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What US foreign policy shamelessly amounts to is this: 'We make the rules so we get to break the rules."
Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action—taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed—rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.
All the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.
On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.” He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”
In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.
But that would require genuine diplomacy—not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right. (The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)
Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”
But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.”
The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.
The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that—several weeks into the slaughter—he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”
There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”
After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so. Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”
Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.
The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.
The poet called it “the great refusal,” this decision not to take a side. And by sides, I don’t mean Israel or Hamas. I mean the side that represents law, diplomacy, and international institutions, and the side that represents lawlessness, hatred, and brute force.
Western leaders have been speaking in double-talk since the bombing of Gaza began, but no amount of newspeak can hide their real message. When it comes to the “rules-based order,” they’ve let us know the rules don’t apply to them.
I’ve known some of these people in my time—the diplomats and lawmakers, the pundits and politicians and advisors and analysts. Their manners are impeccable. They always use the right pronouns. They speak of human rights, but their actions shout the truth their lips refuse to whisper.
The world hears them loud and clear.
They’re the people Dante wrote about in the Inferno, the “sad souls who live without infamy and without praise” between Heaven and Hell, the ones who will march forever with “the craven choir of those angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but only to themselves.”
Dante called it “the great refusal,” this decision not to take a side. And by sides, I don’t mean Israel or Hamas. I mean the side that represents law, diplomacy, and international institutions, and the side that represents lawlessness, hatred, and brute force. The side that honors life, and the side that exults in death.
Western leaders have become more fastidious about including words of sympathy for their victims, but they’re fooling no one.
Joe Biden mourned the children and talked about what their parents will miss about them: “the bend in his smile, the perfect pitch of her laugh, the giggle of your little boy — the baby.”
Oh, he didn’t mean Palestinian babies.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said this in 2022:
“We’ve put diplomacy back at the center of American foreign policy, to help us realize the future that Americans and people around the world seek ... To build that future, we must defend and reform the rules-based international order – the system of laws, agreements, principles, and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.”
Fine words. But Israel is in open defiance of that rules-based order, and has been for decades.The leader of the world’s largest international institution, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, said Israel’s Gaza attacks were an illegal “collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” The spokesman for UNICEF said, “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It is a living hell for everyone else.”
But these bastions of “the rules-based international order” go unheeded by the faithless angels of the global order. As these institutions are traduced and ignored, the Secretary is promoting a phony “humanitarian aid” deal that sets aside less than 3 percent of its $106 billion for the people of Gaza while funding tens of billions of dollars for weaponry, including billions more for Israel’s killing spree.
An official in Blinken’s State Department said, “No one has the right to tell Israel how to defend itself.” But Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the US envoy for combatting antisemitism, was not rebuked for what should be understood as an expression of contempt for international law.
Laws exist for a reason. If a neighbor hurts my child, should I go over to his house and slaughter his entire family? Anyone who uses Lipstadt’s phrase is declaring support for lawlessness, for the trampling of international institutions, for brute force over civilization. Yes, Hamas also violated international law. But we have never financed Hamas (except indirectly, through Netanyahu’s government).
The people making Lipstadt’s argument forget that Americans have sovereign rights, too; one of them, surely, is the right not to participate in war crimes.
With US complicity, Israel has ignored international law for so long that nobody remembers: Israel was created by international law. Without law, only military might can preserve it. If the United States stops funding and arming it—as polls suggest it might someday—how long can Israel survive? Its defenders should think about that.
The American double standard has become a bitter joke to the rest of the world. From the same speech by Blinken:
“... (T)he foundations of the international order are under serious and sustained challenge. Russian President Vladimir Putin poses a clear and present threat. In attacking Ukraine three months ago, he also attacked the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, enshrined in the UN Charter, to protect all countries from being conquered or coerced.”
The once-vaunted “soft power” of US diplomacy has become fodder for grim comedy.
Meanwhile, the West’s diplomatic culture is now poisoned so deeply that people who want to do the right thing have to apologize for it. “Not all the Palestinian people are terrorists,” said European Union diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles as he called for diplomatic measures.
Not all? Half the people in Gaza are children. Who wasn’t a terrorist, the toddlers?
I sympathize with Borrell. He thought it necessary to soften his comments to the point of absurdity, and in this climate I’m sure he was right. Some diplomats, like Craig Mokhiber and Josh Paul, have chosen the side of justice. Others are laying low to preserve their careers. They are the ones of whom Dante writes:
they now commingle with the craven choir
of those faithless angels who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
Meanwhile, the State Department offered sweet words on October 20:
“Our message to Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and all around the world is clear: we see you, we grieve with you, and we mourn every loss of innocent life.”
“We see you.” That’s the same thing President Biden said to victims of antisemitism and Islamophobia: “To all of you hurting, I want you to know: I see you. You belong.”
That was on October 19. Three days later he said this: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” That is the opposite of “seeing.” But then, what’s a few hundred kids, give or take?
Western leaders have become more fastidious about including words of sympathy for their victims, but they’re fooling no one. Come to think of it, they’re not the faithless angels of the global world order. We are. We are the ones who tolerate this brutality in our name. We are the ones who must stand up and stop the killing. History will all of us accountable.
tones of anger, words of suffering,
and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands-
-all went to make a tumult that will whirl
forever through that turbid, timeless air,
like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.
“Don’t wait for the Last Judgment,” said Albert Camus. “It takes place every day.”