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Head of Amnesty International Agrees Trump-Led US Is ‘Destroying World Order’
"Complicity, tacit agreement, appeasement, silence: these have a cost."
Jan 09, 2026
Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard expressed agreement Thursday that the US under President Donald Trump is tearing down world order, while also pointing the finger at other major Western powers for being part of the problem.
In a post on X, Callamard reacted to a warning delivered by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier that the Trump administration was undermining systems developed decades ago with the help of the US to ensure greater international stability.
Callamard agreed with Steinmeier's basic argument, but added that Germany has not been an innocent bystander.
"The US is destroying world order," wrote the Amnesty International chief. "And so did Israel for the last two years. With Germany support."
She then accused Germany and other US allies of ignoring past US violations of international law and only getting upset now that it's come back to bite them.
"German and other European leaders cannot suddenly discover that the rule-based order is on its knee when they have governed over its demise for the last two years," she wrote. "Complicity, tacit agreement, appeasement, silence: these have a cost. A high cost. And you/we will all end up paying for it."
Steinmeier's remarks came in response to increased US aggression against both Latin America, where Trump ordered the invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, and Europe, where Trump has once again stated his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark.
"Then there is the breakdown of values by our most important partner, the USA, which helped build this world order," the German president said. "It is about preventing the world from turning into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want, where regions or entire countries are treated as the property of a few great powers."
Truly extraordinary language by German President Steinmeier: pic.twitter.com/povGBrPmr9
He says the US's values are "broken", that they're changing the world "into a den of thieves in which the most unscrupulous take what they want," and treat "whole countries" as their "property".…
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 9, 2026
Top Trump aide Stephen Miller earlier in the week explicitly advocated returning to an era in which great military powers are free to take whatever they want from weaker powers.
"The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere,” Miller said during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. “We’re a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us.”
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Western Hypocrisy and the Gaza Death Toll
The West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
Dec 06, 2025
First, let’s dissect this puzzle.
On February 29, 2024, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent shockwaves when he informed lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee that over 25,000 Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel in Gaza up to that date. Austin, the military chief of the Biden administration, delivered a fact that immediately subverted his own government’s rhetoric.
The announcement was shocking for two main reasons. First, Austin himself had orchestrated the relentless flow of US arms to Israel, directly enabling the very campaign that liquidated those innocent people. Second, the figure provided was noticeably higher than the casualty tally reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza for the same period—22,000 women and children in the first 146 days of the war.
The crux of the contradiction, however, is that Austin’s detailed account of the US-funded Israeli atrocities in Gaza directly subverted the official narrative regularly disseminated by the White House.
The rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted.
In fact, as early as October 25, 2023—barely two weeks into the war—President Joe Biden himself began doubting the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s death toll estimates. "(I have) no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using," he flatly declared.
Naturally, Austin's declaration neither eroded his unwavering endorsement of Israel nor softened Biden’s patronizing attitude toward the Palestinians. To the contrary, US military and political backing for Israel surged exponentially after that congressional hearing. US military and financial support for the Israeli genocide during the Biden administration in the first year of the war is estimated to be at least $17.9 billion.
These apparent contradictions, however, are not inconsistencies at all, but a perfectly calibrated, deliberate policy. Historically, this approach grants the US license to consistently flout its own declared principles. Iraq was invaded, at a horrific cost of life and societal destruction, under the banner of "good intentions": democracy, human rights, and the like. Afghanistan's protracted agony of war and instability endured for two decades in the name of fighting terror, exporting democracy, and women's rights.
The operational part of the equation satisfies military and political strategists. Meanwhile, the hollow rhetoric of democracy and human rights keeps intellectuals, both on the right and the left, mired in a protracted, perpetually unproductive debate that serves to conceal rather than influence policy.
While the US government may have perfected the craft of deliberate contradictions, it is not the original architect. In modern history, this phenomenon has been owned almost entirely by the West: Colonialism was advanced as a solution to slavery, and forced conversions were brazenly justified as civilizing missions.
The West's stance on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, however, offers the most blatant and current example of this deliberate contradiction. A concise examination of Germany's conduct in the last two years suffices to illustrate the point.
Germany is the world's second-largest supplier of weapons to Israel, after the US. Not only did it refuse to accept the genocide definition recognized by many countries, and eventually by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but it also fought ferociously to shield Israel from the mere accusation.
Domestically, it brutally suppressed pro-Palestinian protests, detained countless activists, and outlawed the use of the Palestinian flag, among numerous other draconian measures. Yet, in the same breath, Germany continued to champion freedom of speech and democracy, and criticize Global South nations that allegedly curtailed these same values.
Predictably, Germany continued to arm Israel, concocting every conceivable justification for its support of Tel Aviv, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders for the crime of extermination in Gaza. Only under immense pressure did Berlin finally yield and agree to stop approving weapons exports to Israel.
Fast forward to recent days. The BBC, among other outlets, reported on November 17 that Germany would reinstate its weapons exports to Israel, rationalizing the decision with the October 10 announcement of a Gaza ceasefire—one that Israel has flagrantly violated hundreds of times.
“Germany’s decision to lift its partial suspension of weapons shipments to Israel is reckless, unlawful, and sends entirely the wrong message to Israel,” Amnesty International declared in a press release—a condemnation that, naturally, was utterly ignored.
A week later, new research conducted by two top, highly regarded academic institutions showed that the number of Palestinians killed as a result of the Israeli genocide is substantially higher than the Gaza Ministry of Health figures. Worse, life expectancy in Gaza has plummeted by nearly half because of the Israeli war.
Of the two institutions, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is German. The globally leading research organization is largely funded by public money coming directly from the federal government—the very entity that ships the weapons that, along with US support, have fueled Gaza's escalating death toll.
In all these scenarios, the West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
But the rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted. To reclaim our collective agency, however, we must begin with a unified realization that the West’s calculated contradictions are specifically engineered to perpetuate the iniquitous relationship between Western powers and the rest of us for as long as possible.
Only by rigorously exposing and forcefully rejecting this hypocrisy can we finally liberate ourselves from the historic delusion that the solution to our problem is a Western one.
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A Victorious Hamburg Climate Resolution Is a Model of Hope-Fueled People Power
While the current German government is rolling back or even boycotting climate action, Hamburg is showing the world that grassroots climate action is effective.
Nov 09, 2025
“This is a story of pure hope in times of climate roll-backs around the world.”
Young climate activists like Luisa Neubauer, cofounder of Fridays for Future in Hamburg, have good reason to celebrate: The city of Hamburg recently voted in favor of more ambitious climate action. Famously, Hamburg was where the Beatles took off. Now the city has another big project that could take off. Neubauer: “Germany’s second largest city has shown that citizens—after all—demand climate action and are willing to self-organize around a just transition.”
At a time when the climate crisis has seemingly been pushed aside by too many other crises, the decisive win of Hamburg’s “Zukunftsentscheid” (Decision about Our Future) at the ballot box on Sunday, October 12, was a win for a dramatically more ambitious climate action plan for the second-largest city in Germany. While the current German government is rolling back or even boycotting climate action, Hamburg is showing the world that grassroots climate action is effective. The new law will make climate policy more fair, more transparent, and more responsive to the needs of future generations. The result could be used as a blueprint by other cities in Germany and far beyond. American cities are perfectly positioned to adopt a similar plan. After all, Americans are actually much more familiar with ballot initiatives than Germans.
Hamburg’s over 1.9 million residents were asked to vote in favor of a binding referendum to require annual carbon dioxide reduction targets, with the goal of net-zero emissions moved up from 2045 to 2040, and requirements that all climate policies will have to be socially just. A majority of over 303,000 residents, or 53.2%, said yes; 43.6% of eligible voters participated in the decision.
While the federal government is indeed moving aggressively against climate action, ballot initiatives give power to the grassroots.
The revised bill, in typical German style comprehensively named “Klimaschutzverbesserungsgesetz” (climate protection improvement law) will require that the city administration must present an emissions estimate no later than six months after the end of every calendar year.
There is a lot in this new climate law that the wonky types among climate activists will love. On their website, proponents list the exact amount of tons of carbon (in thousands) the city will be permitted to emit each year until 2040. If the permissible total annual emissions for the previous calendar year have been exceeded, the government must take measures to offset the excess total annual emissions within five months. If the total emissions exceed or fall short of the permissible total annual emissions from the year in which the act comes into force, the difference shall be credited evenly to the remaining total annual emissions for the next five years until 2040 at the latest, thus greatly incentivizing ramped-up action and disincentivizing delay.
But the referendum’s emphasis on a just transition is also key: If climate action is to benefit everyone, not only those with large pockets who after all tend to also be the bigger emitters, measures taken to protect the climate must be designed in a socially acceptable way. The changes to the existing climate protection law will make climate protection more fair for all in Hamburg, impacting housing, energy, and transportation. Homeowners, for example, will be incentivized to retrofit their homes, but won’t be able to push the costs entirely onto their tenants. Public transit will be prioritized without penalizing those who commute by car.
By emphasizing transparency and predictability (“Planbarkeit”), the proponents also took the needs of companies into account that invest in climate protection initiatives. And because the referendum included legislation, the newly revised law will automatically go into effect within a month from this vote, i.e. on November 12, 2025.
Opponents were quick to complain that the new law would endanger jobs in the city. But over 100 businesses had written an open letter in support of the referendum, and the proponents include positive impacts on economic growth and job prospects for the city in their FAQ.
While the federal government is indeed moving aggressively against climate action, ballot initiatives give power to the grassroots. The climate movement in Hamburg had fought for two years to make this referendum happen. A group of volunteers from various backgrounds contributed to drafting and refining the text. Over 80 different organizations joined a broad alliance of supporters, including cultural and religious institutions, companies, and NGOs. Even the soccer club FC St. Pauli cosponsored the referendum. The chances were not high for it to win—typically, a referendum only wins once every 10 years.
Americans have lots of experience with the process of running ballot initiatives. Portland, Oregon, for example, ran a successful initiative that resulted in the establishment of the PCEF (Portland Clean Energy Fund), a smart move that has since brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the city’s coffers. Over 5,000 miles apart, Hamburg and Portland nevertheless have something in common: Hope-filled people power—sometimes a few frogs mix in…Keep ReadingShow Less
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