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The
world is reeling in horror at the latest Israeli massacre of hundreds
of men, women and children in Gaza. Much of the world is also shocked
by the
role of
the United States in this crisis, as it keeps providing Israel with
weapons to kill Palestinian civilians, in violation of U.S.
and international law, and has repeatedly blocked action by the UN
Security Council to impose a ceasefire or hold Israel accountable for
its war crimes.
In
contrast to U.S. actions, in nearly every speech or interview,
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps promising to uphold and
defend the “rules-based order.” But he has never
clarified whether he means the universal rules of the United Nations
Charter and international law, or some other set of rules he has yet
to define. What rules could possibly legitimize the kind of
destruction we just witnessed in Gaza, and who would want to live in
a world ruled by them?
We
have both spent many years protesting the violence and chaos the
United States and its allies inflict on millions of people around the
world by violating the UN
Charter’s
prohibition against the threat or use of military force, and we have
always insisted that the U.S. government should comply with the
rules-based order of international law.
But
even as the United States’ illegal wars and support for allies
like Israel and Saudi Arabia have reduced cities
to rubble
and left country after country mired in intractable violence and
chaos, U.S. leaders have refused to even acknowledge
that aggressive and destructive U.S. and allied military operations
violate the rules-based order of the United Nations Charter and
international law.
President
Trump was clear that he was not interested in following any “global
rules,” only supporting U.S. national interests. His National
Security Advisor John Bolton explicitly prohibited National Security
Council staff attending the 2018 G20 Summit in Argentina from even
uttering
the words
“rules-based order.”
So
you might expect us to welcome Blinken’s stated commitment to
the “rules-based order” as a long-overdue reversal in
U.S. policy. But when it comes to a vital principle like this, it is
actions that count, and the Biden administration has yet to take any
decisive action to bring U.S. foreign policy into compliance with the
UN Charter or international law.
For
Secretary Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order”
seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and
Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov
suggested
that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international
law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with
“other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and
then imposed on everyone else.”
The
UN Charter and the rules of international law were developed in the
20th century precisely to codify the unwritten and endlessly
contested rules of customary international law with explicit, written
rules that would be binding on all nations.
The
United States played a leading role in this legalist
movement
in international relations, from the Hague Peace Conferences at the
turn of the 20th century to the signing of the United Nations Charter
in San Francisco in 1945 and the revised Geneva Conventions in 1949,
including the new Fourth Geneva Convention to protect civilians, like
the countless numbers killed by American weapons in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Gaza.
As
President Franklin Roosevelt described the plan for the United
Nations to a
joint session
of Congress on his return from Yalta in 1945:
“It
ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the
exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power,
and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries –
and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these a
universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally
have a chance to join. I am confident that the Congress and the
American people will accept the results of this conference as the
beginning of a permanent structure of peace.”
But
America’s post-Cold War triumphalism eroded U.S. leaders’
already half-hearted commitment to those rules. The neocons argued
that they were no longer relevant and that the United States must be
ready to impose
order
on the world by the unilateral threat and use of military force,
exactly what the UN Charter prohibits. Madeleine
Albright
and other Democratic leaders embraced new doctrines of “humanitarian
intervention”
and a “responsibility
to protect”
to try to carve out politically persuasive exceptions to the explicit
rules of the UN Charter.
America’s
“endless wars,” its revived Cold War on Russia and China,
its blank check for the Israeli occupation and the political
obstacles to crafting a more peaceful and sustainable future are some
of the fruits of these bipartisan efforts to challenge and weaken the
rules-based order.”
Today,
far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the
United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about
fifty
important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything
from children’s rights to arms control. Its unilateral
sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are
themselves violations
of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully
failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General
Antonio Guterres’ request
to suspend
such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.
So
is Blinken’s “rules-based order” a recommitment to
President Roosevelt’s “permanent structure of peace,”
or is it in fact a renunciation of the United Nations Charter and its
purpose, which is peace and security for all of humanity?
In
the light of Biden’s first few months in power, it appears to
be the latter. Instead of designing a foreign policy based on the
principles and rules of the UN Charter and the goal of a peaceful
world, Biden’s policy seems to start from the premises of a
$753 billion U.S. military budget, 800 overseas military bases,
endless U.S. and allied wars and massacres,
and massive weapons sales to repressive regimes. Then it works
backward to formulate a policy framework to somehow justify all that.
Once
a “war on terror” that only fuels terrorism, violence and
chaos was no longer politically viable, hawkish U.S. leaders—both
Republicans and Democrats—seem to have concluded that a return
to the Cold War was the only plausible way to
perpetuate
America’s militarist foreign policy and multi-trillion-dollar
war machine.
But
that raised a new set of contradictions. For 40 years, the Cold War
was justified by the ideological struggle between the capitalist and
communist economic systems. But the U.S.S.R. disintegrated and Russia
is now a capitalist country. China is still governed by its Communist
Party but has a managed, mixed economy similar to that of Western
Europe in the years after the Second World War – an efficient
and dynamic economic system that has lifted hundreds
of millions
of people out of poverty in both cases.
So
how can these U.S. leaders justify their renewed Cold War? They have
floated the notion of a struggle between “democracy and
authoritarianism.” But the United States supports too many
horrific dictatorships around the world, especially in the Middle
East, to make that a convincing pretext for a Cold War against Russia
and China.
A
U.S. “global war on authoritarianism” would require
confronting repressive U.S. allies like Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates, not arming them to the teeth and
shielding them from international accountability as the United States
is doing.
So,
just as American and British leaders settled on non-existent “WMD”s
as the pretext they could all
agree on
to justify their war on Iraq, the U.S. and its allies have settled on
defending a vague, undefined “rules-based order” as the
justification for their revived Cold War on Russia and China.
But
like the emperor’s new clothes in the fable and the WMDs in
Iraq, the United States’ new rules don’t really exist.
They are just its latest smokescreen for a foreign policy based on
illegal threats and uses of force and a doctrine of “might
makes right.”
We
challenge President Biden and Secretary Blinken to prove us wrong by
actually joining the rules-based order of the UN Charter and
international law. That would require a genuine commitment to a very
different and more peaceful future, with appropriate contrition and
accountability for the United States and its allies' systematic
violations of the UN Charter and international law, and the countless
violent deaths, ruined societies and widespread chaos they have
caused.
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