Global governance – Globalities

For the commanders of Western hegemony, cruelty is a vital tool

Helena CobbanApril 19, 2025April 20, 2025China, Global governance, Indian Ocean, Israel, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy

The painting above is of Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque

For Pres. Trump, cruelty is a vital tool as he bulldozes through all constitutional requirements to undertake (and publicize) exemplary deportations of undocumented immigrants and of any legally documented visitors like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil whom he arbitrarily chooses to punish.

For Israel’s PM Netanyahu and his ministers, cruelty is similarly a vital tool as they deploy waves of bombers and incendiary drones against two million Palestinians huddling under tarps on Gaza’s trash-piled shores while totally blocking the entry into Gaza of all the basic necessities of life.

Indian Ocean trading routes before da Gama. Click on image to enlarge.

It’s worth noting that cruelty has been a vital, and deliberately deployed, tool for the architects and commanders of “White” empires ever since the 15th century CE. In 1415, Portuguese navigators started carving their way down the coast of West Africa to establish heavily fortified “trading” (plunder) posts in their quest for gold. Those navigators were also intent on finding a sea-route to the richest trading zone they’d ever heard of, the one that traversed the Indian Ocean and wove the riches of East Africa, India, and distant Cathay (China) into the most advanced manufacturing and consumption area then known to humankind…

USA takes sledgehammer to international law

Helena CobbanJuly 25, 2024July 26, 2024Diplomacy, Global balance, Global governance, Israel, U.S. policy, Uncategorized, United Nations3 Comments

The great artist Michaelangelo completed his “David” and some other seminal works before he turned 30. Imagine if, a few decades later, he had carried a sledgehammer along to where “David” stood in Florence’s most famous public square, and set about smashing his masterpiece to pieces…

That is, roughly, analogous to the story of what the U.S. government has been doing in recent years– and more intensively, over recent months– to the whole structure of international law that Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt so painstakingly crafted at the end of World War 2.

The past seven days have seen two momentous events. On July 19, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is the highest court in the whole world, adjudicating only conflicts between states, not individuals, issued a landmark judgment to the effect that, inter alia:

The geopolitical impact of the ICC’s actions on Gaza

Helena CobbanMay 21, 2024May 22, 2024Diplomacy, Europe, Gaza, Global governance, Israel1 Comment

I want to pen some quick thoughts on this topic– not least because in the years 2001-06 I conducted some pretty serious research on the whole matter of “criminal liability/accountability” in individuals in cases of atrocious war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide… And in 2007 I published a whole book on the whole, then fairly recent, emergence of a set of “international courts” that sought to hold leaders and other high-ranking perpetrators criminally responsible for their acts, irrespective of whether they carried out those acts while in political/military office or not. (Most often, they had been in office.)

Two people whom I honored to call friends and colleagues have issued very powerful commentaries on yesterday’s announcement by ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan that he is applying for arrest warrants regarding the situation in Gaza, for Israeli PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and for Hamas General Secretary Ismail Haniyeh and the Gaza-based military-political heads Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif.

These two commentaries come from Jonathan Cook and from Noura Erakat.

Cook’s piece is headed thus:

My longform article on Gaza and the shifting global balance

Helena CobbanFebruary 16, 2024February 16, 2024Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Global governance, U.S.-China relations, United Nations5 Comments

… is now up at the Boston Review website, here. The piece draws on a lot of the writing I did here at Globalities in the nine months of 2023 prior to October 7. The original title I’d given it was “Gaza at the Hinge of History”… Which I still prefer to the one BR gave it, though I realize I’d used “hinge of history” in the title of an essay here last April about the Arabian Peninsular. But hey, these hinges are definitely linked.

I hope you can read the whole of the new BR article. It opens with an intriguing (one hopes) anecdote/observation. The meaty substance comes down near the bottom:

The Gaza crisis, seventeen weeks old at the time of this writing, has not only brought West Asia (and the world) to the brink of a major war. It has sent shockwaves into the heart of a world order that United States took the lead in designing in 1945 and in which, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it has acted as hegemon. Netanyahu and his political allies have adopted an openly confrontational stand not only against the UN’s refugee agency, but also against the UN itself and its highest judicial body, remaining implacably opposed to all those fundamentals of the world system…

Anyway, since BR doesn’t have a Comments section, here is your chance to post any reactions or further thoughts you have about the article, in the Comments box below.

On the Gaza crossings monitoring mechanism

Helena CobbanDecember 22, 2023December 22, 2023Diplomacy, Gaza, Global governance, Israel, Palestinians, United Nations

Yesterday, I wrote a fairly substantial Twitter thread on the freight-crossings monitoring mechanism that’s a critical point of contention as the UN Security Council this week attempts to pass a meaningful resolution on a ceasefire (or even just a “suspension of hostilities”) in Gaza.

It’s a bit of a wonkish, insidery issue but since it has acquired such importance at the SC, I took that deep dive into it yesterday. You can read the whole thread here. That’s where you’ll need to access it if you want clickable links.

By the way if you’re interested in Israeli controls of *people* needing or wanting to cross into or out of Gaza, go read this excellent thread that the currently exiled Gazan Sarah Ali posted yesterday.

Anyway, here’s the content of my thread from yesterday, non-clickably (with two typos corrected):

The UN Security Council can end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Here’s how.

Helena CobbanNovember 10, 2023November 10, 2023Diplomacy, Gaza, Global governance, Israel, Palestinians, United Nations5 Comments

In the past 35 days, the Israeli military has killed well over 10,000 people in Gaza. It has reduced most of Gaza City and the extensive refugee camps that surround it to barren moonscapes of rubble. Meantime, Israeli settler extremists have gone on killing and land-grabbing sprees in the occupied West Bank, with great help from the Occupation Forces there. The currently sharp intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has considerably inflamed tensions along Israel’s northern border. And the high degree of the United States’ direct and indirect involvement in Israel’s war effort, which has included dispatching two aircraft carrier battle groups, a nuclear-capable submarine and other U.S. military forces and assets to the region, has further inflamed tensions in a swathe stretching from Western Iraq through Syria and right down the Red Sea to Yemen.

This madness needs to stop!

As do the series of intense and long-unresolved political conflicts that underlie all these tensions, with at their heart the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The United States. Must step aside. From Arab-Israeli ‘peacemaking’.

Helena CobbanNovember 8, 2023November 9, 2023China, Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Global governance, Israel, Palestinians, U.S. policy, United Nations2 Comments

The United States. Must step aside. From Arab-Israeli ‘peacemaking’. It is that simple.

For 50 years now, Washington has dominated all the efforts that the world’s nations have undertaken in their search for a just and lasting resolution to the many strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict. That U.S. move to dominate the peace diplomacy was launched in late 1973 by Henry Kissinger, who uniquely combined the roles of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. In the aftermath of the October 1973 war, Kissinger brusquely elbowed aside the Soviet Union, which had hoped to “co-lead” the post-war diplomacy.

From December 1973 until today, the United States has dominated all Arab-Israeli diplomacy, with the level of that U.S. domination rising to a situation of unabashed hegemony after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. And as I’ve written elsewhere, in 2005 Pres. George W. Bush even managed to subordinate the United Nations (and the EU, and a then-very-weak Russia) to Washington’s “leadership” of the diplomacy through an extraordinary arrangement called the “Middle East Quad.”

The results, for citizens of all the Arab states with the possible, partial exception of Egypt, have been disastrous. But the impact on the Palestinians has been particularly dire. They have seen Israeli settlers grabbing huge new areas of Palestinian land in the West Bank. They have seen the lives of all the Palestinians still resident in their historic homeland tightly constrained by Israel. They’ve seen Israeli forces and their allies commit unspeakable atrocities in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. They’ve seen their freedom to worship in their holy places in Jerusalem, Hebron, and elsewhere attacked.

And what has Washington done? Washington has continued to shovel massive sums of money and soaring mountains of arms into Israel. It has protected Israel from any international accountability by using its veto at the U.N. Security Council. It has given formal recognition to Israel’s (quite illegal) annexation of Greater East Jerusalem and of Syria’s Golan. It has demonized all who tried to resist Israel’s continued violence and encroachments by calling them terrorists and wielding tough sanctions against them.

And now, in Gaza City and the surrounding Gaza Strip—and also in the West Bank—we see the culmination of all that fervent, intensely one-sided support that successive U.S. presidents and their officials, and the U.S. Congress, have lavished on Israel over the past 50 years.

Polycrisis: Climate crisis entwined with governance crises

Helena CobbanSeptember 15, 2023September 16, 2023Climate crisis, Global governance, Libya

The aftermath of the recent Wadi Derna flood in Libya

Language matters. If we talk only about “global warming” or “climate change”, those terms don’t convey anything like the scale of the devastation that the climate crisis is already inflicting on humankind. So let’s call it what it is: A very present climate crisis.

Figuring out how to respond to this crisis is made many times harder by the fact that it is closely entwined with crises of governance collapse at many levels around the world.

The most impactful level of entwinement has long been the global. Global discord and the often-blind selfishness of the leaders of rich countries mean that these countries still continue to pump greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere at a rate that guarantees there is no prospect that worldwide GHG emissions—and therefore global heating—will be ended within the next 25 years.

The assessments that will be presented to next week’s meeting in New York on the UN’s Sustainable development Goals (SDG’s) are bleak, indeed.

The pace of global warming (heating) has accelerated visibly in recent years. But it’s been underway for several decades already, with effects such as the melting of ice-packs worldwide, desertification of land-masses, heating of seas and the exacerbation of hurricanes and other dire weather events becoming increasingly evident in many parts of the world.

The global risks of a U.S. governance collapse

Helena CobbanAugust 5, 2023August 7, 2023Global governance, Nuclear terror, U.S. policy2 Comments

The above image shows Slim Pickens riding a U.S. nuclear missile to its target, from “Dr. Strangelove” (1964)

With this week’s unveiling of yet more indictments of former Pres. Donald Trump and the defiant (Trump-stoked) reaction of his supporters to the indictments, the U.S. governance system now looks closer to suffering a major, systemic collapse than at any point since 1787.

Given the United States’ possession of a mega-capable nuclear arsenal, any such collapse would have massive—potentially existential—consequences for all of humankind. Policymakers and publics worldwide need to start planning how to forestall the worst possible consequences of any such scenario. Starting now.

I don’t think I’m being alarmist. I lived and worked in Lebanon for the first six years of that country’s civil war (1975-81.) I have done in-depth reporting in two other countries recovering from civil wars (Mozambique and Rwanda), and conducted research in other conflict zones. Now, living here in Washington DC I can sense the extreme risk posed to this country’s political system by the battling narratives, the sharp erosion of trust in national institutions, the greed, the positioning, the exchange of harsh accusations, and the mounting fear and intolerance.

But the United States is not Lebanon. It is not Mozambique, or Rwanda, or any of the numerous other countries wracked by civil wars in recent decades. This is a polity that has sat at the apex of the world system since 1945. Its massive, extremely capable military is deployed on every continent. And did I mention the nuclear arsenal? An internal political implosion in this country would be far more momentous for humanity than any of those other civil wars.

Global South resists Washington’s anti-Russia campaign

Helena CobbanJuly 28, 2023July 29, 2023BRICS, China, Global balance, Global economy, Global governance, Russia3 Comments

Above: Pres. Putin poses with some of the African leaders who attended the Russia-African summit he hosted this past week

Biden administration officials and their supporters have long claimed that the conflict in Ukraine is a clear-cut contest between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” that affects the whole world… and that on that basis the countries of the Global South should line up to support NATO’s campaign against Russia. One big recent version of this argument has been the claim that Russia’s refusal to renew the agreement allowing Ukraine to export grain via the Black Sea is raising grain prices and preventing much-needed foodstuffs from reaching hunger-struck countries in Africa…

But the campaign to win global support for NATO’s anti-Russia crusade has never been very successful. Recall that in the three votes Washington initiated at the UN last year to denounce Russia’s actions inside Ukraine (e.g., 1, 2), three dozen countries including global behemoths China, India, and three dozen other countries failed to support the “Yes” vote.

And just this past week, the proceedings of key gatherings held in South Africa and Moscow have underscored the extent to which the “West” has lost the support of that large majority of humanity that lives in the formerly colonized countries of the Global South. (If indeed, it ever had it… Perhaps a better description of what’s been happening in recent months is that the West is now revealing itself as incapable of imposing its will on the countries of the Global South. More on this, later…)

So what happened at these two recent gatherings?