Over millennia, the brutal clarity of the naked logic of power remains unchanged. However, it has been baptized in human rights, freedom, and democracy. In Western policy discourse, these ideals operate as tools to discipline adversaries, restrain allies, and act as props of war when the empire decides to act. Washington’s brazen acts have always been cloaked in the rhetoric of justice and democracy. Yet extraterritorial kidnappings, coercive sanctions, and the weaponization of legal systems are not features of a rules-based order. They are tools of imperial enforcement.

In the wake of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s blunt dismissal: “I don’t care what the UN says,” was not rhetorical excess; it was imperial honesty. It merely stripped away the pretense that sustained decades of Washington’s hubristic policy. The UN, for all its limitations, remains one of the last forums where weaker states can, at least, contest the narratives imposed by stronger ones. To reject it outright is to confirm what much of the world already understands: Washington does not see itself as bound by the rules it deploys to police others.

This is not an American failure alone. Western allies have spent decades enabling this system of “shared values.” They marched lockstep behind Washington in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, laundering naked geopolitical ambitions as humanitarian intervention. They defended sanctions that immiserated civilian populations and tolerated torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite detention. This, as entire societies were decimated. Nowhere is the hypocrisy more grotesque than in the West’s selective morality. Gaza has been reduced to rubble; its population subjected to a genocide. Yet Western capitals remain insulated from Palestinian suffering, shielding Israel diplomatically, militarily, and morally.

The US-Israel........

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