While Russia continues conducting its “special military operation” in Ukraine, Moscow’s ally, Armenia, has been seeking to normalize relations with its arch enemy, Azerbaijan. Although the South Caucasus region has traditionally been in the Kremlin’s geopolitical orbit, it is the European Union that seems to be playing the major role in peace talks, border delimitation and the reopening of transportation links.
During the past six months, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev met three times through the mediation of European Council President Charles Michel.
In the past, Russia had mediated conflict between the two Caucasus countries over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Although it is an internationally recognized part of Azerbaijan, it has been under Armenian control for more than two decades. In November 2020, Pashinyan and Aliyev traveled to Moscow to sign a ceasefire deal that effectively ended the 44-day war that Yerevan and Baku fought over the mountainous region.
As a result of the conflict, Azerbaijan restored its sovereignty over most parts of Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as surrounding areas. More importantly, Russia deployed about 2,000 peacekeeping troops, which strengthened its positions in the South Caucasus.
‘Karabakh Has Turned Into South Ossetia’
Russian forces are stationed mostly in parts of Nagorno-Karabakh that are still under Armenian control.
According to Tom Mutch, a New Zealand-born journalist who covered the 44-day war, such a position allows Moscow to turn the region into its de facto military state.
“Let’s be honest, Karabakh has turned into South Ossetia now,” Mutch told Toward Freedom, referring to Georgia’s breakaway region that Russia recognized as an independent state in 2008, following the brief war Moscow fought against its small neighbor. “Russia holds all of the political and military power in the region. But the problem is that the Kremlin is so distracted by what is going on in Ukraine that it doesn’t really have any ability to focus on Karabakh.”
Despite its preoccupation with the war in Ukraine, Russia hosted Azerbaijani and Armenian delegations on June 3 in Moscow, where they held the 10th meeting of the trilateral working group on the opening of regional transport communications. According to reports, representatives of the three countries discussed and coordinated on borders, customs, and other kinds of control, as well as safe transit of people, cars, and goods by roads and railways through the territories of Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Following the Brussels meeting in May between Pashinyan and Aliyev, Baku and Yerevan announced the creation of commissions for border delimitation. In other words, they would look into increasing movement between the two states.
Dr. Gulshan Pashayeva, a board member of Azerbaijan’s Center of Analysis of International Relations, claims that is one of the tangible results of the peace talks held under the EU auspices. Still, she does not think the EU can replace Russia as the major mediator in the South Caucasus.
“EU and Russia are quite different geopolitical actors with incompatible resources and influence,” she told Toward Freedom. “Therefore, they cannot replace each other.”
Both Azerbaijan and Armenia are members of the EU’s political and economic Eastern Partnership initiative. Russia, on the other hand, sees both countries as its allies—Armenia, through the military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and Azerbaijan, in the form of the allied cooperation agreement signed in February.
No Agreement Without Moscow
According to Russian political analyst Sergey Markedonov, Russia and the West have always cooperated regarding the Karabakh issue. But the problem is Western powers no longer want to work with Moscow amid the Ukraine conflict.
Meanwhile, Mutch said Nagorno-Karabakh could be a place Russia and the EU can cooperate, despite their strained relations regarding Ukraine.
“But I don’t see any agreement that can be signed without Moscow’s final say,” he stressed.
In his view, the real reason why peace talks seem like they are making progress is the military defeat of Armenia in 2020.
“The speech that Pashinyan made in April was widely seen as signaling that he was prepared to give up Armenia’s aspirations for a de jure independent status of Karabakh,” Mutch said. “That was the sticking point of negotiations for the past 25 years.”
In that speech on April 13, the Armenian prime minister said, “The international community is telling Yerevan to lower the bar on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh.” He pointed out Armenia “cannot rely on international partners, not because they do not want to help the landlocked nation, but because they cannot help.”
Pashinyan also recently emphasized that the most important and most urgent issue between Armenia and Azerbaijan is the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. For Baku, however, the status of the mountainous region has already been resolved.
The most important and most urgent issue between Armenia and Azerbaijan and for the peace in our region is the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. pic.twitter.com/oT1eCluiOE
“I strongly believe that Armenia will come to understand that there will be no special status for ethnic Armenians living in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan,” Samir Mammadov told Toward Freedom. He heads the international affairs department at “Back to Karabakh” Public Union – a political organization that aims to return ethnic Azeris to Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Armenian government officials often claim that they want the rights of Armenians living in Azerbaijan to be respected. Azerbaijan can and will ensure that without allowing the creation of an artificial autonomy within its borders,” Mammadov said, pointing out that if Yerevan continues insisting on the status of Karabakh, Baku will “probably raise the issue of the rights of Azerbaijanis ethnically cleansed from Armenia.”
In other words, Baku expects Yerevan to recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, while Armenia fears full implementation of the ceasefire deal the two sides signed in 2020 in Moscow would jeopardize the landlocked nation’s sovereignty. According to the Moscow agreement, “Armenia shall guarantee the security of transport connections between the western regions of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic in order to arrange unobstructed movement of persons, vehicles and cargo in both directions.”
The Fate of a Corridor
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently assured Armenian officials the future railway and highway that will connect Azerbaijani mainland with its Nakhchivan exclave through southern Armenian will be “based on the recognition of the sovereignty of Armenian territory.”
For Azerbaijan, the future transportation route should be part of the Nakhichevan Corridor, also known as the Zangezur Corridor.
“The narrative of the wording of a so-called corridor is unacceptable for Yerevan,” Pashinyan said in a June 13 interview. “We have one corridor in our region, and this is the Lachin corridor connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.”
That corridor is a mountain road that is de jure in the Lachin District of Azerbaijan, but is under the control of a Russian peacekeeping force as a result of the 2020 ceasefire deal.
Thus, the future of transportation links in the South Caucasus will almost certainly be on the agenda of future meetings between Pashinyan and Aliyev, be it in Brussels or in Moscow.
“The EU is ready to step up its support,” Michel said in a May 23 statement. “We agreed to remain in close contact and will meet again in the same format by July/August.”
Meanwhile, Lavrov is planning to meet today in Azerbaijan, which can be viewed as Russia’s attempt to keep both Armenia and Azerbaijan in its geopolitical orbit, despite the EU’s recent new role as a major mediator.
Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Enquire.
Editor’s Note: The article was originally published by Multipolarista.
I am a Ukrainian-American. I grew up and spent over half of my life in Ukraine, although now I live in the United States. I wanted to explain my thoughts on the ongoing crisis with Russia, because mainstream corporate media outlets don’t ever share perspectives like mine.
It is definitely a stressful time, for obvious reasons. Fortunately, my family and friends in the country are alive and are doing well enough under the circumstances. Unfortunately, in the past decade this isn’t the first time I have had to check in on my loved ones there, and for basically the same reasons. This is what I wanted to talk about.
You see, the U.S. government has meddled in Ukraine for decades. And the Ukrainian people have suffered because of this.
The overwhelming support that Western governments and media outlets have poured out for Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24 is not actually motivated by concern for the Ukrainian people. They are using us to advance their political and economic interests.
We know this because Washington overthrew our government twice in a decade, imposed neoliberal economic policies that made our country the poorest in Europe, and has fueled a devastating civil war that in the past eight years took the lives of 14,000 Ukrainians and wounded and displaced many more.
The following facts don’t get mentioned by the media, as they contradict the foreign-policy goals of the U.S. government. So unless you are actively engaged in the anti-war movement, the info below is probably new to you. That is why I wanted to write this article.
The first U.S.-backed soft coup in Ukraine occurred in 2004, when Western-backed presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko lost the election.
The winner of the November 2004 vote, Viktor Yanukovych, was portrayed as being pro-Russian, so Western governments refused to recognize his victory and declared electoral fraud.
Western-backed forces in Ukraine then mobilized and carried out a textbook color revolution, called the “Orange Revolution.” They forced another run-off vote that December, in which their candidate Yushchenko was declared president.
In a shockingly honest 2004 report titled “U.S. campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” Britain’s establishment newspaper The Guardian admitted that the “Orange Revolution” was “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing,” bankrolled with at least $14 million.
“Funded and organised by the U.S. government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and U.S. non-government organisations, the campaign” attempted to topple governments “in four countries in four years,” The Guardian boasted, targeting Serbia, Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Much like in the United States, Ukrainian presidents are appointed and govern in the interest of wealthy oligarchs, so no Ukrainian president ends his tenure with a particularly high rating. The U.S.-backed Yushchenko, however, set a new record for the lowest popular support in history.
In the next presidential election, in 2010, Yushchenko got just 5% of the vote, which should give you an insight into how popular he actually was.
During his first term Yushchenko implemented a program of austerity, reduced social spending, bailed out large banks, deregulated agriculture, advocated for NATO membership, and repressed the rights of language minorities like Russian speakers.
The second U.S.-backed coup d’etat in Ukraine was launched in late 2013 and consolidated power in 2014, just a decade after the first one.
Viktor Yanukovych, who was frequently called pro-Russian by Western media but in reality was just neutral, won the 2010 presidential election fair and square.
But in 2013, Yanukovych refused to sign a European Union Association Agreement that would have been a step toward integrating Ukraine with the EU. In order to be part of this program, Brussels had demanded that Kiev impose neoliberal structural adjustment, selling off government assets and giving the Washington-led International Monetary Fund (IMF) even more control over Ukrainian state spending.
Yanukovych rejected this for a more favorable offer from Russia. So, once again, Western-backed organizations brought out their supporters into the Maidan Square in Kiev to overthrow the government.
As was the case during the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, the United States sent politicians to meet with the leaders of the demonstrations, and later coup leaders, in late 2013 and early 2014. U.S. Senators John McCain, Chris Murphy, and others spoke in front of large crowds in Maidan.
At some point the control of the stage and leadership of the protests was overtaken by far-right forces. Leaders of such organizations as Svoboda (a neo-Nazi party) and Right Sector (a coalition of fascist organizations) spoke to the protesters, sometimes standing side-by-side with their American backers like McCain.
Later their organizations acted as the spear of attack against the Ukrainian police in the violent February 2014 coup d’etat, and they were the first to storm government buildings.
With the success of the U.S.-backed forces and fascists, President Yanukovich fled the country to Russia.
U.S. government officials met with coup leaders and appointed a right-wing neoliberal, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to lead the new regime, because they recognized they couldn’t appoint the fascists and maintain legitimacy.
A leaked recording of a phone call between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, showed that Washington chose who the leaders of the new coup regime would be.
Nuland referred to Yatsenyuk affectionately as “Yats,” saying, “Yats is the guy.”
The first actions of the post-2014 coup government were to ban left-wing parties in the country and reduce language-minority rights even further. Then Ukrainian fascists attacked anti-coup demonstrations in the streets all over the country.
As the anti-coup protests were being violently broken up by the far-right, two areas in the east of the country, Donetsk and Luhansk, rose up and declared independence from Ukraine.
The people of Crimea also voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Crimea has a Russian military base, and under their protection they were able to vote safely.
The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections.
At first many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their own countrymen, in this civil war that their U.S.-backed government started.
Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups (and the oligarchs that were backing them) formed so-called “territorial defense battalions,” with names like Azov, Aidar, Dnipro, Tornado, etc.
Much like in Latin America, where U.S.-backed death-squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
In May 2014, neo-Nazis and other far-right forces assaulted an anti-coup demonstration in the major city of Odessa. 48 people were burned alive in a labor union building.
This massacre added more fuel to the civil war. The Ukrainian government promised to investigate what happened, but never really did.
My point: Without understanding the Maidan massacre and bringing to justice its perpetrators, it is impossible to understand and resolve peacefully the internal and international conflicts involving Ukraine and the dangerously escalating war in the Donbas. https://t.co/Hxyq0L4sA8
After the 2014 coup, Ukraine held an election without any serious opposition candidates, and Western-backed billionaire Petro Poroshenko won.
Poroshenko was seen as the most “moderate” of the right-wing coup coalition. But that didn’t mean much, considering many opposition parties were banned or assaulted by the far-right when they tried to organize.
Additionally, the areas that would have heavier support for the voices who wanted peace with Russia, such as Crimea and the Donbas, had seceded from Ukraine.
The new president had the impossible task of trying to appear sufficiently patriotic for the far-right while at the same time sufficiently “respectable” for the West to continue backing him publicly.
To appease the far-right, Poroshenko gave out awards to World War Two veterans “on both sides,” including the ones that fought in Nazi Germany-aligned militias like the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
The Ukrainian government officially honored the leaders of these organizations, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukevych, who organized massacres of many thousands of Poles, Jews, Russians, and other minorities during World War Two, and who willingly participated in the Holocaust.
The holiday Defenders of Ukraine Day, or Day of Ukrainian Armed Forces, was changed to October 14, to match the date of founding of the Nazi-backed Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
This is why you sometimes see red-and-black badges on Ukrainian soldiers. This symbol shows support for the fascist Ukrainian forces during World War Two.
Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, shared of photo of herself holding a fascist symbol at a rally where the same fascist flag was everywhere. And yet, Canadian media has ignored it completely.
(Also I have to make a separate but important point here: Ukraine was previously part of the Soviet Union, and the majority of the Ukrainian population during World War Two supported the Red Army and actively resisted Nazi occupation of their country. The Ukrainian fascist collaborationists and parties did not have as broad support as the anti-fascist resistance did, and were mostly active during the period of Nazi occupation.)
A large portion of the civil war that broke out in Ukraine after the 2014 coup was waged under Poroshenko.
From 2014 to 2019, in five years of civil war in Donbas, the geographic region that encompasses the Luhansk and Donetsk republics, more than 13,000 people were killed, and at least 28,000 were wounded, according to official Ukrainian government statistics. This was years before Russia invaded.
The Ukrainian army and its far-right paramilitary allies were responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties, with the United Nations reporting in January 2022 that, between 2018 and 2021, 81.4% of all civilian casualties caused by active hostilities were in Donetsk and Luhansk.
These are Russian-speaking Ukrainians being killed their own government. They are not secret Russian forces.
Researchers at the U.S. government-sponsored RAND Corporation acknowledged in a January 2022 report in Foreign Policy magazine that, “even by Kyiv’s own estimates, the vast majority of rebel forces consist of locals—not soldiers of the regular Russian military.”
Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainians fled the country due to the conflict, especially from the eastern regions that saw most of the fighting.
The United States strongly supported Poroshenko and the Ukrainian government as it was waging this brutal war that killed thousands, injured tens of thousands, and displaced millions.
This is why I say the U.S. government doesn’t actually care about Ukraine.
In 2019, the Ukrainian people clearly showed that they opposed this war by overwhelmingly voting against Poroshenko at the ballot box. Current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky got 73% of the vote, compared to just 24% for Poroshenko.
Zelensky ran on a platform of peace. He even addressed the Russian-speaking eastern parts of the country in Russian.
Very quickly after entering office, however, Zelensky changed his tone. Much like the supposedly “moderate” Poroshenko, Zelensky was told that he was risking losing Western backing, and the loyalty of the far-right, which could threaten to kill him.
So Zelensky did a 180 on his peaceful rhetoric, and he continued to support the civil war.
Here it is important to address another important point: The Ukrainian government is not directly run by fascists, but in Ukraine fascist forces do have significant influence in the state.
After the 2014 U.S.-backed coup, neo-Nazis were absorbed by Ukraine’s military, police, and security apparatus.
So while the parliamentary representation of fascist parties is not large (they often get just a few percentage points of the vote in elections), these extremists continue to be supported by taxpayers’ money through unelected state institutions.
Additionally, these neo-Nazis have the street muscle to terrorize political opponents. They can quickly mobilize dozens or hundreds of people on a moment’s notice to attack opponents.
Moreover, these fascists are highly motivated combatants that ensure the loyalty of the Ukrainian military. They represent a powerful faction of the Ukrainian political spectrum, and one of the forces in Ukrainian society that pushes for escalating war with the separatist regions and Russia.
I sometimes see people try to reject this fact by saying, “How can Ukraine have all these Nazis if their president is Jewish?” Here is the answer: the Nazis are not appointed by Zelensky.
These fascists have a major influence in the unelected state security apparatus. The have systematically infiltrated the military and police. And they even enjoy support and training from Western governments and NATO.
NATO is sending weapons and trainers to help neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s white-supremacist Azov movement fight Russia, as the US floods the country with weapons.
This follows numerous reports of Western government support for Ukrainian far-right extremists.https://t.co/5gYgmU8PFo
The position of fascists grew substantially stronger in Ukraine in the eight years of the civil war, from 2014 to 2022.
For those reasons Ukrainian presidents (Jewish or not) have to take the position of the far-right into consideration. (Not to mention the possibility that far-right gangs could threaten to kill the president or other politicians if they defy them.)
Furthermore, all forces that normally oppose fascism or would oppose the civil war have not existed en masse for eight years in Ukraine: following the 2014 coup, many left-wing parties and socialists got banned by the Ukrainian government, and were assaulted in the streets by the fascists.
Any Ukrainian president, especially since the coup, is highly dependent on the support of the U.S. government as well. So Zelensky is very much a hostage of the situation.
When Washington tells Zelensky he must continue the civil war in Ukraine against his own electoral promises, support NATO membership, ignore the Minsk II agreement of 2015, or even ask for nuclear weapons, he does everything he is told.
Like any other U.S. puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every U.S. administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.
The fact that most Ukrainians wanted peace with Russia was reflected by the fact that they voted for the peace candidate Zelensky in such overwhelming numbers, 73%. And the fact that Zelensky did a total 180 on that promise shows how little political power he actually has.
Now to circle back to the present moment and what to do now. I don’t support the invasion Russia is carrying out. But the only government I can influence by the virtue of living in the United States is the U.S. government.
Luckily, that is extremely relevant, because Washington is one of the root causes of what is happening in Ukraine now.
For the past eight years, I spoke out against the coup and the civil war in Ukraine that the United States supported, promoted, and funded.
While I never thought a war with Russia was possible, I and many other Ukrainians are against Ukraine joining NATO and escalating tensions with the separatist republics and Moscow.
Any further escalation by the U.S. right now can only lead to a larger war.
I even hear some U.S. politicians playing around with the idea of a “no-fly zone,” which means they are calling for NATO to shoot down Russian planes. This is the quickest way to World War Three.
The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the U.S. wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.
The reason U.S. media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.
Washington is willing to fight until the last Ukrainian to weaken Russia.
For that reason, I am absolutely against U.S. sanctions in general, and this round of U.S. sanctions against Russia in particular.
The harsh Western sanctions imposed on Russia target the civilian population.
Sanctions don’t affect ruling elites, and all U.S. sanctions ever do is collectively punish working-class people of a country where Washington doesn’t like their government.
Devaluing the Russian currency, the ruble, is effectively a form of shrinking workers’ wages, cutting the pensions of retirees, and preventing regular people from being able to access food or medicine.
This isn’t to mention the cost that these sanctions are now also having on the people in the United States itself, with gas prices as high as $6 a gallon and even $7 in parts of California.
The skyrocketing oil prices caused by this crisis will lead to more inflation. And while the official U.S. inflation figure is 7.5%, the real number is probably in the double digits.
All of this makes life harder for average working people, in Ukraine, Russia, the U.S., and around the world.
Another factor in the Ukraine crisis is the rampant surge of russophobia.
Since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Democrats have blamed Donald Trump’s victory on Russian hacking without any solid proof. All of the supposed evidence they presented fell apart when investigated.
Many U.S. politicians demonized Russia as much as they could, just to push the blame for their candidate losing on someone else.
Now Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine has made it okay to be openly xenophobic. I have even seen some people call for killing all Russians, boycotting all Russian businesses, revoking student visas for Russians, etc.
Even in the more “respectable” media, you see talking heads speaking about Russian people as if they’re not human.
Under Donald Trump, many of these same people demonized China, and then acted surprised when there was a wave of hate crimes in the U.S. against East Asians.
During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the press demonized Arabs and Muslims, leading to hate crimes against their communities.
My point is that demonizing nationalities is never acceptable, and people can see through the flimsy excuses of hiding one’s own xenophobia behind the declarations of “solidarity” with my country.
In conclusion, I wanted to say that, if you live in the United States, the only government you can actually influence through demonstrations and other forms of protest is our own.
I absolutely think it is a crime right now to support the U.S. government’s drive for war, sanctions, or further escalation of tensions in Ukraine.
The U.S. government has been stoking this conflict for decades. Washington has funded coups and fueled a civil war in Ukraine.
Now, U.S. corporations stand to greatly benefit from what is happening.
The government doesn’t care about the people here in the U.S., and the only reason it says it cares about people abroad is so it can justify further military spending and advance its foreign-policy goals – which aren’t good for anyone except for a handful of rich American oligarchs.
Editor’s Note: This article was produced by Globetrotter.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden Cabinet are fond of proclaiming the “rules-based international order” (RBIO) or “rules-based order” every chance they get: in press conferences, on interviews, in articles, at international fora, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails. Along with the terms “human rights” and “democracy,” the RBIO is routinely used to claim a moral high ground against countries that they accuse of not following this RBIO, and wielded as a cudgel to attack, criticize, accuse, and delegitimate countries in their crosshairs as rogue outliers to an international order.
This cudgel is now used most commonly against China and Russia. Oddly enough, whenever the United States asserts this “rules-based order” that China (and other “revisionist powers”/enemy states) are violating, the United States never seems to clarify which “rules” are being violated, but simply releases a miasma of generic accusation, leaving the stench of racism and xenophobia to do the rest.
This is because there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the RBIO.
The RBIO isn’t “rules-based,” it isn’t “international,” and it confounds any sense of “order,” let alone justice. It is, at bottom, the naked exercise of U.S. imperial power and supremacy, dressed up in the invisible finery of an embroidered fiction. The RBIO is a fraudulent impersonation of international law and justice.
There are many layers to this misnomer, to be deconstructed piece by piece.
‘RBIO’ in Contrast With ‘International Law’
First, the RBIO is not “international” in any sense of the word.
There actually is a consensual rules-based international order, a compendium of agreed-upon rules and treaties that the international community has negotiated, agreed to, and signed up for. It’s called simply “international law.” This refers to the body of decisions, precedents, agreements, and multilateral treaties held together under the umbrella of the Charter of the United Nations and the multiple institutions, policies, and protocols attached to it. Although imperfect, incomplete, evolving, it still constitutes the legal foundation of the body of international order and the orderly laws that underpin it: this is what constitutes international law. The basic foundation of the UN Charter is national sovereignty—that states have a right to exist, and are equal in relations. This is not what the United States is referring to.
When the United States uses the term RBIO, rather than the existing term “international law,” it does so because it wants to impersonate international law while diverting to a unilateral, invented, fictitious order that it alone creates and decides—often with the complicity of other imperial, Western, and transatlantic states. It also does this because, quite simply, the United States does not want to be constrained by international law and actually is an international scofflaw in many cases.
The United States as International Outlaw
For example, the United States refuses to sign or to ratify foundational international laws and treaties that the vast majority of countries in the world have signed, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), ICESCR (the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), CRC (the Convention on the Rights of the Child), ICRMW (the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families), UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), PAROS (the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space), the Ottawa Treaty (the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention), and the majority of labor conventions of the ILO (International Labor Organization). In fact, the United States harbors sweatshops, legalizes child labor (for example, in migrant farm labor), and engages in slave labor (in prisons and immigration detention centers). Even the U.S. State Department’s own 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report acknowledges severe problems in the U.S. of trafficking and forced labor in agriculture, food service, manufacture, domestic service, sex work, and hospitality, with U.S. government officials and military involved in the trafficking of persons domestically and abroad. Ironically, the United States tries to hold other countries accountable to laws that it itself refuses to ratify. For example, the United States tries to assert UNCLOS in the South China Sea while refusing—for decades—to ratify it and ignoring its rules, precedents, and conclusions in its own territorial waters.
There are also a slew of international treaties the United States has signed, but simply violates anyway: examples include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, UN treaties prohibiting torture, rendition, and kidnapping, and of course, war of aggression, considered “the supreme international crime”—a crime that the United States engages in routinely at least once a decade, not to mention routine drone attacks, which are in violation of international law. Most recently, the AUKUS agreement signed between the United States and Australia violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by exploiting a blind spot of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
There are also a multitude of treaties that the United States has signed but then arbitrarily withdrawn from anyway. These include the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, the Agreed Framework and the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, the Geneva Conventions, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and many others.
There are also approximately 368 treaties signed between the Indigenous nations and the U.S. government; every single one of them has been violated or ignored.
There are also unilateral fictions that the United States has created, such as “Freedom of Navigation Operations” (FONOPs): this is gunboat diplomacy, a military show of force, masquerading as an easement claim. FONOPs are a concept with no basis in international law—“innocent passage” is the accepted law under UNCLOS—and it is the United States and its allies who are violating international laws when they exercise these FONOPs. Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZs) are likewise notions that have no recognition in international law—the accepted concept is “sovereign airspace”—but the United States routinely claims that China is violating Taiwan’s ADIZ or airspace—which covers three provinces of mainland China. These are some examples of the absurd fictions that the United States invents to assert that enemy states like China are violating the RBIO. This is weaponized fiction.
The United States also takes great pains to undermine international structures and institutions; for example, not liking the decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it has disabled the WTO’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism; it has undermined—and threatened—the ICC (by passing the American Servicemembers Protection Act [ASPA], also known as the Hague Invasion Act), and more recently, sanctioned the ICC prosecutor and her family members; it thumbs its nose at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its decisions, and generally is opposed to any international institution that restricts its unbridled, unilateral exercise of power. Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, in blunt candor, asserted that there is “no such thing as the United Nations,” but this unhinged ideology is quietly manifested in the day-to-day actions of the United States throughout successive U.S. administrations.
Whose Rules? The United States Applies Its Laws Internationally
On the flip side of this disdain for agreed-upon international law and institutions is the United States’ belief that its own laws should have universal jurisdiction.
The United States considers laws passed by its corrupt, plutocratic legislature—hardly international or democratic by any stretch of the imagination—to apply to the rest of the world. These include unilateral sanctions against numerous countries (approximately one-third of the world’s population is impacted by U.S. sanctions), using the instruments of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the U.S. legislature and courts, as well as currency and exchange systems (SWIFT). These unilateral sanctions are a violation of international law and humanitarian law, as well as perversions of common sense and decency—millions have perished under these illegal sanctions. To add insult to injury, the United States routinely bullies other countries to comply with these unilateral sanctions, threatening secondary sanctions against countries and corporations that do not follow these U.S.-imposed illegal sanctions. This is part of the general pattern of the exercise of U.S. long-arm jurisdiction; examples abound: the depraved arrest, imprisonment, and torture of journalist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange—an Australian national—for violating U.S. espionage laws; the absurd kidnapping of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou (a Chinese national) on Canadian soil, for violating illegal U.S. sanctions on Iran (which Canada does not itself uphold); and many other examples, too many to enumerate.
This long-arm bullying is often exercised through a network of kangaroo courts within the United States, which arrogate to themselves unitary, plenipotentiary international powers to police the citizens of other countries. Not surprisingly, the United States also applies its own laws in a similarly corrupt way within its own borders, with its own gulag system fed through these kangaroo courts. The most dramatic examples of the corruption of these courts can be noted in the routine exoneration of police-inflicted murders of civilians, except under the most extreme protest and activism; and absurd judgments, such as the prosecution of Steven Donziger by a Chevron-linked corporate law firm; or the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse by a judge allowing the accused to run the juror lottery. Note, however, the system itself is set up for conviction: over 99 percent of federal cases that go to court result in conviction; most do not even go to trial: 90 percent of U.S. federal indictments are settled by defendants pleading “guilty” or “no contest” to charges filed against them. The idea that there is any impartial notion of justice is belied by the fact that fair and adequate legal representation is unaffordable for most defendants; that appointed public defenders are so overstretched that they often spend literally minutes on each case, simply counseling defendants to plead guilty—which most do—and individuals, in the rare cases where they do win, are often bankrupted and psychically destroyed by a system that has unlimited resources and finances to beat down its victims. This corrupt system of oppression, despite its obvious injustices and iniquities, is exacerbated within vast gray areas of the justice system where even counsel, appeal, scrutiny, or oversight does not apply, and where a single individual may be judge, jury, and executioner. These include, for example, certain parole and probation systems, review boards within prisons, debt collection systems, immigration proceedings, asset forfeiture systems, and many other quasi-judicial systems of oppression.
Generally, these violations and injustices are excused or erased by the international and national media, which are complicit in maintaining an illusion of impartial, high-standards justice in the United States. This is an illusion without substance: the U.S. legal system, like the U.S. health care system or the U.S. educational system, is essentially a failed system that is designed to work only for the rich and powerful. It delivers substandard, so-called care, if not outright abuse, harm, violence, and death, to the vast majority of people who have the misfortune to enter its sausage-making chambers.
Routine Exemptions, Deadly Disorder
Nevertheless, from time to time, dramatic incidents of the United States flaunting the international “rules-based order”—i.e., international law by the United States—occasionally make headlines (before being rapidly silenced).
One type of recurring violation is the abuse of diplomatic immunity. This type of case is mundane and repetitious: a U.S. (or Western-allied) government employee kills or harms native citizens; the United States immediately claims diplomatic immunity. Sometimes the perpetrator is drunk, out of control, or paranoid; often they are spies or contractors. For example, according to recent reports, Anne Sacoolas seems to have been a drunk U.S. spy who killed a British teenager in 2019. She was spirited away immediately as a diplomat.
Raymond Allen Davis was a U.S. contractor, possibly acting CIA station chief, who shot dead two people in the street in Pakistan. Another person was killed by a vehicle picking up Davis to take him away from the crime scene. Davis was spirited out of the country, no explanations were given, and the murders were erased from media consciousness.
This mindset of exceptionalism and impunity is not anecdotal, but manifests on a general, structural scale in the numerous one-sided U.S. status of forces agreements (SOFAs) in the countries where the United States has troops stationed. These give a blanket immunity similar to diplomatic immunity: the violating U.S. soldier or contractor cannot be arrested and rendered to domestic courts unless the United States chooses to waive immunity; U.S. extraterritorial exemption/immunity can be applied despite cases of murder, mayhem, violence, torture, rape, theft, sexual trafficking, and a host of other sins.
This type of exceptionalism also applies to national health policies and international health regulations. For example, multiple COVID-19 outbreaks have been traced to U.S. violations of domestic public health measures—screening, testing, contract tracing, and isolation—in many territories or countries (especially island regions) where the United States has military bases. For example, several major COVID outbreaks in Okinawa have been traced to U.S. troops entering the island without following local health protocols.
The United States takes the cake for hypocrisy, however, when, in several COVID lawsuits, it accused China—without evidence—of violating UN/World Health Organization (WHO) International Health Regulations by failing to notify the United States and the rest of the world in a timely manner about the outbreak of COVID-19. This is entirely refuted by the facts and the well-established timelines: no other country has worked as assiduously and as rapidly in investigating, ascertaining, and then notifying the world of the initial outbreak, as well as sharing necessary information to control it. The United States, however, has carved out a pandemic-sized exemption from reporting any infectious diseases to the WHO if it deems it necessary for its national security interests. Ironically, this exemption is carved out for the single institution most likely to propagate it—the U.S. military: “any notification that would undermine the ability of the U.S. Armed Forces to operate effectively in pursuit of U.S. national security interests would not be considered practical.”
When the United States disingenuously uses the term RBIO, or rules-based international order, it may be playing at international law, but once its applications are unpacked and defused, it becomes clear that it is a weaponized fiction that the United States uses to attack its enemies and competitors.
If “hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,” the RBIO is the vicious first tribute that the United States sends to its law-abiding opponents to undermine international order, no less dangerous for its falsehood.
K.J. Noh is a journalist, political analyst, writer and teacher specializing in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region.
Editor’s Note: This analysis originally appeared in NewsGhana.
Several geopolitical powers are seeking to enhance their influence and cooperation with the continent of Africa.
United States President Joe Biden announced during July that he would host a summit with African leaders at the White House in December. This announcement by Biden comes in the aftermath of several important political developments which have exposed the ineffective foreign policy orientation of the world’s leading capitalist country. Within the United Nations, many African states abstained from two resolutions which condemned the Russian Federation during the early phase of Moscow’s special military operation in neighboring Ukraine.
In addition, most African governments have not made pronouncements in favor of the war program of the U.S. Compounding these complicated relationships is the reliance by several AU states on Russian and Ukrainian agricultural products and inputs. The imposition of unprecedented sanctions by the Biden administration and the European Union (EU) has hampered the flow of goods and services.
The two leading officials of the AU, President Macky Sall of Senegal, who is the chair of the continental organization and Commissioner Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, traveled to Sochi in June to hold high-level discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The AU statement issued in the aftermath of the meeting reiterated the position of the organization that the conflict in Ukraine should be resolved diplomatically through negotiations. This is a position at variance with the Biden presidency which has openly declared that the administration wants to remove Putin from power and weaken Russia as a world power.
Also, the talks between Putin and the AU resulted in the reconvening of the Russia-Africa Summit which will meet towards the end of the year in Ethiopia. In fact, during late July, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov embarked upon a tour to several African countries including Egypt, Uganda and Ethiopia.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said in a press conference with Lavrov that the enemies of the U.S. were not the adversaries of his government. He noted that Uganda wants to trade with the U.S., Russia and any other country which respects its independence and sovereignty.
The Russian envoy emphasized that Moscow has always supported Africa in the struggle against colonialism. Museveni exclaimed during the press conference held at Entebbe: “How can we be against somebody who has never harmed us? If Russia makes mistakes, we tell them. When they have not made mistakes, we can’t be against them.”
A report published by the Tass News Agency said of the Kremlin’s chief envoy’s trip to Africa emphasizing: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov arrived on Tuesday (July 26) in Ethiopia on a working visit, TASS reports from the site. On Wednesday, Lavrov is expected to hold talks with his Ethiopian counterpart Demeke Mekonnen. The top diplomat visits Ethiopia on the last leg of his tour of Africa. From Ethiopia, he will travel to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Council of Foreign Ministers.”
Lavrov visited four African states during his tour. These countries were Egypt, Congo-Brazzaville, Uganda and Ethiopia, where the AU headquarters is located in the capital of Addis Ababa. The Russian foreign minister denied the allegations made by the U.S. and the EU that Moscow is responsible for the global food crisis.
According to Ahram online, published in Cairo, Egypt, Lavrov said: “There is a very loud campaign around this, but our African friends understand their root cause. They are not related to what is happening within the special military operation.”
France Attempting to Recover Lost Credibility
French President Emmanuel Macron started an African trip at the same time as Lavrov’s visit across the continent. France has come under fire in recent months for its military presence in several countries including the Central African Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso. The CAR and Malian governments are utilizing Russian military consultants from the Wagner Group, which Moscow has denied is an arm of its foreign policy.
Nonetheless, the burgeoning hostility towards Paris within its former colonies on the continent has proved to be worrisome for the Macron government. French military and diplomatic personnel in Mali were requested to leave the country immediately. France has maintained a military presence in many of its former colonies since the 1960s. These forces have intervened in internal political struggles in a manner which benefits France and not necessarily the African states involved.
Although Macron is obviously seeking to counter the heightened scrutiny being placed on France’s involvement in Africa, it is by no means clear what Paris has to offer countries such as Cameroon, Mali, Guinea-Conakry, the CAR, Ivory Coast, among others. In recent years, France has attempted to bolster its CFA zone domination over currencies in various African states even to the point of proposing a new monetary system which would maintain links to Paris.
Even the U.S. State Department-funded Voice of America (VOA), wrote on the mission of the French president while he visited Cameroon noting that: “Macron said European economic sanctions on Russia, which are having an indirect effect on Africa, are intended to stop Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and not to punish Africans. He said France is interested in the well-being of civilians in both African countries and Ukraine. The visiting French president did not say how much France would invest to boost agricultural production in Africa, but said Cameroon is one of the countries chosen for agricultural investments. The U.N. says that Africa depends on Russia and Ukraine for more than 50 percent of its wheat imports.”
Such an admission by the VOA utilizing United Nations data raises the question of why have African governments turned to Russia to meet their domestic consumption demands? France’s foreign policy orientation has heavily relied on military force to advance its strategic interests in Africa.
Moreover, in recent months since the expulsion of French diplomatic and military personnel from Mali, it has become necessary for Macron to advance a new and ostensibly more “compassionate” approach towards various African states. Such a superficial policy shift conflicts with statements made by Macron leading up to the 60th anniversary of Algerian independence when the French leader suggested that atrocities committed by its colonial officials have been exaggerated by successive administrations in Algiers. France controlled Algeria as a colonial outpost for 132 years. Millions of Algerians lost their lives to French forces through massacres dating back to the 19th century notwithstanding the counter-insurgency operations during the war of independence between 1954-1962, when Paris withdrew its military from the North African state.
Biden Maintains Same Imperialist Policy Towards Africa
Mike Hammer, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa, began a tour to Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on July 24. Supposedly the purpose of Hammer’s trip was to facilitate a settlement surrounding the dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the status of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has opposed the GERD saying it will redirect water from the Blue Nile jeopardizing the well-being of its people. The current demarcations for usage from the strategic waterway was instituted by Britain during its colonial domination over Egypt in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ethiopia maintains that GERD utilizing its full capacity would be beneficial to the entire regions of North and East Africa.
What is significant about the U.S. posture as a mediator in this dispute is that the previous administration of President Donald Trump sided openly with Egypt in 2020, even encouraging Cairo to “blow up” the GERD project. The Biden administration, similarly to Trump’s, has worked to either weaken or overthrow the Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
Biden and many members of the Democratic Party in Congress have imposed a ban on Ethiopia’s participation in the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) program which has been in operation since the concluding days of the administration of former President Bill Clinton. In addition to the purging of Ethiopia from AGOA, the Congress had threatened to pass legislative measures designed to implement even more draconian sanctions on the Horn of Africa state which houses the headquarters of the AU.
As a result of Washington’s posture towards Ethiopia, many women garment workers have had their plants closed due to lack of demand from the U.S. Hammer claims that the Biden administration is concerned about the equitable and efficient distribution of aid to Ethiopia where the government has battled the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in the north of the country. Successive U.S. administrations have supported the TPLF during its period in power from 1991-2018, when their government collapsed as a result of a national uprising in Ethiopia.
These factors must be taken into consideration when evaluating the diplomatic competition taking place between Washington, Paris and Moscow. If recent events are any indication, the African people along with their governments will struggle to make decisions which benefit the continent as opposed to the western imperialist states.
Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire, an international electronic press service designed to foster intelligent discussion on the affairs of African people throughout the continent and the world. The press agency was founded in January of 1998 and has published thousands of articles and dispatches in newspapers, magazines, journals, research reports, blogs and websites throughout the world. The PANW represents the only daily international news source on pan-african and global affairs.