Global Dialogues

A long history of erosion of moral authority amongst Western governments is reaching its conclusion. Foreign policy has always been the Achilles heel of the so-called rules-based order. The post-war period, often described as one of the longest peace, established a moral authority that resided in notions of economic and political liberalism, supra-national organization and trade and political compact. Along with that came an entire infrastructure of human rights and global policing—the United Nations, the European Convention on Human Rights, the treaties of the Geneva Convention, and the Rome Statute. And within that system of traffic control developed a complex practical system of sanctions and moral language of enforcement that underwrote interventionist foreign policy campaigns whose declared purpose was to maintain global security by reining in despots. The U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were sold as both a pressing security need and a moral duty, in the case of the latter, to free women from the Taliban.

For those not ensconced within the fold of the rules-based order in the West, there was no peace, long or otherwise. The ramifications of the Iraq war spread across the region and yielded fracture and instability that still reverberate today. After 20 years of war, Afghanistan is back even more decisively under Taliban rule. Sanctions regimes applied most forcefully to poor countries such as Sudan did little but impoverish ordinary people and empower rulers, who always had the sovereign tools to circumvent them. But still, there remained a lacquer of plausibility—these were necessary policies in order to deter outlaws, and if they backfired then there were always Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” to lament. Two events—the war in Gaza, and Donald Trump’s second term—stripped away that veneer. 

It is remarkable, in hindsight, how much effort went into erecting and maintaining the rationale for the unsavory work of the rules-based order, into selling its coherence. The War on Terror was a vast exercise in propaganda, where mainstream media publications took trusting cues from their governments and then sold on the Iraq war as a pressing necessity. In the United Kingdom, government spokespeople were energetically ubiquitous on the country’s news panels, pushing the war in the face of colossal public dissent. For Afghanistan, a historic address by first ladies Cherie Blair and Laura Bush made an earnest plea for the women of Afghanistan, who needed to be liberated from their burqas and sent back to school. The urgency of ramping up sanctions on Sudan, placed on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 1993 for Al Qaeda associations, was upheld by a large high-profile network of celebrities and politicians. 

In comparison, no such effort has been made to justify the war in Gaza, blessed by Western support and enabled by U.S. aid and weaponry. Where what existed before was an understanding that there was a domestic and global polity that needed to be brought on side, today, that persuasion has been replaced by confrontation. What has taken place is in fact, a demolition of whatever residual moral standards and systems remain. Western governments, from Germany to the United States, are in open confrontation with the bodies of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and even the Vatican. That open confrontation is also now with the public and the very law that protects that public’s freedom of speech and right to dissent. Donald Trump’s administration has dismantled whatever soft power was precipitated by USAID’s aid efforts abroad for the past half a century, and reneged on the hitherto unassailable security alliance with Europe in Ukraine against a belligerent Russia. There is an explicit message here, not an abandoning of morality in politics, but its very repudiation as a source of credibility and strength. “Civilizational suicidal empathy,” is what Elon Musk called the regime that Trump is dismantling.

In that process, a transfer of moral responsibility has taken place, away from institutions from which sponsors have divested, and from governments, and towards the people. I use the word responsibility here rather than authority, because without the ability to enforce norms there is no executive power. But what is becoming clear is that both global and domestic law as followed by those states who previously anchored the international order, are now unreliable bulwarks against human rights abuses and persecution. 

The result is ordinary people being thrust onto the front line of the argument for moral rectitude and liberal values. They are the students on American campuses who now must stake their entire careers and even liberty in order to protest against their government’s actions. They are the doctors who insist on their testimonies from Gaza. They are the journalists who died in that war, some in the knowledge that they will be killed in order to keep showing the truth of what is happening. They are the protestors on the streets of cities both in the West and in the Arab World itself, who risk detention and deportation. And they are the immigration lawyers and civil rights activists that continue to defend freedom of expression and the right to due process.

The connective tissue between these groups grows organically, as they bypass political establishments altogether and reach out to each other to raise funds, coordinate efforts, and create physical and online spaces of gathering. They are motivated by two powerful incentives that act both as a glue between them and an enticement to others to join. The first is the urgent desire to practice that empathy that is being discredited, to redraw the red lines that are being erased. The second is a basic human impulse to simply channel distress. “If I cannot air this pain and alter it,” said Audre Lord, “I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

That process of airing eventually begins to constitute its own livestream of public information and moral locus. No longer is it the pages of mainstream newspapers or cable TV that have the monopoly on facts and narratives, but, for a younger generation in particular, the “For You” timelines of TikTok, Instagram, and the comment threads under videos on YouTube. What one no longer seems on the pages of the New York Times is uploaded and shared with more reach than a paper front page ever had the capacity to achieve. 

There is an accelerating quality to these growing alternative gatherings, one where it is not just politics, but a sense of community that drives engagement. That solidarity is all the more compelling for how much it has been sorely missed by societies whose free communal spaces and social bonds have been eradicated through years of austerity, deregulation, and corporate takeover. Becoming a part of something bigger, underpinned by values, duties to each other, and a sense of congruence between action and belief yields the sort of moral clarity that persecution only inflames, rather than suppresses. 

As credibility leeches away from the establishment, it is deposited in a growing number of citizens that are beginning to make connections between the detained immigrant, the arrested protester at home, and the starving child abroad. How that translates into authority is subject to a historical confrontation with a political establishment that is now running on brute power alone.

Nesrine Malik is a journalist and critic who explores issues of race, identity, politics, and world affairs.