Afrasianet - Hassan Nafaa - Trump , whose foreign policy is centered around the "America First" slogan, does not believe in legal or moral rules to be used when making decisions at the international level.
We all remember how Trump began his current term with sensational statements revealing his expansionist intentions. In an early wave of remarks, he said that Canada should become "the 51st U.S. state," arguing that the border between Canada and the United States was "artificial" and that Canada would be better off if it became part of the United States.
In the next wave, he expressed his desire to "acquire the island of Greenland, by purchase or by other means," citing "security and geopolitical imperatives," without much concern that Canada and Denmark are members of a US-led alliance. In a third wave, he revealed his desire to "regain control of the Panama Canal", citing "strategic" imperatives, and some media outlets even attributed his interest in Mexico and Cuba as well, saying that he was "coming to them"!.
Most analysts saw these statements as unsettling at the time, perhaps because they reflected the personality traits of a leadership fond of making a media uproar about a self that is more inflated than an official policy of the U.S. administration. But his decision to launch a sweeping military offensive to kidnap the head of a neighboring country, and the subsequent threats to other Latin American countries, such as Colombia, Chile, Cuba, and others, reminded us of the danger of a man who has returned to power in the world's most powerful country and thus the potential implications for the future of the international system.
Trump, whose foreign policy revolves around the slogan "America First," does not believe in the existence of legal or moral rules that must be based when making decisions at the international level, which means that he should not rule out making catastrophic decisions at any time, which contradict everything that is stable in the rules of international law and in the matrix of moral and human values. If this conclusion is correct, the international system will take steps backwards, and the language of power and dominance will prevail over the language of tolerance and the rule of law, which means a return from New to the law of the jungle.
It is worth mentioning here that it took humanity three full centuries, from the inception of the nation-state in the mid-seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, before world leaders were able to agree together to establish an institutional framework that obliges all states not to interfere in the internal affairs of other states, and to resort to peaceful means alone to resolve disputes that may arise between them, and prohibit the use or even mere threat of force in international relations.
Strangely, this advanced step on the path of human development, embodied by the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, did not mature until the world went through an uninterrupted series of bloody wars, including two world wars that claimed the lives of tens of millions of people.
Therefore, when the head of state, the most powerful in the contemporary world, instructs the leaders of his army to kidnap a head of state, whatever the reasons for it, it is natural for many to see in this behavior as conclusive evidence of the fall and absence of international law on the ground, and for everyone to have a strong feeling that international relations have returned to being managed outside the institutional frameworks of the international system, and have once again become based on the rules of dominance, power, and relations of dependency instead of the rules of international law, which are based on the rules of international law. The principle of sovereign equality between states.
It may be said that many countries, large and small, have already violated the Charter of the United Nations and violated the rules of international law, without any of them being held accountable or punished of any kind, and even the United States itself has already carried out a comprehensive military invasion of an independent country, Panama, during which it arrested its president, Noriega, and forced him to appear before the American courts that sentenced him to prison, in a precedent that some believe is similar to what is happening to Venezuela and its president at the time Currently.
But I think we're dealing with two different situations in context and substance. Voriega is originally a U.S. intelligence agent, and he had previously collaborated with it before he tried to rebel against it. While the U.S. invasion of Panama took place at a time when the Cold War was already over, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, the United States was poised to lead the international system unilaterally, and the United Nations was still able to play important roles in the international system, it was evident during the crisis of the occupation of Iraq The current Venezuelan crisis is taking place in a very different international context, with both the United States and the international system facing a dual and simultaneous crisis.
The crisis facing the United States is the result of its inability to retain its sole hegemony over the international system, due to the erosion of its economic competitiveness and its inability to catch up with other actors that have become in a better competitive position. On the other hand.
Trump claims that Maduro is motivated to kidnap Maduro because he leads a drug smuggling cartel to the United States, endangering the lives of its citizens. Assuming this claim is true, it is natural to wonder why he threatened the current president of Venezuela, who is temporarily in charge, and threatens her with a worse fate if she does not respond to all his demands, especially those related to allowing American companies to regain control of Venezuela's oil sector.
Isn't this conclusive proof of the lie of his claims and reveals the real reason for Maduro's abduction, which is the return of the United States to control a country that stores the world's largest oil reserves, and even a scandal of the slogan "America First", the main pillar of Trump's foreign policy, whose real content reveals a relentless pursuit to enable the United States to steal the resources of other peoples or seize them by force of arms?
In Trump's view, America is limited to its white Protestant population who believe in the Zionist faith and defend "Greater Israel," and it must be free of all "illegal" immigrants, especially people of color and Muslims, and it must be able to control the quality of immigrants coming to it, and it must seek to control the countries of the South that are rich in rare metals, have large financial surpluses, or store raw materials of strategic value.
It is true that this realization is based on the implicit assumption that the only way the United States will be able to win the race to compete for the top of the international system, and perhaps to return to unilateral domination over it, is through its ability to accumulate wealth and provide for its needs for raw materials and rare metals, albeit by force.
Winning the race to compete at the top of the international system depends on the vitality, attractiveness, and creativity of the competing state's political system, especially when it is able to mobilize, mobilize, and manage internal resources, both human and material, and become a role model abroad, which is not measured by the ability to control and acquire.
There is a consensus among experts that the traditional American model has lost its luster, and that the model proposed by Trump, through the slogan "America First", cannot constitute a more effective alternative, because it contains much more structural contradictions than it stores in the elements of attraction that tempt us to imitate and imitate it, especially since both the traditional model and the Trumpian model are organically linked to a racist, expansionist settler Zionist project that has no future.
There is no doubt that Maduro's abduction establishes a new phase in the development of the international system, not only because it signals the return of the law of the jungle as a basis for the management of international relations, but also because it took place in a context in which the competing powers at the top of the international system, namely the United States, China, and the Russian Federation, seem to be more preoccupied with securing their vital sphere than with searching for new rules for managing an international order that has become, for the first time in human history, a cosmic order.
Under President Trump's second term, the United States appears to be far more preoccupied with monopoly hegemony over the Western Hemisphere than it is with monopoly domination of a global system that it can no longer dominate alone.
China seems determined not only to return Taiwan to the bosom of the motherland, in accordance with the "one homeland, two systems" formula, but also to control a vital area that includes: East Asia and the Western Pacific (South and East China Seas, island chains and the Korean Peninsula) as the first circle, and a continental land belt (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan) as a second circle.
The Russian Federation seems to be preoccupied with the war with Ukraine, not in itself but as the main gateway to secure a wide vital area aimed at neutralizing Eastern European countries and reshaping the relationship with Western Europe in a way that leads to a stable regional security regime.
In the context of the above, it is not inconceivable that before the end of his current term, Trump will seek to lay the first building blocks towards the establishment of a tripolar international order, led by the United States, Russia, and China, with the global South divided into spheres of influence between these three poles, as was done at the Yalta Conference in 1945.
