While Israel bombed Hezbollah targets in Lebanon this week, it seems to me that that’s part of an ongoing disarming effort which is locally driven and supported by the Lebanese army.

You never know of course and I’m not an expert, but as the Lebanese government has only just now tenuously consolidated its monopoly of power within its own borders with the support of Israel, that’d be a strange development.

Sounds like they are preparing for a strike on Iran which might result in counterstrikes by Iran in Israel and Lebanon

No I think that would give too much importance to a domestic issue that will be drowned out by other events within days or weeks anyway.

I think this must be viewed through the lens of international relations. The vast majority of Americans have no idea what these organizations do.

I think the US administration purposefully timed its action in Venezuela to ring in its new power-based paradigm of international relations. This here is just the logical second step, making sure that the departure from rules based international relations is perceived by other countries as a credible change in doctrine as opposed to short-term maneuvering. There is a term for this in game theory, but I forgot. Essentially you make a high cost move that restricts your own future decision space. This projects resolve as it makes it difficult to impossible to reverse course in the future due to the high sunk costs.

IMO this is the international politics version of “taking the bandages of”. It’s essentially the preamble to an international (military) intimidation campaign that will follow over the next weeks and months.

Seeing this, I think the likelihood that the US will try to coerce Denmark into giving up Greenland with military force is close to certain.

Knowing the treaty processes behind these organizations, this is a generational shift that cannot easily be undone.

One day the USA will just announce without preamble that they’ll leave NATO or the United Nations Organization.

Every day I’m surprised I’m still surprised by these developments.

Did I say that hasn’t already been happening? Please don’t assume what I think. Obviously, letting Israel get away with bombing Gaza and other Palestinian areas is part of that trend.

What I mean is:

After WW2 many agreed that something like this must never happen again. The UN security council was founded in 1945. European Convention of Human Rights 1950. Treaty of Rome which established the EEC in 1957, and so on, and so on. Despite the cold war, international affairs in the latter half of the 20s century were not a free-for-all. This was a strong era of international law and legal regimes were added and became increasingly more binding, not the other way around. When the USSR collapsed and Germany was unified 1989-1991 many started to envision an ‘end of history’ as the world would converge into a global liberal order etc. The mood in 2000 was generally one of great optimism; a new millennium for humanity, a new chance after the difficulties and horrors of the 20th century had been overcome. For the first time, the world set overarching development goals, the millennium goals, to be reached by 2015.

This general trend towards and joint vision of more international cooperation, universal free trade and a rules based order has slowly been dying since…? I’m not sure when exactly, probably 2010ish. But what has been a subtle turn for the longest time has accelerated noticeably since ca. 2020.

That was my point.

Yes and no.

As a last resort, the threat of violence (or enforced consequences more generally) is ultimately behind the authority of any institution.

But legal and institutional frameworks can persist if power to inflict consequences is distributed and governed by rules, the incompliance with which is again sanctioned, and so on. The system is then kept stable by preventing consolidation of power with few actors and not tolerating arbitrariness in how it is welded. The fact that any authority is ultimately rooted in the threat of violence does not mean that we as social and reasonable animals cannot find reasonable and stable arrangement that should prevent us from actually having to resort to violence all too often.

And we have absolutely slipped up in this regard. Relying on one party (the USA) as the primary locus is power in NATO and the world to keep peace. Allowing big social media platforms to consolidate and grow beyond any reason. Turning a blind eye to violations of international law

Let’s appreciate what this means for the global order.

Russia has proactively attacked Ukraine. Now the US has attacked Venezuela. If China ever needed a permissive international environment to attack Taiwan, this attack was a major step in this direction.

We are quickly sliding back to a world of great powers, where might makes right and hence smaller countries will be bullied into submission without any concerted opposition by what remains of the ‘international community’.

If the US gets away with this, the same is going to happen to Panama in the not too distant futute and to Greenland soon after.

Unless Russia is burned out after the Uktain war, they might try their hand at the Baltics.

Should Russia collapse, China might integrate some of the Siberian regions.

And so on.

I wonder how this all will end.

Fable 4

I’m hyped for Divinity