Sunday, December 14, 2025

The Reader: Implications for International Governance

The film, The Reader (2008), captures a frame of mind that may be so frequently overlooked when it is observed because it is so bizarre in its impact on reasoning that it difficult to explain, let alone grasp for what it is. The phenomenon is not of artifice; rather, it is a natural vulnerability of the human mind, or brain, due to its susceptibility to ideology that is highly unethical in its content, including a circumscribed and even warped mental framework and very unethical prescriptions for conduct. The ideology at issue in the film is that of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1933 to 1945.  The truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely does not fully account for the cognitive warping that is evinced by Hanna Schmidt during her trial in the film.


The full essay is at "The Reader."


Thursday, December 4, 2025

Russia’s Bottom-Line on Ukraine

As American, Ukrainian, and Russian negotiating delegations were flying around the world in early December, 2025 to conduct various negotiating sessions, all the while without the presidents of Russia and Ukraine meeting, it was difficult for bystanders to keep an eye on the proverbial ball as it was being kicked around by offers and counter-offers, and complicated by the high-profiled presence of the businessman, Jared Kushner, who happened to be married to one of U.S. President Trump’s daughters. Kushner was also highly visible in the negotiations on Gaza, which almost certainly included real-estate development. To be sure, commercial and investment deals can easily remain subterranean while the public discourse stays on the political relations between nations, and even just the latter may lack transparency. Democratic accountability in democratic republics as concerning the conduct and results of foreign policy can be difficult. Especially difficult to gauge was the hand being closely held by Russia’s President Putin. I contend that his willingness to negotiate was consistently overestimated by the West and Ukraine.

After a meeting at the Kremlin with an American delegation led by special envoy Steve Witkoff, who had recently been caught coaching Kremlin officials on how to win over U.S. President Trump, Putin arrived in India on December 4, 2025 while Ukrainian officials were travelling to the U.S. to hold talks with an American delegation on a proposal to end Russia’s invasion. How close the Russians and Ukrainians were to deal was at the time unknown likely even to themselves. To an extent, they may have been talking past each other and relying too much on surrogates, some of which, the Europeans, were not even at the negotiating table on behalf of Ukraine.

As a case in point on how badly the negotiating was going, Putin’s statement, which he made in India, that Russia would “liberate Donbas and Nororossiya in any case-by military or other means” went along with his stated intention that Russia would finish the special operation in Ukraine “when we achieve the goals set at the beginning of the special operation, when we free these territories. That’s all.”[1] To be sure, such determination and certainty can be taken as a negotiating tactic, but the statements are consistent with Putin’s pattern of ignoring overtures for peace. It is no accident that Putin could afford to do so because Russia was “negotiating” throughout from a position of strength on the battlefield. The law of political physics applied, Putin and Russia stood to gain little if anything by unilaterally giving up the Ukrainian territory that, as U.S. President had said, had been won. Lest it be assumed that Crimea and even Donbas regions would be enough, it is highly significant that Putin “revived the term” Novorossiya that referred historically “to territories toward the west during the Russian empire.”[2] This is just the sort of move that made Poland and the Balkans nervous, and legitimately gave the E.U. a stake at the negotiating table. In short, Putin’s vision of renewing the historical Russian Empire, which predates the U.S.S.R., gives his statements made in India more substance than merely that of being negotiating rhetoric. A historical vision with the political realism of a position of military strength rendered Putin’s real stance rock solid.

Of course, Russia’s position could change were the E.U. to begin in earnest to hold some of its own wayward states back at the federal level and aid Ukraine militarily to an extent that the balance of power between Russia and Ukraine could finally be swayed toward Ukraine’s advantage, but the E.U. remained mired in its own state-centric federal system as the American, Ukrainian, and Russian delegations were moving around and talking in various, indirect combinations.

It is precisely in this context that the following statement made by Ukraine’s President Zelensky as Putin arrived in India can be criticized: “Our task now is to obtain full information about what was said in Russia, what other reasons Putin found to prolong the war and put pressure on Ukraine, on us, on our independence.”[3] Putin was not finding reasons to prolong the war; rather, he stated that he would not stop until his initial military goals have been accomplished. He had no intention of giving up those goals in a negotiated peace.

To be sure, commercial deals spearheaded by Jared Kushner, involving Russian rare earth minerals for instance, could potentially lure Putin into accepting territory less than the whole of Donbas, but such a political-commercial nexus would be a hard sell given Putin’s vision of resurrecting the Russian Empire of old in Eastern Europe. At best, a commercial mega-deal would likely serve as a resting stop for the Russian dictator. Of course, political forecasting is such a plight that smart analysts remain aloof from that occupation. The Europeans could surprise the world and proffer Ukraine with a spurt of military assistance capable of pushing Russian troops back in spite of Ukraine’s shortage of troops. Russia, whose territory was already empire-scale, versus Ukraine, a kingdom-scale country, was never a fair fight. This has been Putin’s advantage all along, and his statements in India are consistent with it. The problem is that Zelensky’s statement seems to display a lack of political realism regarding Putin’s strategy and objectives, given the Ukrainian territory “won” by Putin without being dislodged by Ukraine and the European Union. This doesn’t even count the possible commercial deals being quietly negotiated by Jared Kushner on behalf of silent investors unknown to nearly everyone, including Zelensky.

The invasion was occurring during, and even abetting, the ascendence of militarized political realism at the expense of international constraints on naked power-aggression. It seems that the Europeans, including Zelensky, had not received this memo, and were still expending Putin to give and take as if Ukraine and Russia could reach justice as equals. It bears remembering Nietzsche’s point that justice is only achievable between parties equal in power. That equality itself is an illusion is a point made by Hume. At any rate, the disparity of military power between Russia and Ukraine as 2025 was drawing to a close should dispel any idyllic thoughts that Putin might give in on his initial military objectives not only with respect to Ukraine, but also with the broader Novorossiya too. It bears remembering that appeasement with Hitler didn’t work, and that that strategy gave not only Britain, but also Germany time to militarize. The E.U.’s self-inflicted handicap of the veto-power of its states, and the refusal of the Europeans to make the necessary structural/procedural correction even in spite of the anticipated enlargement, but also Russia’s ongoing aggression to the east, can be viewed as tacit appeasement even though Trump’s enabling of Putin’s government went far beyond appeasement. Indeed, the stance of the Trump administration alone should have bolted the Europeans into reforming their own federal system even though state officials quite obviously didn’t want to give up (i.e., delegate) more power even for collective action to push back Russia’s invasion in Eastern Europe. All of this only fortified Putin in staying the course.  

A Hobbesian World of Might-Makes-Right

In his famous text, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes the state of nature as one of might, or raw force, being the decider of what is rightly and determinatively so. If one person physically harms another person such that the latter’s food may be taken by the former, then that food belongs to the victor even without any overarching normative, or moral, constraint that says that the food still belongs to the vanquished. If Russia has successfully conquered a few regions of Ukraine by military means, then those occupied lands have become part of Russia. If Israel has physically decimated Gaza and placed its indigenous residents in concentration camps without enough food or access to medical care, then Israel and the United States can engage private investors on large-scale, upscale real-estate development projects as attacks against the remaining residents in Gaza continue unabated. In short, possession is really all that is needed to establish ownership. Might makes right. In this system, the International Criminal Court, or ICC, simply does not exist or is a target. Evolution has not changed human nature from the hunter-gatherer “stage.” To be sure, not all of humanity is on board with this sort of global order, even if guns have a way of pushing down or even silencing the more progressive elements of the species. The Trump administration’s attacks on the ICC represent a case in point.

The absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty feeds into the functioning of a might-makes-right world. “Global standards for how civilians must be treated and how to wage war are often, in the eyes of the Trump administration, a hindrance and a violation of national sovereignty.”[1] The implication is that unimpeded national sovereignty not only comes without danger, but is also the best system for international relations and thus the prosperity and happiness of the species. Rather than merely criticizing Trump’s “unprecedented campaign against a core institution of international law, the International Criminal Court,” the assumptions underlying a global system of unfettered national sovereignty merit critique, given the unnecessarily unheeded power-aggrandizing actions of Stalin and Hitler in the twentieth century. The military exploits of the Empire of Japan can be added to the list as well. In the next century, the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the mass-killing and starvation of Gaza’s indigenous residents by Israeli Zionists demonstrate the fallacy of a stable world to be brought about by unrestrained national sovereignty, given the underlying human nature that manifests too easily as the instinct of power-aggrandizement. In short, the Israeli genocide in Gaza demonstrates that the Nazi holocaust was not a “one off” deviation from human nature, but rather is closer to mainstream human nature than was realized during the last half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the genocide in Gaza may be reckoned by history as yet another holocaust writ large.

Nevertheless, and as evidence that might-makes-right can continue even amid such atrocities in progress, the Trump administration “used America’s disproportionate global financial power and threats of further repercussions to hinder the [ICC’s] work and create a chilling effect—even as Palestinians [continued] to face U.S.-backed Israeli policies that ICC judges said could constitute grave crimes, and that could undermine Trump’s own stated vision of peace for Gaza.”[2] Rather than focus on the role of private investor-capital in planned development projects being planned for Gaza absent its indigenous population, I want to highlight the disproportionateness of a might-makes-right superpower as itself being a problem unless might-make-right is deemed salvific for humanity. For the ICC, the raw power in the disproportionate military and financial power of the Trump administration over other countries presented “an existential paradox: The ICC’s pursuit of accountability over Gaza is both the reason it has a target on its back, and proof that it [i.e., the ICC] is necessary.”[3] But to be necessary and largely impotent against the power of the disproportionate enabler of Israel (and perhaps even Russia) is to be in the worst of two worlds, as it were.

Put another way, the very existence of a partisan “world police force” presents the ICC with its greatest threat as well as its highest raison d’etre. With such a police force operating on the basis of might-makes-right internationally, that same rationale can be seized upon by other partisans internationally to engage in power-aggrandizement activities of their own, even against the global police-force itself. Such a system is inherently self-contradictory, in other words, and thus weak as a system in which the world order can be in order rather than chaos and upheaval. That the dogma of absolutist national sovereignty sanctions and protects parchment-constraints at the national level (and below) saves such a system from being chaotic from top to bottom, but as Trump’s second presidency demonstrated, a might-make-right foreign-oriented attitude can easily be translated into efforts to walk through constraints at the national level, such as legislatures and courts. 

Arresting and deporting a person deemed to be an illegal immigrant before one has the chance to challenge the actions judicially enjoys the default of a fait accompli. Quelle domage. The Trump administration could simply inform a judge that the suspect is no longer under U.S. jurisdiction so there is nothing that can be done. Such a tactic is well-known to the might-makes-right mentality.  This point should not be taken to excuse or accept illegal immigration as if it were not a crime and one worthy of punishment and expulsion by the rule and thus due process of law. 

Might-makes-right hates to be subject to, or constrained by the rule of law as the mentality sees itself as the law. It is easy for this mentality oriented to foreign affairs to be turned inward while using absolutist national sovereignty as a shield both domestically and internationally. Trump, "himself convicted of felonies, has promoted impunity for various violations of domestic and international law; in addition to opposing the ICC warrant for Netanyahu, Trump is supporting the Israeli leader's bid for a pardon over his corruption charges from Israeli prosecutors."[4]

I contend that such a world of both domestic and international impunity from the constraint of an externally imposed law represents a step backward for the species. Given the foregone benefits that political development could otherwise deliver, the phenomenon worthy to be examined goes beyond the legitimacy and functioning of the ICC and the American foreign policy on Israel and even Russia. The post-World War II international efforts to subject might-makes-right to constraints internationally were being cast off and even attacked a few decades into the next century with the implication being that nothing but might-makes-right might be left standing.


1. Akbar S. Ahmed, “Trump’s Pressure Campaign on the ICC Is Falling Apart,” The Huffington Post, December 3, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., italics added.


Thursday, November 27, 2025

We Don’t Have Another America: Ukraine on the E.U.

On America’s Thanksgiving Day, 2025, Dmytro Kuleba, a former foreign minister of Ukraine, was asked whether Ukraine’s government officials could trust American officials negotiating with the Russian officials, given the fact that Steve Witkoff, the U.S. Envoy at the time, had recently been caught coaching Kirill Dmitriev, a top Russian official, on how to get U.S. President Don Trump on the side of Putin even though the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine was still in violation of international law, which, by the way, trumps historical reasons, such as a lost Russian empire. Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine during the 1930s would seem to nullify any imperial claims from the past. Kuleba relied to the journalist’s question with, “Not really, but we do not have another America.”[1] He was really giving Europe a wake-up call, but the problem there was not a lack of consensus, but a structural deficiency in the federal system of the European Union.

Far from being able to diagnose what aspects of the E.U.’s federal system were holding the Union back from protecting Ukraine from an American-Russian one-sided plan to end the ongoing invasion, Kuleba said rhetorically, “Isn’t it embarrassing that almost four years into the war, European leaders are still jumping from one topic to another, from sending peacekeeping forces to reassurance forces to strengthening the Ukrainian army.”[2] While it may be tempting to criticize state-level officials for being “all over the map” on what the E.U. should do regarding the American-Russian negotiations, as well as on Russia itself, moreover, such divergence of opinion is only natural. In the U.S., for instance, polling officials from the 50 states would not likely find even a consensus. For example, the leaders of Arizona and Massachusetts may have been as far apart from each other on whether to help Ukraine militarily as the leaders of Hungary and France. If this comparison itself “touches a nerve,” I contend that a festering, subterranean category mistake is the root cause of the pain.

E.U. citizens had a solid basis for being frustrated, for although “two top E.U. aides joined negotiations with Ukrainian and American delegations in Geneva . . ., European leaders have been largely side-lined from the talks.”[3] As for the Coalition of “the willing,” which consisted of 33 sovereign countries, depending on a bloc rather than on the E.U. to safeguard Ukraine’s geopolitical and military interests, or treating the E.U. as if it were a bloc, can be reckoned as borderline foolishness when up against an active theatre of combat.

Kuleba’s point in lamenting that Ukraine did not have another America in Europe may imply that the E.U. could and even should be another America capable in terms of raw power to be a counterweight to American foreign policy in the world. This is not to say that “another America” would be a replica of the United States, for the European Union, although another empire-scale federal system characterized by dual sovereignty (and thus not a confederation such as U.S.’s Articles of Confederation (1781-1789)), contains differences. For example, whereas the U.S. Senate represents the member-states at the federal level, the European Council and the Council of Ministers represent the state governments at the federal level in European Union. Yet the U.S. House of Representatives and the European Parliament are much more alike counterparts, representing U.S. and E.U. citizens, respectively. The political genus of empire-scale and level federalism of dual sovereignty (i.e., state and federal) can indeed support institutional and procedural differences in the basic, or constitutional, law. Whereas the U.S. in the twentieth century had become too consolidated, the E.U. in its first few decades in the next century has been too state-heavy, as the U.S. was for many decades since it split the atom of governmental sovereignty in 1789. Even though the E.U.’s federalism contains more safeguards protecting the states from federal encroachment than did the U.S. even when the governments of the member states selected U.S. senators, those E.U. safeguards arguably have paralyzed the E.U. on the world stage.

In particular, the veto power of each state government in the European Council and the Council of Ministers, and the refusal of every state to delegate more governmental sovereignty to the European Commission to conduct foreign and defense policy, are why the E.U. president (i.e., of the federal executive branch) and the federal foreign minister were not able to defend Ukraine from the ongoing invasion for years, and to become directly involved in the negotiations to end the invasion. Put more bluntly, by even just threatening to use the state’s veto, the governor of the E.U. state of Hungary was holding E.U. policy and power regarding Ukraine and Russia hostage. Even with regard to the frozen assets of Russia’s central bank, E.U. officials were having trouble using that as political leverage to shift the negotiations more to Ukraine’s favor. It is not that President Von der Leyen was weak or not astute politically, or naïve on defense; rather it is the case that a federal system in which governmental sovereignty is held both by state governments and the Union is incompatible with the confederal device of the state veto at the federal level.

A dean of the Global Affairs school of Boston University told me in 2024 that the E.U. was a mix of confederal and modern (dual sovereignty) federalism. I countered that the two types of federalism are mutually exclusive. To conflate the two, such as by granting the federal institutions some governmental sovereignty while giving each state government a veto over such sovereignty, is self-contradictory and thus inherently implausible. To be sure, the E.U.’s states could look at the process of consolidation of power at the federal level in the U.S. and want institutional and procedural safeguards against such federal encroachment from happening down the road in the European context, but I submit that such safeguards can exist without hamstringing the E.U. internationally.


1. Mared Gwyn Jones, “European Decision-Making on Ukraine ‘Embarrassing,’ Former Foreign Minister Kuleba Says,” Euronews.com, November 27, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Saturday, November 22, 2025

Rewarding Invaders with Profit: The Case of Russia in Ukraine

Operant Conditioning in Psychology, the theory advanced by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s, holds that punishment and reinforcement can change behavior. Positive reinforcement is more likely than punishment to see a given behavior repeated. With regard to the U.S.-Russian plan announced in November, 2025, to end the war in Ukraine, E.U. officials were concerned that if Russia would benefit from the plan, Putin would be more likely to stage other invasions in Eastern Europe. Positive reinforcement financially could make invading profitable, a point that would not be lost on government officials of countries desirous of territorial expansion.

At an international security conference held in Canada on November 22, 2025, some U.S. senators voiced concern that the plan worked out by Trump and Putin would reward aggression. U.S. Sen. Agnus King said as much during a panel discussion. The proposed plan, which the government of Ukraine was considering at the time, “rewards aggression. This is pure and simple. There’s no ethical, legal, moral, political justification for Russia claiming eastern Ukraine.”[1] Sen. McConnell, a former Majority Leader, put out a statement on the dangers of Putin viewing the plan as a win for him.

Besides what future responses Putin might have to the positive reinforcement in having gained territory in eastern Ukraine, the moral question of whether invaders should be rewarded politically and even financially for going to war seems simple enough, especially as it can be argued that a moral duty exists for every other government around the world to make Putin and Russia pay for having invaded Ukraine. As E.U. President Von der Leyen said, might should no longer be allowed to be the decider of rights to territory.

The switch from Russia paying a price to gaining financially (in additional to territorially) was apparent from the E.U.’s vantage-point concerning that Union’s plan to make Russia pay literally for Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction from the Russian financial assets blocked then in Europe. “In a dramatic reversal for the EU, the US-led plan suggests the Russian assets would be unblocked, releasee, and turned into an investment platform handled by [the U.S.]. The language implies the Kremlin would not only be spared from paying war damages in a future settlement but also benefit commercially.”[2] Two separate funds would be created from the €300 billion in “the immobilised assets of the Russian Central Bank.”[3] One fund would “finance Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction and another [fund] shared by the US and Russia [would] develop ‘joint projects in specific areas’”, with both Russia and the US getting the profits.[4] 

That part of the American-Russian plan for peace directly contradicts the Von der Leyen’s position that Russia should not benefit from having invaded another country in Europe. Absent a strong UN that could have acted so as to remove the Russians from Ukrainian territory (and the Israelis from Gaza), relying on disincentives so Putin (and Netanyahu) and any other officials of other governments would think twice before sending troops out. If Putin’s government is allowed to profit and gain additional territory by invading Ukraine, which the internally-weakened E.U. seemed powerless to prevent in 2025, then the fact that both Putin and Netanyahu “won” at the expense of Ukraine and Gaza even in terms of profits from investments is itself a good argument that a stronger international order was needed to stave off the worst that goes with absolutist national-sovereignty. 

Put another way, with the E.U. hampered by the state-vetoes in the European Council and the Council of the E.U., and with the international organizations such as the UN without any governmental sovereignty whatsoever, a world in which so much harm has been unleased by national governments with utter impunity and even positive reinforcements may need a world federation as Kant advocated. Such a global body would have to be capable militarily of removing an invader and stopping a genocide, rather than merely delivering humanitarian aid to civilians.


1. Rob Gillies, “US Senators Slam Trump’s Russia-Ukraine Peace Plan as Rewarding Aggression,” AP News.com, November 22, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Monday, November 10, 2025

COP30: Is Symbolism Enough Amid Climate-Change?

COP30 in Brazil on combatting carbon-emissions and the related global warming, the question of whether the basis of the annual conference, voluntary compliance, is sufficient and thus should be enabled by the staged meetings. Even to continue to have the conferences annually can be viewed as part of a broader state of denial, given that the 1.5C degree maximum for the planet’s warming set at the Paris conference a decade earlier was by 2025 universally acknowledged by scientists to no longer be realistic; the target would almost certainly be surpassed. It is in this context that any progress from COP30 should be placed.


The full essay is at "COP30." 

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Paradigm-Change in International Relations: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine as a Primer

“We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force.”[1] This statement was signed by E.U. leaders, as well as officials at the state level, and even leaders of sovereign European states such as Britain and Norway several days after U.S. president Trump had met with officials from Ukraine at the White House on October 17, 2025. If only the Europeans had been so unified in 1939; it is difficult to fathom how the world would be 14 years short of a century later had World War II not taken place. Force as a de facto decider of territory has been the default through human history. For the principle of the European political leaders to become the default would represent a step forward in our species’ political development, but the even though principle sounds great, it also looks hopelessly idyllic and not at all realistic.

As if enshrining the validity of “might makes right” in territorial disputes, U.S. President Trump had said in an interview before the meeting at the White House, Putin has “won certain property.”[2] By several media accounts, Zelensky and his travelling cadre did not take this fact well at all subsequently at the White House. Just weeks before Trump’s statement, Putin had said that “force of arms would decide the matter” if there is not a peace agreement. The notion that bombs and guns can decide strikes me as an oxymoron. Force of arms take, rather than make decisions. A robber would not say that his gun will decide to whom the desktop computer in a house being robbed belongs. Robbery does not alter ownership.

Rather than feign insight into how the conflagration between Russia, an empire, and Ukraine, a sovereign state, could be solved other than to state generally that a war between an empire and a kingdom-level country is apt to be won by the former if by force of arms, I want to put “won certain property” (as if a sovereign country’s territory can be rethought into being a country’s property) directly up against the principle that “international borders must not be changed by force.” The word must may subtly import the mentality behind “might makes right.” If so, how could the new principle be rephrased so as to sever it from values that have given “might makes right” such staying power? In debate, it is better to find one’s own presuppositions and values than import those of the opposition and merely propose an alternative interpretation.

International borders are not legitimately changed by force, as opposed to an invader has won some territory, better characterizes the underlying antipodal values and beliefs that are actually in conflict. If only the values and presuppositions of the latter way of international relations when diplomacy fails could finally be overcome by those that have been recessive: namely, that territorial gains by force will not be recognized. The latter paradigm for international relations can include severing trade, cutting off memberships in international organizations like NATO and the UN, and even the use of force to push invaders back, as U.S. President Bush did in the early 1990s in leading an international coalition to forcibly remove Iraq’s dictator’s forces from Kuwait. The use of military force is the least preferred way of enforcing the new principle over the old because force itself is still being used in relation to territory. 

Much more consistent with the European 21st century principle is ending trade even with an invader’s trading partners and seeing that the UN remove the invader from being able to participate (reversion to observer status, without a veto-power) for violating the UN’s charter. To avoid even more humiliation, the UN should do that anyway, and for any government that has serially violated the charter (e.g., Israel). 

Successfully changing the default in international relations from the notion that invaders “win” territory and territorial claims can be decided by force of arms to the principle that territorial borders cannot be changed by force would represent not only a paradigm shift, but also a long-awaited advance in political development, and such a change could not arrive too early in the nuclear age. Both Putin and Trump can be seen as antiquated in their world-views if enough of the rest of the world decides on its own to move on. Coming up with new, distinct sea-legs for the European principle that are NOT carried over from the underpinnings of the currently dominant, antithetical dogma that might makes right, or at least that forced territorial changes are legitimate, and then operationalizing the new principle in government policy would go a long way in actualizing the new paradigm in international relations. 



Monday, October 6, 2025

Russia’s President Putin: Political Realism with Lies

As a former KGB agent, Russia’s President Putin could probably write a book and teach a course on the art of lying, or fabrication, as means of doing foreign policy, which manipulation being the not so subtle subtext. The tactic can be reckoned as being expedient, with the loss of value in reputational capital being assessed to be a cost worth incurring. That Putin lied to U.S. President Trump in Alaska in 2025 on the Russian’s intention to “put an end to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine” should have caught the American off guard, if the claim made by Kurt Volker, an American envoy to Ukraine that Putin had indeed lied to Trump about being willing to meet and negotiate with the Ukrainian president is true.[1] The American president was, in short, naïve even in being willing to meet with his Russian counterpart, especially without the president of the E.U. present too, at least to serve as a reality-test regarding Putin’s real game, for Europe had more to lose—more on the line—than did America from incursions from the east. Political realism is the theory that best fits the Russian president.

In realism, states act in their own interests, even in multilateral negotiations, rather than forsaking any such immediate interests for the good of the global order, if indeed such an order exists institutionally. Power is the name of the game, and, as Nietzsche observed, the strong have incentive to give up their position of strength to the weak (so the weak can only hope to beguile the strong into feeling ashamed ethically of using their strength). In other words, Putin still had a winning hand when it came to extending his invasion farther west in Ukraine, so why would he unilaterally offer to sit down at a negotiating table unless any such territory were to be offered to him? Equality in terms of power is the only context in which justice is possible, Nietzsche wrote, and Hume as well as Nietzsche hold that equality does not really exist; more counter-power is needed for an invaded power to arrest the insurgency of a greater power. With Putin stating that the force of arms would decide the political matter of Ukraine, the world should have realized that political realism best fit and that any common good, or world order, would be nugatory in comparison to the interests of strong, powerful states. The impotence and fecklessness of the United Nations had created the vacuum in which both Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu could blatantly pursue their respective military interests even at the expense of the civilian populations of their respective enemies. In other words, impunity, even in being able to arrest peaceful protesters in international waters, and throw them in prison, invites political realism to fill the void and come to characterize international relations. The world itself has been culpable in this by refusing to reform the UN or establish an alternative international body sans vetoes and with an enforcement mechanism of its own that could stand up to aggressors internationally, as Mo Di, the founder of Mohism, had done in China during the Warring States period of the Zhou Dynasty.

Political realism is dangerous, not only because states nakedly pursue their own interests without regard to the common good—that of the world—but also because the personal, emotional reactions of presidents can easily come into play. As Volker said of the effect of Putin’s lie on Trump: “He made Trump look weak and Trump doesn’t like looking weak, so this is now a personal issue for him.”[2] So Trump was considering sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, whether doing so was in the strategic interest of the U.S. or not. Without a world order as a viable constraint as political realist states pursue their own interests in relation to other states, political realism can easily lapse into personal vengeance and retaliation even at the expense of state interests. In short, political realism can lapse in to something much worse—and much more dangerous. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a case in point, as nuclear weapons were in the mix.

So political realism is in need of a major constraint beyond what Koehane and Nye suggest in their theory of neo-realism; especially in the nuclear age when “force of arms” is still being relied on by some state actors to settle political questions and such actors are all too willing to lie, our species should engage in a stepwise political development resulting in a world federation of the willing—countries that are willing to subscribe without a veto and even be willing to transfer some military hardware and troops so the common good has a means of clamping down on state actors who seek to invade weaker states with impunity. It is interesting that even as our species has advanced technology so much, political development has been stalled for centuries. Perhaps a new millennium can mean something, politically, such that deciding questions by the primitive means of force of arms can finally be treated as antiquated.


1. Sasha Vakulina and Shona Murray, “’Putin Lied to Trump and Made Him Look Weak,’ Former US Envoy to Ukraine Says,” Euronews.com, 6 October 2025.
2. Ibid.

Friday, September 26, 2025

Why Evangelical Christian Americans Support Israel

The Christian “belief in the ‘rapture’ of believers at the time of Jesus’ return to Earth is rooted in a particular form of biblical interpretation that emerged in the 19th century. Known as dispensational pre-millennialism, it is especially popular among American evangelicals.”[1] This biblical interpretation is based on the following from one of Paul’s letters to a church:

“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”[2]

Presumably the “trump of God” in the King James version of the Bible is distinct from Trump as God, for that eventuality would raise a myriad of questions and difficulties, and at least two difficulties pertain to the verse and, moreover, to dispensational pre-millennialism as a Christian doctrine. That it was constructed only recently by Christian standards raises the question of why the idea did not dawn on Christians closer to Paul’s time. That Paul does not represent himself in his letters as having met Jesus prior to the Resurrection and Paul’s use of mythological/Revelations language, such as “with the voice of the archangel,” also provide support for not taking the passage literally. After his resurrection in the Gospels, Jesus does not have the voice of an archangel. With Paul’s passage viewed figuratively or symbolically, rather than empirically and literally, the underlying religious meaning would of course remain unperturbed: keeping the faith is of value and thus in holding on to one’s distinctly religious (and Christian) faith, this strength will be vindicated even if no signs of this emerge during a person’s life. In other words, faith in vindication is part of having a religious faith, which is not limited our experience. The Resurrection itself can be construed as vindication with a capital V, regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead empirically and thus as a historical event. In fact, a historical account or claim is extrinsic to religious narrative even though the sui generis genre can legitimately make selective use of, and even alter, historical reports to make theological points. The writers of the Gospels would have considered this perfectly legitimate, given that they were writing faith narratives and not history books. Making this distinction is vital, I submit, to obviating the risk that one’s theological interpretations lead to supporting unethical state-actors on the world stage, such as Israel, which as of 2025 was serially committing genocidal and perhaps even holocaust crimes against humanity in Gaza. In short, the theological belief that supporting Israel will result in the Second Coming happening sooner than otherwise can be understood to be an unethical stance based on a category mistake. American Evangelical Christians may have been unwittingly enabling another Hitler for the sake of the salvation of Christians, while the Vatican stood by merely making statements rather than acting to help the innocent Palestinians, whether with food and medicine, or in actually going to Gaza’s southern border (or joining the flotilla) to protest as Gandhi would have done.


The full essay is at "On the Ethics of Dispensational Pre-Millennialism."

1. Robert D. Cornwall, “The Roots of Belief in the 2025 Rapture that Didn’t Happen,” MSNBC.com, September 25, 2025.
2. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 (KJV)

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

The United Nations: Weak Even in Defending Itself

Besides its humanitarian work, the UN can boast of providing a situs in which officials of national governments can talk to and with each other. The best opportunity for in-person speeches and conversations annually is during the opening of the General Assembly. Even granting there being value to such communicating. the UN was not founded for this purpose; rather, it was founded to end war, and neither speeches nor in-person meetings, typically not directly between warring nations, so obviously have failed to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s occupation and genocide that may even be reckoned as another holocaust. All this aggression has come with impunity, and in this regard, the UN has failed. Even a UN official’s attempt to defend the international organization during the 2025 session of the General Assembly was weak. At the very least, the UN needed to hire some public relations firms, but even a patina of efficacy only goes so far. The staying power of such an institution is itself, I submit, a problem in that organizations tend not to get “the memo” on when it is time (and even past time) to close up and urge that another, different organization be established.

Speaking at the General Assembly on September 23, 2025, U.S. President Trump asked rhetorically, “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”[1] Later, standing next to his counterpart, E.U. President Von der Leyen, Trump answered his own question by saying, “I mean, we shouldn’t have any wars if the U.N. is really doing its job.”[2] The purpose of the UN is to end wars, and being a place where national officials can talk to and with each other is woefully below the UN’s potential in reaching its purpose. In short, a speaking forum with side talks is so far from the UN being able to stop wars and even genocides, not to mention holocausts, that Trump went on to say in his speech to the General Assembly, “I’ve always said (the UN) has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential.”[3] To be sure, he did not provide any suggestions on how exactly the UN could tap into its potential, hence he left the UN to rot on the vine. Any suggestions would almost certainly have had to include providing the UN with enforcement mechanisms with which to implement its resolutions “on the ground” rather than just in words, and the U.S. had a longstanding policy of resisting such proposals due to the doctrine of absolute sovereignty held by recurrent American administrations. So it is really no surprise that Trump was short on ideas that could strengthen the UN in its task of ending wars and belligerent military occupations.

It was left to General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock to try to defend the international organization, which of course is not a government. “Sometimes we could’ve done more, but we cannot let this dishearten us. If we stop doing the right things, evil will prevail,” Baerbock told the Assembly.[4] That the UN had been unable to act even when Israel was bombing UN humanitarian areas in Gaza, not to mention in stopping the genocide and perhaps even holocaust there, begs the question: exactly what right things was the UN doing, as per its role in ending wars and occupations? Clearly not enough right things such that not doing them would enable evil to prevail. With Russia’s army bombing civilian locations in Ukraine and Gaza in the midst of a full-blown genocide and arguably a holocaust given the severity of the intentional infliction of suffering besides death, if evil was not prevailing already, it would be interesting to hear Baerbock’s definition of evil. In short, his defense does not stand up to even easy scrutiny; hence his defense of the UN can be regarded as being very weak, or deeply flawed. It is a defense that could be expected of an utterly failed organization unwilling to accept reality, including the organization’s abject failure to reach its potential.

The staying power of organizations not subject to market competition is too much, given the ability of even failed organizations to stay afloat. That even a weak defense can be sufficient to keep a failed organization—failed in terms of its primary mission—going may mean that more is needed to put failed organizations out of their misery, which of course their officials would deny. In the midst of Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu easily dismissing the UN charter yet remaining members, while the UN ignores even such fragrant violations of membership, it is difficult to see how the UN has any integrity regarding even itself remaining, if indeed it ever had any.

A new international body, without certain nations having veto power and with the body having real enforcement power of its own, such that it would not have to rely on countries for actual enforcement—such reliance is also a sign of abject weakness—was desperately needed, given the large-scale aggression of Russia and Israel that had been going on with impunity for more nearly two years. This alone should be the death sentence for the UN, even with its weak attempts to defend it’s legitimacy and usefulness. Yet in terms of organizations, and even more so, institutions, momentum of the status quo is like a force of nature that is difficult even to divert.

1. Aamer Madhani, “Trump In Speech to U.N. Says World Body ‘Not Even Coming Close to Living Up’ To Its Potentional,” The Huffington Post, September 23, 2025.
2. Darlene Superville, “Trump Says Wars Wouldn’t Happen If UN Did Its Job,” The Associated Press, September 23, 2025.
3. Aamer Madhani, “Trump In Speech to U.N. Says World Body ‘Not Even Coming Close to Living Up’ To Its Potentional.”
4. Ibid.

A Drone Wall for the E.U.: Russian Aggression Assuages Euroskeptic States

Speaking after his meeting with U.S. President Trump in Alaska during the summer of 2025, Russia’s President Putin said that if no agreement is reached with Ukraine, the force of arms would decide the matter. In other words, might makes right, or at least military incursion is a legitimate way to decide political disputes between countries. I would have hoped that such a primitive mentality would be antiquated in the twentieth century, but, alas, human nature evolves only at a glacial pace undetected within the lifespan of a human being. In September, 2025, the United Nations was under attack from within the General Assembly because of the continuance of the veto held by five countries in the Security Council; the U.S. had just vetoed a resolution for an immediate cession of Israeli destruction in Gaza. As a former deputy secretary of the UN had admitted to me during the fall of 2024, the veto itself renders the UN unreformable; a new international organization would have to be established sans vetoes for efficacy to be possible. Even so, absent a real enforcement mechanism, such as a military force, a resolution even of a vetoless organization would merely be parchment. The impotence of the UN is one reason why NATO, a defensive military transatlantic alliance, has been valuable in the face of military threats by Russia. Yet in September 2025, after Russian drones had flown into four E.U. states, E.U. President Von der Leyen felt the need to take the lead by again stressing her proposal for a drone wall along the E.U.’s eastern border; she was not deferring to any international alliance, much less to the United Nations. I submit that Von der Leyen’s initiative is yet another means by which the E.U. can be distinguished from international “blocs,” alliances, and organizations. Unlike the latter three, the E.U. has exclusive competencies and is thus semi-sovereign (and the same goes for the state governments).

After “two or three large drones were spotted at Copenhagen Airport,” which is in the E.U., on September 23, 2025, the E.U.’s Commission “called for a drone wall, a novel initiative first unveiled by President Ursula von der Leyen” in her State of the Union speech.[1] “For those who still doubted the need to have a drone wall in the European Union, well, here we get another example of how important it is,” a spokesman at the Commission said.[2] Why had not the Commission pursued this proposal in time to block the incursions in August and September?

Euroskeptic, or anti-federalist, Europeans, which included at least two governors at the time, loathed the idea of federalizing defense (and foreign policy). Also, just as in the early decades of the U.S., some state governments resisted the federalization of “collective” debt. That the E.U.’s executive branch was “rolling out a €150 billion loan programme to boost defence spending, which could be mobilized to promote domestic production of drones,” represented to some governors a giant leap on the way to a central federal state that would eventually encroach on the state governments.[3] This fear, by the way, is precisely what led several U.S. states to try to exit the U.S. in 1861.

Whereas in the U.S., the state government’s direct power at the federal level had been weakened when state governments no longer appointed delegates to the U.S. Senate, E.U. state governments could wield veto power over a significant number of proposed federal laws and regulations. Whereas the U.S. state governments could no longer adequately protect their turf against federal encroachment, the E.U.’s federal governmental institutions could still be paralyzed by blocs of states or even just one state. So, it is incredible that the Commission was able to act on the incursions of drones once this had been in a north-western state (i.e., Denmark) to create a drone wall and issue significant “collective,” or federal debt. Unlike international organizations, the E.U. has some governmental sovereignty that had been delegated by the states, and this means that it is no surprise that the E.U. rather than NATO or the UN would take action in the face of Putin’s use of force of arms to decide the question of Ukraine. The problem is that the Commission has too often been paralyzed by the state governors, which is particularly damaging because the E.U. is not an international organization, and those that existed as of 2025 could not be relied upon.


1. Jorge Liboreiro, “’We Cannot Wait’: EU Calls for Drone Wall to Deter Russia after New Incident in Denmark,” September 23, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Thursday, September 18, 2025

The E.U.’s Proposed Sanctions Against Israel: Excessive Reliance on the State Governments

To leverage the combined power, or united front, that is possible in Europe, the European Union was established in the waning years of the twentieth century. Roughly thirty years later, the power of the state governments at the federal level still compromised the leverage, especially in foreign affairs and defense. Even in sanctioning trading partners, even qualified majority voting in the Council of the E.U. can be said to have negatively impacted the ability of the E.U. Commission, the executive branch, to leverage the political muscle of the E.U. against other countries. State-level political agendas could essentially hold any possible leverage hostage. It may be worth thinking about why a qualified majority vote in the Council of the E.U., which represents the state governments, rather than in the E.U.’s parliament, which represents E.U. citizens, was necessary for trade sanctions to be applied to duty-free imports from Israel. That state-level political or economic interests could possibility trump applying economic leverage to stop Israel’s genocide and holocaust in Gaza, as well as Israel’s military attacks on other countries in the Middle East can be an indication that the state governments have too much power at the federal level. For if the E.U. is only an aggregation of states, without the whole being more than the sum of the parts, then the whole sans the aggregate cannot very well enact leverage on foreign actors abroad, even those whose behavior has been nothing short of atrocious.


The full essay is at "The E.U.'s Proposed Sanctions Against Israel."

Saturday, August 30, 2025

The UN in the US: Trump Bans Abbas

Should the UN’s General Assembly and Security Council be located in New York City? Both New York and the Union in which New York is a member-state have assumed the obligation of being proper hosts to people from around the world who come to the UN for its business. Even though that international organization has displayed an impotence in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli military incursion that has decimated Gaza and its residents, having an international forum in which talking can take place is not for naught. As an open speaking club of sorts, the United Nations permits adversaries and allies alike to make their views known to each other and the rest of the world. Even though the very existence of the vetoes in the Security Council styme action, that members of the UN so easily get away with violating resolutions renders the entire resolution-process de facto nugatory in real significance. So essentially, the UN building in New York City enables diplomats and heads of governments alike to speak out and with each other. It is vital, therefore, that the US take an expansive approach to issuing visa-waivers so institutional members of the UN can be as well represented as they desire to be. In this regard, the host—the United States Government—should refrain from applying its partisanship in international disputes by restricting the waivers to cover the bare essentials of personnel coming to the UN in New York from abroad.

After having suspended a program that had allowed injured Gaza children to come to the U.S. for medical treatment, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “revoked the visas of a number of Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization officials ahead of the [September, 2025] meeting of the UN General Assembly” even though the two groups had previously been represented.[1] An official at the U.S. State Department said that Palestinian President Abbas and roughly 80 other Palestinians would be denied entry into the US to attend the UN General Assembly’s upcoming session. “Abbas’ office . . . was astonished by the visa decision” and insisted that the decision “violated the U.N. ‘headquarters agreement’.”[2] Palestine had enjoyed non-member observer-state status since 2012, so restricting the non-visa waiver for Abbas especially was indeed a violation of the “UN headquarters agreement.”

That Israel declared Gaza City to be a “combat zone” on the very same day attests to the salience that the Israeli militaristic incursion into Gaza would likely have in the upcoming session, and thus to the need for the Palestinian position—that of the victims (for a genocide is not a war)—to be well-represented both for the sake of fairness itself and so any possible deals can be struck amid full discussions and negotiations “behind the scenes.” The Trump administration held a lopsided position in considering the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, in which over a thousand people died and hundreds of Israelis were taken hostage, to be too horrendous, but the Israeli attacks and perpetrated genocide and even holocaust in Gaza in which tens of thousands had already died and over a million more intentionally subjected to starvation as somehow warranted and thus deserved. In the regard, the monetary footprints of the American Israeli (and Israeli government) lobbyist political action committee in Washington can be inferred as it is probably that Netanyahu was behind the new restrictions on the Palestinian delegation.

It would be only natural for most countries of the General Assembly to object to such blatant unfairness; after all, Netanyahu rather than Abbas was wanted by the International Criminal Court. Additionally, 147 of the 193 countries (not “member states,” as the UN is an international organization, whereas the E.U. and U.S. are not) in the General Assembly already recognized Palestine as a country; a few E.U. states were even set to recognize Palestine as a country in the upcoming session, where Abbas was to take part in a high-level meeting, but Netanyahu did not approve, and even in spite of the genocide or even holocaust that his government was unleashing on Gaza’s 2 million residents, the Trump Administration remained sycophantic via the AIPAC Israeli lobby in Washington.

If indeed the real source of the visa-waiver infringement was the war criminal who at the time was still wanted by the ICC and whose militaristic actions had already violated the UN Charter many times over, the utter abject unfairness in Netanyahu being able to attend (and even speak at!) the General Assembly even as Abbas would be barred due to the “host” country, more than sufficient cause would exist for the General Assembly to hold a debate and vote during the upcoming session on whether another host-country should be found to replace New York.

Switzerland, having earned a reputation of neutrality, could better be counted on than New York, whose membership in the US now compromised that state’s ability to serve as a host. Unlike New York, Switzerland was staying out of the EU so to protect and ensure neutrality in international affairs. Such built-up or accumulated reputation can be understood as a long-term intangible asset that takes considerable effort to build but can be ruined by a single expedient decision that is in line with the immediacy of power and money. Were the General Assembly to let the US Government get away with doing Israel’s bidding even as Israel was declaring Gaza City to be a combat-zone (wherein only one side is allowed to fight), the credibility of the UN itself would be on the line. Unable even to enforce its own resolutions, the UN would be even more compromised, if that was possible. Even just in its capacity as a forum for talking, the UN would fall short if only aggressors and their enablers are able to speak. Such a decrepit institutional condition of the waning post-1945 world order could be dangerous, as power abhors a vacuum, especially in a Hobbesian state of nature wherein might makes right and maintains control of the doors. It should not be forgotten that no international police department existed as of 2025, hence the US Government could get away with putting international partisanship above neutral hospitality even when such partisanship was enabling a genocide and holocaust.


1. Gavin Blackburn, “US Revokes Visas of Palestinian Officials Ahead of UN General Assembly, State Department Says,” Euronews.com, August 29, 2025.
2. Kanishka Singh and Ali Sawafta, “US Bars Palestinian Leader Abbas from UN as Allies Back Statehood,” Reuters.com, August 30, 2025.

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Russia Damages E.U. Diplomatic Offices: Implications for International Law

Even though the Vienna Convention of 1961 includes protections for diplomatic and consular properties in active war-zones, Russia’s attack of 629 missiles and drones on Kiev, Ukraine, came within 50 meters of the E.U.’s diplomatic offices there late on August 27, 2025, severely damaging them but killing nobody in the E.U.’s delegation. The two bombs that hit nearby were enough to give the Europeans the impression that President Putin of Russia did not consider himself bound by international law in war. To the extent that fighting between two sovereign countries, Russia and Ukraine, fits Hobbes’ infamous state of nature, international law is really not law at all, for jurisprudence, including mutually acknowledged rights, requires an overarching polity to enact and enforce laws. So the E.U. could not enjoy a right to be sparred death and destruction at its diplomatic offices in Kiev during the war there, but the Union could claim another right at Russia’s expense within the E.U.’s territory.

After the bombing, the E.U.’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said of it, “It shows that the Kremlin will stop at nothing to terrorize Ukraine, blindly killing civilians—men, women and children and even targeting the European Union.”[1] Even though it was not clear that two bombs going off in the vicinity necessarily means that Putin was targeting the E.U., António Costa, chairman of the European Council, which represents the state governments, stated, “The EU will not be intimidated. Russia’s aggression only strengthens our resolve to stand with Ukraine and its people.”[2] In return for the E.U. having just come in close contact with brazen Russian military might, E.U. President Von der Leyen “promised to tighten the screws on the Russian war machine with a 19th package of EU sanctions.”[3] That so many so-called packages had already not worked gives little credibility to what a 19th might do in terms of making a difference to Russia’s war calculus.

Fortunately, Von der Leyen said that the E.U. would work at the federal level “on new ways to further mobilize Russia’s frozen assets, worth about €210 billion, that are “on EU soil, to finance Ukraine’s defence capabilities and reconstruction.”[4] Even though international law put constraints on confiscation of the funds, and an E.U. spokesperson said the efforts would continue to pertain to “the windfall profits, rather than the money itself,” I contend that if it can be proved that Russia had violated international laws militarily in Ukraine, the E.U. should be released of any legal and moral obligation not to confiscate the frozen Russian assets.[5] It would be unfair to Ukraine, as well as the E.U., were international law to be applied to only one side while the other ignores the very existence of law internationally in line with how Hobbes describes the state of nature prior to any social contract.

It was obvious at the time that Ukraine could use any additional military support that could come from the E.U. confiscating the frozen Russian assets in the E.U., but perhaps even more significant would be the decision that could be taken on whether international law itself pertains to the war. In deciding that no law applies to both sides because of a lack of de jure and de facto recognition by both sides and enforcement, the question of even whether there is such a thing as international law—whether jurisprudence applies in a domain in which enforcement mechanisms are lacking, whether institutionally, as by a militarized international federation or a coalition of the willing.

The lack of any enforcement can be distinguished from a weakness in enforcement or even an abject failure of an extant enforcement effort. That no enforcement mechanism existed at least as of 2025 on international law arguably renders such “law” as merely wishes by some people or organizations. If Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu were able to treat international law as such, this is all that would be required to render international law as something less than law itself. For other people to continue to refer to international law would be an error predicated on a mere wish rather than being a statement of fact. A dictum could be presented to the world wherein international agreements cannot, or at least should not, be labeled as law unless credible enforcement mechanisms exist; by credible, I mean likely to be efficacious in constraining culprit governments. In short, federal officials of the E.U. should not feel constrained by international law on confiscating the frozen assets, just as Russia’s President Putin had been ignoring international “law” in having invaded a sovereign country. With so many obvious attacks on civilians and kidnapping of Ukrainian children, taking them inside Russia far from Ukraine, the very concept of international law goes out the window.

Applied to Russia and Israel in 2025, the invasions would have had to be stopped with the invaders pushed back for there to be such a thing as an international law against invasion (or targeting civilians). To claim that there is such a thing as international law while a genocide or even holocaust is underway unimpeded involves cognitive dissidence, if not an abject refusal to think at all. In Cameron’s film, Titanic, an employee of the ship tells third-class passengers that they cannot go through a passageway only to be knocked into the rising water by Dawson. Without enforcement, the employee can only be regarded as strongly expressing a desire. Similarly, a food-aide or medical-aide worker in Gaza could shout again and again at Israeli tanks, you can’t come into Gaza City, but if those tanks keep rolling in, it is not as though the worker would be supposing that a law is being broken, for there is no viable enforcement to force the Israelis out of Gaza; not even a coalition of the willing had emerged to do so in more than a year. Netanyahu could easily dismiss such shouting as pleas rather than even a demand, much less a law. Anyone watching the tanks continue onward would regard any onlooker making a demand as crazy. I submit that it is just as crazy to refer to international law in the context of the Russian and Israeli invasions in the mid-2020's.


1. Jorge Liboreiro, “EU Delegation in Kyiv Severely Damaged by Shock Wave of Russian Strike,” Euronews.com, August 28, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Jorge Liboreiro, “EU Summons Russian Envoy after Strike Damaged the Bloc’s Delegation in Kyiv,” Euronews.com, August 28, 2025.

Monday, August 25, 2025

The E.U.’s Hungary Overreaching on Sovereignty: International Trade

Sovereignty is not a word to be casually used, especially if in overreaching. In both the E.U. and U.S., state governments have overreached at the expense of the delegated competencies or enumerated powers of the respective Unions of states. The Nullification Crisis in the U.S. and de facto unilateral refusal of the E.U. state of Hungary to observe E.U. law both demonstrate how the overreaching by state governments can compromise a federal system.[1] In the E.U. the refusal to do away with the principle of unanimity in the European Council and the Council of the E.U. enable and even invite such overreaches at the expense of the E.U. itself, and its distinctly federal officials. Even a state government’s pursuit of it’s state’s economic interests does not justify holding the E.U. hostage. The case of supporting Ukraine in the midst of the invasion by Russia is a case in point.

In part because of Hungary’s veto of the accession of Ukraine into the Union, as intimated by Ukrainian President Zelensky on August 24, 2025, Ukrainian attacks on the Druzhba oil pipeline blocked oil imports into the E.U. states of Hungary and Slovakia. “Ukraine attacked oil facilities on Russian territory with drones and rockets.”[2] This violation of Russia’s sovereignty was predicated on Russia’s long-standing invasion of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Accordingly, the main motive for the bombings of the oil facilities in Russia can be said to have been to weaken Russia’s military by reducing the revenue to the Russian state from oil exports. To be sure, Ukraine’s president himself “suggested that the attacks on the pipeline might be connected to Hungary’s veto on Ukraine’s EU accession.”[3] On the anniversary of Ukraine having broken off from the Soviet Union, Zelensky said, “We always supported the friendship between Ukraine and Hungary. And now the existence of the friendship depends on what Hungary’s position is.”[4]

The overt threat to continued imports of Russian oil was received loud and clear in Budapest, the Hungarian state capital. The state’s foreign minister, Péter Szijártó “said his government firmly rejected what he described as the Ukrainian President’s intimidation and considered those bombings on the Russian pipelines as an attack on Hungary’s sovereignty.”[5] On social media, the foreign minister puts sovereignty in terms of “territorial integrity, and, furthermore, claims that an “attack on energy security is an attack on sovereignty.”[6] I beg to differ.

Sovereignty as understood territorially and applied to the E.U. state of Hungary does not include Ukrainian bombings within the territory of Russia because the latter is not Hungarian territory. Furthermore, energy security is not sovereignty, especially when such security depends on international trade. The severing of such a contract by the inability of a counterparty to deliver product does not violate sovereignty. In fact, as pointed out by Andriy Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, the E.U. state of Hungary could have diversified and become independent of Russian oil “like the rest of Europe.”[7] Indeed, the ability to do so would have been an exercise of the governmental sovereignty retained by the Hungarian government in the E.U., and the latter may have used its portion of sovereignty to assist the state, given the consensus at the E.U. level against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began in 2014 with Crimea.

The problem of the Hungarian overreach on what sovereignty means and entitles helps to explain why Viktor Orbán, the governor of Hungary, had been serially violating E.U. law and regulations even after the Commission began withholding money for the state. Orbán’s refusal to recognize that some governmental sovereignty, in the form of competencies—full and shared—had been delegated to the E.U.’s federal governmental institutions in 1993 coupled with an overreaching construal (or distortion) of what territorial sovereignty means and entitles, explains why Hungary has stymied so much at the federal level, given the power that states wield there through the European Council and the Council of the European Union. Therefore, it is ironic that Tamás Deutsch, a representative in the European Parliament representing a district that is within the state of Hungary, “said the pipeline bombings represent a military attack against an EU member state, and that the EU should not conduct [accession] talks with Ukraine as a result.”[8] So Hungary is a member-state after all, when being one is convenient.

Playing by convenience at the state level without concern for the viability of the federal level is precisely what could unravel the European Union. The irony is that without the E.U., Hungary would not have an empire-scale union at hand to push back against Russia, should Putin decide to invade Hungary after all. That would be a violation of Hungary’s sovereignty. So resisting the urge of convenience or state-rights ideology to exploit state power at the federal level could actually strengthen Hungary’s sovereignty even if international trade deals do not all go Hungary’s way. Unfortunately, the principle of unanimity at the E.U. level ultimately undermines rather than strengthens the remaining governmental sovereignty of the states if the veto power is exploited for expediency rather than to protect vital, long-term state interests against federal encroachment on the governmental sovereignty reserved by the states.


1. In 1832-1833, the government of South Carolina held that the U.S. tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were null and void within the state. “The resolution of the Nullification Crisis in favor of the federal government helped to undermine the nullification doctrine,” which holds that states have the right “to nullify federal acts within their boundaries.” Britannica.com (accessed August 25, 2025). I submit that the European Court of Justice could do worse than declare the same with regard to state laws, including the refusal of a governor or state legislature to implement federal directives, that are in violation of E.U. law and regulations. Monetary sanctions by the European Commission have not been a sufficient deterrent. If either de facto or de jure nullification becomes the norm, then it would only be a matter of time before the Union dissolves and the states could once again take up arms against each other.
2. Sandor Zsiros, “Hungary and Slovakia in Spat with Ukraine over Bombed Druzhba Oil Pipeline,” Euronews.com, August 25, 2025, italics added.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

On Presumptuous Pride: Netanyahu Castigates Europe

While conducting a genocide and even a holocaust in Gaza from 2023 through at least the summer of 2025, the Israeli government was in no position to launch diplomatic threats against either the E.U. or any of its states for recognizing a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli state.[1] At the time, the warrants issued by the ICC for the arrest of Netanyahu and a former defense minister were still outstanding, and no doubt more warrants would be issued for other culprits in the Israeli government and military. I applaud Jews around the world, and especially in Israel, who have had the guts to protest publicly on behalf of human rights in Gaza and against Israel's savage militaristic incursion into Gaza and the related death of tens of thousands and starvation of millions. The human urge of self-preservation is astonishing in that as of August, 2025, so many residents of Gaza were still alive. So, for Netanyahu to charge government officials in the E.U. with being antisemitic is not only incorrect and unfair, but highly presumptuous given the severity of the atrocities unleashed by Netanyahu and his governmental cadre. Regarding both the Israeli protesters and the Netanyahu government, distinguishing the ethical from the theological domains, which are admittedly very much related, is helpful.


The full essay is "On Presumptuous Pride." 
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)