Yesterday, the USA showed it cares nothing for the international order.
Who will care now for Gaza?
The West Bank?
Ukraine?
Greenland?
Canada?
The Baltic states?
Taiwan?
Who, too, will care for oppressed people anywhere?
And the refugees who flee in fear?
And those who face terror from foreign powers because of who they are and what they believe?
Once, we presumed these were issues we could walk away from. We paid a terrible price for doing so.
Will we have to do so again? Or might some vestige of what we had learned by 1945 still save us?
This is an issue to reflect on.
It is a matter that requires the greatest scrutiny.
It is one where brave leadership is demanded.
Are we possessed of such a thing?
The moment when we found out might have arrived.
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So many places around the world where vulnerable people suffer violence, and appalling poverty, are in the state they are, because more powerful nations (our nations) either don’t give a ****, or because they are competing selfishly with each other for control and advantage.
Yemen, Sudan, Somaliland to name just three African examples.
Then there’s almost the entire Middle East, where citizens are either openly invaded, or subject to foreign dominated autocrats.
South and Central America – subject to the whims of a criminal Congress and crazy White House.
The Far East – waiting on China for permission to proceed.
Eastern Europe, balanced between Putin, Trump and a rudderless Europe.
Who can make a difference?
WE can.
Not our leaders, not the latest messiah to hove into view, but YOU & ME.
On this blog, I would hesitantly say also – not Richard either, not in a messiah role. Richard’s role is the same as yours or mine – to use HIS considerable talents and his unique experience, his growing influence, to make a difference in the way HE and his team can, just as each one of US can, and has to make a difference, using OUR unique experience, gifts and contacts.
I know an elderly lady who makes a unique difference every time she goes into hospital as a vulnerable sick patient – making the ward she is in, a better place for patients and staff. Powerless? Far from it.
None of us is without power and influence, but bad people want to persuade us that we are helpless, or divert us from noticing and then changing what is happening around us.
The bad people are right now, looking very vulnerable. Lies are not working any more. Crimes are being seen as crimes. The formerly complacent are finally noticing that something is wrong.
As things crack up around us, we can either have chaos and suffer in competitive isolation (whether as individuals or as nations), or we can co-operate with others of goodwill, not to prop up a failed status-quo, but build something better.
And agreed.
And I am no messiah. Nor, I should add, a very naughty boy 🙂
You are revealed as quintessentially British by that remark, one only really understood by Brits of ‘a certain vintage’.
🙂
Human history has repeated itself for as long as humans have formed societies. The sociopaths rise to the top. They eliminate their opposition and try to cement as much control as possible, whilst the majority are canon fodder, either in war machines or economic machines. It is human tendency to respond to inate psychological fears by adopting self-preservation behaviours, which run contrary to the common good, this creates conflict. What’s different about our epoch within our human timeline is unlike the centuries before, we have had electoral agency, we have had the luxury of having all the necessary things needed to expand our critical thinking, and what do we do, we vote for the same sociopaths who like their biologically unrelated forebears who took power by force, we, in our enlightened state, freely give it to them. The sad thing isn’t that the human story is repeating itself, the sad thing is we chose it, either through volition or apathy.
My reflections rarely end with a silver lining, thankfully Richard, yours do.
I try.
This isn’t true of the Aboriginal cultures that filled Australia and have lived in relative peace and sustainability for 50,000 years. We should look to them for guidance. See this excellent series: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/deep-time
This person cares
https://x.com/ryangerritsen/status/2007483901057605863
If you want to support an international order, then the removal of Maduro is the last hill I’d put my flag on. There must be better examples rather than this one of big international bully winning against a local tyrant.
International law has never been self enforcing. It works only when powerful states choose to bind themselves to it and are seen to suffer consequences when they do not. Once the strongest actor demonstrates that force can be used unilaterally, openly, and with little more than rhetorical criticism in response, the signal is unmistakable. Law becomes conditional. Restraint becomes optional.
Other powers do not need to be persuaded ideologically. They simply observe behaviour. Russia does not need speeches to justify Ukraine, it needs precedent. China does not need Western approval to contemplate Taiwan, it needs evidence that norms collapse under pressure. When enforcement fails, adaptation is rational.
You are also right about the limits of the UN. The Security Council was designed to prevent great power war, not to guarantee justice. Veto paralysis means that legality increasingly depends on self restraint by those most capable of breaching it. When that restraint disappears, the architecture remains on paper but loses authority in practice.
Western outrage does matter, but only if it is paired with consequence. Without that, it becomes performance. Silence, as you note, is even worse because it suggests acceptance. Hypocrisy is corrosive because it removes the moral high ground entirely. Once that is gone, appeals to law sound like convenience rather than principle.
The most unsettling point you make is about normalisation. International order rarely collapses in a single act. It degrades through repetition, through the quiet acceptance that one breach is exceptional, then another, until exception becomes pattern. At that stage, smaller states cease to be protected by rules and instead become variables in other powers’ calculations.
This is not about sympathy for any particular government or leader. It is about whether the post war assumption that borders are not altered by force and leaders are not removed at will still constrains behaviour. If that assumption no longer holds, then Ukraine is precedent, not anomaly. Taiwan becomes a timing question, not a taboo. And states that believed themselves sheltered by alliances discover that shelter is thinner than advertised.
Once rules are treated as optional, rebuilding them is vastly harder than breaking them. History suggests that doors opened this way are rarely closed by good intentions alone.
Thanks
I think it is important to set the Venezuela intervention in its broader historical context.
This is what we tried to do in today’s issue of THE LEFT LANE.
https://theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/after-kidnapping-its-president-us
Alan Story, Norwich
The two international courts are (were?) the bodies trusted to “bring justice” but they have been hamstrung by the US sanctions against the judges as well as UN personnel that they find particularly troubling such as Francesca Albanese. Neither the ICJ or the ICC can continue their work while some of the judges are sanctioned. Apparently the sanctions work by cutting off their access to banking facilities particularly the SWIFT international system that is controlled by the US. As the judges and their families are sanctioned so too are their families and anyone who works with them, causing the last ditch barrier to complete lawlessness ineffective. Can the international community come up with a go around to US sanctions?
I wish I could answer that question.
Sorry this is not on topic Richard but for some reason, for the last two days, on my computer when I click on your “Read more” link I get the message “Hmmm, can’t find this page”. On my phone I can access your articles. I don’t know if this is a Microsoft attack on your writing that Apple has not caught up to or if it’s just something new on my computer.
I do not have a PC and so cannot reproduce this.
Might I ask the obvious question, and check if you have rebooted?
Richard, reading through the comments, what strikes me is that the “bully culture” you describe on the world stage has a domestic counterpart that we rarely acknowledge. The same absence of courage that allows powerful states to intimidate weaker ones is also visible inside our own economic institutions.
When key bodies — the Bank of England, the OBR, the Treasury — become intellectual monocultures, dominated by a single economic worldview, dissent isn’t debated, it’s marginalised. Not through personal hostility, but through structural gatekeeping. That, too, is a form of bullying: the quiet pressure to conform, the narrowing of acceptable thought, the treatment of alternative models as heresy rather than contribution.
It mirrors the global pattern.
When institutions lose diversity of thought, they lose courage.
When they lose courage, they lose the ability to stand up to coercion — whether abroad or at home.
People sense this. They see powerful states acting without restraint. They see international bodies paralysed by outdated structures. And they see domestic institutions that should offer balance instead retreating into caution and orthodoxy. The result is the same everywhere: a vacuum where leadership should be.
You’re right that this moment demands scrutiny. But it also demands something deeper: the courage to challenge coercion abroad, and the courage to open up debate at home. Without both, we risk repeating the very mistakes history has already warned us about.
If this is the moment when we discover whether genuine leadership still exists, then the questions you’re raising could not be more urgent.
Thank you, and a great deal to agree with.