Liberals Discover International Law
After sponsoring the genocide of Gaza, welcoming the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro, cheering the bombing of Iran, backing murderous assaults on Beirut and Iraq and applauding the assassination of Yemen’s government, liberal leaders across the west have discovered international law just in time for the US invasion of Greenland.
Among the many to finally find the right keys in the right order on her keyboard was Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission, who responded to Trump’s increasingly aggressive threats towards Greenland with an appeal to international law.
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland the UK and others, in a joint statement, said that the future of Greenland could only be decided by “upholding the principles of the UN Charter, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders.” You will be astonished to know that these are the same leaders who a little over two weeks ago supported the US attack on Venezuela and the abduction of Maduro.
The same leaders who talk now in hallowed terms about the “principles of the UN Charter” spent two years engaged in repeated and atrocious breaches of these principles, principles which suddenly have precious value and meaning now the empire has parked its tanks on Europe’s lawn.
The same leaders who invoke “the principles of the UN Charter” to argue against the US invasion of Greenland have spent two years criminalising and arresting their citizens for demanding these principles are applied in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Yemen.
The same leaders who decry US threats to annex Greenland have enabled and encouraged Israel to impose a ‘security line’ which has resulted in the effective annexation of 60% of Gaza. Israel also continues to annex land in the West Bank and Syria, all with the support of liberal leaders who now tell us territorial integrity is paramount.
These leaders have also repeatedly invoked the necessity for engagement and dialogue with the US to avoid conflict over Greenland. This newfound enthusiasm for dialogue comes after cutting Russia out of every conceivable international forum and pushing Europe to the brink of a major war by refusing for years to discuss the future of Ukraine in the same manner they now wish to discuss the future of Greenland.
The hypocrisy, absurdity and dangerousness of the situation can’t be overstated.
And today the absurdity reached new heights when Trump posted two private messages he’d received from European leaders. One was from Macron and one was from Mark Rutte the head of NATO and former prime minister of the Netherlands.
In his message to Trump, Macron told him “we are totally in line on Syria” and “can do great things on Iran” but that he “doesn’t understand what you are doing on Greenland.”
In other words, we promise to stand by your side for regime change in Iran or the carving-up of Syria, but come on, Greenland! That’s Europe!
Glenn Diesen, professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, put it well when he said “the Europeans still hope that by being Trump’s partner in crime in Syria, Iran, and Ukraine, the Europeans will be spared.”
An article in the New York Times on the topic of Trump’s threats to Greenland by Alain Berset, the secretary general of the Council of Europe, struck the same tone.
Berset’s article ends with this jaw-dropping line: “International law is either universal or meaningless. Greenland will show which one we choose.”
To utter this line now, after the genocide of Gaza specifically, but the imperial violence of the last two years more generally, is quite unbelievable.
Berset truly doesn’t understand that the choice has already been made. By him! By Europe!
To talk about Greenland as the inflexion point for international law after everything the west has supported in the last two years is grotesque. It also takes a frightening level of cognitive dissonance, and racism.
These people truly don’t see Arabs and citizens of countries not aligned with western imperialism as people.
They really do not see the violence meted out by empire as illegal.
A basic translation of his article might be: we thought imperial violence and regime change was just for wogs, not for us!
I use the word wog deliberately, but not to offend. Because this is the imperial, racist mindset that underpins everything we’re seeing.
Tests of international law clearly only apply when there is a threat to the material interests of white empire.
In this way Trump is useful, revealing something very real that had been buried by the sophisticated niceties of technocratic liberal governance.
It took a mobster for us to see the mob rule we’ve always lived by.
Europe has plotted a disastrous course.
It now finds itself trapped. Between its professed ideals and a country led by a man that has decided to do away with all pretence. And there’s no way out.
Because the US gangster state owns Europe.
Europe cut itself off from cheap Russian gas and then, incredibly, allowed the US to blow up the pipelines that supplied that gas. This forced Europe to buy American gas and railroaded them into an even more slavish relationship.
And Europe took it like good subjects, without even a whimper.
Then when the US got bored with its Ukraine project, as it eventually gets bored with all its imperial projects, it demanded Europe keep paying. But to ensure US arms companies could keep profiting, Trump insisted the weapons stayed American. European leaders gladly doffed their caps. So now the EU and UK plough billions to Ukraine, via the US gangster state, and watch it all get destroyed in a never-ending proxy war.
Europe put everything on the American dice, and now its turning up snake eyes.
Which is why Europe will give the US whatever it wants on Greenland.
They’ve got no leverage.
They’ve got nothing.
Not even self-respect.
Trump and his gang have a deep loathing for liberal Europe.
JD Vance went to Munich and blamed liberal values (code for ‘all the Muslim immigration’) for Europe’s decline. And the recent national security strategy document openly said the US should cultivate anti-immigration, nativist forces in Europe.
Macron and friends get trashed talked by Trump constantly, he posts their private correspondence on social media, and they just take it.
Yet despite this, despite the threats, despite the loathing, despite the humiliation, the liberal European delusion of a partnership with the US will persist.
Because Europe has nowhere else to turn.
The Greenland tale plots like a tragedy.
Betrayal. Ego. Humiliation. Violence. A jilted lover.
And the frantic appeal to principles when those principles were inconvenient to our protagonist’s earlier pursuit of interests is the moment of comic absurdity all good tragedies need.
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"To talk about Greenland as the inflexion point for international law after everything the west has supported in the last two years is grotesque. It also takes a frightening level of cognitive dissonance, and racism."
Not the last "two years" habibi. The last 70 years (if ones just considers the now fully rotten UN IR system) or to be honest the last 5 centuries of European lawlesness, terror and pillage inflicted on humanity.
This column should be the lead editorial for any news publication that proclaims their affiliation with and advocacy for human rights.