In the past few decades, a slogan that threatens to destroy the world has become popular. This is the “rules-based international order.” According to this idea, all nations are supposed to follow peaceful rules for the settlement of disputes between them. This sounds good when you first hear it, but the key point is that this is just a cover for control of the world by pseudo-American global elites. They set the rules that all other nations have to follow. Other countries must take a subordinate place within the American Empire. This situation is what Vladimir Putin is protesting about, and it is efforts to enforce the “rules-based international order” that have led to the Ukraine War and the threat this poses of nuclear destruction.
Caitlin Johnstone explains how the “rules-based international order” works: “The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with ‘either disinformation activities or violent organizations’ and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.
This would be the same US government that is imprisoning Julian Assange for journalism which exposed US war crimes, the same US government which paid for the weapons used to destroy more than 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza last month, the same US government whose unipolar domination of the planet is made possible by the journalism-destroying propaganda of the media-owning plutocratic class in alliance with sociopathic government agencies.
This would also be the same US government which constantly pays lip service to the need to protect the freedom of the press, as part of the ‘rules-based international order” it purports to uphold in the world.
The Biden administration has been bleating ‘rules-based order’ so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Times voiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term ‘international law’. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:
For 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 Sergey 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.”
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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 50 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 António Guterres’ request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.
Indeed, US government officials babble endlessly about ‘rules’, and the ‘rules’ are literally always tools used for the benefit of the US government, and the US government literally always flouts those ‘rules’ exponentially worse than any other government on earth.
What the phrase ‘rules-based order’ actually means is Washington-based order. It means a world order imposed by the US government and its lackey states on pain of devastation and death, which exists solely to keep the US at the head of a unipolar empire. It means do as I say, not as I do. It means rules for thee but not for me. It means we decide what happens based on what suits our interests.
If you peel away all the narrative spin and outward politeness, the US empire just looks like any other tyrannical force that has ever existed throughout human history, except it kills a lot more people than most of the others. In the old days the thugs with the most effective killing force would dominate everyone else using terror, wearing frightening battle costumes adorned with the body parts of their enemies. Nowadays they still dominate everyone else using terror, except they do it while wearing suits, and while waxing self-righteously about the ‘rules-based international order’. And they are much better at killing.
There is no other government on earth that is less qualified to impose any ‘order” upon the world. This is the only government on earth which has killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, the only government on earth that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. Yemen alone completely delegitimizes any claim the US may have had to be the arbiter of ‘order’ in the world, to say nothing of Iraq, Vietnam, Libya and all the other innumerable atrocities that this monstrous regime has inflicted upon our species.
The sooner humanity can extract the parasite that is the US empire from its skin, the better off the whole world will be. See this.
David Grewal, writing in the Winter 2022 issue of American Affairs, gets to the root of this evil system. “ The year 2022 was not supposed to see the threat of nuclear conflict among major powers and the return of war to the European continent. Since the end of the Cold War, a world divided into hostile halves had become ‘one world’—or so we were repeatedly assured. Politically, the fall of the Berlin Wall supposedly signaled the ‘end of history.’ Liberal democracy was declared a regime without rivals—and a lack of rivals meant no further need for the barriers between ‘economies,” perhaps even states. So strong was the assumption that nothing could change that most Western states, apart from the United States and the United Kingdom, refused to believe the obvious until Russia’s armies crossed the border into Ukraine. It would be similarly naïve to suppose China’s State Council does not believe ‘complete national unification’ with Taiwan to be the strategic necessity and national prerogative it declares it to be. . .
The hope of previous decades was that China and Russia’s incorporation into the global economy would not only prove profitable, but would also strengthen the cause of international peace. The fear now is the opposite, and commentators like to wonder when the ‘end of history’ ended. Less theoretically, how much of our foreign policy remains tied to a geopolitical ideal that, if it ever held sway, was dominant for only about six years? The world without walls that Blair and Annan called inevitable began in earnest in 1995, with the inauguration of the WTO, but had already begun to crumble by the autumn of 2001, sometime between the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Chinese entry into the global economy as its future anchor. The last two decades have been a drawn-out exercise in pretending otherwise.”
The struggle against American global hegemony explains Putin’s foreign policy. “Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of trying to encourage extended hostilities in Ukraine as part of what he described Tuesday as Washington’s alleged efforts to maintain its global hegemony.
Addressing a security conference attended by military officials from Africa,, Asia and Latin America, Putin reaffirmed his long-held claim that he sent troops into Ukraine in response to Washington turning the country into an ‘anti-Russia’ bulwark.
‘They need conflicts to retain their hegemony,” Putin charged. ‘That’s why they have turned the Ukrainian people into cannon fodder. The situation in Ukraine shows that the United States is trying to drag the conflict out, and it acts in exactly the same way trying to fuel conflicts in Asia, Africa and Latin America.’
The speech represented the latest attempt by the Russian leader to rally support amid bruising Western sanctions that targeted the Russian economy and finance along with its government structures, top officials and businesses for Moscow’s action in Ukraine.
Putin also drew parallels between the U.S. backing Ukraine and a recent visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, charging that both were part of an alleged American attempt to foment global instability.
‘The American adventure in Taiwan wasn’t just a trip by an irresponsible politician. It was part of a deliberate and conscious U.S. strategy intended to destabilize the situation and create chaos in the region and the entire world, a blatant demonstration of disrespect for another country’ sovereignty and its own international obligations,’ Putin said.
The Russian leader claimed that ‘Western globalist elites’ were trying ‘to shift the blame for their own failures to Russia and China,’ adding that ‘no matter how hard the beneficiaries of the current globalist model try to cling to it, it’s doomed.’
‘The era of the unipolar world order is nearing its end,’ he added.
Speaking at the same conference, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu charged that along with supplies of weapons to Ukraine, Western allies also have provided detailed intelligence information and deployed instructors to help the Ukrainian military operate the weapons systems.
‘Western intelligence agencies not only have provided target coordinates for launching strikes, but Western specialists also have overseen the input of those data into weapons systems,’ Shoigu said.
He dismissed allegations that Russia could potentially use nuclear or chemical weapons in the conflict as an ‘absolute lie.’
‘From the military viewpoint, there is no need for using nuclear weapons in Ukraine to achieve the stated goals,’ Shoigu said.’ The main mission of the Russian nuclear forces is providing a deterrent against a nuclear attack.’
Shoigu added that the claims of a possible chemical attack by Russia were equally ‘absurd,’ saying that Moscow fully liquidated its chemical weapons stockpiles in compliance with an international treaty banning chemical weapons.”
The efforts by brain-dead Biden to maintain the “rules-based international order”—American Empire in plain language— threaten the world with nuclear destruction. The threat is especially great now, because of Ukrainian Preident Zelenskyy’s vow to retake the Crimea. Maintaining the Russian fleet at Sevastopol in the Crimea is a vital Russian security interest, and we can be sure Putin would go all-out to maintain it. Here is a report on Zelenskyy’s reckless ambitions.
“Zelenskyy also said that Kyiv plans to liberate all of the country’s occupied territories, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia without any Ukrainian military resistance in 2014.
‘My signal to the people in Crimea: We know that these are our people, and it is a terrible tragedy that they have been under occupation for more than eight years,’ Zelenskyy said. ‘We will return there. I don’t know when exactly. But we have plans, and we will return there, because this is our land and our people.’
Zelenskyy’s ambitious war goals are a clear departure from the initial aims stated by Kyiv in the early weeks of war.”
According to the “rules-based international order,” the Russian occupation of the Crimea was “illegal” and must be ended. Is this worth nuclear war? It is madness to say that it is.
