The United States and its allies are behaving in a reckless, illegal way by invoking unilateral sanctions based on subjective accusations.
A growing, solid alliance between Russia and China is a necessary stabilizing factor against the United States and its allies who are recklessly firing off unilateral sanctions and inflaming international tensions and insecurity.
Hardly a week goes by when Washington and its allies announce sanctions against Russia or China based on spurious claims. Dozens of smaller nations are also under the lash of Western strictures, all of which are unilateral breaches of international law.
This week, both Canada and Australia gave notice of financial and diplomatic penalties on Russia over its alleged annexation of Crimea in 2014. The remoteness of Ottawa and Canberra in such a matter speaks of a tortuous, disingenuous agenda. Moscow vowed to take counter-measures.
The U.S. and European Union have already imposed sanctions on Russia over similar claims. As Russia’s foreign ministry pointed out, such Western interventions are a futile denial of the historic reality that the Crimean people voted in a legally constituted referendum to join the Russian Federation, following the NATO-backed coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014.
Last week, the United States, Canada, Britain and the EU coordinated punitive measures against China citing accusations of human rights violations.
Beijing caused a shock when it hit back immediately with counter-sanctions, saying the Western accusations were baseless and represented a gross interference in its sovereign affairs. Sure enough, the West’s provocative claims about “genocide” against the Uyghur ethnic minority in China’s Xinjiang region have been exposed as fabrication and distortion. Britain’s state-owned BBC has also been outed for running blatant disinformation campaigns regarding Xinjiang, as well as Hong Kong and the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that any Western sanctions will be reciprocated. He indicated that Russia and China had consolidated a policy of returning Western measures with counter-measures.
This is an important line in the sand. The United States and its allies are behaving in a reckless, illegal way by invoking unilateral sanctions based on subjective accusations. Such behavior is a violation of the United Nations Charter, the bedrock of foreign relations.
What Washington and its allies are doing is trampling over international law and kicking it to the curb. Their conduct is that of rogue states who perceive themselves to be above the law, entitled to act in whatever way they please with no accountability.
Ironically, and sickeningly, the Americans, Europeans, Canadians, Australians and other partners, talk loftily about respecting “values” and “rules-based international order”. They are the ones who are trashing any semblance of order. It is these NATO powers that have launched numerous criminal wars of aggression without any mandate from the UN Security Council. They have carried out covert regime-change operations which have unleashed mayhem and terrorism. They impose unilateral sanctions on nations suffering from NATO’s intrigues, such as Syria and Venezuela. They run assassination programs and torture-renditions to black sites around the world. Their troops kill Afghan civilians in cold blood after kicking down their doors in the middle of the night. The United States rips up nuclear arms control treaties with Russia, while sailing warships into Chinese territory.
Western powers are deluded in their vanity and pretensions of virtue. Their self-regarding rhetoric about upholding rule of law and human rights is hallucinatory hyperventilation.
Russia and China are not going to let Western states get away with their dangerous games of making up the rules to suit their orders. That way leads to perdition, as history has shown us in former periods of lawlessness with catastrophic consequences.
It is Moscow and Beijing who are upholding the UN Charter and the rule of law that all nations are obliged to abide by. Central to that framework is mutual respect for the sovereignty of all nations. Unilateral actions are impermissible as enshrined in the UN Charter. They undermine global security and inevitably lead to a law-of-the-jungle scenario where strong powers presume predatory privileges over weaker ones.
Earlier this month, on March 22, Russia’s top diplomat Lavrov held a landmark summit with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in China’s southern city of Guilin.
Both statesmen reiterated the paramount, inviolable principles of the UN Charter. They condemned bullying and hegemonic ambitions of the United States and its partners. And they declared that any unilateral violations will be held to account by Russia and China upholding international law and guaranteeing justice.
This is an historic moment in international relations. The world either embraces principles of equality and sovereign mutualism, dialogue and diplomacy – or the alternative is barbarism, conflict and ultimately war.
Absurdly, Russia’s Lavrov was obliged to explain that such warning to Western states of adhering to international law is not a threat from Moscow. It is simply a statement of fact and of their legal, moral duty. It shows how deranged these powers have become whenever they have to be reminded to obey the law.
The United States and its allies seem to think that “diplomacy” means “diktat”. Their arrogance and deluded self-entitlement has made them blind to the reality of their own degeneracy. Fortunately, Russia and China are formidable enough to remind others of reality.
We may conclude with a quirky news story this week that serves as an allegory of a bigger picture. One of President Joe Biden’s pet dogs reportedly went rogue and took a dump inside the White House. The mess was inflicted on a carpet outside the Diplomat Room – of all places. The story sort of sums up how the conduct of America and its lackeys has lost all sense of decency and restraint these days. They’re going to have be re-trained.
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Strategic Culture Foundation