The corporate media often repeats the trope that the US government supported multilateralism and international law until Donald Trump came along and blew it all up. But that is completely false, ahistorical, and absurd.
https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1949550064558297497
The corporate media often repeats the trope that the US government supported multilateralism and international law until Donald Trump came along and blew it all up. But that is completely false, ahistorical, and absurd.
George Bush signed the Hague Invasion Act, threatening military intervention if the Hague ever tried US officials or their allies. He also "unsigned" the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC). Moreover, like Trump, Bush withdrew from a major international treaty on climate change. And, of course, he invaded Iraq in a criminal war of aggression, which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said clearly violated international law.
Barack Obama cut US funding for UNESCO after it voted to admit Palestine. He then signed the biggest deal for US military aid to the Israeli colonial regime in history, at $38 billion. Obama, likewise, waged wars on Syria, Libya, and Yemen, not to mention his drone wars in Pakistan and Somalia and his continuation of the military occupation of Afghanistan.
Going back to Ronald Reagan, in 1983-84 he withdrew the US from UNESCO -- just like Trump. The Reagan regime complained that the UN body discussed disarmament (ie, peace) proposals, was "collectivist", and considered the New International Economic Order that was demanded by the formerly colonized countries of the Global South. Reagan also waged a criminal terror war in Nicaragua, and the US lost a case over this at the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1986, but the US regime refused to pay reparations to Nicaragua, which are still owed to this day.
What Trump is doing now -- withdrawing the US again from UNESCO again and tearing up climate change treaties, while attacking multilateral organizations -- is exactly what the US empire has done for decades, regardless of who the president of the regime is.
Trump himself is not the sole problem; he is a symptom of the deep structural rot. The problem is US imperialism, and it is thoroughly bipartisan.
posted by Satish Sharma at
04:30
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