’s a problem with the citizenry, and it’s a recurrent problem for democracies. It’s illuminated by inquiring why ancient Athens abandoned democracy, and why the leading thinkers of the time, like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, felt that the ordinary public or the citizenry had become too vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues. And what we’re doing, in a way, is living in an era where demagogues are dominating the political space.

Matthew Stevenson: Richard, can I ask you and Danny: Are we living with them because the voice of the people has selected them? Meaning that the democracy is functioning, it’s just functioning in a way that none of us admire? Or is it that they have managed to subvert the normal workings of a democracy and have rigged the ballots?

Richard Falk: Well, I can say a word about that: It’s not the voice. It’s the heart. It’s the appeal that this kind of leader, at this time, has to the deep emotional wellsprings of human identity that somehow connects them not with the kind of figures that a modern society descended from the kinds of Enlightenment rationality and affirmation of science and devotion to truth-telling would have anticipated. There’s something else going on that’s very fundamental, that’s more connected with religion, in a way, than politics. And that’s what I think makes it very hard to know how to counter effectively.

Daniel Warner: I think Richard has touched on the emotions of politics and how, in his first comment he talked about manipulation. In terms of Trump and his followers, there is an enormous animosity toward a certain form of elitism, whether you call it bi-coastal or you call it the “degree gap” between those who are college-educated and those who are not. Richard goes back to Athens, Aristotle, and Plato. In a sense, democracy is based on an openness to citizens voting. And the citizens don’t necessarily have to be graduates of Princeton University.

There is a disconnect between those in urban areas today and those in rural areas; those who are college-educated or have advanced degrees and those who may be high school graduates. I think when Richard talks about religion, he’s talking about emotions and animosity toward a certain elite, whether it be Georgetown or Harvard, et cetera. Biden, who has tried to present himself as kind of the average Joe, middle-class Joe, University of Delaware Joe, has not succeeded in touching that part of the population. Trump, somewhat to his credit, has touched an emotional nerve with a large part of the population.

There is that animosity against an elite which is fundamental, certainly in the United States. You think of Franklin Roosevelt, for example, who was able to touch a large part of the population. I come back to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State. With all their degrees, they remind me of “the best and the brightest” under presidents John F. Kennedy and certainly under Lyndon Johnson who didn’t understand much about Vietnam. It seems to me that Blinken and Sullivan are part of a certain elite that doesn’t present itself well to the general population and is not able to communicate with Trump’s followers.

“…between the Enlightenment and oligopoly…”

Matthew Stevenson: There are two sides to the Trump followers. There’s the side of extreme wealth, which he does represent, and then there’s the underclass, if you want to call it that, the disenfranchised—as a second side. But I would ask both of you to consider this: that Trump, rather than being an aberration, is a consistent pattern of American history. In the Constitutional Convention [1787], the divide was between Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson—what Richard would call on the side of the Enlightenment. And on the other side, there were John Adams, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, who really did want there to be an oligopoly to run the country—there was no secret there.

And if you look at the Constitution, you don’t need to be Charles A. Beard to see that the Constitution was drafted for those with extreme wealth—slaveholders were defended, capital more than rights were enshrined in the Constitution. And if you look at those two twin elements of American Constitutional history—between the Enlightenment and oligopoly…. Yes, Trump is extreme. Trump is extreme, in his criminal conduct. But Trump’s not the first politician to try to steal an election; that was done successfully in 1876. And Trump is not the only one to rally the extremes. We had Huey Long in the 1930s. So my question is, are we romanticizing the American past to draw a line under Trump when in fact this is what we’ve always had for 247 years?

Richard Falk: Well, I do think you’re right that there is a kind of structural continuity that you can trace back to the making of the Constitution and the early experience of being a post-colonial country and incorporating very fundamental injustices into this structure. But what I think is, and that’s why I keep stressing that this is not a matter of the mind as much as of the heart, that there is a passion that transcends this urban-rural divide and the educated-and-uneducated class divisions and eludes rational analysis and argumentation. There is present a quality that seems to me possessed by this kind of leader at this moment in history where the species itself is in jeopardy, that through climate change, through the risk of nuclear war, there has developed a kind of disorientation that flourishes because it is maintained in part by the passion that leaders like Trump can generate. And it’s a kind of macro-denialism that is leading in a very destructive direction for American society and for a number of other societies, as a paucity of leaders seem adequately responsive to this demanding new world historical situation. And that’s what I’m trying to identify. And that’s why I talked about not just supporting Trump, but something more that remains elusive that gives his worldview a toxic potency. And this something else, however, it is understood, has the potential of being a pathway to a fascist dictatorship.

Daniel Warner: I think that the fact that the three of us—one is in Geneva, one is in Slovakia, and one is in Turkey—indicates that we could be identified as “globalists”. And the question of identification, Richard, I think is crucial to this particular moment. We are living in a moment of complex interdependence. That’s a reality, it’s a technological reality, it’s a financial reality. And the question is, how do people react to that globalist reality?

To a large extent, those who are nationalist and passionately nationalist are saying that they are against globalism and globalists. So to take the story of the bi-coastal, rural and urban on another level, there also is a need for identity because certain people are worried and feel lost in the situation of globalism and complex interdependence. So to say I am an American, I am Polish, I am Hungarian, in a sense, is a reaffirmation of an identity that gives a sense of security in the face of growing realization of the global actuality that’s taking place. I think that, to some extent, answers part of Richard’s question about why there’s such a strong belief in Trump I think people are worried. Identity politics comes to the fore when people feel insecure.

Matthew Stevenson: I agree, Danny, but I also think that there are globalist sides of Trump’s philosophy, in that, for example, denying climate change means “I can use the atmosphere any way I want, and nobody should be able to tell me what I should be able to do with my patch of air.” And the side of Trump that I find disquieting, leaving aside the obvious criminality, is the nativist side of Trump, which I would say comes out of the 19th century—the Immigration Restriction League, the Know Nothing party. It comes out of all these strange cultish groups in American history. Trump is one of them. And Trump’s followers, in effect, are not dissimilar to some of the utopians who found some sort of redemption in slavery. They might have found it in economic isolation, you tell me. But the anger in Trump, I would say, is a nativist anger: anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Black, pro-slavery. And that, to me, is the origin of Trump’s political philosophy.

Richard Falk: Can I briefly react to that by saying that your remarks suggest to me that what Trump has managed to do is to create a Jonestown for America; in other words, a cult that encompasses the society. And it has, as you point out, these elements that have always been in the broader picture, but they’ve been marginalized. By and large, he’s brought them to the center partly for the reasons that Danny and I have been mentioning.

At this point I would like to call our attention to a famous remark of Antonio Gramsci that I don’t have the exact words for… but the gist of what Gramsci said is this: “In times of transition, morbid things happen.” And what we are experiencing, I think, is a stunted transition from a state-centric world to a globally coherent world. But the transition is encountering extraordinary resistance from regressive ultra-nationalism that expresses itself by extreme cruelty and hostility to migrants and to those that would breach these national divisions. We’re living amid uncertainty and contradiction of a depth that has never before been the experience of humanity conceived as a species rather than as a series of distinct communities.

“…how is it that we can calm the ardor…”

Daniel Warner: Let me ask Matthew and Richard a question. If we can reach a consensus that throughout American history there have been tendencies that have been in the background and then come to the fore. If we accept my comment about insecurity and Richard’s about globalization, how is it that we can calm the ardor of those people who are so nationalistic and so insecure about globalization and the change from the international to the global? Because if insecurity leads to this identity and potentially to fascism, how do you deal with that? If we ignore the 75 million who voted for Trump the last time and maybe more will vote this time, we’re being undemocratic.

If it’s an emotional problem, Richard, what are we going to do about it? We can’t ignore it. Perhaps we could ignore it in Hungary or Poland, but within the United States, it’s such a threat to the system. How do you deal with this emotional situation today?

Richard Falk: Well, if you accept the premise that you’re dealing with a form of love, we have no instruments to counter that. The Enlightenment mindset is irrelevant. That’s why I feel rather gloomy about the future. And I think Biden is one sign of the bankruptcy of opposition to a situation that is characterized by the uber emotion of love. It’s a distorted love and has deforming impacts, but it is not going to be countered by Enlightenment rationality or by material social protection measures. A new Roosevelt wouldn’t be able to handle this kind of passion unless maybe if there was some deep crash of the economy, one might have a new set of parameters to deal with that. But short of that, I don’t see any signs that there is a neutralizing force in America or many other places to deal with this emergent autocratic fascistic passion.

Matthew Stevenson: What I find extraordinary in looking at Trump from a distance is he really doesn’t have a very consistent ideology himself. I don’t think he’s read six books since he finished the 11th grade, and he probably didn’t even finish The Old Man and the Sea.

The problem I have with Trump is, on one hand, his form of fascism is an economic fascism, in that he looks at the presidency, at government, as a way to enrich himself and his corporate cronies. I don’t think he has national aspirations of an imperial colonial side. He might. But I think rather he looks at the world and says: How am I, Donald Trump and my few followers, Jared and a few others, going to make money out of this situation? Which to me sounds like some of the businessmen in Rome, around Mussolini in the 1920s, who didn’t really care what Mussolini did or said or stood for, as long as they made money out of it.

And so, Danny, I’d like to come back to your dichotomy between elites and non-elites as the division point, but since to me, Trump is what Richard is describing as a coup d’état of a cult. Yes, 75 million people did vote Republican in the last presidential election.

I don’t think all 75 million people believe everything Trump believes, any more than everybody who voted for Biden agrees with everything Biden will do or has done.

Let me ask you: is Trump’s fascism of an international character where he wants to make alliances with North Korea and Putin against Ukraine and Europe and the Global South? Or is it just a get-rich-quick scheme?

Daniel Warner: I think, Matthew, there’s a little bit of both. But the argument is Richard’s point, and I’ll come to that about the difference between the international and the global and Richard’s gloom. I mean, I’m amazed at what’s going on in New York at the United Nations. After all, the Secretary-General is more a secretary than a general. There is a certain moral leaning behind the UN charter. There’s a certain moral role for the UN. It doesn’t have an army. And yet here we have a meeting where the leaders come, and talk about various issues. Climate change is coming up, and yet four of the five members of the Security Council, permanent members did not have their leaders in New York. I think this is part of a movement where there is little leadership in the global community.

If we’re moving technologically, and financially, away from nationalism to something larger. The problems of pandemics and climate change are global. There is no pretense for the moment at any form of global leadership or moral leadership. Richard for years has talked about some kind of a global assembly. We’re getting further and further away from that at the same moment the problems are becoming more and more global.

“…there’s a feeling of a ship without a rudder…”

Richard Falk: Yes, I completely agree with this series of comments that Danny just made. I think part of the disaffection from the UN, I’m pretty sure Biden also wouldn’t have gone to speak at the General Assembly if the UN wasn’t headquartered in New York City and if he wasn’t the ‘host’ of this gathering. There is a helplessness on the part of these supposed leading governments and there’s a feeling of a ship without a rudder. And I felt that ever since 2003 when the U.S. acted unilaterally in Iraq and later to some extent in Afghanistan and Syria; the UN has demonstrated its irrelevance when it comes to war prevention. And what the U.S. has tried to do in this post-Ukraine period is to revive the UN, or more accurately to revitalize the UN as an instrument of its foreign policy, to rally countries against Russia, to compromise the veto, and to do various things that will make it more of a policy instrument than a community generating framework where countries that disagree can at least communicate with each other.

I regard these developments as a low point for the UN and a high point for groups like the G7 and the BRICS coalitions that are emerging outside the framework of the UN and purporting to address a similar world-order agenda. That should be central to what the UN is preoccupied and committed to doing and receive the funding that would enable it to carry out its mission as set forth in the Charter. This was part of the Secretary General’s complaint to the effect that the UN has a voice but it has insufficient funding and it is impossible to change the world without material capabilities.

Matthew Stevenson: I think you’re right, Richard, in that the United States, maybe when John Quincy Adams was president, had the ability to be the counterweight to some of these negative trends in the UN and other bodies. But if you start about 1848 with the Mexican-American War and go through to the Spanish-American War up to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and stops in between, the United States, for whatever reasons, probably economic, ceded that moral high ground to bring others behind the idealism that was present when the Constitution was drafted in 1789.

Now, Trump is in lockstep with so many of these other strong men in North Korea, Russia, India—that’s his peer group. And they don’t want to hear about the issues that everybody else feels are weighing on their soul—inflation, climate change, whatever they are. And you asked Richard, what can we do?

To me, the hope is somehow to allow the empowerment of what I consider a natural majority in the United States. A natural majority is not for the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court; nor is it for Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican Party; and it’s not for the Senate of Mitch McConnell.

The problem is that Americans cannot vote for the government that it both wants and deserves.

Richard Falk: I wonder about that. That’s an overly optimistic reading, I think. And we should remember that Biden is creating an atmosphere of moral hypocrisy on the fundamental issues that we’re talking about. He stresses his friendship with Modi and is very ambivalent about the horrible things that Netanyahu is associated with. How can one talk credibly about an alliance of democracies when you are so fundamentally hypocritical? It’s an alliance against China, and to say any country that is willing to join that alliance, including Saudi Arabia, a very repressive, non-democratic country, is welcome to be in that alliance.

And so the ideological roots of democracy are themselves not credible as a posture that opposes Trump. So Trump is the real thing when you look at it this way. And he did earlier have a vision of bypassing Europe and forming a new geopolitical alignment with China and Russia, which might have avoided the Ukraine crisis, I’m not sure, or at least handled it very, very differently. And so we’re in a period where the either-or of American politics leaves one with very little foundation for genuine hope.

“…it can happen here…”

Daniel Warner: I mentioned the United Nations because I’m trying to see if we don’t want to love Trump, we should want to love something. We can love our families, we can love our friends. But in a larger sense, in a moment of uncertainty and insecurity, we’re looking for certain places we can believe in and even love, if you want to use that word.

The United Nations, the international community, the charter of the United Nations, human rights, we could go on. They’re not out there. And that’s why I asked the question about where we could look for something positive. I do think that lots of people are not going to vote in the United States this time, perhaps not even thinking that, well, if Trump gets elected, does it make that much difference?

So I think there is not only gloom out there. I would say that people are turning more to their own needs, family needs, and financial needs. The whole concept of being part of a larger audience, a democratic audience, a larger part of a global marketplace, is losing whatever appeal it might have. It’s interesting to watch the paradox that at the same time the world becomes complex and interdependent, we are going back to a certain form of tribalism. Trump and the cult of Trump are an example of that return to a kind of simplistic, primitive tribalism that we thought we had overcome or that technologically demands a larger response.

Matthew Stevenson: Well, at the risk of becoming the closet optimist in this conversation, which is not my normal role in most conversations, let me posit the slightly positive side, which is, I think that Trump’s election in 2016 was an anomaly. They happen in American politics. His was an anomaly. Hillary Clinton, for whatever reason, had a lot of negatives that people didn’t want to vote for. Leave that aside. He didn’t win in 2018, he didn’t win in 2020, he didn’t win in 2022. Or his proxies. I don’t think he will win in 2024, at least.

If he does win, however negative you’ve been, you can be more negative.

But I would also say, Danny and Richard, that I do see hope in younger generations, our children, your children, everybody’s children, when you see some of the things that they’re willing to tackle—climate change, inequality, economic distribution into the Global South—and they’re devoting their lives to these causes, not simply just attending a rally here and there. At some level, that generation has to be heard.

It’s not being heard by the Bidens and by the Supreme Court and by the Senate and by Trump. And that’s to the detriment of all of us. And they’re not being heard in many countries beyond the United States, not being heard in India, Israel, Korea, you name it. But I do think in that in the younger generation, there is eloquence and there’s optimism. Optimism may be the wrong word. There’s at least a path that they’re willing to commit themselves to.

Daniel Warner: Matthew, I completely agree, and I’m impressed by the people, the young people, who are doing what you said. The question is the relationship between what they’re doing and politics. We started with the notion of Biden and democracy. Democracy has a cultural background to it and it also has a very simple administrative one. The question is how these young people cannot only do what they’re doing, but also get involved in a democratic process, political party, et cetera. And that seems to me to be complicated today.

Richard Falk: Just to add a word to that, the political party that is in opposition to Trump is not something that is attractive to these idealistic younger people. So they have to create their own new organizing framework and mobilize support, which is possible to make happen. Lots of unpredictable things have happened in our lifetimes, so we shouldn’t discount that. And I would share the view that the younger generation is more attuned to how the world needs to work if it is to overcome these challenges that are confronting society and are being met by mediocre or worse, leadership in the principal countries of the world.

“…is there a book that you might recommend?”

Matthew Stevenson: Let’s end on a literary note, since you’re both big readers. Let’s each of us recommend to our listeners and readers who’ve been with us on this dialogue a book that you’ve read that you think might be worth adding to the commentary on the subjects we’ve been discussing today.

Danny, you mentioned The Best and the Brightest, which is a show in and of itself about the making of foreign policy in Vietnam. But is there another book that you might recommend to our listeners?

Daniel Warner: Well, I was rereading Stanley Hoffmann’s Duties Beyond Borders. I was working on how little is going to humanitarian assistance today and how much money is being spent militarily. I think it’s important when we see the people fleeing the Global South, the desperation, and how here in Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross has a considerable budget deficit. It seems to me that Duties Beyond Borders is a good book to reread.

Richard Falk: Stanley Hoffmann, I agree with that, and there are a lot of books of that sort I would like to recommend. But I think for Americans, maybe this book that was written ten years or so ago with the title What’s the Matter with Kansas? [the author is Thomas Frank] is a good place to begin because it focuses on this phenomenon of people voting against their own material interests, and it raises questions about how the society is organized and how the capitalist mystique has led people to be distracted through these cultural issues like abortion and gay rights and other things that grant primacy to values over interests. We haven’t talked about that, but I think that’s all part of the alienation that is in some sense, one of the sources for “Loving Trump”—that he provides some kind of overview of the good society which is really a caricature and what it really embraces is a coherent, regressive vision of a bad society. But it’s something that engenders this kind of widespread love and devotion.

Matthew Stevenson: I am going to suggest the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, which was about the 1936 election—it’s fiction—but it results in not Roosevelt’s landslide win over Alf Landon, but the election of a fascist American senator who is very Trump-like in his depiction by Sinclair Lewis. And it is a quite a long novel, I would say, more than 400 pages about how the United States—at least in a fictional sense, and I would say in a current sense—pushed along by MAGA-like Republicans did embrace a native form of fascism. It might not have been Mussolini on his Rome balcony, but it had all the elements. Sinclair Lewis’s novel ends not on a pessimistic note, in the sense that the fascism burns itself out like some wildfire in the West. But the Lewis thesis is, don’t think that you’re above the descent into the anarchy which so many other countries have descended into, because, as he implies in his title, it can happen here.

Matthew Stevenson: I think we’ve reached the end of our allotted time. Gentlemen, one last wrap-up. Let’s end with Richard, who brought us the topic: “On Loving Trump”. Danny, you go first. I’ll go second. And Richard will go third. Any last word that you like to add?

Daniel Warner: Well, I think that the three of us continuing to talk in spite of the fact that we’re spread out around the world is an indication that we shouldn’t be all too gloomy.

Matthew Stevenson: Since I’m here in Prešov, which is in eastern Slovakia, I will quote David Lloyd George, who was one of the architects of world peace at Versailles and, in theory, on the side of angels, at least in some tellings of history. Not so much my telling of history…. At Versailles, when they were talking about Slovakia with Woodrow Wilson and whomever, David Lloyd George asked out loud: “Who are the Slovaks? I can’t quite seem to place them.” So it tells you that our leaders have limitations if we expect too much direction from the top.

Richard Falk: I certainly agree with that parting sentiment and I’d say that we can’t know the future but we can struggle to create the future we believe in. And if that message is widely enough disseminated it might generate a new kind of political energy that could reframe politics in the United States and elsewhere.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB. He is the author of numerous books, including Public Intellectual: Memoir of a Citizen Pilgrim and This Endangered Planet. He divides his time between the United States and Turkey.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva, where he served for many years as Deputy to the Director of the Graduate Institute. He lives in Geneva. 

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails, Appalachia Spring, and The Revolution as a Dinner Party, about China throughout its turbulent twentieth century. A recent book, about traveling in France and the Franco-Prussian wars, is entitled Biking with Bismarck. His new book is: Our Man in Iran. He lives outside Geneva.

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Why is Palestine’s West Bank Under Assault by Settlers and Netanyahu Coalition Government?

24 Jul

[Prefatory Note: The post below is a stylistically modified version of my conversation with independent journalist Daniel Falcone, which was published online in CounterPunch on July 21, 2023 under the title Collective Forgetting and the Politics of the West Bank. It tries to clarify the focus on Israel’s intensified repression concentrated on the West Bank since the Netanyahu coalition government took control. While the media focus has been focused on ‘the judiciary overhaul’ confrontation between antagonistic Jewish factions as to the ‘democratic’ character of Israel, the unifying themes in apartheid Israel remain the further marginalization of the Palestinians in their own. Homeland and matters of internal and national security. The Biden response is to act as if the only crisis worth addressing is that of Jew against Jew with regard to the contested issue of judicial reform, which if resolved consensually,  will permit the U.S. and rightest autocrats to reaffirm ‘shared values’ and ‘common strategic interests.’ A related question not directly covered in our dialogue is to ask is why the UN is so quiet about these disturbing developments, especially ignoring the obvious applicability of the legal norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) even as a prolonged Israeli occupation daily defies international law and the UN Charter, subjecting Palestinians to a deprivation of their basic rights in a period that has last for over a half century.

 

Why is Palestine’s West Bank Under Assault by Settlers and Netanyahu Coalition Government?

  1. With much of the Mideast in terms of current affairs, the reporting on human rights and the plight of Palestinians is usually geared towards a coverage of Gaza, Jerusalem and Israel proper. Could you provide a brief history of the West Bank and the significance of this landlocked occupied territory? In your estimation, is the region overlooked?

You raise an important, indeed a vital question, by wondering why until quite recently the media focus on human rights issues, weak as it has been with respect to Israel overall, has mainly given attention to events involving Gaza and East Jerusalem, while indirectly fostering an impression of virtual normalcy on the West Bank. I think a partial answer has to do with the relationship of these three Palestinian territories occupied since the 1967 War to the policy priorities of the Zionist agenda. In effect, East Jerusalem was extinguished as a separate international political entity shortly after a ceasefire was negotiated in 1967. Israel quickly moved to enlarge the spatial limits of Jerusalem, declared the unified, enlarged city as the eternal capital not only of Israel but of the Jewish people, and has so administered the city ever since. This unilateral move in violation of the ceasefire diplomacy was repudiated in the UN General Assembly and Security Council by large majorities of UN members but was never further challenged at the Security Council (because of the U.S. veto) or the World Court (International Court of Justice). Jerusalem as capital of Israel became the operative reality for the country, but not for most governments in the world, including surprisingly even many NATO .members who continued to believe that peace could be found if Palestinian statehood was agreed upon with East Jerusalem as capital.

When the Trump White House in 2017 broke ranks and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced its intention to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem the GA reacted, condemning the proposed U.S. diplomatic departure from the UN consensus as ‘null and void’ by a. vote of 128-9 (35 abstentions; 21 absences) [GA ES-10/10/29, Dec. 21, 2017; shortly before, the Security Council supported a similar position by 14-1, but the U.S. blocked action by casting its veto]. The embassy was moved and as always, no adverse effects for Israel followed this defiance of International Law and UN authority. When Biden took over the U.S. presidency in 2021 he did nothing to modify or even moderate Trump’s extremely one-sided approach that exceeded prior forms of U.S. pro-Israeli partisanship, including that of Biden’s Democratic Party predecessor, Barack Obama. This Biden behavior is a strong confirmation that bipartisanship persists when it comes to Israel, despite the overall political mood, which is one of polarization. By so acting Biden tends to disregard even the most Trump-supported Israeli disruptive departures from the UN consensus and the requirements of international law. Yet unlike Trump Biden lamely reiterated the U.S. commitment to a two-state solution totally overlooking how much Israel’s dailly actions were making such a politically negotiated outcome almost impossible to imagine, This gave the continuing advocacy of the two-state approach an increasingly zombie-like quality, and. made Biden appear naïve or muddled, and Trump at least forthright and consistent..

The UN as an Organization, never formally accepted, nor did it meaningfully challenge, this outcome of de facto revisions of the Security Council 242 unanimous decision calling for Israeli withdrawal from all Palestinian territories occupied during the war and a just settlement of the refugee controversy, Successive UN Special Rapporteurs on Israeli violations of international law in the OPT continued to treat Israel as an Occupying State in East Jerusalem with full responsibility to uphold international humanitarian law as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation. These well-evidenced charges angered Israel to the point of ending any semblance of cooperation with the UN, a move that ran counter to its treaty obligations as a UN Member to cooperate in the discharge of activity authorized by UN procedures. It needs to be recalled that the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) was understood as a temporary interlude, prefiguring the territorial boundaries of an independent Palestine state that was widely, and at first, genuinely believed to be the indispensable and realizable precondition for an Israeli/Palestine durable peace, with East Jerusalem serving as the capital of. Palestine.  

With respect to Gaza, although the same OPT designation as used for East Jerusalem and the West Bank was adopted at the UN after the 1967 War, its relationship to Israel and Zionism, or to the UN/US image of a peace process, was quite different than either that of East Jerusalem or the West Bank, which is explained by the fact that under most readings of the. Zionist Project Gaza is not included in standard conceptions of the permanent territorial delimitation of the Jewish supremist state. According to Jewish tradition the biblically specified Jewish entitlement in Palestine did not include Gaza, which was not part of the Jewish imaginary of ‘the promised land.’.

Israel did occupy Gaza for many years after 1967, and even established a number of unlawful settlements in the coastal region of the Strip, Nevertheless, Gaza was never a. territorial priority for Israel, which explains the adoption and relative uncontroversial implementation of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 ‘disengagement plan’ calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the dismantling of the settlements. From a UN/international standpoint, Israel’s plan of disengagement had no legal effect on Israel’s continuing responsibilities of Israel as an Occupying Power regarding the administration of the Gaza Strip, In terms of the modalities of Israeli control, disengagement amounted to little more than a redeployment of IDF occupying troops on the Israeli side of the Gaza borders reinforced by a variety of miliary penetrations ranging from overflights emitting terrifying sonic booms to massive incursions with advanced weaponry.

Until very recently Gaza seemed mainly an economic and security burden for Israel, accentuated as previously mentioned that it was seldom included among Zionist territorial objectives and besides was thought of as a difficult demographic pill for Israel to swallow given its civilian population of 2.1 million, with about two-thirds living as refugees in camps, mainly families descended from those dispossessed by the Nakba in 1948. In addition, Gazans did not endure their fate passively. Gaza has long been a thorn in Israel’s side, being the site of several radical forms of Palestinian resistance, including both the intifadas of 1987 and 2000, militant forms of resistance, The Great March of Return (March 2017-December 2019), and the heartland of Hamas. In 2006 Hamas was partly enticed by Washington to abandon armed struggle and participate in the 2006 Gaza elections, being assured that this was a way of moving toward ‘peace’ or at least ‘peaceful co-existence,’ which Hamas leaders were proposing during this period. Despite this background, the Hamas electoral victory defied Washington’s expectations and came as a shock. It also produced a harsh Israeli response awkwardly supported by the U.S., leading to the imposition of a comprehensive punitive blockade that has remained in force since 2007, periodic large-scale military incursions causing much devastation and serving as a show case for new Israeli weapons and counterinsurgency tactics, the scene of frequent targeted assassinations, and a deterrent warning to Arab neighbors and Iran to avoid provoking Israel or expect punishing military attacks as directed at Syria and Lebanon over the years..

When it comes to Israel proper, the settler colonial discourse is relevant and has been more recently relied upon to explain the. history of the struggle through the optic of the Palestinian narrative, featuring an apartheid regime of ethnic control and repression. Palestinians are effectively marginalized within Israel, currently threatened by the prospect of a single Jewish supremist state that incorporates the entire OPT, plus or minus Gaza, and enjoys legal status in Israel by virtue of the Basic Law adopted in 2018.. The only internal obstacle to carrying out this maximalist version of the Zionist Project seems to be the resistance mounted in the West Bank, typified by the deep attachment of the residents to what they feel and understandably believe to be their homeland. The interplay of. oppressive rule and tragic circumstances, given meaning and dignity by Palestinian sumud or steadfastness, and expressed by the common extreme sayings popular among WB residents: “If we had the chance we would choose death over living under occupation” or “living from lack of death.” This situation is made more acute by the absence of proper Palestinian representation in international and domestic venues, exemplified

by the collaborationist Palestinian Authority and the fragmentation of Palestinian unity arising from bitter ongoing tensions between the PA and Hamas.

Given the extremist government in Israel since the beginning of 2023, this shift in attention. to the West Bank seemed inevitable. Netanyahu’s coalition government has given a green light to settler violence and extremist strivings, apparently to bring an end to the conflict through tactics of state-endorsed terror, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, settlement expansion, and total demoralization of West Bank Palestinian communities. It represents the last desperate stage of settler colonialism in which the objective is to totally subdue and marginalize the resisting native population., In some historical instances of settler colonialism the people of the land are virtually eliminated as an oppositional presence (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand). It is also widely believed by settler communities if they do not win by such a replacement logic, they lose as in South Africa or Algeria.

  • 2. How would you gauge and evaluate the international responses to the West Bank and the human rights abuses that take place there in terms of the following two areas: 1) political and legal institutions and 2) the press coverage around the world? 

We should not believe that the period before the recent Israeli government took over was free from systemic and severe human rights abuses by Israel in its role as Occupying Power of the West Bank. The issues of excessive force, unlawful settlements, house demolitions, internal mobility restrictions, collective punishments, de facto annexation, separation wall, apartheid were all present ever since the occupation commenced in 1967, and each represented serious violations of international law. At the same time, the extremists in the present Israeli government have scaled up the intensity, overtness, and blunt and defiant racism of preexisting Israel’s repressive policies and practices. To the extent that the Israeli government has responded to international criticism it has either claimed ‘security’ or ‘counterterrorist’ justifications, accompanied by a bright shining green light of hands-off approval to settler violence no matter how vicious and overt, as with the. genocidal burning of the Palestinian Village of Harawa on February 26, 2023. The attack on the Jenin refugee camp for several days in early July was a horror show for the people on the that was given scant international media coverage, given the magnitude and indiscriminate character of the Israeli violence. Such displays of excessive force flagrantly violates the duties of an Occupying Power under international humanitarian law, and has led recent UN Special Rapporteurs to declare Israel’s continued status as an authorized Occupying Power under the 4th Geneva Convention at an end.

In effect, political and legal institutions in Israel have given their approval to these settler

outbursts, which can only be seen as an attempt to make the West Bank unlivable for Palestinians, and thus should be interpreted as a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of a people long held captive in their own homeland. The use of the IDF to mount a major military operation, involving death and devastation, against the refugee camp in Jenin was a further indication that Israeli settlers were not lone wolf predators, but part of a public/private campaign to complete the Zionist Project by imposing Israel’s rule over the whole of Occupied Palestine except for Gaza, that is, a single supremist and exclusivist Israel state of the Jewish people, containing as few Palestinians as possible. There is also renewed talk among this new brand of Israeli leadership favoring the reoccupation and resettlement of Gaza, possibly reflecting partly the extension of expansionist goals beyond the promised land and partly the realization that being situated next to Egypt and the scene of recently discovered offshore natural gas fields gives Gaza a previously unappreciated strategic importance.

The main media coverage has focused on the violent events, and in the West given a typically misleading ‘both sides’ treatment of the issue of responsibility, blaming the Palestinians, especially Hamas and Islamic Jihad, for an upsurge of terrorist incidents while mildy criticizing Israel for over-reacting by entrusting the shaping of its security policies to such leading extremist figures as Itamar Ben-Gvir, currently the Minister of National Security. There is very little interpretative assessment to be found on the main media platforms as to why this Israeli intensification of West Bankl violence is currentlly occurring, and thus little public understanding of what underlies this new stage of Israel/Palestine confrontational politics. It requires heeding a Zionist ideologue such as Tom Friedman of the NY Times to give a cynical realist account that makes overt what had long been common knowledge among independent commentators and UN diplomats that Palestinian statehood was never intended to become a reality but was useful only because it served Israel and the U.S. as ‘a shared fiction.’ [July 11, 2023], and amazingly, despite its implausibility, still does. The two-state mantra has served all along as the cynical keynote of the beguiling charade called ‘a peace process’ in which Washington has long helped Israeli leaders manage off-stage, a demeaning story well-documented by Rashid Khalidi in his pre-Trump Brokers of Deceit (2013). In truth, Trump’s value added for Israel was to end the deceitful core of Washington’s ‘honest broker’ posture and bring U.S. policies into the bright sunlight of undisguised partisanship. In a new twist, Friedman proposes an opportunistic revival of two-statism as still the most viable path to a sustainable peace, better for Israel and the U.S. than the present Netanyahu’s push for one-statism. In Friedman’s words, “it is vital that Biden urgently take steps to re-energize the possibility of a two-state solution and give it at least some concrete diplomatic manifestation on the ground.” [NYT, May 25, 2023.]

Put differently, the media coverage gives some attention to the trees (the violence), but seems mindless about the fate of the forest (the underlying scheme). The West Bank strength of Palestinian sumud  is an extraordinary display of resolve to remain attached to land and place. It is the background of the mounting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s effort to appropriate the land, olive orchards, and traditions of a rooted people. The present Israeli government conceives of this struggle to achieve supremacy in the West Bank as the overdue last act in a suspenseful political drama that has unnecessarily lasted so long in a wasteful effort to appease world opinion and satisfy allies.

While most of the. world, including the NATO West, is distracted by Ukraine and the challenges of climate change, this Netanyahu government apparently is seizing an opportunity to achieve two hard-right victories (away from constitutional democracy, and crushing Palestinian resistance). In this unfolding situation, the Palestinians rally to stay engaged in a struggle that they remained determined to win eventually, having the flow of anti-colonial history, as well as law and morality on their side. Israel, in contrast, seems caught between a final fulfillment of the Zionist dream and a fear that its house of cards may collapse as happened elsewhere, especially in South Africa. In these circumstances Netanyahu’s Israel is trying to impose an anti-democratic judicial overhaul of the Israel state to remove obstructions to institutionalizing autocratic populism that is pitting Jew against Jew in Israel in a deep struggle of marginal significance to Palestinian aspirations. Yet it keeps American leaders awake because the Jewish veneer of democracy is vanishing before their eyes and with it the credibility of the claim of ‘shared values’ and ‘shared interests,’ used to validate the continued large annual appropriations of U.S. taxpayer funds as well as the official posture of seeing no evil. Although the U.S. Congress seems undaunted and as blindfolded as ever backing a resolution of continuing unconditional support for Israel by a vote of 412-9 on July 18th, that is after weeks of the judiciary overhaul protests and the brutal attack with drones and hundreds of troops on the densely inhabited Jenin refugee camp, cutting electricity and water, and ripping up many of the camp’s roads with bulldozers.

  • 3. The US-backed recent attack on the Jenin refugee camp on July 4, 2023 saw thousands fleeing for safety for those lucky enough to survive. One feature of the violence is the profound effect it’s having on women and children in the region and the society. Can you describe how the Israeli policies exist within a framework of sexism and childism as well as classism and racism?

You pose very deep questions about this reality, climaxing recently, at Jenin. From the Israeli point of view, the most vulnerable among the Palestinians have been victimized throughout the prolonged occupation. Partly this reflects the fact that children often were the most visible and innocent of resistors, imprudently throwing their symbolic stones at their high tech Israeli military oppressors, and thus encountering the security apparatus most directly and disturbingly, with a recent World Bank survey finding that as many as 58% of Palestinian children living under occupation are suffering from mental disorders of depression and PYSD.[Haaretz, July 16, 2023] This all takes place in the context of a pervasive repressive social structure that encompasses class, race, religion, and gender hierarchical distinctions, and what amounts to the Orientalist erasure of the Palestinian people. It is notable that in the principal rendition of Friedman’s recalibration of support for Israel, in effect, letting Israel be Israel without liberal softeners, there is not a word of empathy for the Palestinian ordeal or even the now acknowledged fiction of seeking a political compromise that turns out to have been all along a cruel, prolonged instance of ‘fake diplomacy.’ [See Philip Weiss, “’Apartheid’ Says Tom Friedman, Mondoweiss, July 15, 2023]

4) With the reemergence of Elliott Abrams, can you comment on the path forward for the Biden Administration and talk about how the recent attacks move us further away from roadmaps to achieving peace in the West Bank?

It has become clear that when it comes to human rights the Biden presidency is tone deaf, self-righteously condemning rivals for their violations while using its diplomatic leverage to. shield Israel and others from justified criticism, double standards writ large equates with moral hypocrisy. The appointment of Elliott Abrams to the U.S Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy should appall what’s left of the liberal conscience. [See Sarah Jones, Why is the Biden Administration Rewarding Elliott Abrams? Foreign Policy, July 6, 2023] It is well known that Abrams, as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, knowingly fashioning a partial coverup of the El Mazote 1981 massacre of over 1,000 left civilian opponents of the repressive government, by a U.S. trained death squad in El Salvador. In subsequent roles, Abrams has been unconditional supporter of Israel over the years backing its most controversial behavior and castigating critics. [Detailed critiques of Abrams’ career see Eric Alterman, “Confirmed: Elliott Abrams Defense of Murder Was Based on Lies,” The Nation,June 30, 2020} To select someone with Abrams’ record relative to human rights as a high-profile consultant on diplomatic policy is to drop the veil of liberal innocence altogether. It is, perhaps, a further indication that Friedman’s shift to ‘fake diplomacy’ is part of a broader revisioning of American political identity, although it makes even emptier Biden’s already vapid championship of an alliance of democracies.

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January 6th: A Year Later

6 Jan

In retrospect, the attempted insurrection at the Capitol was about a great deal more than an angry expression of disappointment by the populist side of gun culture America. The coup attempt of January 6th failed, yet it succeeded in undermining the unwritten, yet vital, social contract that brought high levels of stability to United States since the republic was established in 1789. The contract had featured a long succession of peaceful transfers of power after national elections. In effect, the U.S. more than almost anywhere earned high praise for its sustained establishment of procedural democracy, further enhanced by a two-party system that put aside differences during times of national emergency proclaiming bipartisanship a political virtue if national security was at risk.

This stability was unquestionably a great achievement for an ethnically and religiously diverse country with a large population, but this American record should be celebrated cautiously, with humility, and massive qualifications that must never be ignored. This U.S. rise to great power status rested on genocidally driven ethnic cleansing of native Americans combined with economic prosperity for a land-based settler colonial white elite that owed its high standard of living to the racist and exploitative benefits of slavery. Even after the American Civil War and the end of slavery, racism remained, was cruel in its dehumanizing effects on perpetrators as well as victims, and extended to the entire country. That the United States could constantly invoke its own exceptionalism and convince most of the world that it was ‘the city on the hill,’ ‘the new Jerusalem,’ and ‘a light unto the nations’ remains without doubt a masterful triumph of public relations and state propaganda, a precursor of the capitalist empires built by Madison Avenue advertising ingenuity. But truth it is not, and never was!

What was true, which was a truthful exception to the big early lies, was the widespread adherence to the electoral process by which political leadership was determined, and legitimized. Procedural democracy at its core remains about the sanctity of elections as credible expressions of citizen consent. Even though there is no text it was this core provision of the social contract that was dangerously weakened by the January 6th assault on the Capitol, and even more than the assault itself, by the instigating and cheerleading role played by Trump and his immediate entourage. Even more telling is the commitment a year later by one of the two major political parties to a manifest falsehood of the greatest political consequence. The Republican Party overwhelmingly supports the central lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and this Trump deserves to be president. We can safely assume that most of the Republican leadership knows that it is endorsing a falsehood, but does so nevertheless for cynical reasons associated with calculations about their own political futures.

In the recent past this national ethos that expected politicians, whatever their ideology, to be good losers was strong enough in 1960 to lead Richard Nixon, not noted for his high morals, to forego any effort to overturn the official results despite strong indications that the votes recorded in Illinois were fraudulently manipulated to hand John F. Kennedy a victory he may not deserved if the votes had been fairly counted. Similarly, in 2000 Al Gore handed the presidency to George W. Bush despite some chicanery in Florida that invalidated a large number of Gore votes and may well have handed the White House over to the Republicans even though they ‘lost’ the elections. The point is not to revisit such controversies, but to show how previously strong was this sense that even when electoral outcomes that possibly had decisive, rough edges the official outcome should be respected for the sake of maintaining  confidence among the citizenry in the trustworthiness of the process. In mounting this ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign Trump repudiated this tradition in a context that lacked even a credible basis for questioning the propriety of the electoral process.

Such behavior prefigures downfall in a political system that stakes its legitimacy on the periodic opportunity of its political parties to nominate candidates, adopt platforms, and compete for the support of the citizenry. Such a procedural democracy does not pretend to rest its legitimacy on justice, yet early on the Constitution was amended to confer civil and political rights on its citizenry with the central abuse of power by the government. Yet to this day America never purported to become a substantive democracy that extends effective social protection or universal human rights to all of its citizens in the manner of many European countries that have upheld a quite different social democratic contract with their citizens . In that sense, the most basic freedom of all for American  citizens, although not inscribed in parchment or openly proclaimed, has been preserving the right of every citizen to fail, a right substantially upheld through times of prosperity and hardship, reflecting the boom and bust bedrock cycles of capitalist theory and practice. The mixture of a cult of individualism together with minimally regulated capitalism is as much a part of constitutional order as are elections and the rule of law, but rarely avowed.

Under the economic weight and political challenges of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the New Deal fashioned by FDR and the Democrats served to rescue capitalism, a recovery process further helped by the onset of World War II. This was something so-called principled conservatives never liked, considering it an encroachment on individualism, which included the sanctified right to fail, and the willingness of those who fail to accept the often cruel consequences resulting in homelessness and denials of health care. A sophisticated interpretation of January 6th would be to regard it as a long deferred payback by Republicans for the alleged abandonment by Democrats of this right to fail, including attendant flirtations with the New Deal safety net of social protection, demonized by the Republicans at the time and ever since as ‘crypto-socialism,’ if not outright socialism. Already in the 1980s Ronald Reagan built the ideological foundations upon which the House of Trump was erected, including dislike of the left, including liberals with particular hostility to organized labor, reproductive rights for woman, permissiveness toward racism, racially tainted toughness on crime, and initiatives that gave the 50 states much more of a governance role in the country at the expense of the central governance structures that operated out of Washington. 

What is almost as worrisome are that the defenders of the old order, mainly the Democrats and the Democratic establishment, are sleepwalking while political subversion on a large scale occurs. Democrats are disunited, lack coherent ideas, and mostly without passion, except at the progressive edges represented by Black Lives Matter and Alexandria Ortega-Cortez and the squad. Remember that AOC, despite being the clearest voice of national conscience was only allowed 30 seconds to speak at the Democratic Party nominating convention in 2019. Also, when it comes to truthfulness, the Democrats also have dirty hands. How many among their leadership condemn the apartheid nature of the Israel state despite the preponderance of the evidence, confirmed by mainstream human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem)? Or propose sanctioning Saudi Arabia in response to the brutal murder of an internationally respected journalist, Jamal Khasoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in 2018, a state crime carried out on orders of the government? And despite school shootings and an epidemic of urban gun violence how many Democrats are willing to advocate the repeal of the Second Amendment or take the political risk of voting against a bloated military budget at a time of growing domestic economic misery? Bringing Joe Biden to the White House in 2021 was a metaphoric display of a moribund opposition that didn’t seem to grasp the central reality that the country was facing a growing crisis of toxic polarization. Biden obviously didn’t understand that his repeated early calls for national unity were not only ineffectual, but called attention to how out of touch he was with political tides sweeping across the country, which were yearning for confrontation, not societal harmony. As Noam Chomsky has been warning us what happened lasst January is still happening. In other words, the coup was not only an event, but that a process that is continuing to haunt our future, gains momentum, and engages willing architects draw up plans for achieving its dark goals.

Such a situation is dire, not only at home but globally. The needed focus on climate change, COVID, refugees and migrants, nuclearism and militarism, international law and the UN, peacemaking in the Middle East is missing, and other concerns is absent.

In other words, January 6th not only broke the social contract between state and society, but also exposed the ineptitude and decay of two-party democracy. Such an exposure should not be limited to the U.S. as parallel descents into political infernos are evident in such varied national contexts as Brazil, India, Myanmar, Philippines, Hungary, Russia. There seems to be a structural flight from humane patterns of governance due almost everywhere, at least partly due to the effects of neoliberal globalization intensifying inequalities and deepens alienation.

What must be evident is that without a surge of revolutionary energies responsive to national, sub-national, regional, and global challenges, the human future is unfolding beneath darkening clouds. Smoothing the rough edges of this American political crisis may buy some needed time to reinvent humane politics in the 21st century at the onset of this first bio-political-ecological-ethical-spiritual crisis ever to confront the human species, and then the hard work of inventing and deploying a transformative politics begins.     

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The Trump Pardons and Fast-Tracking Capital Punishment

31 Dec

Measuring Trump the Man: Pardons and Capital Punishment

Among the disquieting dimensions of this strangest of all Christmas holidays

has been the lurid spectacle of misplaced empathy by Donald Trump, placatingcronies and criminals who helped him circumvent law and morality while exhibiting hard heartedness toward those unfortunate souls awaiting execution on death row in federal prisons. Perhaps, most lamentable of all oversights has been the failure up to this moment to pardon Assange on both principled and humanitarian grounds. The U.S. application for Assange’s extradition, if granted, could subject him to a lengthy prison term. 

The pardon power is set forth in general terms in Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, and by Supreme Court decision is without limitation beyond its own terms. The pardon power applies only to federal crimes, and cannot be used to pardon state crimes, and it does not apply to impeachment proceedings. The rationale for the pardoning power, contested at the time by federalist opponents of strong national government, was set forth in Federalist Paper #74 authored by Alexander Hamilton. The stress was on the need for some check on mistaken or unjust punishments resulting from improper applications of  federal criminal law. In Hamilton’s words, without “easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” This linkage between the pardoning power and the need for an effective antidote for the unjust application of criminal law was central, and has generally governed its use, but there have been a variety of questionable pardons in the last 50 years, but none to match the Trump’s undisguised corruption of pardoning as an aspect of governance.

Eyebrows have been raised in the past when occasionally U.S. presidents have pardoned former contributors to their political campaigns or tried to avoid criminal accountability for those who tried to cover up presidential wrongdoing. Richard Nixon explored all his options in seeking to achieve impunity for those who carried out the Watergate break-in and his closest complicit aides. Nixon, apparently wary of partisan pardoning, even floated the idea among his aides of freeing the Watergate band of warriors from criminal accountability at the same time that he uncharacteristically pardoned an equivalent number of anti-war Vietnam protesters or issuing a pardon for all who left the country to evade military service during the Vietnam War. Nixon’s idea, never acted upon, seemed to assume that a show of political balance would quiet criticism of an inappropriate pardon. Obviously, such wheeling and dealing is not what the drafters of the Constitution had in mind. Gerald Ford, as president, issued a controversial pardon to Nixon in 1974 for all offenses against U.S. law committed during his time in the White House (1969-1974), understood to refer to the Watergate break in, and part of the arrangement to secure Nixon’s resignation.   

Now Trump comes along with a more coherent message of loyalty to followers and those beloved by the extreme right-wing and vindictiveness toward those who fall afoul of law and order militants. Love for those who stood by him, however disreputable their behavior or how gross their flaunting of the law, which even concluded in several instances consorting with America’s number one geopolitical rival, Russia. While so bestowing pardons as if thank you notes for evil deeds, Trump indulged  his seemingly gratuitous hatred toward those who were sitting on death row in Federal prisons sentenced to death, including in some cases where the evidence establishing guilt was flimsy or still under legal challenge, and often where the harshness of the sentence seemed to reflect considerations of race and class more than the gravity of the crime. Trump abandoned the practice of civility by past presidents, who suspended federal executions during the transition period between elections and inauguration. Instead Trump went to the perverse opposite extreme by ordering the fast-tracking of executions, presumably to take away the possibility of commuted sentences or eventual pardons. Any reliance on capital punishment is increasingly rejected by societies where democratic values and practices prevail, and it remains a substantive and symbolic concern for all of us who fear and oppose the violence of the state whether at home or abroad. No state is trustworthy enough, or even sufficiently competent, as to be empowered with the right to impose a death sentence even on those convicted of transgressing the criminal constraints of law in the most horrifying ways. It is not only a matter of being sure not to execute someone later shown to be innocent or of executing a convicted person who was subjected to a harsher punishment than the crime warranted. The rejection of capital punishment is an expression of a societal commitment to the sacredness of every human life, whatever the offending behavior, expressing the view that a path to redemption should never be altogether closed off.

Unquestionably, the worst of Trump’s pardons involved Blackwater security guards who opened fire back in 2007 on unarmed Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad , killing 14 Iraqis including children aged 9 and 11, and wounding another 30. This event was viewed by the Iraqi population as a massacre of such gravity that it generated demands for legal redress from this people supposedly ‘liberated’ from the oppressive and dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and if not met, then to the steeper demand that the U.S. end its occupation and remove its troops and bases. Four of the Blackwater killers were indicted, and in 2014, three were convicted of ‘voluntary manslaughter’ and one of ‘murder,’ and all were given lengthy prison sentences. Trump’s pardons, apparently partly prompted by right-wing extremist agitation in ultra-conservative U.S circles, caused ripples of disapproval by the liberal media in America, but expressions of outrage and dismay in Iraq, especially by families of those killed or wounded. It reinforced an image of the occupation of Iraq as an imperialist venture, which devalued the lives of Iraqis, and completely discredited American claims of promoting the rule of law and a claimed commitment to criminal responsibility for its civilian security operatives. A widely quoted observation by a classmate of one of the young victims in 2007 expresses the toxic perception of the pardon by the Iraqi people, including anti-Saddam Iraqis who had initially welcomed the American intervention, although later living to regret their receptivity to a foreign regime-changing intervention: “The Americans have never approached us Iraqis as equals. As far as they are concerned, our blood is cheaper than water and our demands for justice and accountability are merely a nuisance.”

Of course, the pardon exposes the larger unindicted international crime of aggression against Iraq in 2003 followed by occupation, which with troublesome irony, was less supported back then by Trump than by the incoming president, Joe Biden. At the time of the Nisour Square Massacre there were over 160,000 American mercenaries in Iraq, a for-profit supplement to a troop presence of about the same number, a telltale expression of mercenary militarism disconnected from securing the homeland. As with other large-scale U.S. regime-changing interventions, the costs in Iraq have been incredibly high, and yet none of the promised positive results prompting the attack in 2003 have been achieved. Iraq became the site of one those ‘forever wars’ that causes the population to suffer for long periods, usually ending only when the imperial invader gets tired, and gives up the venture.

In Vietnam this intervention fatigue happened with memorable clarity, in Afghanistan periodic efforts to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban point in the same direction. In Iraq, ISIS emerged in reaction to pro-Shi’ite occupation policies and sectarianism greatly intensified as a result of the American occupation. A national circumstance of bitterness, chaos, and unresolved political strife, is the legacy of 17 years of costly occupation that also diminished the overall U.S. reputation as a generally benevolent global actor entrusted with a leadership role. The pardons certify this underlying geopolitical refusal of the American ‘bipartisan consensus’ to live with the results of national self-determination in the post-colonial, post-Cold War era, where nationalist resistance to intervention is more intense and the ethos of exploitative occupation becomes manageable only by dehumanizing the indigenous population through intimidating violence and a regime of inequality that corrupts elites while making most citizens endangered strangers in their own homeland. The Palestinian ordeal is a gruesome variant, colonists displacing natives from which many forms of malevolence follow, including cycles of resistance inducing displacement and oppression. The Zionist Project of establishing a Jewish state in an essentially non-Jewish society almost inevitably led to racially tinged modes of oppressive internal security, which is best understood as a form of apartheid that the statute of the International Criminal Court has classified under the heading of Crimes Against Humanity in Article 7.

The Blackwater pardons occur just a short time before Iranians and others in the region pause to remember General Qassim Soleimani on the first anniversary of his drone assassination on the direct order of the U.S. President, not only an extreme example of targeted killing in the vicinity of the Baghdad Airport that violates international human rights law has been described by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Agnés Challimard, in her 2020 official report as amounting to an ‘act of war’ in violation of the UN Charter and customary international law. As Iranians and Iraqis have been quick to observe, the Soleimani assassination and the Blackwater pardon are two sides of the same coin, the geopolitical currencies of U.S. criminality abroad and impunity at home. As has been pointed out in an article on the blowback potential of the Blackwater pardons, the anger aroused among those in Iraq and elsewhere opposed to the American presence in the Middle East could retaliate in ways that put at greater risk the lives of American soldiers. [See Iveta Cherneva, “Soleimani’s Death Anniversary could Fuel Retaliation by pro-Iran Militias,” Modern Diplomacy, Dec. 30, 2020].

Nothing better reveals the Trump approach than the vindictive pursuit of Julian Assange despite his serious illness and prolonged confinement, the Obama period decision to not pursue prosecution despite an espionage indictment for revealing classified information, and in light of the essential nature of his whistleblowing undertaking that focused on the disclosure of war crimes in the WikiLeaks’ documents. The Federal Court in Virginia that found Assange guilty of 17 violations of the 1917 Espionage Law, subjecting him to a potentially absurd 175 years in a maximum security prison where he would be housed alongside the country’s most notorious criminals. His unjust confinement would likely be coupled with the added punishment of solitary confinement. Most worrisome as an example to others, it would be the first time ever that a journalist doing his job was prosecuted and convicted of espionage in the United States.

After seven stressful years of refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador, Assange was finally free to leave the without facing extradition to Sweden as dubious rape charges were dropped. It was at this point the the US requested the UK to extradite Assange, with a decision due from the London Central Criminal Court on January 4th of 2021, a. tribunal that seemed  hostile to Asssange in its administration of the extradition hearing, with the presiding judge reported to have close family ties to leading figures in British intelligence. Acts deemed ‘political crimes’ are normally. excluded from extradition. Assange’s allegedly criminal behavior was what journalism should be doing in democratic societies. It was clearly politically motivated. As such, Assange’s supposed ‘criminal’ offenses should be treated as non-extraditable, and on humanitarian grounds he should be released forthwith from Belmarsh Prison in London, and issued an official apology. Assange, along with others whistleblowers. who dared to reveal the hidden infrastructures of state crime, deserve to have statues in public squares, not prison cells.  

This notorious effort to criminalize the disclosure of state crimes strikes one more blow against truth-telling and the limiting of freedom of expression in countries that pride themselves by proclaiming democratic values. The scandalous abuse of Assange accentuates prior efforts to criminalize the whistleblowing exploits of Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning.  It is more evident than ever thar the future of constitutional democracy depends on the safety valve of an unintimidated media and the insulation of informants from criminal liability. This is not to deny the existence of tricky policy issues associated with protecting legitimate state secrets relating to homeland security, diplomacy, and law enforcement, but no such issue excuses either the treatment of Assange in Britain or his pursuit by the U.S. Government. 

There have been rumors that Trump might still use his authority to grant Assange a pardon, not so much for political reasons, as to avoid one more line of controversy. After all, it was Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign who encouraged WikiLeaks to release a batch of emails thought to be damaging to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. There are others in the Trump entourage, most prominently Mike Pompeo, who support extradition and jail because the Assange disclosures allegedly weakened U.S. security. Whatever Trump does about Assange, it will not greatly alter this final chapter of his presidency, which exposes above all else, his warped attitudes toward life and death. 

If there is no pardon, Biden’s handling of this now incendiary pardon/impunity/capital punishment interface in relation to Julian Assange will give a strong clue to the kind of leadership he will provide. Unfortunately, Biden is on record as having compared WikiLeaks to a terrorist organization. No matter what happens on January 4th, drama will ensue.

There are lessons to be learned  and acted upon by progressives in reaction to these dual celebrations of death at this time of seasonal holiday at the end of a year of this strange year dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic: demilitarize security at home and abroad, disarm America and Americans, retrain and restrain the police, abolish capital punishment, close hundreds of American overseas bases, bring the navy back to territorial waters, demilitarize and denuclearize as national priorities, rejoin and enhance global cooperation related to climate change, and shift resources from ‘national (regime) security’ to ‘human (people) security.’

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Interview on U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East

2 Nov

[Prefatory Note: a short interview on Election Day in the United States, a momentous test of whether the Trump challenge to constitutional democracy will be decisively repudiated by the American people and whether Republicans will mount a perverse challenge via the judicial system to deny the majority of the people their choice of leadership. The system is structurally rigged against democratic values by enabling Trump to be reelected via the anachronistic Electoral College even if he loses the popular vote by 5,000,000 or more. Beyond this, a Biden presidency will not address the deeper flaws associated with U.S. global militarism and predatory neoliberalism but it will respond responsibly and empathetically to a country gravely wounded by the pandemic and it will moderate the toxic political atmosphere that Trump and Trumpists have so stridently championed. For the first time ever in American political history, the aftermath of the election is likely to be more consequential than the election itself! The full meaning of this electoral experience is more likely to be disclosed on November 4th and the following weeks than on November 3rd when voting comes to an end. This interview was conducted by a journalist representing the Mehr News Agency in Iran.]   

Q: Will US foreign policy towards the Middle East change with the possible change of US president? What about US policy toward Iran?

A: While it appears as if Biden will be elected, dark clouds of uncertainty hover over the American elections as never before in the country’s history. The possibilities of a paralyzing constitutional crisis and serious civil strife cannot be excluded. At the same time, if Biden enters the White House, U.S. foreign policy will not change dramatically, at least in the beginning. For one thing, the domestic challenges are too great. The COVID health crisis and the troubled US economy are likely to dominate presidential politics during Biden’s first year of so. The emphasis would be placed on strictly American issues including imposing strict regulation of health guidelines, stimulus initiatives to help ease economic hardships especially among the jobless, minorities, and the poor, while calming racial tensions and lessening political polarization.

Against this background, if as expected, Biden is elected, and a proper transfer of political leadership by Trump, then it is likely that in the short run US foreign policy toward the Middle East will be moderated, but not fundamentally changed. It is likely that Biden’s approach to Israel/Palestine will remain highly partisan in Israel’s favor but with somewhat less disregard of the UN and the EU on issues such as annexation and settlement-building, but will allow the US Embassy to remain in Jerusalem, will endorse the recent normalization agreements with UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, and will not challenge the Israeli incorporation of the Golan Heights into its territory. 

The Biden approach will likely be instructively revealed by its approach to Syria, which in turn will reflect the willingness of Russia, and Iran, to help manage a transition to peace and stability, including elections and arrangements for the removal of foreign armed forces, an autonomous region set aside for the Kurdish minority, and reconstruction assistance. More than Trump, if geopolitical frictions arise with Russia and China, the Biden center/right approach to foreign policy is highly likely to intensify geopolitical tensions with Russia and China with risks of dangerous incidents and an overall slide into a second cold war. 

Similarly, with respect to Iran, I would expect Biden to pursue a somewhat less confrontational policy, exhibiting a greater concern about avoiding policies that might provoke war in the region. A test will be whether the Biden presidency take steps to revive American participation in the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Program of Action), the International Agreement on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, a step Israeli supporters in the US opposed in the past and would oppose in the future, but some Democratic advisors and officials are likely to favor. Of course, Iran’s diplomacy in this period will be an important factor, especially if it signals its willingness to seek accommodation within the region and beyond, and expresses hope for a new approach to its relations with the West. How Israel behaves directly and through its levers of influence in Washington will also be highly relevant, especially, the intelligence consensus on the nature of Iran’s intentions with respect to nuclear weaponry. 

A Biden presidency might push Saudi Arabia and Iran to work toward a compromise in Yemen, motivated by humanitarian as well as political considerations, which include an end to military intervention and encouragement of a negotiated end of the civil war. If something along these lines occurs, it would be a sign that significant changes in US foreign policy in the Middle East might be forthcoming. At present, the most responsible analysis of the future of US foreign policy in this critical region would emphasize continuity with some attentions to marginal variations. This expectation of continuity also reflects ‘a bipartisan consensus’ that had its origins in the anti-fascist consensus during World War II, the anti-Communist consensus during the Cold War, and the anti-Islamic consensus during the ‘War on Terror.’ Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Middle East has been the region, more than any other, where the playing out of this consensus has been most evident. It has had particularly adverse consequences in relation to the Palestinian struggle for basic rights and for Iran’s defense of its sovereignty.    

  
Q: Some experts warn that the US is on the edge of political unrest and riots. What is your taking on it?

A: There is no doubt that the internal realities in the US are quite frightening at this stage, and that a contested election might be the spark that sets the country aflame. It is difficult to predict what forms this violence would take, and whether Trump would incite unrest in the aftermath of his defeat, or at least fan its flames, as part of mounting an ill-conceived challenge to electoral results that voted him out of power. If this were to happen, widespread right-wing violence could occur with very mixed efforts to exert control over lawless behavior verging on domestic terror, and undoubtedly accompanied by massive responses from the left side of the political ledger, involving both peaceful protests and more radical actions of resistance throughout the entire country. The future of US constitutional democracy could be at risk as never before, or at least not since the American Civil War of the early 1860s. And not far in the background is a judicial system, presided over by the U.S. Supreme Court that is inclined toward Trumpism, and reactionary modes of legal reasoning and constitutional interpretation.

  
Q: How will the US political and security structure react to any possible unrest (if happens)?

A: Many expert observers believe that the responses of governmental authorities and police forces will depend on whether the presidential election is being seriously contested by Trump, and conceivably also by Biden. The prospect of serious unrest seems also less likely if the results are one-sided in Biden’s favor, a so-called landslide

victory, which would weaken, if not undermine, arguments that the election was ‘rigged’ or ‘stolen,’ and make the losers less motivated, except some extremists, to cause civil strife and property damage. Much depends on how Trump handles defeat, and whether he can gain support for an electoral challenge from the military leadership of the country and from the US Senate, which will still be under Republican control from November 4th until inauguration of the president on January 20, 2021 even if control of the Senate is lost, as the outcome of the election is not given immediate effect.

It should also be remembered that the US is a federal country with 50 distinct jurisdictions for handling ‘law and order’ issues, and great variations in behavior regionally and depending on which party controls the machinery of government in these sub-state units. There is also a Federal layer of law enforcement that can be invoked by the national government, giving the White House a means to counteract behavior within any of the 50 states that it opposes. As there is very little past experience, there is little

understanding of how the aftermath of the election will be handled in the US, and this should worry not only Americans but the world. 

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Why Biden Must Win: It is not about Democracy, its about Fascism

9 Oct

[Prefatory Note: Responses to an Iranian journalist, Javad Heiran-Nia Interview Questions on U.S. Elections (8 Oct 2020).]

Why Biden Must Win: It is not about Democracy, its about Fascism

  1. What is the most important issue affecting the upcoming US presidential election? (Economy; Foreign Policy; Domestic Policy; etc.)

For the voters in America the most important issues at this time are the (mis)management of the health crisis by Trump and the impact on the recovery of the U.S. economy. At this point there is a surge of criticism directed at the present U.S. leadership with respect to the Coronavirus pandemic: more infections and deaths per capita than almost any country in the world, intentional disregard of guidance by health specialists, dishonest and irresponsible reassurances, and economic relief favoring the rich and influential while understating the economic distress caused others by the loss of jobs, food insecurities, and threats of eviction. There is little interest, at least up to this point, in foreign policy with the single exception of international economic relations and geopolitical tensions with China. Both candidates for the presidency seem to adopt anti-Chinese positions, but Biden seems less militaristic and provocative than Trump. Biden refrains from blaming China for the virus, and seems somewhat less likely to embrace a strategy in East Asia that will lead to a second cold war.

For the peoples of the Middle East and elsewhere, the foreign policy implications of the elections assume greater importance. As with China, Trump seems more inclined than Biden to push the anti-Iran coalition of Israel, UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia toward the brink of war, with the hope that the persistence of ‘maximum pressure’ will cause destabilization in Iran, and if possible, regime change. Biden would not likely change very much in terms of alignment, but might be expected to be more cautious in endorsing aggressive policies, and might even restore the agreement on Iran’s Nuclear Program negotiated toward the end of the Obama presidency. At the same time, Biden might be more inclined than Trump to push an anti-Russian approach that could take the form of regional and global confrontations, as well as arms races in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe.  

One cost of such foreign policy initiatives is to weaken the attention given to challenges  that can only be solved by multilateral cooperation at a time when it is most needed, especially in relation to climate change, the control of nuclear weaponry, migration flows, and health issues. As noted above, Biden is much more likely to renew American support for ‘liberal internationalism’ than Trump, and can almost certainly be expected to do so unless geopolitically distracted.

There are other hot spots around the world that are capable of generating dangerous foreign policy crises, especially in relation to Korea or India/Pakistan.

2. Which candidate has the best chance of winning? (Trump or Biden)

As of now, it appears that Biden will win the election rather decisively, but in 2016 there existed a comparable clear outlook close to vote, reinforced by public opinion polls. It created a strong impression that Hillary Clinton would win easily over Donald Trump, a view almost universally shared by the media, and reportedly even by the Trump campaign. The American political mood is unstable, and could be influenced by developments in the coming weeks as the date of the election approaches that are supportive of Trump’s campaign for reelection as, for example, violent riots in American cities, a further surge in the financial markets, a crisis in the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula. .

Additionally, there are a series of factors that sow doubt about present expectations of a Biden victory that go beyond which candidate will gain the most votess: first of all, Biden could win the popular vote by a wide margin, and yet lose the election because of the way in which the peculiar American institution of the Electoral College determines the outcome of presidential elections by counting the results on a federal state by state basis rather than nationally. This happened in 2016, Hillary Clinton winning by wide margins in New York and California, but losing close votes in such battleground states as Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan. According to the Electoral College a candidate receives the same number of electoral votes assigned to a state if he wins by one vote or 10 million votes. The value of the vote in states where one party dominates, an individual vote becomes of diluted value, whereas if both parties are more or less of similar popularity, the value of an individual vote is inflated. The question posed is whether the Electoral College vote will again override the popular vote as it did in 2106.

Secondly, it is well known that Republican control of governments in the 50 states making up the U.S. has resulted in a variety of voter suppression schemes that make it harder to vote, and particularly affects African Americans and the very poor, making voting more difficult i cities and the rural South. Trump has also attacked mail-in voting as subject to mass fraud although the evidence in no way supports the accusation. Less votes are seen as helping Trump. Republicans are better organized and more disciplined than Democrats, although the Democrats have devoted great energy this year to getting out the vote.

Thirdly, Trump has intimated that he can only lose the election if it is has been ‘rigged’ by the Democrats. The reality seems to justify a different complaint that targets the Republicans. Much of the rigging that occurred in 2016 was attributable to Russia, and definitely worked in Trump’s favor, being intended to do so. Back then such partisan interference seemed welcomed by the Republican campaign, and likely would be again.  There are concerns that similar interferences might occur again this time around as Russia continues to prefer Trump to Biden, although there seems to be a greater effort in 2020 to insulate the election process from outside interferences, especially in relation to social media.

It is important to grasp a basic ideological feature of recent American elections of the presidency. Ever since the unified response to fascism during World War II the political parties have accepted a ‘bipartisan consensus’ that almost completely excludes certain crucial policy commitments from political controversy. The most important of these is overinvestment in the military, the predatory features of global capitalism, and so-called ‘special relationships’ with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and European alliance partners. This consensus held up throughout the Cold War, was sustained during the banner years of neoliberal globalization in the decade of the 1990s, and reinvigorated after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon after George W. Bush launched the war on terror, and Barack Obama continued it. 

Bernie Sanders challenged this consensus as it impacted upon policy discourse during his two campaigns to obtain the Democratic Party nomination, but his efforts were rejected by the party elite because he threatened the consensus, defied the ‘deep state,’ worried the Washington foreign policy establishment, and frightened the large private sector donors whose funding support depended on respecting the bipartisan consensus. In this sense, the Democrats successfully subordinated in their own party all radical elements that enjoyed movement support, especially among youth. The Republicans sidelined their moderate leadership, giving over control of the party to extremists that formed the base of Trump support. And so while the Democratic Party establishment neutralized the progressive Sanders’ challenge the Republican Party was radicalized from the right giving Trump control over all mechanism.

In part, it is this issue of party identity, and its relation to the governmental structures of power, that may be the most important effect of the November elections. If Biden wins, the bipartisan consensus is reaffirmed, while if Trump somehow prevails, the bipartisan will be further weakened, and even threatened by replacing the consensus with a right-wing policy agenda. If Biden loses, the consensus will be further discredited by its mistaken view that moving toward the political center is what wins election. What evidence exists by polls and other measurements of public opinion suggest that Sanders would have been a stronger candidate than Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, but for reasons suggested above, adhering to the bipartisan consensus was more important or Democrats than winning elections. 

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Trumpism: What Will 2020 Bring?

8 Aug

Trumpism: What Will 2020 Bring?

 

During the height of the Cold War when it was viewed as disloyal and compromising to show a sympathetic interest in Marxism or sympathies with Soviet ideology, someone at the U.S. military base at Frankfurt distributed to the soldiers stationed there, a handwritten version of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution, in the form of petition. Very few of the soldiers approached were willing to affix their signatures, most alleging that this seemed a subversive document circulated by enemies of the United States, and was Soviet propaganda. Somehow the Western propaganda message that the Cold War was about the defense of ‘the free world’ against a totalitarian enemy had made no impact, or alternatively, that the free world had nothing to do with the substantive elements of freedom as social practice.

 

For me, and for the person who was using the petition to assess the commitment of Americans to the values of a free and democratic society, it conveyed the reality that what freedoms exist can be easily swept aside by an opportunistic or autocratic leadership. This perception has been confirmed, at least provisionally by Trump’s extreme encroachment on American institutions and civil liberties during his first term as president. A final confirmation would occur if Trump is able to hold onto power either by being reelected in November or by somehow managing to remain in the White House even if defeated by his electoral opponent.

 

There is another more subtle interpretation of the Frankfurt test. The political reality of systemic racism and discriminatory practices is so engrained in the lived experience of America as to make the U.S. Constitution seem indeed a radical document that must represent the views of an adversary ideology intent on undermining the American way of life. In effect, to implement fully the Bill of Rights would require nothing less than a revolution, and in this sense aa cross section of American soldiers were undoubtedly not so minded, and acted appropriately by refusing to endorse such drastic departures from their experience.

 

More disappointing to me is the degree to which Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 exhibited massive support for a regressive and demagogic leadership by an alienated American electorate. Of course, there were attenuating factors. Hillary Clinton, despite a poor campaign and a militarist foreign policy profile, won the popular vote by three million votes. Part of the

rightest populist backlash reflected a global trend, which was a result of the alienating impact of neoliberal globalization, and its production of drastic forms of inequality and its tendency to homogenize identity. Additionally, the American experience emphasized hostility to immigrants and Islam blamed for destroying the quality of life and bringing terrorism, crime, and drugs to the country, as well as losing a white identity for America as prefigure by the Obama presidency.

 

Now almost four years later, there is even less reason than in 2016 to regard Trump as an acceptable candidate even for Republicans who subscribe to a social contract that is based on a governing process of laws not men, and upholds ideas of separation of powers, checks and balances, and judicial independence, as well as the Bill of Rights. On matters of material interests the two party system is hobbled by the persistence of the Cold War ‘bipartisan consensus’ that creates commonality of views on militarism, Wall Street capitalism, and Israel/Saudi Arabia. Such a consensus means that there is no pragmatic reason for Democrats or moderates to vote for Trump to uphold liberal/moderate self-interest and worldview. Although Republican campaign strategy and Trump rally rhetoric uses inflammatory rhetoric to portray Biden and the Democratic Party as ‘socialist’ and ‘radical’ to make the middle of the voting spectrum to fear the material threat to their class interests if Democrats control the White House and Congress. In reality, only progressive have reason to ponder not voting or voting for a third party candidate as Biden, seen in abstract, offer little to hope for and nothing to inspire.

 

In the end, the future of the United States, and indirectly the world, rests on whether the fear of fascism exceeds the fear of left liberalism, as the balance plays out given the peculiarities of the electoral college system. It seems clear that the Trump base responds positively to Trump partly because he offers the prospect of a fascist future for the country premised on white racial supremacy and partly because of indifference to his ideas, giving their support having succumbed to the numbing excitement associated with his demagogic style of leadership even if it could cost them their life. For many in the muddled political middle, distressed by the Trump base but also wary of the more radical demands of Black Lives Matter and AOC Squad, the challenge is one of choosing the lesser of evils, which is analogous to the dilemma of progressives who wonder whether they can persuade themselves to pull levers that favors Democrats and Biden. The difference being that the moderates believe that the Democratic Party even with Biden will be pushed toward adopting the progressive agenda while many progressives believe that Biden will be ‘a feel better’ version of Trumpism, leaving the plutocratic and militarist pillars of neoliberal capitalism, somewhat deglobalized, but as sturdy as ever.

 

The immediate future of the United States will likely be determined by the results of the November election. For the first time in my life the prospect of a peaceful transfer of power respectful of the will of the people cannot be taken for granted. Unless Trumpist support shrinks dramatically the fascist threat will remain part of the scene even if Trump loses and leaves the White House without putting up a fight. If Trump should lose the election, despite rigging and gerrymandering, and yet refused to leave the White House, the resilience of the constitutional order will be severely tested, and left to the tender mercies of the military leadership, the deep state, and private sector elites, which in turn will assess the intensity of public outrage and the risks of civil strife. Trumpism will also be tested as to. whether its fascist leanings and demagogic submission are sufficiently belligerent to launch a second American civil war rather than loosen their grip on state power.

 

 

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Is the United States a Failing State? A Failed State?

22 Jul

Is the United States a Failing State? A Failed State?

 

To ask whether the United States, the world’s dominant military power, is ‘a failing state’ should cause worldwide anxiety. Such a state, analogous to a wounded animal, is a global menace of unprecedented proportions in the nuclear age. Its political leadership is exhibiting a reckless tendency of combining incompetence with extremism. It is also crucial to ascertain at what point a failing state should be written off as ‘a failed state’ for which there is no longer a clear path to redemption. The November elections in the United States will send a strong signal as to whether the United States is failing or has failed.

 

Even raising these issues suggests how far the United States has fallen during the Trump years, despite already being in sharp decline internationally ever since the Vietnam War, and continuing, despite a few redemptive moves (now renounced), during the Obama presidency. The responses of the Trump presidency to the two great crises of 2020 were helpful in solidifying the image of the world’s #1 state as truly failing, and not just sour grapes taking the form of an expression of partisan frustration with an appalling leadership. It was appalling because it was affirming the most regressive features of the American past while unconvincingly claiming credit for the stock market rise and low unemployment. The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter campaign against systemic racism gave Trump the opportunity to exhibit his lethally systemic incompetence as a crisis manager producing thousands of deaths among his own countrymen. He also seized the occasion to show the world his seemingly genuine racist solidarity with the Confederate spirit of the American South that tried to split the country and preserve its barbaric slave economy and supportive culture in the American Civil War 150 years ago, and has been a sore loser ever since.

 

With these clarifying developments, it no longer captures the full reality of this downward trend to be with content by calling attention to America’s ‘imperial decline.’ In the present setting, it seems more relevant to insist on describing America as ‘a failing state,’ and try to understand what that means for the country and the world. To make the contention more precise, it is instructive to realize that the United States is not only a failing state, but the first instance ever of a failing global state, which takes due account of its multi-dimensional hegemonic status as concretized by the planetary projection of its military might to air, land, and sea, to space and cyber space, as well as by its influence on the operation of the world economy and the character of popular culture whether expressed by music or cuisine.

 

There are several measures of a failing state that cast light on the American reality:

—functional failures: inability to respond adequately to challenges threatening the security of the society and its population against threats posed by internal and external hostile political actors, as well as by ecological instabilities, by widespread extreme poverty and hunger, and by a deficient health and disaster response system;

—normative failures: refusal to abide by systemic rules internationally as embedded in international law and the UN Charter, claiming impunity and acting on the basis of double standards to carry out its geopolitical encroachments on the wellbeing of others and its disregard of ecological dangers; patterns of normative failures include endorsements of policies and practices giving rise to genocide and ecocide, constituting the most basic violations of international criminal law and the sovereign rights of foreign countries; the wrongs are too numerous to delimit, including severe and systemic denials of human rights in domestic governance; economic and social structures that inevitably generate acute socio-economic inequalities on the basis of class, race, and gender.

 

Some additional considerations accentuate the failing state reality of the U.S. due to the extensive extraterritorial dimensions that accompany the process of becoming ‘a failing global state.’ This new type of transnational political creature should be categorized as the first historical example of a ‘geopolitical superpower.’ Such a political actor is neither separate from nor entirely subject to the state-centric system of world order that evolved from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and became universalized in the decades following World War II. Although lacking a true antecedent, the role of European ‘great powers’ or ‘colonial empires’ give clues as to the evaluation of the U.S. as a global state or geopolitical superpower;

—effectiveness: the loss of effectiveness by a failing state is disclosed by its inability to maintain and exert control over challenges to its supremacy. Such an assessment if vindicated by failed military operations (regime-changing interventions) and the inability to learn from and overcome past mistakes, disclosures of vulnerability to homeland security (9/11 attacks) and overly costly and destructive responses (9/12 launching of ‘war on terror’; declining respect and trust by secondary political actors, including close allies, in the context of global policy forming arenas, including the United Nations; as a further reflection of this failing dynamic of lost control is the pattern of withdrawal from arenas that can no longer be controlled (Human Rights Council, WHO) and the rejection of agreements that appear beneficial to the world as a whole (Paris Climate Change Agreement and Iran Nuclear Program Agreement-JCPOA;

—legitimacy: the legitimacy of a global state, which by its nature potentially compromises the political sovereignty and independence of all other states, reflects above all else, on its usefulness as a source of problem-solving authority, especially in war/peace and global economic recession settings; the degree of legitimacy also depends on perceptions by political elites and public opinion that the assertions of global leadership are in general beneficial for the system as a whole, and as particularly helpful to states that are vulnerable due to acute security and development challenges; in this regard, the U.S. enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy after the end of World War II, as a source of security, and even guidance, for many governments in most regions of the world throughout the Cold War, and was also appreciated as the architect of a rule-governed liberal economic order operating with the framework of the Bretton Woods institutions charged with avoiding recurrences of the Great Depression that undermined stability and economic wellbeing during the 1930s, developments that then contributed to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of a systemic war costing upwards of 50 million lives. The American leadership role was also prominent in achieving global public order in such settings as the management of the oceans, avoiding conflict in Antarctica and Outer Space, establishing international human rights standards, and promoting liberal internationalism as a way to enhance global cooperative approaches to shared problems.

 

As suggested, the United States as a failing state has been graphically revealed as such by its response to the COVID-19 pandemic: refusal to heed early warnings; unacceptable shortages of equipment for health personnel and insufficient hospital capacity; premature economic openings of restaurants, bars, stores; contradictory standards of guidance from health experts and from political leaders, including falsehoods and fake news embraced by the American president in the midst of the health emergency. Beyond this, Trump adopted an inappropriate nationalist and commodifying approach to the search for a vaccine capable of conferring immunity from the disease, while at the same time immobilizing the UN, and especially the WHO, as an indispensable venue for dealing with epidemics of global scope, including its role in dispensing vital assistance to the most disadvantaged countries. These failings have shockingly resulted in the United States recording more infected persons than any country in the world, as well as having the highest incidence of fatalities attributable to the disease.

 

In contrast, has been the responses of several far less developed and affluent countries that effectively contained the disease without incurring much loss of life or severe economic damage by way of lost jobs and diminished economic performance. Judged from the perspective of health such societies are success stories, and instructively, their ideological identity spans the political spectrum, including state socialist Vietnam to market-driven countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Such results parallel the finding of Deepak Nayyar who reports in his breakthrough book, The Asian Resurgence (2019), that the remarkable growth experience of the 14 Asian societies that he empirically assesses, supports the conclusion that ideological orientation is not an economistic indicator of success or failure. Such findings are relevant in refuting the triumphalist claims of the West that the Soviet collapse demonstrated the superiority of capitalism as compared to socialism. The crucial factor when it comes to economistic success is the skilled management of state/society relations whether in relation to investment of savings in prioritizing development projects or seeking to impose a lockdown to curtail the spread of a deadly infectious disease.

 

Yet, there is a normative side of response patterns as suggested above. China treats the desperate search for a workable vaccine as a sharable public good, while the United States under Trump maintains its standard transactional approach despite issues of affordability for many countries in the South, as well as the poor in the North. From a 21stcentury perspective, the ethos of being all in this together is the only foundation for grappling with the increasingly challenging dilemmas of world order. It is a sign of a failing state, whatever its capabilities and status, to use its leverage to gain national and geopolitical advantages. Along this line, as well, is the normative disgrace of refusing to suspend unilateral sanctions imposed on countries such as Iran and Venezuala, already stressed, for at least the duration of the pandemic in response to widespread humanitarian appeals from civil society actors and international institutions.

 

A final observation as to whether the U.S. vector points toward a failed or redemptive future. If Trump loses the election and gives up the White House to his opponent the prospects for reversing the failing trend improve, while if Trump is reelected in November or succeeds in cancelling the electoral outcome then the U.S, will have moved closer to being a failed state as the citizenry would have endorsed failure or the constitutional order shown to be enfeebled, insufficiently resilient to reject failure. Even if Trump is replaced and Trumpism subsides, the momentum behind predatory capitalism and global militarism will be difficult to curtail without a revolutionary push that rejects the bipartisan consensus on such matters and challenges the sufficiency of procedural democracy centered upon the role of political parties and elections. Only a progressive movement from below will shatter that consensus, ending laments about the U.S. being in transition from failing to failed. Whether the BLM leadership of a movement alternative is robust and comprehensive enough to end American freefall will become clearer in coming months.      

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