BRANKO MARCETIC

One of Joe Biden’s top priorities has been convincing a skeptical world to buy into the "rules-based international order.” His backing of the war in Gaza is completely undercutting that effort.

Since Joe Biden became president, you can barely navigate his administration’s rhetoric or media coverage of it without tripping over the phrase “rules-based international order.” It’s constantly invoked in speeches and major documents. The president is explicitly committed to rebuilding and upholding it, by persuading countries to buy into and abide by this global order. Meanwhile, the United States has pointed the finger at adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, that it charges with threatening or undermining it. It’s why the United States is so deeply involved in the war In Ukraine. It’s why it’s ratcheting up tensions with China over Taiwan.

All of that has gone out of the window with Biden’s virtually unconditional support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza over the past two weeks.

Critics of US foreign policy have often taken a dim view of Biden, his officials, and his underlings’ use of this phrase. They ask what the “rules-based” order actually is, and charge that those “rules” were written by Washington to let the United States do whatever it wants. They question what, if any, relationship these “rules” have with the system of international law largely established after World War II that’s meant to govern states’ behavior, especially since the US government has often been the most serial violator of that system. And they conclude that it’s a vague and deliberately vapid concept that is constantly invoked precisely because it can mean, or not mean, anything.

The Biden administration’s decision to give a blank check to Israel’s far-right government to unleash hell on Gaza has served to vindicate many of these criticisms, while giving ample reason for the many who view the concept with suspicion or trepidation to think they were right. Just consider what Israel has done over the past two weeks, with full political, military, and rhetorical support from the US government.

The Israeli government is inflicting collective punishment on all Gazans for the terrible crimes of Hamas, the group that governs the territory. Israeli officials, current and former, have openly admittedtheir war is not merely against Hamas, but innocent Palestinians themselves, and that the brutal siege they’re imposing — cutting off food, water, and electricity to Gaza, so that hospitals are failing and people are starving and dying of dehydration — is aimed at making life intolerable for civilians. Israeli officials, the Western states backing their war, and Western media figures have all justified this policy by invokingWorld War II, in which the Allies inarguably carried out war crimes by indiscriminately firebombing civilians, and which in large part prompted the adoption of the Geneva Conventions after the war’s end that strictly distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Beyond “just” a siege, Israel has brought a mass bombing strategy into the tiny enclave of Gaza. The Israeli military boasted it had dropped roughly six thousand bombs in the first five days of the war. That’s more than the US military dropped on Afghanistan in most years of the Afghanistan war and more than it dropped in Iraq and Syria each month during the war against the Islamic State; the daily average (1,200) beats the highest daily total of the Iraqi invasion. Israeli military officials have publicly said they are not firing “surgically” and that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

Given that Gaza is only a fraction of the size of those countries, it’s not surprising this has already resulted in the deaths of nearly four thousand Palestinian civilians, more than 1,500 of them children. Both Human Rights Watch and the Washington Post concluded that Israeli forces are using white phosphorous as part of this campaign, even though deploying such munitions is internationally prohibited.

The Israeli military has also targeted nonmilitary infrastructure. In recent days, it has bombed and destroyed: a centuries-old Orthodox Christian church housing refugees, killing an estimated 150; a United Nations (UN) school where more refugees were sheltering, killing six, a little over a week after killing eleven UN workers; hundreds of residential buildings and thousands of homes; and an evacuation corridor it had itself designated a “safe route.”

Meanwhile, several days ago, the Israeli government issued a twenty-four-hour evacuation order to Palestinians in north Gaza to move to the south ahead of a likely ground invasion. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans fled to the south — which the Israeli military swiftly also bombed. There is a term for forcing people to flee their homes en masse at the point of a gun, or in this case, a fighter jet: ethnic cleansing.

Pretend for a second you’re a citizen of whatever part of the world the Biden administration is trying to convince to buy into its rhetoric about the “rules-based international order” and the desperate need to defend it. Given that Biden has specifically invoked that global order to justify his support for Israel, what conclusion could you come to other than that these “rules” allow states to inflict collective punishment, use starvation as a weapon, indiscriminately bomb civilians and the infrastructure they depend on, kill UN personnel, and carry out ethnic cleansing, all with total impunity?

That doesn’t seem like a particularly good world order, or one that you’d want to play any part in restoring, let alone upholding. All of these things, by the way, happen to be illegal under international law.

In short, by enabling this parade of atrocities instead of doing the responsible thing and pushing for a cease-fire (as even his Democratic predecessor did), Biden is not only leaving a moral stain on himself, his presidency, and the United States. He’s also undermining one of his own central foreign policy goals and effectively handing his critics ample ammunition, all while losing much of the world’s backing for his geopolitical strategy.

Worse, it all makes it far more likely that other aggressor states will flout such laws and norms in the future and carry out horrific abuses of their own. After all, they can always say they were simply following the leader of this “liberal order.”

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/joe-biden-israel-palestine-gaza-rules-based-international-order

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Pitiful score obtained by the greatest power in the world during the recent vote at the UN demanding the lifting of the American embargo against Cuba. We may have the largest army in the world, but when fundamental human values ​​are lacking, we just have the “buddies” we deserve. Having only the Zionist State, a criminal and genocidal organization, as a white-collar acolyte in the corridors of the UN headquarters and as a second knife in fatigues for the extermination of Gazans, that is decadence. If we add Ukraine's abstention, despite the billions of dollars poured by Uncle Sam into the battalions of Azov & Co. to wage war against Russia, it simply becomes decline...

Even loyal micro-states like Palau, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, tired of the unhealthy relentlessness of the United States against the Cuban people, decided, in 2015, to no longer oppose the UN resolution.

Between 2015 and 2018, the USA-Israel couple found themselves very lonely: the small Caribbean island had managed to ostracize them from nations.

In 2019, the microstates were replaced by Brazil, Colombia and… Ukraine.

This change in Brazil's position corresponds to the arrival of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro (January 1, 2019 – January 1, 2023), "fervent admirer» of the American president at the time, Donald Trump, The election of Lula at the head of Brazil changed the situation as shown by the 2023 vote.

Colombia's position is also a consequence of the election of President Ivan Duque (2018 – 2022), a virulent opponent of Cuba. The current president, Gustavo Petro, who brought his country back into the concert of nations regarding the American embargo against Cuba, even accused his predecessor of being at the origin of the inclusion of Cuba in the list of countries that support terrorism.

Never two without three: the turnaround in Ukraine's vote corresponds, as luck would have it, to the election of Volodymyr Zelensky, the acrobat president dubbed by the American administration.

Thus, in 2023, all that remains as "friends" of the United States against Cuba are two countries in turmoil, two geopolitical boils whose seeds have been inoculated and maintained by the Americans themselves.

Israel, an entity barricaded behind high walls, is razing Gaza and its population with American blessing and, above all, thanks to military equipment “Made in USA”.

Ukraine, plagued by neo-Nazism and Russophobia, was pushed into a proxy war largely sponsored by Washington, which still lives in the vestiges of the Cold War. To thwart Russia, the United States will not hesitate to sacrifice every last Ukrainian soldier by providing them, of course, with all the weapons they need.

Annoyed by the “evil” Western media who currently prefer to show Palestinian hemoglobin spurting through the screens instead of the “prowess” of the Ukrainian army, the Kiev acrobat lamented that “the war in Gaza diverts attention from Ukraine».

When will there be a little tear for the Palestinian children crushed by the Zionist war machine, Mr. Zelensky?

And, to keep up with the news, he did not hesitate to declare that he was certain that Russia was providing support to the “operations carried out by Hamas».

Clearly, a clown will always remain a clown. Except that political clowns do not make people laugh, but cry with tears.

The hegemon, in his great solitude, his hands dripping with blood, has only two miserable accomplices with whom he poisons the life of the entire planet.

Meanwhile, Cuba, the Island of Freedom, the Island of Revolutionaries, the Island of Humanist Values, enjoys with pride the plebiscite of the rest of the world.

Watching the hegemon decline.

Inexorably...

https://en.reseauinternational.net/la-grande-solitude-de-lhegemon/

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