The famous Macedonian actor and political dissident Risto Shishkov – in one of his roles as a prisoner due to his political beliefs and for simply being a Macedonian – said to the guard who ordered prisoners to sing a song. Yes, we will sing, but which song, your or ours?
Yes Mr. Blinken we are all for the rule-based order, the one that you and your country is repeatedly breaking, sidelining and dismantling for decades now, not for your private version of “rule-based” order that is made up as you go and as it may suit your daily focus at any given moment. The only currently valid and legitimate international rule-based order is the one agreed after the WWII under the auspices of the United Nation and its charter signed by all sovereign states, the same ones that your country is continuously and systematically destabilizing with violent paid color revolutions against legitimate governments, with illegal – not to mention inhumane – sanctions against the vulnerable people across the world, or simply bombing the entire nations into submission.
The US is the sole driving force behind the marginalization of this international body, beginning with tearing up the UN SC resolution that prevented a use of force against Yugoslavia, to anyway illegally and criminally bomb Belgrade and its civilian population. The breach of entire international law and order by the US continued with either bombing or supporting terrorists and extremists in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine etc. The marginalization of the UN was officially announced to the world in the speech of US President Barack Obama to the United Nations General Assembly where he declared that from now on, the US reserves the right to go alone in any issues it deems as being of national interest. And it went alone, and will fail alone.
Is that the rule-based order you are promoting Mr Blinken, as the same president Obama infamously said, we twist arms of other nations when necessary? Are you offering to the rest of the world this wild-west rule-based order instead of the existing UN order that you helped destroy by starting and supporting wars not approved by the UN Security Council in which millions of innocent people were killed?
These meddling and overthrowing the legitimate governments in Libya, Ukraine, Macedonia, and continuous attempt to do the same to others such as Hungary, Russia, China, are the true face of the rule-based order offered by the globalists that Blinken represents, as continuation of what Dani Rodrik (2012) describes as “the assault on the nation state that transcends traditional political divisions, and is one of the few things that unite conservative neoliberals and leftists socialists.” Rodrik illustrates this with a seemingly timeless and contemporary sounding response by Leon Trotsky given in the distant 1934 who asked at the time “How may the economic unity of Europe be guaranteed, while preserving complete freedom of cultural development to the peoples living there?” And Trotsky’s answer – who would probably be a darling of today’s CNN, NYT and globalists elites – was to get rid of the nation state: “The solution to this question can be reached … by completely liberating productive forces from the fetters imposed upon them by the national state.” The academic field of global or regional level governance is full with claims from both sides formerly known as left and right, that the states are to be weakened and that they should not participate in the global governance under various excuses (Bexel, Tallberg & Uhlin, 2010).
Today’s international order ideologies have gone past the classic left-right divisions, that have merged into the old Trotskyist and new Soros view of the world without borders and nations and for the benefit of only of handful elites and their multinational corporate monopolies. This current ideology of false globalism that preaches and practices oppression, uniformity, servility, obeyance and fear, is opposed by the sovereign people across the world who want to manage their own affairs and way of life in the own nations’ states.
The role of the states has remained and it is going to remain to be the last battleground, since they only possess an existing source of legitimacy where citizens that identify with the states can organize and manage their affairs and their ways of life. The nations see through offers such as Blinken’s and view them with deep suspicion as the continuation of the campaign to abolish the nation states for the benefit of an international elite consisting of unelected illegitimate technocrats, bankers, businessmen and politicians.
Now, the United Nations is ruined as a cornerstone of the international order during the 45 years of the bi-polar world with its Security Council and its General Assembly serving as a platform for all states to manage various crucial international issues such as peace, economic cooperation, environment, poverty, security, etc. This loss of significance in recent years in solving global issues by UN has spread to number of other important areas and is marked with the decrease of influence of the global international organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization etc (Karns & Mingst, 2009). This marginalization of the UN and other international bodies has rendered them unable to continue to be an effective platform for addressing global issues. And that will not bode well for the falling empire, in a way that they may become be nostalgic for the international order they helped destroy.
Since replacing the current international order established with blood of tens of millions of people in the World War II, will require similar earth-shattering geopolitical earthquakes, Blinken’s offer of his own private Idaho rule-based order will not be enough. And in these tectonic changes the falling empire will be defeated either by its own misadventures of starting regional and global wars that it will lose, or, by quietly accepting the facts on the ground and peacefully relinquishing its misplaced military, economic and ideological ambitions, together with its current hollow offer of rule-based order. And in the style of Shishkov, the people across the world will sing Mr. Blinken, but not your song. We will sing Ours!
References
Mingst A. K, & Karns P. K, (2009). International Organizations: The Politics and Processes of Global Governance. 2nd edition.
Rodrik, Dani. “The Globalization Paradox.” 2011.
Rodrik, Dani. “Who Needs a Nation State.” 2012.
Bexell, Magdalena, Jonas Tallberg and Anders Uhlin. 2010. Democracy in Global Governance: The Promises and Pitfalls of Transnational Actors. Global Governance.