Has the United Nations gone the way of the League of Nations? Trump’s self-serving “Board of Peace,” which the moronic Chairman-for-Life said will “oversee the UN,” would appear to be the final nail in its coffin.
Speaking at the launch of his corrupt-from-the-get-go Gored of Peace, Trump lied through his twisted mouth for the umpteenth time: “We’re going to strengthen up the UN, making sure it runs properly.”
He revealed his real intentions as a puppet of darkness the following week, after the Supreme Court belatedly ruled against his shambolic tariff policy, which he has used as a cudgel to try to beat friends and foes into economic submission: “I can destroy trade. I can destroy the country. I can do anything I want.”
Last September the disgraceful President of the United States had the temerity to stand before the General Assembly and condemn the UN for failing to prevent the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. He malevolently ignored the fact that Israel has used US bombs, bullets and bullshit to level the quarantined strip.
Prodded by Netanyahu, America is about to attack another Middle Eastern country that poses no threat to the United States. Trump deno denounced the Bush-Cheney Administration for invading Iraq, but believes he can have a “quick and easy war” by bombing Iran.
The United States bypassed the UN to prosecute George W. Bush’s “global war on terror,” which, as Shada Islam has written, “cost millions of lives and caused mass displacement of people from across the Middle East.”
What’s more, the USA is currently 4 billion dollars in arrears on its dues, hamstringing the UN’s peacekeeping and humanitarian projects. This after Trump destroyed one of the best things out of America – USAID.
As widely reported and generally agreed, “The organizing principle that emerged from the ashes of the second world war, that interdependence would promote world peace by knitting nations’ interests together in a drive for common security and prosperity, no longer works. The US blew it up.”
Anyone who has stood under the ancient redwoods in Cathedral Grove of Muir Woods, where the United Nations was consecrated shortly after World War II, cannot help but mourn the demise of the UN.
Ostensibly, the intent of the representatives of nearly 50 nations gathered in “this temple of peace,” after a world war that had killed tens of millions of people, was to honor Franklin Roosevelt, who died just before the conference in San Francisco that inaugurated the UN.
It was FDR’s vision and political strategy that made the United Nations possible. Visiting those holy spires of Muir Woods, one feels that the UN was blessed there as much as a political body can be. How far we’ve sunk as a nation by twice electing such a small, stupid man as Donald Trump.
For a brief moment in human history, the spiritual, philosophical and political dimensions converged in Cathedral Grove. The United Nations was instrumental in preventing another world war between the nuclear-armed superpowers of the US and USSR, and held fast to its mission for 70 years.
As ineffectual and hypocritical as it often was, the UN system at least made the attempt to forge a world order based on universal values and multilateral rules. Now, when a new foundation is required more than ever, a global order is almost universally derided as impossible, with the likes of Trump and Putin leading the world back into the law of the jungle.
Unable or unwilling to see beyond the flawed and defunct international order, European leaders are following the USA into the abyss. How else to explain giving Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio a standing ovation in Munich for praising colonialism and pridefully calling for a return to empires?
At best, EU leaders bought into California Governor Newsom’s wishful thinking that “Donald Trump is temporary — he’ll be gone in three years.” But Newsom is an empty suit, and will never be president.
One deranged narcissist has the immense military power of the United States to use at his whim, with his twitchy little fingers on the nuclear button. Meanwhile the American media issues brainless and heartless reports about a military buildup larger than any since Bush-Cheney’s unprovoked and immoral war against Iraq without even a squeak of outrage.
Canada’s Prime Minister Carney was right that Trump represents “a rupture not a transition.” But can Europe respond? It sure doesn’t look like it.
Trying to sound Churchillian, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, intones, “We must build our hard power, because that is the currency of the age.” The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said in Munich, “Europe has to learn to become a geopolitical power.”
Doubling down on a post-world war worldview by calling for more militarization and coercive power is not leadership, but followership.
The international order is dead and gone. It was never global, despite decades of conflating international and global dimensions by analysts and pundits.
As the failing and flailing Security Council attests, the post-war international order was always a shaky consortium composed of an uninvaded nuclear superpower, a devastated but soon-to-be nuclear superpower, a huge developing nation, a receding island empire, and a liberated ally that America demanded be included as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.
Thirty-five years ago, the USSR non-violently exploded. Six years ago the USA violently imploded. And 25 years ago a new economic superpower unloaded.
A mercantilistic China is flooding the world with subsidized exports as it closes its market to imports from abroad. The CCP has no interest in leading the world toward a balanced global order with a fair playing field for all.
The idea that every event is an open question until it occurs is as wrongheaded as the idea that everything is predetermined.
Trump believes he has absolute power, and that he wields two huge economic and political hammers– tariffs and the US military. The Supreme Court unequivocally limited the first one. Do you think for a moment he won’t use the second and attack Iran, no matter what they say during so-called negotiations?
That’s a rhetorical question. Here are two authentic ones: will it take another world war to yield a new paradigm and the emergence of a true global order? Will it take a nuke or two to shatter comforting gradualist illusions and self-fulfilling nihilistic profusions?
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“He malevolently ignored the fact that Israel has used US bombs, bullets and bullshit to level the quarantined strip.”
So who was it that provided guns, bullets and bullshit to Hamas in order for them to murder 1300 Israeli civilians on Oct 7?