Although the reasoning of
government officials in foreign policy can be impeccable, they are susceptible
to being so oriented to the intricacies of the “chess” playing that they may
actually be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, a ship that sank in the icy
Atlantic in 1912. At a talk by American foreign-policy experts at Yale’s School
of Global Affairs in March, 2025, Ely Ratner, who served as an assistant
secretary of defense, and Celeste Wallander, who was also an assistant
secretary, joined Andrea Kendall-Taylor of the Center for a New American
Security (CNAS) to speak mainly on U.S. foreign policy in regard to Russia and
China; only scant mention was made of the situation in Gaza even though a
holocaustic genocide was well underway there. What the speakers said about the
post-World War II world order was most telling; what they did not say, however,
spoke volumes.
The talk was incredibly
timely. On the very same day, Oscar-winning filmmaker, Hamdan Ballal, who had won
for the film, “No Other Land,” was allegedly beaten by Israeli settlers in the
West Bank, after which he—not the Israeli thugs—was arrested and detained by
the Israeli military, ostensibly so he could get medical attention.[1]
Were he in Gaza, where the Israeli military had recently bombed two hospitals,
he might well have died getting medical treatment. On the very next day,
Euronews reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had told U.S. Vice
President J.D. Vance, U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and National
Security Advisor Michael Waltz, “I fully share your loathing of European
free-loading. It’s pathetic.”[2]
Hegseth was doubtlessly referring to Europe’s reliance on the U.S. militarily
since the end of World War II. With Russia invading Ukraine, the Trump
Administration was urging the E.U., including its state governments, to
increase their defense-spending. Hegseth said nothing about Israel’s crimes
against humanity in the occupied Gaza territory.
I contend that the impunity
that both aggressive Russia and Israel were enjoying are but symptoms of the slow
demise of the post-World War II global order. Although Ratner agreed with this
conclusion, and the other two speakers at Yale agreed, they all pointed out that
elements of the existing order were still working and should be retained.
However, such elements were no match for the obvious impunity that by 2025 came
with military invasion and none of the speakers proffered an alternative to the
existing world order, even though Ratner warned that President Trump’s “spheres
of influence” basis for international relations was dangerous, for it could
mean that the U.S. could take Greenland and Russia could subjugate Ukraine with
impunity.
That none of the speakers mentioned
the United Nations at all is significant because that international
organization’s utter failure to enforce its own resolutions and even kick out
countries that had willfully and repeatedly violated resolutions (e.g., Russia
and Israel) attests to dire need for a new international order. That the UN had
allowed certain members of the Security Council to shamelessly exploit a
conflict of interest in wielding the veto on their own behalf or to protect
their allies strongly suggests that a new global organization was urgently
needed by 2025. Nevertheless, none of the three speakers at Yale even mentioned
the UN. Instead, they were essentially rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic.
People who work too closely
within a given institutional order can easily succumb to missing the forest for
the trees—focusing minutely on even the design of a leaf and thus missing the
forest-fire going on even nearby. Meanwhile, radicals with no vested vocational
and monetary interest in the existing order can easily become so utopian that
their proposals simply cannot be taken seriously. In the rise and fall of world orders, people
at credible vantage-points issuing realistic proposals that go beyond tweaking
existing institutions are needed. A former undersecretary of the UN who spoke
at Harvard in 2025 agreed with me that the UN could not be adequately reformed
because none of the five veto-powers on the Security Council would agree to
give up their power even though doing so would enable the UN to pass
resolutions against even governments committing crimes against humanity. Even
extirpating the vetoes from the Security Council would not be sufficient; the
UN would need military power of its own with which to enforce its resolutions
on recalcitrant national governments. Fears of a world government coming from
populist fringes, which would likely include religion over-reaching, could
shout over realistic explanations that a semi-sovereign federation would not be
a world government in the sense of dominating national governments. At the
regional level, both the E.U. and U.S. demonstrate that governmental
sovereignty can indeed by divided between federal and state governmental
systems within a federal system.
Given the human-caused breach
of the climate by excessive carbon-pollution, the existence of nuclear bombs
many times over, and both the scale and severity made possible by modern
technology of crimes against humanity—as perpetrated for instance by Nazi
Germany and then Israel—continuing to rely on a global system based on an
absolutist version of national sovereignty absent any global-level
accountability is nothing short of reckless. In my experience at both Harvard
and Yale, I heard nothing said either by the faculty or visiting officials on
how humanity could realistically move on from the antiquated world order. Meanwhile,
Israel and Russia continued with their toxic military activities unabated.
2. Tamsin Paternoster, “’Pathetic European Free-Loading’: US Officials Slam Europe in Leaked Chat,” Euronews.com, March 25, 2025.
