On December 17th, Russia presented America with a proposed peace-settlement that would empower the U.N. to be not only nominally but in reality the one-and-only body that can create international laws.
The proposed treaty would obliterate America’s effort to replace the U.N. by America’s never-defined ‘rules-based international order’, which was first proposed by the neoliberal-neoconservative Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008 and never ever defined by anyone because it implicitly would replace international laws (from the U.N.) by the edicts of the U.S. Government, which nobody (outside the U.S. regime’s vassal-nations such as Australia) will accept. So: Rudd’s ‘rules-based international order’ is really just an attempt to impose the U.S. empire to replace the U.N., and that won’t be able to be done without a Third World War in which the U.S. and its allies go to war against the rest of the world and win, which is impossible because there would be only losers: any WW III would end all life on this planet, or at least all human life, because of nuclear winter if for no other reason. (Yes, it’s possible for BOTH sides to lose a war.) It’s just an American-empire pipe-dream for individuals (such as Rudd, and Bush, and Obama, and Trump, and Biden, and all American ‘allies’ or vassal-nations) who insist that, as the neoconservative Obama told the U.S. military on 28 May 2014:
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.
In short: all other nations are “dispensable,” and all rising and competing less-wealthy nations are enemies to whom “your generation’s task” is “to respond” (militarily) to that economic competition, from such ‘enemies’.
That would be the spirit in which the proposed “rules-based international order” would be imposed upon the world. And, now, Russia is finally demanding that America stand down from America’s demand to replace the U.N. by its own international dictatorship (no Security Counsel; no General Assembly). Russia, finally, is telling America that ONLY the U.N. is, and will be, the source of international laws; America won’t.
Russia is demanding that, just as the originator of the U.N., FDR, had been intending ever since 11 August 1941 (see pages 5&6), which was even before America entered WW II, and until his death on 12 April 1945, when he became replaced by the neoconservative (i.e., seeking an all-encompassing global U.S. empire) President Harry S. Truman, all empires need to be ended now and replaced by a U.N. that is, at last, fully empowered to make and to judge and to impose international laws so that all geostrategically important weaponry will be placed under the U.N.’s control, as FDR had intended. Russia is now (in effect) demanding that this finally be done. Russia is demanding that all empires, including America’s, must be REPLACED by a U.N. that will be re-formed in the image that FDR had been advocating, ever since 11 August 1941. That is what Russia is demanding now: the end of the “neoconservatism” that Truman had started on 25 July 1945, when Truman decided (based largely upon the advice of General Eisenhower, whom Truman practically worshipped) that either the Soviet Union would take over the world, or else America would, and when both he and Ike chose for America to take over the world, and then all subsequent U.S. Presidents have been following through with that neoconservative plan — the Truman-Eisenhower plan, for a world controlled by America’s billionaires (the people who now control the U.S. Government).
So, since what followed after FDR has been Truman’s America, instead of FDR’s America, this America will say no to that.
Russia also presented, on the same day, a proposed “AGREEMENT ON MEASURES TO ENSURE THE SECURITY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION AND MEMBER STATES OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION”, which would start as being an “agreement,” but would be intended ultimately to produce a set of treaties between Russia and each of the NATO nations.
The great teacher on international national-security law, Alexander Mercouris, headlined on December 18th, “Russia Demands US Strategic Retreat, Demands US Agree Draft Treaties Ending/Reversing NATO Expansion, Revive INF, ABM Treaties, Respect UN, End US Exceptionalism, Regime Change Wars”, and explained there in a one-hour video, in very clear terms, what Putin is proposing in each of these two documents, and what the significance of those proposals are, though those proposals will be the start of either serious negotiations for a fundamental change in the current world-system, or else WW III. This will be a major turning-point in history, either way.
U.S.-and-allied arms-manufacturers will no doubt be terrified that their decades-long gravy trains are finally being seriously challenged, and the billionaires who are riding those trains will be doing everything they possibly can to continue the current direction of those trains, ever-closer toward WW III (and ever-bigger arms-sales).
* * *
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.