Davos: Western double standards on global order were laid bare

The recent handwringing of some Western leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the post Second World War global order has broken down rings hollow.

Take French president Emmanuel Macron’s lament over “a shift towards a world without rules, where international law is trampled underfoot and where the only law that seems to matter is that of the strongest. And imperial ambitions are resurfacing.” His speech, while pointing out the “shift towards a world without effective collective governance” and the weakening of multilateralism “by powers that obstruct it or turn away from it”, failed to address the reasons for this.

Macron also didn’t mention the role of all Western US allies, including France, in bringing about this situation.

While Europe was still recovering from the effects of the Second World War, France launched its abhorrently brutal but ultimately futile military campaign against the Algerian resistance and the Algerian people to block their struggle for independence from French imperialism. Needless to say, that campaign was replete with violations of the provisions of International Humanitarian Law that emerged out of the horrors of WWII.

And those very US allies now aghast by US behaviour supported the creation of Israel in the historic land of Palestine, overlooking the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians, which entailed Zionist terrorism and massacres against the Palestinian people only three years after the end of the Second World War.

Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney was more candid in his speech at Davos. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” said the PM.

So why did Canada and Washington’s other US allies support such double standards? Carney provided an answer of sorts when he stated that, “American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes”.

He also admitted that amoral political and economic expediency basically “no longer works.”

Carney and other leaders of what he calls the “middle powers like Canada” are either ignoring or trivialising the fact that this arrangement never worked for the Global South.

The point that all “middle power” Western leaders miss – Canada, the United Kingdom and the EU in general – is that the so-called "rules-based world order” has been eroding for a long time, and they have been complicit in its demise.

Even as recently as 3 January, when the US militarily assaulted Venezuela – an independent sovereign country – and kidnapped president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores – the reaction from various European countries to such a violation of international law was muted. In effect, they were turning a blind eye to a resurrection of naked imperialism, with Trump announcing that the US would run Venezuela and take over its oil sector – in other words, plunder its resources.

The UK went even further, saying it did not regret Maduro’s fate, and several days later provided the US with the intelligence that enabled it to seize two tankers carrying Venezuelan oil.

But the writing on the wall has been much clearer for at least two years. The gaslighting of the genocidal horrors committed by Israel in Gaza in clear and blatant violation of International Humanitarian Law was an actual death knell to a flawed and already shaky global rules-based system.

It is almost certain that Israel correctly perceived the fatal weakening of an already faulty and biased international rules system and was therefore emboldened to engage in its genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.

As Israel’s atrocities in Gaza unfolded on livestream before our very eyes, those of us following the situation also knew that the international order was in its last stages of collapse, and that those who had looked the other way would eventually pay a price.

Perhaps Canada was the first US ally to realise the perils of the collapse of the global governance system when Trump began referring to annexing that country soon after his second presidential term began. Western Europe only seems to have realised that its turn has come with Trump’s strident demands to seize Greenland – a semi-autonomous Danish territory.

US imperialist ambitions are likely to outlast Trump, and a return to the status quo ante is an unrealistic scenario. If the “middle power countries” are serious about emerging as an independent counterweight, they must face up to the double-standards to which they have hitherto subscribed out of political and economic expediency. They must also establish genuine relations of partnership with the Global South based on justice, respect and equality. Otherwise, they are doomed to fail and to turn into the irrelevant subservient states that Trump wants them to be.

Samira Kawar is a Palestinian-Jordanian-British writer and translator based in London.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.