Good Read
At one level, this project of globalising the postwar order was defined by ‘humanitarianism’. I put it in quote marks because that term, which sounds so unobjectionable, has actually led to no end of conflict. Indeed, humanitarianism provided the justification for countless military interventions, carried out by a revamped NATO – from the aerial bombardment of Bosnia in the mid-1990s to the war in Kosovo in 1999 to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. While Western elites championed these interventions, on the grounds they were the ‘right thing to do’, these clear violations and suppressions of national sovereignty were simultaneously eroding the key principles of the postwar order – namely, territorial integrity and a people’s right to self-determination.
More importantly, the US and its allies had sown the seeds of the liberal international order’s own future problems. The NATO-delivered ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the 1990s and 2000s, right up until the disastrous intervention in Libya in 2011, intensified the insecurity of regional powers, not least Russia. They also rode roughshod over the postwar order’s own supposed principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Indeed, it was telling that when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Putin invoked the jargon of humanitarian interventionism to justify it, talking of Moscow’s need to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population from ‘genocid
www.spiked-online.com
At one level, this project of globalising the postwar order was defined by ‘humanitarianism’. I put it in quote marks because that term, which sounds so unobjectionable, has actually led to no end of conflict. Indeed, humanitarianism provided the justification for countless military interventions, carried out by a revamped NATO – from the aerial bombardment of Bosnia in the mid-1990s to the war in Kosovo in 1999 to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. While Western elites championed these interventions, on the grounds they were the ‘right thing to do’, these clear violations and suppressions of national sovereignty were simultaneously eroding the key principles of the postwar order – namely, territorial integrity and a people’s right to self-determination.
More importantly, the US and its allies had sown the seeds of the liberal international order’s own future problems. The NATO-delivered ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the 1990s and 2000s, right up until the disastrous intervention in Libya in 2011, intensified the insecurity of regional powers, not least Russia. They also rode roughshod over the postwar order’s own supposed principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Indeed, it was telling that when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Putin invoked the jargon of humanitarian interventionism to justify it, talking of Moscow’s need to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population from ‘genocid
How the globalists dug their own grave
The liberal international order is crumbling under the weight of its own failures, hypocrisies and contradictions.
www.spiked-online.com
