At this point, however, it is clear that the U.S. no longer values or promotes international law, human rights, liberalism, or democracy. The U.S. increases its military spending significantly every year, pressures other NATO countries to do the same, threatens other countries with military force, and wants to forcibly take Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally. The U.S. also says it wants to see Canada, another NATO member, as the 51st American state. The U.S. threatens its allies with economic sanctions, shoots down ships in the Caribbean on the grounds that they are carrying drugs, carries out summary executions, threatens to attack Venezuela, and amasses its navy off the country’s coast to attempt to seize its oil reserves.
The U.S. also unilaterally withdraws from agreements, such as the one with Iran, and imposes sanctions that would collapse the country’s economy. The U.S. supports Israel’s war of aggression, bombs Iran’s nuclear facilities, enables Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza by supplying weapons and providing economic and diplomatic support, and withdraws from international institutions, such as UNESCO and the World Health Organization, and withdraws from international agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement. President Trump talks about bringing peace to Gaza and Ukraine, but what he presents as peace is nothing more than surrender on the terms imposed by powerful aggressors.
These examples clearly demonstrate the U.S.’s understanding of peace and the type of global political system it desires: One in which the powerful impose their terms on the weak and get what they want. This is not a new phenomenon; international relations have always been shaped by power. Following the catastrophic events of World War II, including the use of nuclear weapons and the loss of approximately 80 million lives, Western countries created the illusion that diplomacy and dialogue would be fundamental to international relations. They believed that problems would be solved through peaceful means rather than force and that the use of military force would only be legitimate in cases of self-defense and with a UN Security Council resolution.
During this period, centered around the UN, the concepts of international law, human rights, democracy, and liberalism were used as tools to intervene in other countries. American interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chile, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, and many other countries were justified by the stated objectives of bringing democracy, protecting human rights, preventing violations of international law, and intervening against terrorism.
These justifications, used by Western countries in particular to mask their military, economic, and diplomatic interventions and pressures, have given rise to a substantial body of literature in International Relations centered on these concepts. One could argue that this literature has convinced some audiences that international relations are shaped by law and that Western countries base their foreign policies on democracy, human rights, and liberal values.
However, Israel’s two-year genocide in Gaza, supported by the U.S. and other Western countries, coupled with this aggressive alliance’s simultaneous attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, as well as the Zionists’ involvement in the attack on Qatar, signaled to many that the world had entered a new era.