IN THE discussion about the latest developments in the Middle East, Shlomo Maistre makes these observations:

The willful forgetting of what “war” means, which James N. rightly notes seems to be a post-1945 phenomenon, is intricately related to the lack of de facto sovereignty of almost every nation on earth, which (and not coincidentally) is also a post-1945 phenomenon. Though there’s room to quibble with any specific list, I’d designate the United States, Russia, China, and Germany as the only de facto sovereign nations on earth at the moment.

Israel cannot eliminate Hamas’s capacity and will to wage war because such action would require the permission of a sovereign nation.  Israel receives American economic support and diplomatic protection in exchange for acting in alignment with American interests to an extent.  Certainly chief among American interests is that Israel remains its client state and not an actually sovereign one.  For now, as Israel has not taken sovereign (or what is called “unilateral”) action by decimating Hamas or bombing Iran without permission, Israel appears to place greater weight on the benefits of American support than the debilitating strings attached to it.

Hamas, as is so often the case with the weaker power in a moder- day conflict, reports less directly to a sovereign power than does its adversary.  Hamas is primarily and directly supported by the Palestinian Authority, Qatar and Turkey – at least at the moment.  The first is a puppet of the American State Department.  The second is home to America’s largest military base in the Middle East.  And the third has been shifting of late under Prime Minister Erdogan from the American to the Russian sphere of influence.

You see, the elimination of Hamas would directly harm the interests of an American puppet (the Palestinian Authority), a pseudo American ally that is a key oil exporter and a burgeoning client of the American defense industry (Qatar), and a NATO member with rising moral authority in the Muslim world that is a key player in regional pipeline politics with the capacity to consolidate Russian influence over European economies at the expense of American influence (Turkey).

And this is how it is the world over: conflicts that, in remaining unresolved, serve the interests of sovereign power(s).

For instance, one may deduce from American actions that is in American interests to A) condemn the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a repressive regime that is cruel to its people and B) to not dismantle its regime by force, as such a liberating action would obviate much of the alleged justification for American troops, warships, and armaments to be stationed all around China.  Unlike Iraq there is not on the Korean peninsula a juicy mix of ethnic and religious tensions to necessitate the presence of American security forces for a decade.  Besides, though, only second-tier powers border Iraq so leaving no military presence there is of less consequence than losing a key justification for stationing troops next door to another sovereign power and clear rival (China).

How did this tense, destructive environment characterized by ongoing conflicts and widespread duplicity come to be?

The post-1945 environment is a flower that started as a seed.  That seed was planted by President Woodrow Wilson who zealously sought to bless the world with democracy. [cont.]

— Comments —

James N. writes:

Sydney writes:

James N. writes:

“The territory formerly occupied by the Ottoman, Russian, Austrian, and German empires has seen more rape, burning, terror and death after those empires were dissolved than it ever did during their existence. This is because those empires arose organically, and their replacements are entirely artificial.”

“Entirely artificial?” Edmund Burke’s comments about the dismemberment and partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth contradict the proposition that the growth of three of the aforesaid empires which devoured it was “organic.” Furthermore, the First World War was not declared by these allegedly “artificial” entities; it was a consequence of the empires’ internal political bankruptcy, arthritic governance and arrogant foreign relations. President Wilson, I assure you, had little involvement therein.

Much of the “rape, burning, terror and death” that followed the reconstitution of the Central European states in its aftermath was a function of their bloody struggle to remain sovereign to the best of their ability under overwhelming, impossible circumstances. These are people with a distinct ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural identity. Many of them were unified medieval or pre-medieval kingdoms long before the existence of the empires that assimilated them though conquest and colonisation. Poland, for example, introduced Europe’s first national constitution and had an elected monarchy with a franchise that at one time dwarfed even that of England (the so-called “father of parliamentary democracy”).

If the use of the term “organic” above was a metonym for national legitimacy (which in my experience, it often is, particularly when used by revisionists) there is nothing more legitimate in terms of the national question than a total war for the self preservation of a people whose very sense of peoplehood is at question. That, unfortunately, involves bloodletting – particularly if the appetites of neighbouring empires is insatiable. A genuinely artificial geo-political paradigm more closely resembles one in which there are Turks on the Danube, Germans and Russians on the Vistula.

Buck writes:

The concept of sovereignty as applied here to the United States (no longer America) and to Israel is so watered down that it’s meaningless. The United States no more conducts it’s affairs without foreign interference than does Israel. We are no longer a nation and we are no longer sovereign. Sure, we write our own laws (with hard looks at foreign laws), collect taxes and engage in commerce with other countries, but hundreds of countries do. Our critical commerce is, for example, buying Qatar’s critically valuable hydrocarbons, which we depend on and secure by also headquartering there our U.S. Central and U.S. Air Force Central Commands. Al Jazeera, Qatar’s government-backed satellite television news network, is in the next building. Qatar seems to be too quietly in the mix to a far greater extent than is being discussed. I wonder why?

I understand strategic alliances. But we’ve become a big dumb dog being wagged by many tails. China and Russia may still be sovereign in the important ways. We no longer are. Sovereign nations have borders and [nation]al interests, and they protect them. We have no [nation]al interests.

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