The ICC Indicts Israeli and Hamas Officials: On the Perils of Absolutist National Sovereignty

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu, former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and the military commander of Hamas on November 21, 2024. With the world having had centuries wherein national sovereignty has been the basis of the international order, the heads of national governments could be expected to instantly bolt from just being indicted by an international court. Since the world woke up in 1945 to learn of the Nazi atrocities against Slavs (20 million), Jews (6 million), intellectuals and gays, whether murdered in concentration camps or on the proverbial street, as well as reading as years went by of Stalin’s mass-graves from his government’s mass-murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and even Russians, the hegemonic doctrine that the sovereignty of a state should be absolute has been barely subject to any resistance. So, when the ICC has issued arrest warrants, it has been up to national governments around the world to enforce the warrants by arresting the heads of other governments charged with having violated international law. This weakness in the constraint on what would otherwise be absolutist national sovereignty attests to the marginal degree to which that doctrine has actually been questioned since 1945. In other words, the international order can be said to occupy a rather uncomfortable ‘betwixt and between’ position with respect to whether the sovereignty of countries should be constrained internationally. Not until international law comes complete with real enforcement powers will the world be able to say that heads of governments (and of state) are no longer in a state of nature as described by Thomas Hobbes in his tomb, Leviathan.  

In the case of Israel and Hamas, the nature of their respective crimes is such that the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty can legitimately be discarded and replaced by a doctrine of relative national sovereignty. The ICC’s judges said there were “reasonable grounds” that the three defendants bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity since October 7, 2023,[1] when Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped a couple hundred more. In (over) response, or retribution as “punishment,” the Israeli military had killed over 44,000 residents of Gaza and made over a million more homeless by the time the ICC issued its warrants. Israel even dropped bombs on the tents being used by the homeless residents. The scale alone of the suffering can be seen as an indictment on the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, which had been able to protect more than one head of a national government in the world.

In fact, during the very month in which the ICC announced the three warrants, Russia’s President Putin signed a revised, more flexible government policy on when the country’s military could use tactical nuclear weapons and was still having the military bomb civilian targets. Even the U.S. Embassy in Kiev was no longer safe from becoming a target. To be sure, the ICC had already issued an arrest warrant for Putin, but it was an easy matter for him to avoid being arrested. Netanyahu too could be expected to easily evade capture. Besides being able to stay in their respective countries, they could safely visit the respective allies. Often missed is the hesitancy that other, third-party governments, have in arresting the heads of other governments. Besides not wanting retaliation, it is easy for a country’s government to ignore the ICC’s requests. The ICC’s enforcement mechanism has been, in short, like a bad joke.

The weakness of the E.U. federal system only made the arrests of the three defendants within that territory especially unlikely. Put another way, that the ICC would have to depend on the E.U. to hold its states accountable demonstrates just how weak the court’s enforcement mechanism was when the court issued the warrants. Hence, the BBC noted at the time, “Netanyahu and Gallant do not face any immediate threat of prosecution.”[2] Even though “if either of them set foot in any [signatory country to the ICC’s jurisdiction], the two men “must be arrested and handed over to the court.”[3] The E.U.’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, “said the ICC decision was binding on all E.U. member states.”[4] Nevertheless, “Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said . . . he would ignore an arrest warrant issued by [the ICC] for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”[5] Orban’s refusal to recognize the validity of federal law would imperil the E.U. were his decision to go against the E.U. requirement to eventually become the norm with respect to E.U. law in the state governments; it could turn into something akin to the Nullification Crisis in the early 1830s in the U.S., when it too had a young federal system and had to contend with South Carolina’s Nullification Acts. Orban’s disrespect for E.U. law (including regulations and even directives, which the states have some discretion in implementing) is a microcosm of the disrespect for international law (and arrest warrants) that had become the norm at the global level by 2024; otherwise, coalitions of countries would have literally pushed Putin out of Ukraine and Netanyahu out of Gaza, as the U.S.’s coalition had pushed Saddam Hussain out of Kuwait in the early 1990s.

It is precisely such a lack of respect for the international court and international law itself that led Netanyahu’s office to condemn the ICC’s warrants against the prime minister and the former defense minister as “antisemitic.”[6] Of course, the warrant against the commander of Hamas’s military was not said to be a case of prejudice against Muslims. In fact, Gallant, the former Israeli defense minister, objected that the ICC was placing “the State of Israel and the murderous leaders of Hamas in the same row, and thus legitimizes the murder of babies, the rape of women and the abduction of the elderly from their beds.”[7] The ICC was not legitimizing the events of October 7, 2023 because the court issued a warrant for a Hamas high official too.

The court found reasonable grounds that Hama’s Deif was “responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form[s] of sexual violence; as well as war crimes for murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages; outrages upon personal dignity; and other form[s] of sexual violence.”[8] While this may seem duplicative, crimes against humanity are legally distinct from war crimes. Regarding Netanyahu and Gallant, the court found reasonable grounds to believe that they “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”[9] If the Israeli government officials still needed an explanation for why the court was putting them in the same criminal category with the Hamas official, perhaps contrasting 44,000 dead and over 1 million homeless with 1,200 dead and only a few hundred homeless (i.e, taken as hostages)—many of whom had been able, unlike the Gaza residents, to return to find a house or apartment building still standing. Just the fact that Israeli officials objected to the equivalence in the ICC’s charges leveled against Israeli and Hamas officials even though Israel’s military response had been disproportionately aggressive and destructive suggests just how warped human judgment can be, and just how dangerous the doctrine of absolutist sovereignty is as applied to national governments under which government officials can act with the sense of impunity from international law having “teeth” internationally. Even that such a misplaced doctrine had by the 21^st century become a part of the status quo in the global order does not bode well for human nature, which the doctrine contradicts.  That both the presidents of Israel and the United States called the ICC arrest warrants against Israeli officials “outrageous” boggles the mind, given the scale of destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza.[10] Put more directly, a species capable of such mental feats devoid of reason should not grant absolute sovereignty to any human being. Giving absolute sovereignty to people heading a government that has nuclear weapons is a bad idea, and yet the world, out of fear, has not stood up to keep that from continuing.

Given the salience of greed the thirst for power that are so indelible in human nature, the U.S. was still selling military weapons to Israel and the Biden administration had not courageously resisted the notoriously strong American Israeli lobby (the AIPAC). So the U.S. Government had a vested economic and political interest doing two things at the expense of human rights and international law: 1.) being the single veto at the UN Security Council against a resolution the day before that would have stipulated an immediate ceasefire, the removal of Israel’s military from Gaza, and the unconditional release of the hundred or so remaining Israeli hostages being held by Hama; and 2.) rejecting the ICC’s warrants for the two Israelis (but curiously not the one against the Hamas commander)—both in the same week! Countering the vested interest of the U.S., the E.U., a third party to the dispute/war, more objectively stated that all three warrants should be respected and enforced.[11] Given the magnitude of killing and destruction in Gaza, going much beyond the heinous acts of Hamas on October 7, 2023, the position of the E.U.’s foreign minister could indeed be viewed as being relatively objective, mature, and even ethical.

Lest it be objected (as it was by Israel and its enabler, the U.S.), that neither the U.S. nor the sovereign state of Israel had signed documents agreeing to be covered by the ICC’s jurisdiction, “the court [had] ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction over the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza because the UN’s secretary general had accepted the Palestinians” constitute a member of the UN.[12] Just because Israel does not recognize the Palestinians politically does not mean that the UN and the ICC could and should not do so.

Lest it be objected that the ICC, as a court of last resort, is “supposed to act when domestic courts cannot, or will not, genuinely investigate or prosecute serious international crimes,” Israel had had a bit more than a year to do so, but had not even charged Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity.[13] Especially given the judicial reforms that the prime minister had successfully had the legislature adopt, it would be highly unlikely that the judiciary would ever hold Netanyahu accountable even for corruption.

In short, like Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu and the U.S.’s Biden conveniently rejected the very validity of international law, and perhaps that position is fair because law without an enforcement mechanism can only really be a resolution or policy befitting an international realm with no sovereignty having been delegated to it from the world’s countries, whose government officials have gotten used to enjoying the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty serving as the bedrock of the global order. Reading slowly through the detailed charges promulgated by the ICC might get a person to reconsider whether, given human nature, the world hasn’t made a mistake in allowing it to become the status quo and thus enjoy considerable inertia even in the face of horrendous atrocities in Gaza as well as Ukraine with the perpetrators—national governments and their respective officials—being able to act with the smug sense of impunity. It is a pity that the national governments adopted, whether explicitly or by not rejecting it in action, such flawed doctrine as an important geo-political element of the status quo. Even if the world comes to realize that the squalid doctrine has enabled abuses of power by national governments, the very nature of the status quo suggests that the doctrine will nevertheless still be likely to enjoy considerable inertia as the power behind the thrones because of the political (and even military) energy needed to dislodge the artifice.

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1. David Gritten “Arrest Warrants Issued for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas Commander Over Alleged War Crimes," BBC.com, November 21, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Tansin Paternoster and Evelyn Dom, “European Leaders Give Mixed Reactions on Netanyahu’s War Crimes Arrest Warrant,” Euronews.com, November 22, 2024.
6. David Gritten “Arrest Warrants Issued for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas Commander Over Alleged War Crimes.”
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.; Jaroslav Lukiv, “Biden Says ICC War Crimes Arrest Warrant ‘Outrageous,” BBC.com, November 22, 2024.
11. David Gritten “Arrest Warrants Issued for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas Commander Over Alleged War Crimes.”
12. Ibid. 
13. Ibid.

 

UN Climate Conferences Harbor an Institutional Conflict of Interest

Whereas people become instantly upset upon hearing that someone has self-aggrandized oneself by exploiting a conflict of interest, by, for example, embezzling funds for personal use, our species has the tendency to ignore the institutional variety of conflicts-of-interest. We don’t want to hear of another person incurring a privately-held benefit by ignoring the duties of one’s office, such as fiduciary responsibility, but we are fine with countries whose dominant industry is oil hosting the UN’s annual climate conferences. The sheer denialism entailed in assuming that the governments of such countries can be expected to steer a conference from the interests of the domestic oil companies is astounding. If there were ever a case of private benefits being at odds with the public benefit from mitigating climate change from carbon emissions by humans, this instance would be it. As had been the case of tobacco companies that promoted smoking even to minors while knowing that smoking kills or at least shortens a person’s lifespan, oil companies place their own profits, which are only a benefit to themselves, their managements, stockholders, and their external sycophants (i.e., governments) through more tax revenue and higher political contributions, above whether the planet warms more than 2C degrees—1.5, the prior limit, being passed in 2024. In other words, greed (i.e., the desire for more) can render board directors and managements oblivious to even forecasts of catastrophic impacts from global warming. In 2024, as COP29 was in progress in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, Al Gore, who had been the U.S. vice president during the eight-year Clinton administration in the 1990s, was astonished by how blatant (and undercutting relative to the conference’s goal) the institutional conflict of interest has been in allowing petro-states to be the hosts. I’m skeptical, given the lapse that seems to be inherent in the human brain when it comes to assessing and even recognizing such conflicts of interest, whether Gore’s “wake-up” call would make more than a ripple next to the power of the oil industry, given its private wealth.

With regard to allowing oil states to host COP conferences, Gore said, “I think it’s absurd to have, for example, what we had last year with the CEO of one of dirtiest oil companies on the planet serving as the president of COP.”[1] The 2023 conference had been hosted by Dubai. As though wielding a club to knock some sense into the cognitive ability of the species’ collective mind, he stated, “It’s a direct conflict of interest.”[2] Perhaps I should use only capital letters for Gore’s last point to indicate just how incredulous the human blindness to institutional conflicts of interest is. That the governments of Dubai and Azerbaijan, in 2023 and 2024, respectively, would ever use their position as hosts to protect those countries’ respective oil companies is a point that seems to allude human thinking and consciousness.

Lest there be any doubt, the president of COP29, Mukhtar Babayev, was “very much in sync with [Azerbaijan’s] reliance on fossil fuels,” given that 90% of the country’s balance of payments was coming from the sale of oil and gas.”[3] Even though Babayev had worked at the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (Socar) for two decades, he was chosen at the beginning of 2024 to preside over the conference in Baku. It was really Russia’s President Putin who “made this choice,” Gore said.[4] He continued, “One of the reforms that I have proposed is to give the [UN] secretary general a say in who hosts the COPs, and not just leave it to allow voices like Valdimir Putin’s to determine who gets this one, and let the petrostates of the Middle East decide.”[5] At the time, Russia itself was an oil producer, so its own interests were tied with those of the interests of oil.

How might such an institutional conflict-of-interest skew the output of a COP conference in line with the host’s domestic oil industry at the expense of the survival-interest of our species? “Gore singled out carbon capture and storage (CCS), which typically involves pumping CO2 underground or below the seabed into depleted gas fields” as being in the commercial interest of oil companies, who could then sell as much oil and gas as they like while counting only on technology to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere without having to curtain CO2 emissions, and thus sales.[6] CCS has “been proven to be completely ridiculous and totally ineffective,” Gore asserted, before crucially adding, “Of course, the fossil fuel companies want to pretend that that’s the solution—anything other than reducing the amount of fossil fuels that are burned or reducing their markets.”[7]

Considering that 2024 was the first year that the planet’s atmosphere surpassed the limit set by the Paris Conference in 2016, a “both-and” approach was required, but this assumes that the interests of our species are more important, even vital, than are oil profits, which are only privately-held rather than species-as-a-whole benefits. I contend that the good of a whole surpasses the private good, and thus interest, of a part, especially if the latter’s good is at odds with the former. Out of jealousy and puffed up moral outrage, we get so angry at individuals taking advantage of, and thus exploiting their respective positions, but no one blinks an eye when Mukhtar Babayev of Azerbaijan was steering the climate conference in Baku in 2024 towards a climate-strategy that is in the financial interest of the oil industry in Azerbaijan, which is state-related so there is another institutional conflict of interest, at the expense of biting hard to reduce CO2 emissions, especially given that the world had just sailed through the limit of warming from pre-industrial levels. With most countries having failed to reach their own targets of CO2-emission reductions, COP29 could ill-afford to be handicapped by being limited to means in line with the financial interests of oil companies. Unlike the tobacco case, it might not be merely a matter of more people dying from climate change; the species itself could conceivably go extinct. That oil CEOs and their governmental sycophants would put the financial “health” of oil companies above the survival of the species ought to lead the rest of us to discredit the oil interest to the point of sidelining it at climate conferences, which, by the way, have been inundated with oil-industry lobbyists. That the global population looks the other way, and may not even recognize the institutional conflict of interest, reflects very badly on our species, and might be its undoing while God, disgusted with our species, looks on in utter disbelief. If disbelief comes to inhabit God, then we really are in trouble.

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1. Robert Hodgson, “Al Gore Calls for Reform of COP Climate Process,” Euronews.com, November 15, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Why a Stronger E.U. Is Needed in International Affairs

As 2023 and the following year made clear, the world still faced additional challenges in rebuffing incursions that violate human rights, including crimes against humanity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s military incursion into Gaza both demonstrate how easy it had become, especially with advanced military technology, to kill civilians so as to decimate an entire population so the land could be filled with the people of the aggressors. If this sounds like Hitler’s policy to make room for the German people in Eastern Europe, you are not far from touching on the real motives behind the aggression. It would be a pity were such motives to become the norm while the world looks on. I contend that the U.S. enabling of Israel has unwittingly contributed to the establishment of such a norm, and that therefore a stronger E.U. was needed not only domestically, but also internationally, as a counter-weight in defense of the human rights of civilians in Gaza.

UNRWA Gaza director Scott Anderson, speaking on the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza as of November, 2024, said, “We haven’t been able to get food to those people for over a month. If we don’t do something quickly, it could devolve into a full-blown famine, which would be a manmade condition and something that could easily be corrected if we just get enough aid in to take care of everybody.”[1] The key here is the word, manmade, for as officials in the Israeli government had been openly admitted, including the president, everyone in Gaza is culpable and thus deserves to suffer the consequences. Ironically, as the case of Nazi Germany demonstrates, it is very easy to go from the supposition that a certain people is subhuman to the sordid instinctual urge to exterminate the group. The “meta-premise” is that identity-politics by group is valid and based on ontological rather than merely cultural differences.

A month earlier, the “Famine Review Committee [had] called the situation in the north of the Strip ‘extremely grave and rapidly deteriorating’ and said all actors in the war much take immediate action ‘within days not weeks’ to avert a humanitarian disaster.”[2] During that month, the amount of aid entering Gaza dropped dramatically due to yet another offensive by Israel’s military in the north of Gaza.[3] “By the end of October, an average of just 71 trucks a day were entering Gaza,” whose population at the time was over a million.[4]

Anderson’s assessment in mid-November suggests that his demand had not been heeded, especially by Israel, but also, and this is important, by its strongest ally, the United States. Even though less than a week before the U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration “accused Israel of ‘not doing enough’ to answer international concerns over indiscriminate strikes on Gaza,” which in turn was a factor in the reduction of food-aid getting into Gaza, “Israel’s military chief . . . said the Israel Force needs to be larger, as the war expands to different fronts.”[5] U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said of the Israeli government officials, “They are not doing enough to get us the answers that we have requested.”[6] Of course, the token U.S. resistance to Israel did not win Michigan for Harris, as Arabs in Grand Rapids did not take the bait.

A few weeks after the U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration declared that Israel was not violating U.S. law after all in terms of killing and limiting food-aid to the residents, who by then were almost all displaced, and thus homeless, of Gaza. Back in May, the administration had said “that Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law.”[7] Of course, the administration provided for itself a caveat that would enable a reversal after the election: Wartime “conditions prevented U.S. officials from” collecting enough evidence to go beyond stating that Israel likely violated international humanitarian law, which, by the way, would mean that Israel had been violating U.S. law too. Even at the time, the media noticed that “the caveat that the administration wasn’t able to link specific U.S. weapons to individual attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza could give the administration leeway in any future decision on whether to restrict provisions of offensive weapons to Israel.”[8] In November, 2024, after the election, the Biden administration stated that the U.S. would continue to supply Israel with weapons. Exactly a week after the election, the administration announced “that it would not without weapon shipments to Israel,” even though the “30-day deadline” for Israel to “significantly alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza [had] expired.”[9] U.S. State Department spokesmn Vedant Patel said that Israel had not violated the U.S. law that “bars offensive weapons from being transferred to countries that block aid from reaching civilians.”[10] A report written by aid groups and requested by the Biden administration “determined that Israel had failed to meet the vast majority of the requirements laid out by” the administration—Israel having failed to comply with fifteen of the 19 measures that the U.S. had indicated must be met to avoid a delay in weapons shipments, and yet the administration announced that the U.S. would continue to ship weapons to Israel.[11] That this occurred just after the election is relevant, as this strongly suggests that the strategy was based on domestic U.S. politics—namely, trying to get as many votes as possible for Harris from Muslim Americans.

It is also significant that on the very same day, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign minister, “proposed formally to suspend political dialogue with Israel over the country’s alleged violations of human rights and international law in the Gaza Strip.”[12] Unlike the U.S., the E.U. was not politically beholden to AIPAC, the American Israeli Political Action Committee. Even by the report that the Biden administration had requested, the Israeli government had been violating humanitarian law by restricting humanitarian aid into Gaza, perhaps to rid the Strip of its remaining population as the final solution. The world needed an active E.U. with sufficient competencies (i.e., enumerated powers delegated to the E.U. by the states) to stand against U.S. policy in defense of humanitarian law—even that which had been enshrined in U.S. law! Especially with Russia invading Ukraine with many civilian casualties there, the world very much needed a world-power, which the E.U. could be, to push back on violators.

Clearly, the world could not count on the allies of violators, such as China and North Korea in the case of Russia, and the U.S. in the case of Israel; in fact, those allies went beyond merely standing quietly by to actively enable the aggressors. With regard to Muslims, I suspect that the U.S. Government was still too oriented to redressing the attack that took place on September 11, 2001, to accurately and fairly even perceive the one-sided over-kill being committed by Israel in Gaza.

The Israeli government’s perception was biased, which is why John Locke argued that government should exist to impartially judge cases of injury because victims tend to exact too much punishment by being swayed by emotion (hatred). Following Locke, Adam Smith wrote that the administration of justice should be “exact,” meaning not disproportional, and “equal and impartial.”[13] Victims who have been injured are in no position to determine and dispense justice in such a matter; hence the need for government. But what if governments are themselves the victims?

Holding onto resentment more than twenty years after the Muslim attack on the World Trade Tower in New York City may explain why the Biden administration was tacitly going along with Israel’s excessive “pay-back,” also known as punishment-as-vengeance, against the civilians residing in Gaza. Even allies should not be entrusted with being able to reasonably assess and contribute to punishment. Israel had been woefully excessive in inflicting suffering on the civilians in Gaza, acting with impunity in part because the E.U.’s states had not transferred enough sovereignty to the union in foreign policy and defense for the E.U. to be able to act as a counterweight to the United States.

It is dangerous when a sovereign country, such as Israel, can act with the presumption of de facto impunity internationally. That the rest of the world had not acted with sufficient force to arrest Israel’s aggression and deflate the sense of impunity suggests that if the UN could not be given real power, at least the European Union should be strengthened at the federal level. More to the point, the delusion that the E.U. is but an international organization or alliance and thus should not be given more power by its states has cost not only the E.U., but also the world. 

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1. Stefan Grobe, “UNRWA: Risk of Famine in Gaza without Swift Action,” Euronews.com, November 15, 2024.
2. Euronews, “UN Warns Famine Is ‘Imminent’ in Northern Gaza as Israel Siege Continues,” Euronews.com, September 11, 2024.
3. Euronews, “14 Killed in Israeli Strike on UNRWA School Used as Shelter for Displaced Gazans,” Euronews.com, August 11, 2024.
4. Ibid.
5. Euronews, “US Accuses Israel of ‘Not Doing Enough’ to Address Concerns over Strikes in Gaza,” Euronews.com, October 31, 2024.
6. Ibid.
7. Ellen Knickmeyer, Aamer Madhani, and Matthew Lee, “US Says Israel’s Use of US Arms Likely Violated International Law, but Evidence Is Incomplete,” The Associated Press, May 11, 2024.
8. Ibid.
9. Jacob Magid, “US Says It Won’t Withhold Weapons to Israel, as Deadline to Address AidCrisis Passes,” The Times of Israel, November 13, 2024.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Shona Murray and Jorge Liboreiro, “Borrell Proposes to Suspend E.U.-Israel Political Talks over Gaza War,” Euronews.com, November 13, 2024.

13. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 38. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), V. i. b. 1, 15, and 25.

Advancing the E.U.’s Strategic Autonomy: Beyond Security by Regulation

Faced with the return of Donald Trump as U.S. president in early 2025, the European Parliament debated on November 13, 2024 how the E.U. should respond and, if needed, protect its strategic interests with respect to Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine. “In their debate, MEPs considered hw to engage with the new administration to address challenges and leverage opportunities for both regions as the E.U. seeks stable transatlantic relations.”[1] The possibility of the incoming U.S. President pulling back on NATO and with respect to contributing military supplies and money to Ukraine, and issuing protectionist tariffs on imports from the E.U. had added urgency for the E.U. to come up with ways of countering those external threats from the West just as Russia’s latest forays into Ukraine were external threats from the East. On the same day, Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s secretary of state/foreign minister/foreign policy “chief” “proposed to formally suspend political dialogue with Israel over the country’s alleged violations of human rights and international law in the Gaza strip.”[2] This alone put the E.U. at odds with Israel’s stanchest defender/enabler, the U.S., and with its incoming president, Donald Trump. From a human rights standpoint alone, both with respect to the governments of Russia and Israel, the trajectory of the E.U. in incrementally increasing its competencies (i.e., enumerated powers delegated by the state governments) in foreign policy and especially in defense (given the new post of Defense Commissioner) was in motion. The question was perhaps whether the E.U.’s typical incrementalism would be enough to protect the E.U.’s strategic interests, which includes protecting human rights at home and abroad. Fortunately, on the very same day, Kaija Shilde, Dean of the Global Studies school at Boston University, spoke at Harvard on the very question that I have just raised. I will present her view, which will lead to my thoughts on how viewing the E.U. inaccurately as a mere alliance harms the E.U.’s role internationally from within. That is to say, the continuance of the self-inflicted wound, or category-mistake on what the E.U. is, was compromising the jump forward in defense that the E.U. needed at the time to more competently address the crisis in Ukraine.

Shilde began by noting the important role that the private sector had been playing within the E.U. with regard to providing Ukraine with military assets. Any state-actor has to harness markets to generate defense items, and the fact that the states were still commanding their respective militias, or armies, does not nullify this federal competency (enumerated power) that has been difficult to fully recognize given the contribution of the private sector. The E.U. and the U.S. both had been regulating their respective markets and thus encouraging their respective military-industrial industries. Therefore, both unions were more important than NATO, which has only been an alliance since its inception, in pushing against Putin who, in 2014 and again in 2022 invaded Ukraine militarily. In 2024, the E.U. was in fact doing things to generate military power. Direct lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine, enhancing defense integration within the E.U., and coordinating a war economy have been just three of the contributions at the federal level since the invasion of 2022. In 2024, the E.U. was the third largest military spender in Europe. Combining financial aid and military allocations, the E.U. allocated more money than did the United States.  

Europeans have been in favor of a role for the E.U. in defense. As of 2024, over 70 percent of Europeans in a poll every year since 1999 have said that the E.U. should have a role—that it shouldn’t be left up to the states. Only around 20 percent disagreed during that interval. Asked which level of governance best addresses defense threats, 43 percent said the federal level, which is to say, the European Union. In fact, the Europeans polled had specific ideas of what a E.U. army should do. Defending the E.U.’s territory was number one on the list. Shilde concluded that there must be something organic about pan-European defense, but would popular opinion be enough for the E.U. to augment its defense competencies (powers) in time to help Ukraine push back the Russian (and North Korean) army?

Since 1950, European integration proceeded by occasionally taking back-steps, and has been pushed forward by external threats. In the 1950s, the European Defense Community was prompted by the Soviet threat. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, France proposed a federal union for Europe rather than the extant Economic Community. Whereas the U.S. began with an emphasis on defense, for obvious reasons, the E.U. took off from an economic core of competencies (i.e., enumerated powers). Federal governmental sovereignty can be at both poles, as well as in the incremental powers that both unions have been able to add at the federal rather than state level. To be sure, starting with defense is more typical of federal levels than with economic regulations, which have traditionally been made at the local, provincial, and state levels.

A plurality of Europe’s military power has been due to the E.U.’s regulatory power; this is a modern way of generating military power—a modern way of exercising governmental sovereignty even if defense competencies are added later. The role of European companies in the E.U.’s shaping of markets to deliver military goods should not be minimized. In 2024, E.U. private firms spent 3 times that of American firms on defense research and development. This is because of E.U. regulations. For example, the E.U. facilitates some infant industries by means of protectionism. To be sure, given the Russian military incursion into Ukraine, the E.U. needed to become a large scale buyer of military goods and it needed a defense industrial policy in 2024, according to Shilde, even if the upcoming U.S. President were to decrease the American military support not only to Ukraine, but even NATO. Should he make a retreating dent in these respects, Shilde predicted that the E.U. would see a sizable enhancement of its role in defense, including in regard to helping Ukraine. It may not make any difference, she said, whether the federal level directly commands any military units; after all, the Confederate States of America relied on the armies of its member-states in the 1861-1865 war between the USA and the CSA.

I contend that the comparison between the E.U. and the CSA is not nearly as accurate as a comparison between the E.U. and U.S., even in 2024, especially if you take account of time, and thus development, by comparing the E.U. of 2024 with the U.S. of 1820—both unions being around 30 years old. Even comparing the E.U. and U.S. as they were in 2023 allows us to exclude the claim that one of the two was merely an alliance or an international organization. Federalism had already come to Europe within the E.U.’s borders, and, like case of the U.S., both the federal and state levels of the E.U. already enjoyed some governmental sovereignty. Hence both unions could be classified as having modern federal systems rather than being confederations, in which the states hold all of the sovereignty.

Importantly, getting the comparison right, and being realistic about what the E.U. was even as of 2024 is important to eliminating the self-inflicted handicap that had held the E.U. back since 1993. Classifying the E.U. as a mere alliance, and thus like that of NATO, has held the E.U. state governments back from agreeing to delegate additional defense competencies to the E.U. so a stronger united and collective defense of Ukraine could possibly tip the scales against Russia’s President Putin. This would be as if to say, with action as well as words: invading another country is no longer allowed. Such a twenty-first-century advance in international relations would truly be a Hamiltonian feat. Perhaps it would also be such a feat to get enough E.U. citizens to admit to themselves that the E.U. had already become a federal system, and thus has not in fact been inherently limited to the roles of an international organization or alliance. To put on a united front with one arm tied up, and to be doing so unwittingly or at the behest of an ideology is a self-infliction that the E.U. could have done without, especially with American isolationism rising in the West and Russian militarization intensifying in the East.

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1. Euronews, “MEPs Debate Future E.U.-U.S. Relations Against Backdrop of U.S. Administration Change,” Euronews.com, November 13, 2024.
2. Shona Murray and Jorge Liboreiro, “Borrel Proposes to Suspend E.U.-Israel Political Talks over Gaza War,” Euronews.com, November 13, 2024.

Resolved: The E.U. Should Join NATO

I contend that the European Union rather than its states should be in NATO. Besides eliminating duplication from the E.U. having a nebulous observer status while the states are formally in the alliance, the increasing role in defense being played by the Commission, including there being a Defense commissioner (secretary/minister), calls for being formally in the alliance. Whereas the U.S. began as a military alliance of sovereign states, the E.U. can trace its beginnings to the European Economic Community. Both unions have since incorporated powers or competencies beyond the respective starting points. For the E.U. this has meant moving beyond economics and trade to include social policy and, last but not least, defense. It is in NATO’s interest to adapt to this change. Lastly, that the E.U. and U.S. are both instances of (early) modern federalism, which at its core has the attribute of dual-sovereignty wherein both the federal and the state levels enjoy at least some governmental sovereignty, whereas NATO, as an international alliance, is confederal in that all of the sovereignty resides in the members of the alliance, justifies the E.U. being a member of NATO rather than being misinterpreted as a comparable international organization as the state-rights Euroskeptics like to believe.

On November 6, 2024, at his confirmation hearing at the European Parliament, the Commission’s nominee to be the union’s first defense commissioner (defense secretary in American parlance), Andrius Kubilius (of the European People’s Party) said, “If we want to defend ourselves, we need to spend at least €10 billion up to 2028.”[1] In addition, €200 billion would be needed over the next decade to update infrastructure and €500 billion to build an air-defence shield. “We need to spend more,” he said, “not because it is a demand of President[-Elect] Trump, but because of Putin”, the President of Russia, who, not coincidentally, was in the second year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[2] Showing “that we’re able to defend ourselves” would “convince Putin not to start another military campaign” within the E.U.’s territory.[3] Strength comes in numbers, and at the time that meant 27 states united to thwart Putin’s military expansionism.

A united force would carry over into NATO, within which the E.U. would have more clout than any of the 27 E.U. states had ever had in the alliance. Furthermore, were the E.U. to replace its states in NATO, the seven E.U. states that still had not met the commitment to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense would be wiped clean because the only requirement would be that the E.U. spend at least 2% of its GDP on defense, and Kubilius was clearly signaling that the Commission was in favor of doing so.  Of course, whether the Parliament would go along is another story. For NATO, no longer would 27 states in Europe have to be watched as far as defense spending is concerned, and the integration of military infrastructure at the E.U. level would also be easier for NATO to connect to instead of doing so separately to 27 state military forces (militias in American parlance).

Perhaps most important, with the E.U. being a member of the NATO alliance and spending €200 billion over a decade on infrastructure that would integrate the fractured militaries at the state level, the chances would be lower that war would erupt within the E.U. between the states. Nineteenth-century American history reminds us that such a war is possible in an empire-scale federal system wherein the state governments are powerful, and twentieth-century European history contained two world wars that began in what would become the European Union. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is very much in the interests of the U.S. that the E.U. not only be able to defend itself, and thus rely less on American money for the purpose and be better equipped to fend off Russian expansionism, but also join NATO. Having one voice rather than 27 to speak with would simplify the communicative tasks on both sides of the Atlantic. I suspect that the foremost obstacle to further European integration on the defence front is ideological in nature, and this resistance, not coincidentally, aligns quite well with the personal and short-run political interests of the heads of the state governments in the European Union, for it is human, all too human, to relish being in the spotlight.

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1. Paul Soler, “Boost E.U. Defence Capabilities Against Putin, Future Commissioner Warns,” Euronews.com, November 7, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Taoist Climate Change on Halloween

In the midst of the intensification of the very polarized and thus divisive U.S. presidential campaign “season” (i.e., year) during its last week, Halloween of 2024 occurred in Boston, Massachusetts not only without the need of trick-or-treaters and their parents to wear winter coats, but also with the option of wearing shorts and short-sleeve shirts without even having to wear a light jacket. That this was so as late as 8pm was nothing short of surreal not only to New Englanders, but also to any transplants from the northern-tier Midwestern and Plains states.  It being around 70F degrees well into the dark hours was nothing short of unprecedented, and so much so that the negative impact of the cold climate in detracting from the holiday in prior years could finally be grasped. I had realized this more than a decade earlier when I was in Miami during Halloween. There is indeed a silver lining to global warming for people living in places that are cold during the late fall, winter, and early spring seasons, even as contrary to political correctness it is to admit this even to friends. The proclivity of the human mind/brain to divide up the world in terms of dichotomies of mutually-exclusive, antagonistic poles does not necessarily fit with empirically with the real world. Taoism speaks to this.

The full essay is at "Climate Change on Halloween."