Contrary to her position at the time of the attack on Iraq, in the case of Syria France failed to defend the principles of international law, rallying instead the imperial camp and its lies. Together with the United Kingdom and the United States, she has suffered a diplomatic defeat of historic proportions, while Russia and China have become the champions of the sovereignty of peoples and peace. The new international balance of power is not only a consequence of the United States’ military decline, it is also a penalty for their falling prestige. Ultimately, Western powers have lost the leadership they enjoyed throughout the twentieth century, having forsaken all legitimacy by betraying their own values.
On two occasions, 4 October 2011 and 4 February 2012, permanent members of the UN Security rebuffed draft resolutions on the situation in Syria. This showdown has pitted members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against those of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The end of the unipolar world
This quadruple veto seals the end of a period of international relations that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and witnessed the undivided domination of the United States over the rest of the world. It does not signify a return to the previous bipolar system, but the emergence of a new model whose contours are yet to be defined. None of the New World Order projects have been achieved. Washington and Tel Aviv have failed to institutionalize the unipolar governance they intended to impose as an inviolable paradigm, while the BRICS fell short of creating a multipolar system that would have enabled its members to rise to the highest level.
As Syrian strategist Imad Fawzi Shueibi had rightly anticipated, the Syrian crisis has crystallized a new balance of power, and from there a redistribution of power that no one had foreseen or wanted, but which must be accepted as an inescapable reality. [1]
In retrospect, Hillary Clinton’s “leadership from behind” doctrine appears as an attempt by the United States to test their limits, while shifting the responsibility on their British and, especially, French allies. Yet, it was they who burst on the scene imposing themselves as political and military leaders during the overthrow of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, something they hoped to live through again by toppling the Syrian Arab Republic, even if they did so as vassals and sub-contractors of the U.S. empire. So it is London and Paris, even more than Washington, that suffered a diplomatic defeat and bear the consequences in terms of loss of influence.
States of the Third World are sure to draw their conclusions from these recent events: those who choose to serve the United States, like Saddam Hussein, or to negotiate with them, like Muammar el-Qaddafi, could be executed by the imperial troops and their country destroyed. On the contrary, those who resist, like Bashar al-Assad, and build alliances with Russia and China will survive.
Triumph in the virtual world, defeat in the real world
The setback of the GCC and NATO brings to light a power struggle that many scented, but no one could ascertain: the West won the media war but had to retreat from the military arena. To paraphrase Mao Zedong: they have become virtual tigers.
During this crisis, and even today, Western leaders and Arab monarchs have managed to intoxicate not only their own people, but a large part of international public opinion. They made people believe that the Syrian population had risen against their government and that he conducted a bloody crackdown against political protesters. Satellite channels not only concocted arrangements for misleading the public, but they also shot staged images in a studio to fit their propaganda purposes. Ultimately, the GCC and NATO invented and kept alive through the media for ten months a revolution that existed only in words and images, while on the ground Syria had to face a low intensity war conducted by the Wahhabi Legion supported by NATO.
However, with Russia and China having made use of their veto already once and Iran having announced its intention to fight alongside Syria if required, the United States and their vassals had to recognize that pursuing their plans would draw them into a world war. After months of extreme tension, the U.S. admitted they were bluffing and didn’t have good enough cards for their game.
Despite a military budget of over $ 800 billion, the United States is a giant with feet of clay. Indeed, if their armed forces are still capable of destroying developing States, debilitated by previous wars or lengthy embargoes, like Serbia, Iraq or Libya, they are no longer in a position to occupy a territory, or measure up to a State capable of responding and taking the war to America.
Contrary to accepted wisdom, the United States have never been a significant military power. They were engaged for a few weeks towards the end of World War II, against a foe already annihilated by the Red Army; they were defeated in North Korea and Vietnam; they have never controlled the situation in Afghanistan and they were forced to clear out of Iraq for fear of being crushed.
During the last two decades, the U.S. empire has erased human reality from its wars and has communicated by assimilating war and video games. It is on this basis that recruitment campaigns are conducted, and that military training takes place. Today, it uses hundreds of thousands of video players as surrogate soldiers. Therefore, the slightest contact with reality can demoralize its armed forces. According to its own statistics, the majority of dead soldiers did not fall in combat, but committed suicide, while one-third of their serving military personnel suffers from psychiatric disorders and unfit for combat. The exorbitance of the Pentagon’s military budget is cannot to compensate for its human degradation.
New values: honesty and sovereignty
The failure of the GCC and NATO States goes hand in hand with the breakdown of their values. They pretend to be defenders of human rights and democracy, when they have established torture as a system of government and most of them are opposed to the principle of popular sovereignty.
Even if public opinion in the West and the Gulf is under informed on this subject, the United States and their vassals have been running since 2001 a vast network of secret prisons and torture centers, including inside the European Union. On the pretext of the war against terrorism, they have sown terror, kidnapped and tortured more than 80 000 people. During the same period, they created special operations units with an annual budget of nearly $10 billion, which boast of political killings in at least 75 countries, according to their own reports.
Regarding democracy, the United States today make no secret that in their eyes it does not stand for a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln, but the subjection of people to their will as illustrated by the policies and wars of President Bush. Moreover, their constitution rejects the principle of popular sovereignty and they have suspended fundamental freedoms by establishing a permanent state of emergency through the Patriot Act. As for their vassals in the Gulf, there is no need to mention that they are absolute monarchies.
It is this model that combines unashamedly massive crimes and humanitarian discourse, which was defeated by Russia and China; two States whose record on human rights and democracy, though very questionable, is infinitely superior to that of the GCC and NATO.
By making use of their veto, Moscow and Beijing have defended two principles: respect for the truth, without which justice and peace are impossible, and respect for the sovereignty of peoples and states, without which no democracy is possible.
The time has come to strive to rebuild a human society after a period of barbarism.