I am little surprised (not!) by the sudden gush of admiration for a speech delivered by a self-described “middle power”, a phrase that already sounds like a short-ish child on a playground loudly insisting to the taller kids that they are short, yes, but not THAT short, delivered amid solemn pronouncements about the supposed demise of the “rules-based international order” because the President of the United States is, once again, on the verge of throwing a tantrum, a tantrum that appears to include open threats of military action against allied forces, the imperial demand that a piece of a sovereign European nation simply be handed over to him, and a governing style consisting of public social-media posts and late-night messages written in the tone of a mob boss, addressed to the leaders of what are, in practice, vassal states in everything except ceremonial language, who are almost uniformly white men with a token sprinkling of women who are themselves aggressively white, blonde, blue-eyed enough to have met with the approval of a certain mid-20th-century Austrian corporal, all of them continuing to perform the theatre of independence while being materially dependent on American benevolence for trade, security, intelligence, weapons, software, and political cover.
What makes this performance especially grotesque is the double consciousness on display, where on the one hand there is ritualised posturing, carefully worded statements, and choreographed hints of defiance designed to signal backbone and sovereignty to domestic audiences, while on the other there is barely concealed terror at the prospect of tariffs, sanctions, withdrawal of military support both hardware and software, and the possibility of outright violence from the most trigger-happy, nuclear-armed military apparatus in human history, leading them to posture even as they flatter, and to flatter even as they hope, desperately, that the man in Washington will be placated, distracted, bored, or seduced by some shinier grievance in the immediate future.
And through all of this, these same champions of the “rules-based international order” have been enthusiastically supportive of Israel’s ongoing, highly visible, meticulously documented genocide in Gaza, an exercise in mass killing that has not troubled their faith in rules, order, or international law in the slightest, because apparently when bombs fall on Palestinians, when snipers shoot children, when people collecting food aid are machine-gunned, the rules are functioning perfectly and the order is intact, everything proceeding exactly as designed so long as no white person’s sovereignty (or the right to kill seals and whales) is threatened, with the problem arising only when the imperial centre begins to speak too openly, too crudely, and too honestly about how little those rules were ever meant to constrain real power in the first place.
So forgive me if I find the sudden moral panic unconvincing, because this order was never rules-based, it was power-based, racially coded, selectively enforced, and only ever euphemised for polite company, and watching its beneficiaries recoil now because the emperor has temporarily paused spitting on the poor third world folks and started shouting abuses at the rich white people does not inspire awe or sympathy, it inspires contempt, and frankly, fuck you, chaps.
P.S.: To the idiots on FB who “hearted” this post and commented “Lovely picture” on it, I have blocked your ignorant and stupid asses. This is Hind Rijab. Google her, you wasters of oxygen.
