Category: Politics

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Careful what you wish for.

One gets the sense that Netanyahu has used his post-October 7 military successes (including ethnic cleansing and IDF war crimes in Gaza) to prepare for this moment of friction vis a vis Iran while manoeuvring Trump into a corner on joining the war in pursuit of regime change as much or more than nuclear non-proliferation (as I have pointed out in previous posts, Trump is an empty intellectual vessel devoid of firm policy positions other than those that he thinks serve himself. He is therefore highly susceptible to suggestions that appeal to his vanity and self-interest, such as being “the saviour of Iran” if he joins Israel in the military campaign against the theocratic regime).

Already, the son of the deposed Shah, Reza Pahlavi, has broadcast statements claiming that he and his supporters will return to Iran soon after the collapse of the current theocratic regime. Pahlavi is close to Netanyahu and Trump’s inner circle and US-based heirs of the Shah’s exiled supporters (many concentrated in and around LA) are willing to assume control of a post-theocratic government under Reza Pahlavi’s leadership. The stage appears to being set for a regime take-over following military defeat of the ayatollahs.

The trouble is that while many Iranians abhor the mullahs and Revolutionary Guard, they also remember very well what the Shah’s rule was all about (SAVAK, anyone?). They remember well that Israel was the Shah’s best ally, and that Mossad helped train and shared intelligence with SAVAK. So it is not clear that his heirs will be universally welcomed, something that sets the stage for prolonged internal conflict within the Persian power. In addition, with the old leadership gone a new generation of militant leaders may emerge in their place, hardened by their experiences with Israel and its Western backers. They may not prove easily removable or amenable to a negotiated compromise on governing alongside Western-backed groups.

Even if the West gets its way and the ayatollahs are deposed, there is the issue whether a new generation of Iranian expats, many coming from monied backgrounds in places like Southern California, have the skillsets with which to govern a country, and culture, that mixes pre-modern beliefs with post-modern technologies and a ponderous bureaucracy that straddles a stark urban/rural demographic divide. Will the US pour in aid to help them with the task of reconstruction at a time when DOGE is cutting back on all types of US foreign aid? Will Iranians welcome such assistance and the US/Western personnel that deliver it? Or will they resist what could be seen as an affront to their nationalistic and cultural pride?

This is a noteworthy point. Persian nationalism is rooted in millennia, not the last half century. Persians come in many faiths and ethnicities, and what unites them isa rejection of foreign interference in their affairs, especially by Sunni Arabs and Western colonisers (and their descendants). In the US and other interested parties there appears to be a failure to understand how deep Persian nationalism runs as an ideological glue in Iranian society. This could prove costly for the adherents of forcible regime change in that country.

The US and Israel appear to believe that after they bomb Iranian nuclear development and storage sites, military infrastructure and command and control facilities and kill leaders of the revolutionary regime, the people will rise up, the regime will fall, a new government will be installed and everyone will go home happy. The truth is otherwise. Iran will have to undergo a long term military occupation if a new order is to be imposed. Who is going to do that? Iran is a huge country and as mentioned, not all of its inhabitants welcome foreign interference in their affairs. The US and Israel do not have the capability to impose an occupation regime, not does any other State in part because of their realistic unwillingness to do so. So the operative assumption in Washington and Tel Aviv about regime change in Iran seems to be based on a pipe dream conjured up in the war-fevered minds of Trump and Netanyahu’s strategic advisors. And a reality check is also worth noting: the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan this century by Western-led coalitions have not ended well for them or with the stated objectives of their missions being achieved.

Then there is the reaction of the global Shiite diaspora to seeing their most venerated leaders killed, incapacitated or imprisoned by Western powers or those backed by the West. Iran may not be able to defend itself against Israel and the US by conventional and nuclear military means, but it has many unconventional assets at its disposal, and they have global reach. The current tit-for-tat exchanges may be a prelude to a widening regional and perhaps global conflict fought by unconventional means. The end to the current (fairly short) conventional military war may be just the beginning of a protracted unconventional, asymmetrical conflict that could spill into other States in the region and beyond.

And here is another background thought: The modern Western-led international community has always reacted poorly to revolutionary regimes, e.g.: USSR, PRC, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Angola, Algeria, Granada, DPRK, etc.. The specific evolutionary ideology matters less than the usurpation of power by force because it upsets the international status quo because it upsets an international status based on acceptance of shared rules and norms (if not values). That is, states agree to get along within established rules of conduct and revolutionaries do not respect that basic rule of the game and seek parametric change in their societies as well as in their relations with the external world..

In response, revolutionary regimes tend to support each other against former colonial and imperialist Western powers, creating a vicious circle of hostile action/reaction. It may be 46 years after the Iranian revolution, but perhaps this is somehow at play here?

Whatever the case, I have a bad feeling that this is not going to end well, except perhaps for Netanyahu (who will receive a boost in domestic support after the Iranian regime is ousted as well as perhaps further delay his court trial on corruption charges and the collapse of his coalition government). Trump is being slow-walked by Netanyahu into joining a war of convenience rather than necessity that may spiral into a deeper regional confrontation that will consume US blood and treasure for some time to come (in exact contravention of Trump’s promises to end US foreign “entanglements”). With the US mid-term elections scheduled for next year, prolonged involvement in Iran may prove damaging to Trump’s allies in Congress and hinder pursuit of the GOP/MAGA policy agenda if they lose one or both majorities in the Deliberative Chambers. Meanwhile, Iran’s allies Russia and China sit quietly on the sidelines, either out of impotence or because they are hedging their bets. One gets the feeling that, especially with regard to the PRC, they are not impotent.

The slanted (often triumphant) Western media coverage of the conflict disguises the fact this may not be entirely over soon, and that whatever its battlefield successes Israel may pay a heavy reputational and diplomatic price for its actions, as the rise of global anti-semitism suggests is in fact now the case.

Dark and sad times ahead, I’m afraid.

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Pre-emptive or preventative?

I do not mean to be pedantic about this sort of thing, but since it lies within my area of supposed “expertise,” here goes:

Unlike what is being reported in the corporate media and by some defense officials, the Israeli strike on Iran was not “pre-emptive.” “Pre-emptive” means “a sudden strike thwarting an imminent attack.” That is not the case here. Iran was not about to imminently attack Israel. What Israel has done is a preventative attack designed to degrade Iran’s nuclear R&D/storage facilities, missile launcher sites and command and control capabilities. The IDF attacks are focused on preventing and delaying development of Iran’s nuclear strike capability before it reaches operational status and was telegraphed in advance (remember the US pulling out embassy staff and military families from facilities in the Middle East this week). Both suspected weapons-grade nuclear stores as well as launching platforms were on the target list, as were those responsible for them.

The preventative nature of the move may help moderate the Iranian response. On the other hand, killing the Revolutionary Guard Commander and Deputy Commander is a serious affront that will require a response in order for the Iranian regime to save face among its domestic audiences. So the escalation scenario is real, albeit not as bad as it could be.

Just like his response to October 7 with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, Netanyahu has seized his moment of opportunity because, quite frankly, he can. No one will stop him (certainly not the Iranians) and the US backs him, with most of the West tacitly supporting Israel with their silence or tepid responses to the conflict. This, I suspect, is due to Israel’s value as an intelligence partner of the West as much as any other reason.

Let’s see how this plays out….

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Sending in the Marines.

One of the basic foundations of democratic civil-military relations is that the active duty military is organised and trained to fight and defeat foreign enemies in combat–that is, by using organised lethal force until the enemy is defeated. Domestic security is a matter of national/federal, state and local law enforcement. Their training and organization is in ensuring via non-combat means civilian adherence to the rule of law. Although use of lethal force is one component of domestic law enforcement, it is constrained by legal and social frameworks in a way that military combat lethality is not (and even then the military is supposed to adhere to the Laws of War, both in terms of jus ad bellum (reasons for going to war) and jus in bello (conduct in war)). Domestic security is about keeping the peace and maintaining control of civilian populations; external security is about prevailing over armed adversaries of the State.

Domestic and external security represent the Janus faces of what Althusser and others labeled the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs). Both internal and externally-focused repressive apparatuses are wrapped around an inner core of ideology, usually framed as patriotism, nationalism and selfless sacrifice (for external agencies) and community service, protection and duty of care (for internal agencies).T here are elements and agencies other than the military and uniformed constabulary services in the RSAs, including such things as paramilitary units and criminal courts, that involve several shades of grey when it comes to repressive focus. The US is an exemplar in this regard, what with its proliferation of security agencies and militarization of local police forces, but the principle of separation between domestic and external repression has long been considered sacrosanct in US civil-military relations. So much so that the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. 1385) specifically prohibits the use of active duty troops for domestic security purposes unless authorized by Congress.

In the US reserve military units such as the National Guard are called upon during periods of serious security crisis as a backup to local law enforcement. This usually happens at the orders of the State government but can happen by order of the president in extenuating circumstances. In the majority of cases they do not carry combat weaponry, instead deploying non-lethal tools appropriate for their law enforcement support roles (say, tear gas for crowd control).

Both reserve and active duty military can and are used for natural disaster and humanitarian relief, but they do not carry live weapons when doing so. Their assistance is focused on provision of critical goods and services to affected communities, not enforcing security.

While Trump appears to be within his authority to order the California National Guard into Los Angeles for law enforcement purposes, “federalising” what should normally be the Governor’s decision, and may even have authority to order other state’s National Guard units to join the forces gathered in LA (there is debate on this), his ordering of a US Marine infantry brigade into LA is an egregious assault on the separation of internal and external security functions under democratic conditions and a major erosion of a core tenet of US civil-military relations. The Marines are trained and organised to seek out and destroy the enemy, not practice crowd control. Their entire orientation is towards prevailing in lethal combat, not convincing rowdy crowds engaging in protest and dissidence to go home.

Perhaps the deployment of Marines is an intimidation tactic and they will not be carrying combat weapons or live ammunition. But if they are, we are now facing the real prospect of US soldiers killing US citizens and residents on home soil.

Years ago I shared space with the Haiti Task Force in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I heard them discussing sending in Marines to quell anti-American violence in Port-au-Prince (there is a history of US Marines in Haiti). I chimed in from the sidelines that I thought it was a bad idea to use combat troops to engage in what was supposed to be civilian peace enforcement operations. The US has military police and paramilitary units like the US Marshalls and Border Patrol (and now ICE!) who train in those sort of things. I was ignored by my colleagues and a brigade of Marines were ordered and deployed to enforce the peace. When confronted by a rock-throwing mob they opened fire, killing over 100 people. The streets did in fact go quiet.

I asked the head of the Haiti Task Force why they chose that option when there were others available. He simply said that the people to be confronted where foreigners on foreign soil, so it was permissible to use combat troops for crowd control under those circumstances. In fact, today US private military contractors have been engaged to do exactly the same thing in Haiti given the breakdown in law and order there. It seems like in Haiti history repeats, but in different garb.

More importantly, deployment of Marines to LA is not a case of lethally confronting foreigners on foreign soil. For all the talk of “illegal aliens” and “invasion,” the protesters are on US soil exercising their right to peacefully protest and dissent. Those who act violently certainly can be handled by local law enforcement without the resort to combat-oriented troops whose missions primarily involved killing people abroad.

This is more than authoritarian-minded over-reach by a fear-mongering president. It is what a democracy’s slide into dictatorship looks like.

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The 2nd amendment spectre.

Given that the US 2nd Amendment was drafted in part to resist “oppressive”government armed overreach, it may be only a matter of time before 2nd amendment supporters decide to invoke the clause to forcibly resist kidnappings by masked and warrantless ICE agents. Things could get ugly.

What may be stopping things from getting to that point up until now is 1) most 2nd amendment supporters lean Right on the political spectrum and support Trump’s deportations policies; and 2) most of those detained so far have been foreigners of varying immigration status, although that is changing with significant arrests of US citizens for whatever reason (mistaken identity, faulty paperwork, etc.).

While it is true that the Founders envisioned “well regulated militias” to be the armed-bearing citizen’s ultimate defense against “oppressive” (presumably foreign) government, things have changed a bit since its promulgation and the federal authorities are now the focus of 2nd amendment supporter’s concerns. Although the possibility exists, 2nd amendment resistance is less likely to come in the form of civil war or lesser armed confrontations than in the form of social and political problems for law enforcement and the Trump administration. That does not bode well, especially if the gun lobby and conservative media and politicians side with 2nd amendment resistors, civil rights advocates and even police unions (because of the warrantless nature and lack of specific charges filed in many cases) in what will inevitably become constitutional challenges to ICE’s policies. That could well spell trouble for Trump’s immigration agenda and GOP election prospects in the upcoming midterm and general elections.

The Reagan Presidential Library has an interesting summary of the legal evolution of the clause: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/constitutional-amendments…”-,Constitutional%20Amendments%20–%20Amendment%202%20–%20“The%20Right,to%20Keep%20and%20Bear%20Arms”&text=Amendment%20Two%20to%20the%20Constitution,their%20rights%2C%20and%20their%20property.

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Say it again: Hate crimes are not terrorism.

Since I have written extensively about this subject over the years I will not bore readers with more tedious expositions. But in light of recent events I thought it would be permissible to height some basic facts about hate crimes and terrorism. Here goes:

Government officials, politicians and media have misidentified the recent murders of two Israel embassy staffers in DC as terrorism. It is not. It is a hate crime. In this instance there is no differentiation between target, subject and object of the attack, which is what separates terrorism from hate crimes. Hate crimes are acts of violence against specified “others” and confined to the acts themselves. They can be done for political (i.e., ideological, partisan), and/or non-political reasons (e.g., basic racism, religious animosity, greed, jealously). They can be motivated by revenge, which in turn is most often fuelled by hate. But in all instances the target, subject and object are the same. For the perpetrators, focused violence IS the intent and does not extend beyond itself (even if repercussions do).

Terrorism involves separate targets (victims), subjects (audiences) and object(ives) that go beyond a given violent event. For example, innocents are killed in order to influence the perceptions and will of both sympathetic and antipathetic audiences with the intent of altering their behaviour to or away from certain courses of action (say, regarding an occupation). The motives of terrorism may dovetail with those of hate crimes but the subject and object are broader than just the targets.

While they matter in terms of specific causality chains and the impact derived from them, terrorism is not defined by the identities of the victims, perpetrators or the motives of the latter. It is defined by the act of violence set against a broader context involving actors, audiences and behaviours. It is grotesque theatre of the macabre. In contrast, hate crimes are about the identity of the victims, not their behaviours per se. Hate crimes are designated as a special category of crime because they involve a “usual” act of violence (e.g., murder or rape) committed against someone for ascriptive reasons, that is, because of who they are, not what they do. Terrorism makes no such distinction.

Remember that October 7 can be properly called a terrorist act in part because a number of those killed, kidnapped and held hostage were not Jewish or Israelis (e.g., Filipino agricultural workers). For Hamas the objective of the attacks was to sow fear in Israel and among its rival in the Palestinian Authority while demonstrating resolve to the Palestinian people, allies like Iran and Hezbollah and the world in general when asserting Hama’s claim to leadership of the Palestinian cause.. As targets, the victims props and pawns in the larger stage play.

Although politically-motivated, the DC murders are not terrorism. Attaching that label in order to influence popular perceptions and add legal weight to prosecutions for partisan purposes is an egregious instance of conceptual stretching that renders the term terrorism meaningless. In fact, “terrorism” is now used to describe pretty much any act of politically-motivated violence precisely because it is such an emotionally-charged term, one that gets trotted out by authorities, politicians and media depending on who the perpetrators and victims are.

Worse yet, deliberate misuse of the term “terrorism” often serves as a type of what is legitimately known as “stochastic terrorism.” Stochastic terrorism involves the framing of social narratives in order to invite, incite or provoke violence against a designated group or entity (one example is Great Replacement theory, which argues that there is a plot by Jews and other nefarious actors to replace the white races with non-Christian people of color. That was a major rallying point of the racist violence in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally).

Misuse of the term “terrorism”also allows governments to clamp down on dissent, opposition and civil society in general by invoking national security threats related to those designated as such. For example, the Trump administration has designated the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal gang as a “terrorist entity” in order to detain and deport thousands of Venezuelans resident in the US (regardless of their immigration status or the fact that most have no affiliation with T de A).

Because of the very real dangers associated with the misuse of the term, we really need to demand conceptual clarity when and where political or ethnographic-religious/racial/sectarian violence is concerned. Otherwise we are on just another race to the bottom when it comes to understanding the darkness that surrounds us.

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Trump’s theatre of the absurd.

I know that it is undiplomatic to say so, but I sure wish that some foreign leader would interrupt one of Trump’s Oval Office public humiliation stunts to tell him to his face in front of the media that he is an adolescent bullying imbecile who seems to think that such stunts make him look strong. And then up and leave.

King Hussein of Jordan, President Zelensky of Ukraine and now President Ramaphosa of South Africa have been subject to the ambush/humiliation stunt, so all future foreign dignitaries are on notice that they too can become props in an act of staged political onanism inside Trump’s Oval Office (except Putin, who if he ever makes it to DC while Trump is POTUS will likely see Trump greeting him by grabbing his ankles).

Of course, foreign leaders could just refuse to do the staged photo op knowing that they will be ambushed and keep any one-on-one discussions private, or they could simply refuse to do any White House one-on-one visits while Trump is in residence. Whatever they do, someone has to start standing up to Trump in public. The bullying, the photoshopped handouts and edited videos, the endless false claims and lies, the fawning array of nodding sycophants surrounding the main characters in the staged farce–at what point do foreign leaders decide that prostrating themselves in this theatre of the absurd is a bridge too far? Do they really think that if they grin and bear it that they will get something from the Trump administration? Seriously?

It seems that people acquiesce to his boorishness because they want to curry his personal favour, believing that will translate into individual, diplomatic, economic, military or some other (national) benefit to them given the personalist authoritarian nature of Trump’s rule. Or they are just scared. They fail to understand that his “transactional” approach to foreign relations is mostly one-way, from them to him, and that he does not repay their favours or ass-kissing by responding in kind. To the contrary. We have now moved into emperor-has-no-clothes, clown show territory with he and his crowd (as seen in recent congressional testimony by his cabinet members), so the house of cards is starting to look increasingly flimsy. Clearly fake props like the MS 13 knuckle photoshop or the edited South African video and doctored handouts are signs of incompetence among his PR people. For a guy who is all about tough image, THAT is a major Achilles heel.

As an aside–it is pretty obvious that Trump’s interest in the plight of Afrikaner farmers in South Africa is due to the racist influence of Elon Musk and Peter Theil. Musk and others on Twitter/X post dozens of memes, mostly containing false and often crude narratives that include references to black intellect and culture, about the white “genocide” occurring in South Africa. This is not a coincidence and may be due in part to Musk and Theil’s South African heritage, their distaste for black majority rule (as Curtis Yarvin- influenced oligarchy-supporting “techbros”) and their intense dislike of South Africa’s role in trying to bring war crimes charges in the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Israeli leadership for its actions in Gaza and the West Bank. That dovetails with Trump’s racist dog-whistling (if not outright beliefs) and slips into the “s**thole country” storyline that he used in his first term. In taking up the Afrikaner “refugee” trope Trump reveals himself to be a puppet of the South African billionaires as well as the ringleader of the MAGA clown show.

The good news is that even if foreign dignitaries suffer further indignities from Trump, the damage to the US reputation (and national pride!) will be such that foreign States will work to avoid dealing with Trump altogether while he is still in office. As I have written elsewhere, among all the other things that Trump is and is not, he and his minions are not serious people and should be treated as such. Avoiding Oval Office photo ops is just a start. Best leave that to Kid Rock and other useful MAGA fools and tools.

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A return to Nature.

Thomas Hobbes wrote his seminal work Leviathan in 1651. In it he describes the world system as it was then as being in “a state of nature,” something that some have interpreted as anarchy. However, anarchy has order and purpose. It is not chaos. In fact, if we think of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” we get something similar to what anarchy is in practice: the aggregate of individual acts of self-interest can lead to the optimisation of value and outcomes at the collective level. Anarchy clears; chaos does not.

For Hobbes, the state of nature was chaos. Absent a “Sovereign” (i.e. a government) that could impose order on global and domestic societies, humans were destined to lead lives the were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.“ This has translated into notions of “might makes right,” “survival of the fittest,” “to the victor goes the spoils” and other axioms of so-called power politics. The most elaborate of these, international relations realism, is a school of thought that is based on the belief that because the international system has no superseding Sovereign in the form of world government with comprehensive enforcement powers, and because there are no universally shared values and mores throughout the globe community that ideologically bind cultures, groups and individuals, global society exists as a state of nature where, even if there are attempts to manage the relationships between States (and other actors) via rules, norms, institutions and the like, the bottom line is that States (and other actors) have interests, not friends.

Interests are pursued in a context of power differentials. Alliances are temporary and based on the convergence of mutual interests. Values are not universal and so are inconsequential. International exchange is transactional, not altruistic. Actors with greater resources at their disposal (human, natural, intellectual) prevail over those that have less. In case of resource parity between States or other actors, balances of power become systems regulators, but these are fluid and contingent, not permanent. Geography matters in that regard, which is why geopolitics (the relationship of power to geography) is the core of international relations.

It is worth remembering this when evaluating contemporary international relations. It has been well established by now that the liberal international order of the post WW2 era has largely been dismantled in the context of increasing multipolarity in inter-State relations and the rise of the Global South within the emerging order. As I have written before, the long transition and systemic realignment in international affairs has led to norm erosion, rules violations, multinational institutional and international organizational decay or irrelevance and the rise of conflict (be it in trade, diplomacy or armed force) as the new systems regulator.

These developments have accentuated over the last decade and now have a catalyst for a full move into a new global moment–but not into a multipolar or multiplex constellation arrangement in which rising and established powers move between multilateral blocs depending on the issues involved. Instead, the move appears to be one towards a modern Hobbesian state of nature, with the precipitant being the MAGA administration of Donald Trump and its foreign policy approach.

We must be clear that it is not Trump who is the architect of this move. As mentioned in pervious posts, he is an empty vessel consumed by his own self-worth. That makes him a useful tool of far smarter people than he, people who work in the shadow of relative anonymity and who cut their teeth in rightwing think tanks and policy centres. In their view the liberal internationalist order placed too many constraints on the exercise of US power while at the same time requiring the US to over-extend itself as the “world’s policeman” and international aid donor . Bound by international conventions on the one hand and besieged by foreign rent-seekers and adversaries on the other, the US was increasingly bent under the weight of overlapped demands in which existential national interests were subsumed to a plethora of frivolous diversions (such as human rights and democracy promotion).

For these strategists, the solution to the dilemma was not to be found in any new multipolar (or even technopolar) constellation but in a dismantling of the entire edifice of international order, something that was based on an architecture of rules, institutions and norms nearly 500 years in the making. Many have mentioned Trump’s apparent mercantilist inclinations and his admiration for former US president William McKinley’s tariff policies in the late 1890s. Although that may be true, the Trump/MAGA agenda is far broader in scope than trade. In fact, the US had its greatest period of (neo-imperial) expansion during McKinley’s tenure as president (1897-1901), winning the Spanish-American War and annexing Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the Philippines, so Trump’s admiration for him may well be based on notions of territorial expansionism as well.

Whatever Trump’s views of McKinley, the basic idea under-riding his foreign policy team’s approach is that in a world where the exercise of power is the ultimate arbiter of a State’s international status, the US remains the greatest Power of them all. It does not matter if the PRC or Russia challenge the US or if other emerging powers join the competition. Without the hobbling effect of its liberal obligations the US can and will dominate them all. This involves trade but also the exercise of raw (neo) imperialist ambitions in places like Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada. It involves sidelining the UN, NATO, EU and other international organisations where the US had to share equal votes with lesser powers who flaunted the respect and tribute that should naturally be given in recognition of the US’s superior power base.

There appears to be a belief in this approach that the US can be a new hegemon–but not Sovereign–in a unipolar world, even more so than during the post-USSR-pre 9/11 interregnum. In a new state of nature it can sit at the core of the international system, orbited by constellations of lesser Great Powers like the PRC, Russia, the EU, perhaps India, who in turn would be circled by lesser powers of various stripes. The US will not seek to police the world or waste time and resources on well-meaning but ultimately futile soft power exercises like those involving foreign aid and humanitarian assistance. Its power projection will be sharp on all dimensions, be it trade, diplomacy or in military-security affairs. It will use leverage, intimidation and varying degrees of coercion as well as persuasion (and perhaps even bribery) as diplomatic tools. It will engage the world primarily in bilateral fashion, eschewing multilateralism for others to pursue according to their own interests and power capabilities. That may suit them, but for the US multilateralism is just another obsolescent vestige of the liberal internationalist past.

A possible (and partial) explanation for the change in the US foreign policy approach may be the learning effect in the US of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza. Trump and his advisors may have learned that impunity has its own rewards, that no country or group of countries other than the US (if it has the will) can effectively confront a state determined to pursue its interests regardless of international law, the laws of war or institutional censorship (say, by the UN or International Criminal Court), or any other type of countervailing power. The Russians and Israelis have gotten away with their behaviour because, all rhetoric and hand-wringing aside, there is no actor or group of actors who have the will or capability to stop them. For Trump strategists, these lesser powers are pursuing their interests regardless of diplomatic niceties and international conventions, and they are prevailing precisely because of that. Other than providing military assistance to Ukraine, no one has lifted a serious finger against the Russians other than the Ukrainians themselves, and even fewer have seriously moved to confront Israel’s now evident ethnic cleansing campaign in part because the US has backed Israel unequivocally. The exercise of power in each case occurred in a norm enforcement vacuum in spite of the plethora of agencies and institutions designed to prevent such egregious violations of international standards.

Put another way: if Israel and Russia can get away with their disproportionate and indiscriminate aggression, imagine what the US can do.

If we go on to include the PRC’s successful aggressive military “diplomacy” in East/SE Asia, the use of targeted assassinations, hacking, disinformation and covert direct influence campaigns overseas by various States and assorted other unpunished violations of international conventions, then it is entirely plausible that Trump’s foreign policy brain trust sees the moment as ripe for finally breaking the shackles of liberal internationalism. Also recall that many in Trump’s inner circle subscribe to chaos or disruption theory, in which a norms-breaking “disruptor” like Trump seizes the opportunities presented by the breakdown of the status quo ante.

Before the US could hollow out liberal internationalism abroad and replace it with a modern international state of nature it had to crush liberalism at home. Using Executive Orders as a bludgeon and with a complaint Republican-dominated Congress and Republican-adjacent federal courts. the Trump administration has openly exercised increasingly authoritarian control powers with the intention of subjugating US civil society to its will. Be it in its deportation policies, rollbacks of civil rights protections, attacks on higher education, diminishing of federal government capacity and services (except in the security field), venomous scapegoating of opponents and vulnerable groups, the Trump/MAGA domestic agenda not only seeks to turn the US into a illiberal or “hard” democracy (what Spanish language scholars call a “democradura” as a play on words mixing the terms democracia and dura (hard)). It also serves notice that the US under Trump/MAGA is willing to do whatever is necessary to re-impose its supremacy in world affairs, even if it means hurting its own in order to prove the point. By its actions at home Trump’s administration demonstrates capability, intent and steadfast resolve as it establishes a reputation for ruthless pursuit of its policy agenda. Foreign interlocutors will have to take note of this and adjust accordingly. Hence, for Trump’s advisors, authoritarianism at home is the first step towards undisputed supremacy abroad.

The Trump embrace of international state of nature differs from Hobbes because it does not see the need for a superseding global governance network but instead believes that the US can dominate the world without the encumbrances of power-sharing with lesser players. In this view hegemony means domination, no more or less. It implies no attempt at playing the role of a Sovereign imposing order on a disorderly and recalcitrant community of Nation-States and non-State actors that do not share common values, much less interests.

This is the core of the current US foreign policy approach. It is not about reorganising the international order within the extant frameworks as given. It is about removing those frameworks entirely and replacing them with an America First, go it alone agenda where the US, by virtue of its unrivalled power differential relative to all other States and global actors, can maximise its self-interest in largely unconstrained fashion. Some vestiges of the old international order may remain, but they will be marginalised and crippled the longer the US project is in force.

What does not seem to be happening in Trump’s foreign policy circle are three things. First, recognition that other States and international actors may band together against the US move to unipolarity in a new state of nature and that for all its talk the US may not be able to impose unipolar dominance over them. Second, understanding that States like the PRC, Russia and other Great Powers and communities (like the EU) may resist the US move and challenge it before it can consolidate the new international status quo. Third, foreseeing that the technology titans who today are influential in the Trump administration may decide to transfer there loyalties elsewhere, especially if Trump’s ego starts becoming a hindrance to their (economic and digital) power bases. The fusion of private technology control and US State power may not be as compatible over time as presently appears to be the case, something that may not occur with States such as the PRC, India or Japan that have different corporate cultures and political structures. As the current investment in the Middle Eastern oligarchies shows, the fusion of State and private techno power may be easier to accomplish in those contexts rather than the US.

In any event, whether it be a short-term interlude or a longue durée feature of international life, a modern state of nature is now our new global reality.

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The video sums things up.

Let me make this short and sweet (taken from my other social media):

Seeing some of the world’s richest men shaking the blood-stained hand of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin-Salman while being warmly introduced by US president Donald Trump pretty much sums up the era we live in. It was a Petrotechthugocracy meeting in real time. Shameful.

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Drawing Parallels.

The April 22 attacks by Kashmir Resistance (KR), a (at least tacitly) Pakistani-backed irredentist group in Indian-controlled Kashmir, in which 26 people were murdered, has some unfortunate parallels with the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Although many more Israelis died in the latter (nearly 2000) and the costs to Palestinians living in Gaza (and to a lesser extent the West Bank) from the subsequent Israel war campaign against them have been astronomical (53,000 dead in Gaza alone while the India-Pakistan conflict is just now beginning and its outcome is as of yet undetermined), there are enough similarities between them to offer some observations about them, as well as their differences.

Hamas and Kashmir Resistance are both ethno-religious-nationalist irregular warfare movements that violently resist occupation and apartheid-like segregation. Both are animated by pre-modern if not primordial hatreds. Both are Muslim, opposed to Indian Hindu nationalism in the latter case and Israeli Zionism in the former instance. Both are proxies for other States, those being Iran in the case of Hamas and Pakistan in the case of KR. For their part, in their present political guises both Israel and India (who quietly support each other in their respective conflicts) prefer that their rule lead to consolidation of ethno-States dominated by their respective Jewish and Hindu majorities, including in the disputed territories over which their respective conflicts have periodically erupted.

The October 7 and April 22 attacks were provocations designed to prompt an over-reaction from the stronger State adversary which in turn was supposed to spark a broader conflict that would draw in other actors and create international pressure on, if not popular protests against the respective State adversaries. For a short moment, Hamas appeared to have succeeded, as the Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza is by any definition disproportionate and indiscriminate in effect, involving the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity in doing so. Hamas’s tactical objective was to spread the IDF thin as it encountered armed resistance in Gaza, the West Bank and coming out of Lebanon, and have Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis eventually join in a multi-front struggle against the “Zionist entity.” This would in turn draw in more actors from the region and elsewhere as public pressure mounted for an end to the Israeli campaign (including in Israel), thereby forcing a diplomatic compromise that recognised Hamas’s status as the main Palestinian interlocutor (rather than the Palestinian Authority). The mounting toll of victims (including hostages taken on both sides) was a pawn in this larger game.

Protests erupted world-wide against the Israelis, causing civil unrest in many Western democracies as well as throughout the Muslim diaspora. Iran and its regional proxies, Yemeni Houthis and Hezbollah in Lebanon, attempted to widen the conflict into a regional war while fomenting pro-Hamas unrest in Arab States. For the first year of the conflict it looked like the Hamas strategy was working, especially after a coalition of US-led nations broadened the fight by sending a naval flotilla the Red Sea to thwart Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the maritime choke point in support of Hamas. This was seen by Hamas and its supporters as confirmation that the West was on Israel’s side regardless of its behaviour and therefore not just anti-Palestinian but anti-Islamic as a whole (because the Houthis, Hezbollah and Iran are Shiites while Hamas is mostly Sunni Muslim).

For its part, KR hoped and may still be hoping that an Indian overreaction in the form of attacks on Pakistan and/or ethnographic-religious purges in Kashmir that will lead to Muslim uprisings throughout India and anti-Indian violence in surrounding countries with significant Muslim populations such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. That may be wishful thinking.

Whatever initial propaganda gains may have been made in the first six months after October 7, Israel’s response against Hamas and the Palestinian people has been multi-faceted, overwhelming, relentless, devastating and successful. It has ramped up its repression in the West Back while now moving to permanently occupy Gaza. It has intimidated Iran by killing some of its leaders on Iranian soil while launching missile attacks on military facilities, all while threatening Iran’s nuclear sites. It has conducted strikes against the Houthis and Hezbollah in their territories (including in foreign capitals like Beirut, Damascus and Sanaa) and killed scores of their leaders using conventional and unconventional means (such as the pager bombs used against Hezbollah, missile attacks on Iranian diplomatic facilities in Syria and the murder of a Hamas leader in an Iranian Revolutionary Guard guest house). It has occupied swathes of northern Lebanon and western Syria for good measure and shows no signs of withdrawal from anywhere anytime soon.

In other words, the Hamas “sucker ploy” (getting a stronger adversary to over-react to a provocation so world attention is focused on the response, not the initial atrocity) may have worked over the short-term but has now backfired spectacularly because, among other things, no other country or the community of nations appears able or willing to persuade or force the Israelis to stop their scorched earth campaign. In fact, Israel appears to see October 7 as an excuse and window of opportunity for its territorial expansion and direct control of Gaza and territorial strips from neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Syria. Much of that is also due to the US blanket backing of Israel with weapons and aid, something that as of yet is not a factor in the India-Pakistan conflict. But for Hamas, it means that its provocation may well result in its annihilation.

An obvious difference is that unlike the David versus Goliath nature of the Palestinian-Israeli war, the KR provocation has resulted in a peer conflict between two nuclear-armed States, again, with neither receiving the unequivocal backing on any Great Power (in fact, US president Trump initially said that the US should just “let them go to it and sort it out” or words to that effect). More subtly, the India-Pakistan conflict has become a bigger proxy clash between arms weapons suppliers, with Pakistan mostly fielding PRC-made weapons while India has diversified amongst Russian, French and Israeli platforms. That arms supplier competition is an ominous incentive to broaden the conflict into a conventional war.

Israel can engage in a scorched earth campaign against Hamas and other irregular warfare actors because it is a nuclear power with the strongest and most experienced conventional military in the region, one that has no significant challenger to its supremacy. It has cowed Iran and its proxies into acquiescence to its logic of force, if not submission to the new status quo. All with the backing of the US and other Western nations.

The situation is different in South Asia. India and Pakistan are nuclear armed peer competitors (although the Indian military is much larger). Notwithstanding some of the alarmist rhetoric of armchair pundits (including in NZ), neither is interested in using nuclear weapons for non-existential reasons, so this puts a cap on the escalatory potential of the conflict. Whereas Israel is free to mete out collective punishment on Palestinian civilians as it pleases, arguing that they harbour terrorists and disguise the terrorist’s infrastructure (and it is likely that due to their life histories and upbringing many Palestinians do indeed hate Israel and Jews, which still does not justify committing atrocities and war crimes against them), India and Pakistan have to tread more lightly. So far India has targeted “terrorist infrastructure” and air defence systems in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Pakistan itself, with Pakistan retaliating with limited air strikes across the border aimed at as of yet indeterminate (presumably military) targets. So long as the Indian targeting remains focused on military sites and irregular warfare proxies’ staging and hiding places, and the Pakistanis limit their response to military targets, then the escalatory potential for the conflict is low. It will be a limited conventional military tit-for-tat rather than a rush towards a conventional or nuclear Big Bang.

This demonstrates the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, at least when in the hands of rational actors like the Indian and Pakistani military leaderships. Civilian groups, politicians and ethno-religious partisan media may agitate for all out war but unless there is a hot-head or two in the high commands of both countries, the chances of either ordering a nuclear strike–a first use one at that–is remote. Not impossible if things do not go as foreseen above, but pretty unlikely in any event.

Truth be told, the Indo-Pakistani conflict is about saving military face and national honour rather than conquest or retribution no matter how much historical baggage is layered onto it by war-mongering actors on both sides.

Perversely, the fact that Israel is (yet) the only nuclear power in the Middle East deters all would-be adversaries from openly posing real existential threats against it. For all of the talk by Iran and its proxies about erasing the “Zionist entity” from the face of the Earth, in practice they steer clear of actually attempting to do so. They know what that will bring, and this was the case before they were militarily and diplomatically neutered by the current Israeli war effort. In a strange way, all of this suggests that in both instances nuclear deterrence works and can be used to a nuclear-capable country’s advantage as a conflict limitation device under given circumstances. That is of no solace to Palestinians of course, but it may spare Indian and Pakistani civilians similar levels of devastation given the different nuclear context in which the conflict has begun.

This is where KR may have erred in emulating the Hamas provocation strategy. Rather than induce a sucker ploy scenario that garners global sympathy for the plight of Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir (and elsewhere in India), it has led to a peer clash between adjacent nuclear armed States that have previously fought conventional wars against each other. This very different context suggests that the conflict will not only be a two-sided rather than a one-sided affair, but that interests of State will prevail over ethnographic-religious hatred and ambitions for territorial expansion by either of them. For KR, much like for Hamas but in a different way, April 22 may well have sown the seeds of their own demise, at least as an armed irregular warfare group. Their ideology will remain and give hope to future resistance fighters, but for the moment current exigencies mitigate against widening their war and in fact suggest that they may be sacrificed in the pursuit of larger interests.

Other parallels may well be drawn as the Indo-Pakistani conflict evolves, but for the moment let us leave on this note: Sometimes the lessons learned from the experience of others are not the ones that were hoped for or intended to be.

That is the ultimate parallel of all.

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A culture of cruelty.

In February I wrote a post about “the politics of cruelty” in which I highlighted the mean-spirited commonalities of recently elected rightwing governments in the US, NZ, Italy and other democracies. In this post I shall expand on them with reference to some of the authoritarian features that I researched and wrote about when I was a young academic.

In the 1980s and early 1990s when I wrote about Argentine and South American authoritarianism, I borrowed the phrase “cultura del miedo” (culture of fear) from Juan Corradi, Guillermo O’Donnell, Norberto Lechner and others to characterise the social anomaly that exists in a country ruled by a state terror regime like the “Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional” in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. In those circumstances individual psycho-pathologies are often rooted in the pervasive feelings of dread, vulnerability and hopelessness brought about by the regime’s use of death squads, disappearances and other violent authoritarian measures to enforce public compliance with their edicts. That pervasive sense of fear extends to collective life, something that was and is a deliberate objective of authoritarians because it produces a sense of survivalist alienation and social atomisation in the body politic, thereby disrupting basic horizontal bonds between and within groups in civil society (you can see one of my essays that uses this concept here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2111080).

In recent years and especially since Trump’s re-election in the US, Javier Milei’s election in Argentina and the election of the right wing “chaos coalition” in NZ, I see an extension of this concept in what I will call the culture of cruelty. A culture of cruelty is one in which social groups and organisations, including governments, engage in particularly cruel behaviour in order to punish, humiliate and revel in the plight of others, particularly political opponents and scapegoated social out-groups. We only need to think of Trump’s deportation policies and the behaviour of his immigration Gestapo, ICE, to see the culture of cruelty at work. We can see it is the DOGE chainsaw approach to public sector employment and federal regulations. We can see it at MAGA rallies. It is personalised in the behaviour of Trump advisors like Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt and Tom Homan, who show utter contempt for the suffering their policies have caused and in fact appear to relish being able to rub in the fact that they can act with apparent impunity due to the weakness of the courts and congressional or partisan complicity. 

In fact, the “culture of impunity” is another characteristic of authoritarianism that I and others wrote about three decades go, and it goes hand-in-hand with the culture of fear because it is the feeling of impunity that leads dictatorships to use wanton repression as an instrument of subjugation of the popular will. In other words, the culture of regime impunity leads to the imposition of a culture of fear in society. That is what is at work, to various degrees, under Trump, Milei, the evil clown circus currently ruling NZ (especially in the ACT and NZ First parties) and in other former liberal democracies today.

This culture is mean-spirited and malicious. In many instances it is fuelled by hatred of “others,” be they immigrants, indigenous people, people of colour or different faiths, those who are sexually “deviant” from “traditional” norms (i.e. non-binary) and others who do not conform to a given set of social mores or expectations or are simply easy scapegoats given public attitudes. It is facilitated by the increased vulgarisation of social discourse and erosion of societal norms regarding behaviour and civic exchange, now megaphoned and accentuated by social media. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and uses cruelty as a punishment, as an intimidation tactic and as a dark reminder of what is possible when one is targeted for any number of perceived transgressions

Cruelty can be physical, mental, emotional, social or any combination of them because its impact is not confined to just one dimension or aspect of human existence. It is “unusual” in that its objective is to cause disproportionate anxiety, anguish, stress and suffering to targeted people and groups beyond whatever duress might (or might not) be warranted under the circumstances. The term “scarred for life” is an accurate depiction of the broader long-term effects that cruelty can have on the human subject. And when it comes to public policy or social exchange among groups, that is exactly what perpetrators hope to achieve via its use: it psychologically traumatises people and groups in the moment as well as their individual and collective memories, something that renders asunder the social fabric into which they were previously woven.

As is the case with torture (which is inherently cruel), social and political cruelty works. Not so much as an instrument to induce cooperation from those otherwise disposed not to give it, but as a disincentive, revenge or retribution tool against them.

I could write more about the subject but this is not the place to do so. However, I hope that the notion is clear. We are now in an era where the culture and politics of cruelty have become integral features of democratic politics in at least some Western societies (I will leave aside for the moment the fear that exists in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes like those in Russia, China or Nicaragua). And if the cultures of impunity that have led to the imposition of these growing cultures of cruelty and fear in Western societies continues unchecked, then another social pathology will follow–the reaping or harvesting of fear (“cosecha del miedo,” in O’Donnell’s words) in the form of a legacy of damaged people and institutions resultant from the practice.

Should that happen, then democracy as a social construct and a method of governance will never be the same.