The narrative being offered to us today by the media is that of a US President, Donald Trump, who advocates the unlimited use of force in the international arena and is destroying the fabric of international law that should protect us so much. This theme was also echoed by President Mattarella in his end-of-year message, when he described as repugnant the attitude of those who reject peace because they feel stronger.
The condemnation of the use of force, the rejection of peace, is accompanied, in official communication, by a defense of international law, which supposedly emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. Sergio Mattarella also recently stated that the path of international diplomacy since 1945 has been marked by many contradictions, many gaps, and many flaws, but it has advanced the international community in terms of civilization and the positive development of shared rules; a path that today is under threat.In reality, these shared rules that form international law are based on relationships of mastery and servitude between hegemonic governments and governments seeking to expand their sphere of influence abroad. One of the documents that Western diplomacy bases these "shared rules" on is the Atlantic Charter, signed in 1941 by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland. This much-vaunted document provides, in point IV, that "all countries, large and small, victors and vanquished, shall have access, on equal terms, to the world's trade and raw materials necessary for their economic prosperity" and, in point VIII, that "Since no future peace could be maintained if states which threaten, and may threaten, aggression beyond their borders, continue to employ land, sea, and air weapons, they consider that, pending the establishment of a permanent system of general security, it is indispensable to proceed to the disarmament of those countries."
It doesn't take much to understand that these definitions are perfectly suited to justifying US aggression against Venezuela, a state that has not made its energy resources available to the United States, and also to justify potential aggression against Iran, which appears to be threatening aggression beyond its borders. It is implicit that "access to raw materials" means free, and that the presence of Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf, which Iran borders, is a threat, while the presence of US ships thousands of kilometers from its shores evidently is not. Naturally, the principle is flexible enough to justify Israeli aggression beyond its borders, using the excuse of a threat from overbearing neighbors.
The very institutions born out of the Second World War-the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the United Nations-are affected to varying degrees by the asymmetrical relationship of mastery and servitude that dominates international relations. The old colonial empires of the European powers, reconstituted in the aftermath of the Second World War, have dissolved. To this day, the United States and the old colonial powers have maintained a preeminent and, in some cases, dominant role, sanctioned by the dollar's role promoted by the IMF and protected by US weapons and the many "humanitarian" and "peacekeeping" missions involving other allied governments. The United Nations, which should be the linchpin of international relations, is in reality the target of joint attacks by the imperialist governments that have dominated until now. One example among many: the 2030 Agenda, which incorporates the United Nations' recommendations and is essentially a propaganda tool to be flaunted as a flagship by the governments of "advanced" countries, is in reality viewed as smoke and mirrors by large financial and industrial groups, who see even this purely formal document as a threat to the freedom to fully exploit populations and territories.
Global trade is the foundation of international relations, and its evolution is the cause of changes in these relations. Already in the December 2024 study "China, the United States, and Europe in the New Era of Global Trade War," edited by the Center for International Studies (CeSI), published by the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was possible to read that international political conflict is, first and foremost, economic conflict, and that global trade is therefore the arena where competition manifests itself most directly and virulently. In the era of "hybrid warfare," or, to use the Chinese term, "unlimited warfare," we are witnessing the militarization of economic and commercial instruments. War, therefore, is commercial before being military.
According to this document, this phase is characterized, first and foremost, by the US desire to avoid the risk of deindustrialization and maintain its primacy in sectors critical to economic growth and technological hegemony, from renewables to high-tech (microchips, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence), to the supply of critical raw materials. All this is done in an effort to secure its own economy and at least slow the growth of China's (despite its internal problems). Obviously, Beijing does not want to stand idly by or take a step back, strengthened by its dominant position in numerous sectors (batteries, extraction and refining of critical raw materials and rare earths, high-tech manufacturing) and driven by the need to reduce the technological gap with Washington and some European states.
Returning to Trump and his demand for the unlimited use of force, we are not, as some claim, witnessing the convulsions of a demented mind that has seized world domination. Rather, we are witnessing the explosion of the profound contradictions of a society based on political domination and private property. This society cannot continue to exist without a continually increasing rate of profit: only with this constant increase will it be possible to meet the interest burdens on sovereign debt and the debt of private individuals, businesses, and citizens. But this rising rate of profit cannot be achieved without simultaneously increasing the exploitation of the planet, both human and non-human, deepening poverty and the environmental crisis.
If the conflict in international trade presents us with the image of two opposing camps, an analysis of social relations in the two camps presents us with the image of a unified imperialism, in which the struggle for dominance in exploitation reveals that the common basis is nonetheless exploitation itself. This is the true violence inflicted on the vast majority of humanity and on the environment in which we live, violence of which wars and genocides are striking examples. In light of these considerations, a myth must be dispelled: the bloc of anti-imperialist governments does not exist; there are governments that aspire to replace the bloc that emerged victorious first from the Second World War and then from the end of the Cold War, substituting a new imperialism for the old. Russia, China, and India, among other places, are already competing over the sources of Himalayan rivers, or in Central Asia, or in Siberia beyond Lake Baikal, not to mention Africa and Latin America, where Brazil and South Africa aspire to build their own imperial role.
The Chinese proposal for collective security itself, although it harks back to the myth of international relations in the years following the Second World War, harks back to Soviet foreign policy in the years before the Second World War, which was accompanied by the popular front policy advocated by the Third International. This policy effectively paved the way for World War II, allowing Nazism to grow stronger in Germany and Fascism to win a bloody civil war in Spain. At the same time, it evoked the betrayals of Social Democracy at the start of World War I, subjugating the class vanguards organized in Stalinist parties to the Soviet Union's power politics.
Just as law is the legal defense of the privileged classes against the propertyless and oppressed, so too the much-vaunted international law is in reality merely the law of the strongest. The crisis of this law is a sign that someone else aspires to the role of the strongest; but for the exploited and oppressed masses of the world, only a new ordeal of suffering and war lies ahead.
Until governments and states are relegated to the museum of the horrors of the past.
Tiziano Antonelli
https://umanitanova.org/museo-degli-orrori-diritto-internazionale-e-commercio-mondiale/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #3-26 - Museum of Horrors. International Law and World Trade (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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