China Beyond the Wall spoke with Rudolf El-Kareh about today’s major global crises—from Palestine and Europe to Russia and China. The full interview is published below.
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Lama El Horr – The Middle East region appears to be undergoing a profound transformation, marked, on the one hand, by Iran’s refusal to capitulate, and on the other, by the signing of a defense pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan—a pact that Egypt is expected to join soon, and likely other states in the region as well. While the influence of Washington and the Zionist regime appears to be waning throughout the region, Lebanon and Palestine remain beset by headwinds. What impact might this new defense pact have on Lebanon and Palestine?
Rudolf El-Kareh – Let me first challenge, once and for all, the relevance of the term “Middle East.” This is a concept that originated with British colonial expansion and subsequently became widespread. I prefer to use the term “West Asia,” which clearly reflects our region’s historical roots. As for what you refer to as “Iran’s refusal to capitulate,” let’s just say that the notion of “capitulation” existed only in the minds of those who launched and devised the plan of aggression—namely, the Israeli scriptwriters and the American “Keystone Cops,” I use this term deliberately—people like Pete Heghseth, the “Minister of War,” or Steve Witkoff, the real estate agent turned “diplomat.” Didn’t the latter, shortly before the war of aggression against Iran, express Donald Trump’s astonishment that the Islamic Republic had not capitulated at the mere sight of the American “armada”?
That said, what has been described as a “defense pact” between the three countries mentioned should be viewed with great caution and perspective. The motivations of each signatory differ; their conceptions of their national interests and geopolitical positioning are not identical, nor are their perceptions of threats; and their commitment to providing mutual operational assistance is not automatic—contrary to the ramblings of self-proclaimed, uninformed analysts, some of whom have seen in it nothing more than a scaled-down regional version of NATO, nothing less than that; for others, the beginnings of an anti-Iranian alliance and other such nonsense. As if Turkey—heir and remnant of the Ottoman Empire, beyond the fantasies and revivalist tendencies of its current leaders—were going to call into question the 1639 Treaty of Qasr-el-Chirin, which has been and remains a factor of regional stability. Or as if Pakistan were going to call into question its new political, military, and diplomatic status, following its victory in its latest confrontation with India and its role as a mediator between Washington and Tehran.
Another question: What will the three parties do if one of them commits an act of aggression, the victimed party responds in self-defense, and strictly adheres to international law—specifically, the status of foreign bases as set forth in the additional protocols to international humanitarian law, particularly the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions? This is exactly what happened when U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia were used in the attack against Iran. It is also what happened when Saudi Arabia attacked Yemen. Remember that Islamabad—which was approached, is bound to Riyadh by a treaty, and maintains an official military presence on the kingdom’s territory—clearly refused to join the 2015 military adventure that turned into a disaster. As for Egypt, it remains cautious, and its calculations are driven in particular by its own geopolitical vision of its national interest, by the consequences of Israeli maneuvers, and by the current Greek political regime—all of which are backed by a European Union that seems to be reverting to its old colonial demons and apparently learns nothing from history, including its own.
No, I believe we must approach this issue with great discernment and not get swept up in the media frenzy. One thing is certain, however: the agreement is a clear sign of the end of a phase in the region’s history regarding its relationship with the United States of America—and more specifically, that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with Washington. The Kingdom has “discovered” that U.S. bases were not only not there to protect it, but primarily to protect the Israeli colonial entity, and that, on the contrary, they attracted calamities rather than averting them. This is not, of course, a radical political break, as all Gulf countries remain structurally integrated into the Atlanticist sphere, while seeking a position better suited to the inexorable emergence of a multipolar world. But it is a mental shift that calls into question the entire balance of power and the conditioned responses born of the famous Quincy Pact between Abdelaziz Ibn Saud and Franklin Roosevelt. It will have consequences. Indeed, one illustration of this has been Riyadh’s reconciliation, brokered by Beijing, which has largely regulated Saudi relations with Tehran by channeling the antagonisms.
The pursuit of security agreements among major regional actors in this region also—and paradoxically—brings international law and the United Nations Charter back into focus, as Chapter VIII of the Charter provides for regional collective security agreements. The so-called “Mecca” agreements, taken in a constructive sense, can align with the position advocated by the Islamic Republic of Iran—namely, that the countries bordering the Gulf and, more broadly, this part of Western Asia are best suited to organize their common and collective security, under the auspices of the Charter and without the intervention of an external hegemon that poses as a “protector” but acts like a pyromaniac firefighter. It was, in fact, this perspective that I had articulated in the early 2000s during a conference on regional appeasement policies organized by the Zayed Center in Abu Dhabi, and which the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time hastened to derail before exerting pressure that led to the closure of the institution and the devastating consequences we see today.
It is clear that this situation has had—and will continue to have—an impact on developments in Lebanon and Palestine. The historical factor behind the regional instability that has persisted for over a century in this part of the world is the establishment of a foreign colonial entity in Palestine—a term coined by the father of British geopolitics, Lord Halford Mackinder. This colonial project of displacement, initially based on the falsehood of “a land without a people for a people without a land,” is now, under the name “Greater Israel,” stripped of its masks and all the window dressing that accompanied its development since the British Imperial Conference organized in 1907 by Prime Minister Henry Campbell Bannerman, well before the Balfour Declaration.
It is clear that the project to reshape, conquer, and restructure Western Asia—built on a “Zionist centrality” (itself based on destruction, violence, and submission to brute force and the policy of fait accompli)—poses an existential threat, obviously to Palestine, which the occupier is relentlessly trying to wipe out. Without success, which explains the growing savagery of the endeavor. It is also an existential threat to Lebanon, which, beyond its internal structural crises, represents, to this day, both the antithesis of the totalitarian and racist Zionist colonial entity and the epicenter of direct resistance to the “Greater Israel” project on the ground.
It is also evident that this project of expansion and structural disintegration—spatial, political, economic, cultural, historical, and in terms of memory—which touches upon human life itself, directly threatens to dismember both Turkey and Saudi Arabia and, by extension, the entire regional balance of power. You can therefore see that this is not merely a geopolitical game, but the creation of a new regional paradigm capable of countering both the structural effects of U.S. failure in the face of Iranian resistance and resilience, and the destructive dynamics of the Zionist project, which is now in full swing. The problem is that, instead of devoting their energy to thwarting this project of disintegration that threatens their very historical existence, the current leaders of these two countries are relentlessly attempting to impose and expand their own hegemony in the region at the expense of their own strategic national interests—but above all, at the expense of the national interests of other countries. This is particularly true of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Lebanon, where the kingdom’s current authorities are attempting to compensate for their setbacks in Yemen and elsewhere by trying to exert a crude and trivial form of control.
Lama El Horr – These upheavals are also affecting European countries. The Western narrative on human rights is a traditional means of selling colonial wars to the public; at the same time, Europe’s protection of Israeli crimes constitutes in itself a blatant disregard for that same public, which has widely expressed its disapproval of Israeli crimes. How far can this crisis of governance escalate between the Euro-Atlantic leaders who sponsor Zionism and their populations, who are increasingly denouncing this complicity? Does Western public opinion still constitute a counterweight to those in power?
Rudolf El-Kareh – The European Union is not suffering from a crisis of governance but from an existential crisis. The Union, now reduced to technical mechanisms, has failed in its political construction because it failed to establish itself as an autonomous political entity outside the Atlanticist sphere. It has thus become the backyard of the United States at the worst moment in its history, just as U.S. hegemony is now a thing of the past—after the U.S. saw itself as the planet’s “mothership” following the collapse of the post-World War II bloc system—and as its political system is rapidly moving toward fascism. Their own internal cohesion is threatened by deep divisions, exacerbated by their international military failures. Their politics and diplomacy have hit rock bottom, reduced to acts of sabotage, often of unprecedented brutality. Their economic model, dominated by the financialization of their economy, has gradually transformed into a rentier system, coupled with forms of piracy and state actions rooted in mafia culture—of which Donald Trump is now the emblematic symbol.
The member states of the European Union, and their ruling “elites,” could have built a unique experiment based on their own culture and on the lessons drawn from their own history, marked by terrible wars that claimed millions of lives. They could have, drawing strength from their social struggles and hard-won gains, invented a novel social model. They could have reinvented their unity while respecting their diversities, shaped by history. Instead, they chose total submission to Washington to a point that borders on the absurd. They abandoned patriotism to the deceptions of the far right—the heirs of Nazism and collaboration with the Nazis. They demonized the very notion of resistance, both at home and around the world. In France, they have buried the National Resistance Program that had enabled France to recover in the aftermath of the war and the Occupation. In Germany, the ideological echoes of Nazism are felt in all political spheres, and militarism is making a strong comeback.
In several countries of the “Union,” the collapse of the USSR is perceived as a posthumous victory for Nazism, and new bellicose stances are targeting the Russian Federation. If the peoples of Europe do not remain vigilant, the risk of a resurgence of fascism can no longer be ruled out. We see the warning signs of this emerging on a daily basis in the practices of increasingly illegitimate authorities. A case in point is these “letters of arrest” with a new look, which target “non-conforming” citizens or critics who find themselves, overnight, stripped of all social status, reduced to the equivalent of “nobody”—in the sense of physical and moral absence—in the purest Orwellian style.
At the same time, the manipulation of the ideology of human rights—which had prevailed after the end of the bloc system and which, under the deceptive guise of morality and the “responsibility to protect,” had marked the return of the colonial mindset, itself “repackaged” under the guise of the “right to intervene”— has collapsed amid the blood and tears of the open-air genocide that has been ongoing for three years in Gaza, Palestine.
Official Europe, represented by the President of the Commission—and followed in her footsteps by most European leaders—grotesquely and obscenely dropped the mask in a speech delivered in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Palestinian Nakba, pardon me, the “birth” of the colonial entity called “Israel,” where she celebrated and “paid tribute to those who made the desert bloom.”
And when a country’s authorities attempt to restore a moral compass to their policies and reaffirm the basic rules and principles of international law, a veritable storm of fury erupts—one in which the whiners who complain about the treatment they receive from Donald Trump cheerfully follow suit and band together to better silence the black sheep. Look at the behavior toward Spain on the Palestinian issue.
Not to mention the use of “newspeak” that is shamelessly based on the inversion of meanings. Independence becomes submission; dependence, national pride; terrorism and terrorists are rebranded as “gentlemen” (to use Donald Trump’s expression) —an approach replicated, to give just one example, on the steps of the Élysée Palace to warmly greet a figure covered in the blood of his crimes, who was yesterday on the UN’s list of terrorists and has today become “our man in the land of Zenobia.”
Faced with this political deadlock, Palestine is now as much the cause of a people fighting for their very existence as it is a metaphor symbolizing the dividing line between justice and the rule of law on the one hand, and injustice, arbitrariness, and the law of the jungle on the other. The stakes for Europe will be fundamental. The European Union and the majority of its current leaders have opted for a revival of the colonial past, which today manifests itself in shameless support—following the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime—for the last remnant of the colonial era that began in 1492 with the so-called “discovery of the Americas.” It is now up to the peoples of Europe to put an end to this unacceptable situation. To do justice to Palestine is to protect justice throughout the world. For Europe, its very existence is at stake—its historic nations, its societies, and the values it has upheld, which its unworthy sons trample upon every day. Its future is also at stake. Choosing to support the genocidal entity would be nothing short of suicidal.
Lama El Horr – Global crises have reached such a level of intensity that international conventions, laws, and bodies seem to have lost all credibility. So much so that it is legitimate to ask what purpose global crisis-resolution mechanisms serve. What good are conventions for the “prevention” of the crime of genocide if their enforcement always comes after the disaster has already occurred? How can we take the decisions of international legal bodies, such as the ICC, seriously, given that they are sometimes exploited (to neutralize opponents of Euro-Atlantic hegemony) and sometimes sanctioned by the major powers (when they denounce the crimes of Western nations and their allies)?
On the other hand, given the deteriorating relations between the transatlantic imperialist powers and the Global South, what could compel a hegemonic power to respect international law? The Thucydides Trap is often cited to describe the threat a hegemonic power may perceive from an emerging power. In practice, this translates into a competition between international law and the law of the jungle. How do you see this confrontation being resolved? Will China be able to avoid joining the United States in the jungle to defend its independence within a multipolar world?
Rudolf El-Kareh – Let’s first set the record straight regarding this famous “Thucydides Trap,” which has been trotted out regularly ever since Graham Allison, a Pentagon advisor, coined the phrase—just as American ideologues often do, only to be endlessly repeated by the mainstream media. We’ve already seen this phenomenon with Bernard Lewis, his student Samuel Huntington, and their so-called “clash of civilizations,” which countless parrots—including those in the Global South—have been feeding us for years.
Whether deliberately or out of intellectual laziness, the media—and politicians are not far behind—have attributed the expression to the Chinese president. But what exactly did President Xi Jinping say? Here is his statement, and I quote: “There is no such thing as a Thucydides Trap in the world. But if major countries continually make strategic miscalculations, they risk creating such traps for themselves.”
In other words, President Xi was made to say the opposite of what he actually said. This phenomenon is a form of deception that has now become commonplace in mainstream media practices.
These maneuvers are also a sign of the deterioration in international relations that began three decades ago, with the temporary undermining of the balances established after World War II—balances that had formed the basis for the creation of the United Nations and the entire body of laws and regulations collectively referred to as international law. But the United States obviously interpreted this as if it had become the master of the world, and some of its ideologues, such as Fukuyama, let themselves get carried away to the point of prophesying the end of history. But their “strategists”—and I use quotation marks deliberately—notably Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw this as an opportunity to challenge the world order that had been gradually built upon the framework of the Treaties of Westphalia, which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe.
But above all, they were the ones who formulated the principles that, after three centuries and a series of devastating wars, led to the establishment of the United Nations: sovereignty, the rejection of border violations, non-interference, respect for the independence of states, and, above all, the idea that the balance of power was one of the fundamental guarantees of stability. To these principles was added the right to self-determination, intended to put an end to the consequences of colonization—the dark side of Europe.
It is by no means a coincidence that Brzezinski, then head of the U.S. National Security Council, subtitled his major work, The Grand Chessboard, “Illusions in the Balance of Power,” and subsequently proposed, as early as the second half of the 1990s, the creation of an axis linking Paris, Berlin, Warsaw… and Kyiv, in order to destabilize the Russian Federation. This sheds particular light on subsequent developments in Ukraine.
In 2006, in line with her so-called “remaking of the Middle East” project, Condoleezza Rice had emphatically declared in a speech delivered at a military base that, and I quote, “the Treaty of Westphalia is now obsolete.” This statement came shortly before the so-called “Thirty-Three Days’ War” launched by the Israeli colonial entity against Lebanon under Washington’s control. The Lebanese Resistance to the aggression thwarted its objectives—in particular two of them: the recognition of faits accomplis and the primacy of force over law. This means that the Trump presidency in the United States and its caricatures are not a bolt from the blue but rather the most grotesque manifestation of a political line.
It is from this perspective, in my view, that we must examine the issue of international law, the role of the UN, and the practices of the organization and its administration—practices that have increasingly bordered on purely criminal acts, but above all have violated the very principles set forth in the Charter. For this reason, any fetishization of international law is not only counterproductive but also creates a space into which ideologues and practitioners of the “law of force and by force” rush—of whom Trump’s United States and its henchmen in the colonial entity occupying Palestine are today the most prominent examples.
Observe their practices. They are all the antithesis of the UN’s founding principles. They oppose sovereignty with interference and dependence. Instead of legal equality among states recognized as equal under the law regardless of their power or size, they create hierarchies based on racist, economic, ideological, and geographic segregation, as well as mafia-like affiliations. In contrast to the principles intended to maintain international peace and security—by ending wars, suppressing acts of aggression, and resolving disputes through peaceful means and respect for the law—they instead promote war and aggression as tools of international relations and submission to fait accompli as a political premise.
It is therefore not a question of the “credibility” of international organizations and their subsidiary institutions—the ICC, the ICJ, etc.—but of the credibility of those who blithely violate laws and principles, led by the United States and European states, whose geographical scope, beyond any nuances, largely overlaps with that of the colonial powers. Is this a coincidence?
One fact remains, and I will never tire of repeating it: Just because rules are violated does not mean that those violations constitute a new rule. Just because a criminal breaks the law does not mean the law becomes null and void. Yet another violation remains a violation.
As for the UN, I reiterate that the Organization is a forum for confrontation, for organizing confrontations, and for regulating conflicts. This is by no means a matter of naively sanctifying international law, but rather of understanding its function—of understanding that it is the balance of power that creates the space allowing for the exercise of common rules. And above all, of understanding the role of the people as the source of all legitimacy. Remember that the preamble to the Charter begins with the following phrase: “We, the peoples of the United Nations.” That is the fundamental reference point.
No, China—like all the other states targeted by the neocolonial upheaval led by the United States and its European accomplices in a rearguard action—does not need to join the wolves and hyenas in the jungle. Quite the contrary. The goal is to drive the rampaging beast back into its cage. You have no doubt observed China’s commitment to respecting international law, just as you have certainly noticed that Iran—which faces the most brutal violations of international law—strives to conduct its resistance in strict accordance with it.
To take just this one example, Washington and its European accomplices talk to us all day long about “sanctions,” violations of “sanctions,” and other legal heresies. Well, it is they who are violating international law. The concept of “sanctions” does not exist in international law. The UN Charter refers only to “coercive measures,” and these are strictly codified and regulated. In this case, it is the United States and the European states that are violating the law, and their practices are more akin to piracy and privateering.
The emergence of the Global South and its powers is obviously not a smooth ride. But it heralds the advent of a new international paradigm that will put an end to this profoundly unjust system in which nine-tenths of the planet exists to serve the opulence—not of the remaining one-tenth, but of a tiny fraction of its so-called dominant “elites.” In this transformation, in which the very future of the planet hangs in the balance, the peoples of the Global South and their governments have a vital role to play, as do the peoples of the Global North, who seem to be gradually shaking off their complacency. I see the first sign of this in the place that Palestine now occupies, inexorably, in the world’s consciousness.
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Rudolf El-Kareh is a University Professor, Sociologist, and Political expert. He has taught in Lebanon, France, and Canada. He is notably the co-author of *International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States* and *Only Cultivated Diversity Can Feed the World: A Response to the WTO*. He has also held official positions.
