UN chief is Persona non grata?
#Politics
Been that way since the start. It's clever diplomacy. The UN and Israel have never been in agreement over Israel's obligations in Gaza and the West Bank - Israel disagrees with a Geneva Convention that would be used against it, so it didn't sign the Rome Statute, and N has especially hated the UN since the court accepted a Palestinian petition to review the '14 campaign for war crimes, so it's been very smart of N to whip up loathing of the UN to bolster his allies in this war.
(The political-science training in me recognizes game when they see it.)
It sucks how little people in general understand when they're being played by sabre-rattling diplomatic tricks like this.
But on the "plus" side, the UN is damned ineffective in a) world security, b) combatting climate change, and c) reducing corruption, so... 🤷🏻♂️ Not the biggest loss?
The real heartbreak here is people thinking anyone's in control here. Plenty want to be! But there's no magic off button.
I was watching an analysis of the Hezbollah Conflict this morning and their conclusion was N, who is deeply unpopular now in Israel, has nothing left to lose, and so if he can drive the Hezbollah conflict to some kind of victory condition he goes from having no political future to a slim chance of one.
Yes!
And JPost made a really good point this week about how economics factor in. Israel's economy is not doing well--another massive cut to its Moody's rating, local business gutted, huge brain drain as people leave--but it's always been precarious because only around 20% pay taxes in part due to Orthodox exemptions.
This means that military funding *funds the country*. N can't afford peace, because the country can't transition to a peacetime economy fast enough.
@MLClark @BosmangBeratna Thats a remarkable parallel to what's going on in russia. They are starting to stagflate as they are wholly dependent on their military complex atm.
This is what drives me nuts in any discussion of "terrorism" - whether talking about state or non-state forms: all those grand ideological mandates are largely secondary to socioeconomic issues.
In South American and African countries dealing with terrorist groups, it is well known that one needs to address the local socioeconomic opportunities to divert youth recruitment. But the West is so caught up in the lie that ideology exists in a vacuum of material causes.
It's been biting the west in the keister for time immemroial too. Vietnam and beyond. That and short term thinking that is biased only to the West's benefit.
I've often argued that America can be a very fair weather friend and ally, which only makes for more rage, which only drives recruitment.
Next Rewind Wednesday, I'm talking about US support of Pol Pot, because it was deemed more important to stave off the Soviets, so... yes indeed.
It's heartbreaking because most US citizens carry an idea and dream of their country that's far better than its history, especially in the world - but so long as resource wars are a thing, US foreign policy is never going to live up to its citizens' greatest ideals. (Rooting for everyone to keep trying, though!)
@MLClark @BosmangBeratna There was also our support of the Shah in Iran that created one of our biggest enemies in the Middle East.
Iran had a democratically elected govt that we overthrew, and thirty years later we paid the price for it and now the whole world is paying the price.
Yes indeedy. I had a wee podcast series on petronationalism, and it was even worse than that: US and UK corporations played a huge role in hurrying many regions into formal territorial boundaries that could be used as the basis for contracts leasing land for extraction. But the reality was that much of the land was populated by Indigenous peoples with loose notions of tribal borders, so "nation-states" were forced artificially on many disparate cultures... for oil!
This is why "state-building" has been so hard in many parts of Africa and the Middle East: those regions weren't exactly asking for it! They had other ways of interacting locally, and when they later tried to use some of those ways to overcome strife caused by Western statism (e.g. Pan-African, Pan-Arab associations) they were smacked down again by a Western culture that wanted to deal with private-business-friendly solo states, or not at all.
History is a trip! 🙃