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 strikes on Iran after the decimation of Gaza epitomize the mindset of a deadly duo bound by a shared logic of dehumanization. Unbridled, they wreak horrors like the martyrdom of the 165 students at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. The martyrdom of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family members, including his daughter and grandson, was a treacherous diplomatic ambush. The supreme leader and his military commanders had gathered to review the US-Israel de-escalation draft received by them through the Omani interlocutors. 

When powerful states operate above the rules they claim to uphold, global institutions become theaters of symbolism rather than engines of justice. The UN, headquartered in New York, stands as a witness and casualty to this erosion. Its charters affirm sovereign equality and self-determination, yet its enforcement mechanisms are brushed aside by the powerful. Ironically, the US-Israel duo and their Western lackeys posture as defenders of Iranian freedom. It is a farce. The instability cited to justify aggression is itself the product of imperial interference.

Regime change is sold as liberation, war as prevention, and sanctions as diplomacy. The script never changes, only the target does. The message is always the same. Defiance shall be punished; sovereignty exists at the pleasure of power. That this act is performed while invoking democracy only underscores the brazen dichotomy. Freedom, in this formulation, is not a right; it is a grant, bestowed by the strong and revoked from the weak.

The silence surrounding Palestine and the strikes on Iran is not accidental. It exposes deference to Washington and the absence of Western commitment to international law. UN resolutions affirming the rights of the pulverized are routinely ignored or vetoed, hollowing out the very system designed to prevent perpetual conflict. Democracy, in this context, becomes conditional, extended only when outcomes align with dominant geopolitical interests.

Human rights discourse has become the empire’s preferred alibi; a moral gloss for coercion. The antithesis of democracy is to plot regime change. To invoke peace while engineering destruction is desecration. Stability cannot be enforced by force, nor legitimacy extracted at gunpoint. As moral authority erodes, imperial behavior grows cruder. Trump and Netanyahu’s impunity and territorial fantasies about Gaza or Iran are not aberrations. They are the project laid bare.

This is not to absolve others. Power is diffuse, and many states replicate similar hypocrisies within their own spheres. The tragedy is not that this reality exists but that it is still treated as surprising. Much of the world has lived under this system for generations. What is new is that Western allies now find themselves in the crosshairs.

Now, these allies are discovering the limits of loyalty. Canada faces exclusion, economic coercion, and tariff threats. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney referred to it as “a rupture in the world order.” Strange how the world order never ruptured when sovereign countries were being occupied, and their people bombed to oblivion. This “rupture” is a crisis of Western hegemony, not a case of newfound morality.

Washington now treats Europe as a subordinate. Britain, ever eager to prove its loyalty, is rewarded with contempt. Trump mocked the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s leadership and rejected his offer of sending an aircraft carrier to the Middle East to help in the Iran strikes. Trump also dismissed Britain’s role in the Afghanistan war. Greenland is discussed not as a people or polity but as an asset to be acquired like Gaza. Empire has no friends; just an insatiable appetite.

True leadership would require consistency over coercion, opposing occupation regardless of the occupier, defending human rights regardless of the violator, and respecting sovereignty even when outcomes are inconvenient. It would mean strengthening international institutions rather than bypassing them and listening to affected populations rather than speaking for them.

Democracy cannot be delivered through sanctions that starve, interventions that destabilize, or silences that condone suffering. It must be cultivated through dialogue, accountability, and humility. Until this lesson is learnt and practiced, Palestine, Iran, or Kashmir shall not be the last victims or the last forgotten names in the long ledger of selective justice. This, in a world where Washington’s invocation of peace, freedom, and democracy is nothing but an empire; finally unmasked.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.

Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance contributor.

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