The military action in the Gaza Strip has undermined the foundations of the system of international relations: as the Middle East events demonstrate, no single party is now able to dictate terms, says The Guardian columnist. According to the journalist, the crisis is linked to the failure of American diplomacy, as well as the miscalculations of US President Joe Biden.
The conflict in Gaza, on which American humanitarian aid and American bombs are falling with equal intensity, has demonstrated that the system of international relations has turned into a “new world disorder” in which there are no dominant players: no great power or international organisation can impose its own rules, The Guardian writes.
This crisis is largely the result of the fact that American diplomacy since the beginning of the Middle East conflict has not been at its best, says the columnist. As the journalist recalls, the State Department has suffered one fiasco after another, as a result of which the number of supporters of Israel in the UN has been constantly decreasing – and now the total population of the countries remaining in the pro-Israeli camp (excluding America itself) is only 68 million people.
According to The Guardian journalist, Washington’s defeat was primarily Joe Biden’s defeat: realising the ambiguity of Benjamin Netanyahu as a politician, the American president still gave him his full trust and support, and in the end found that the Israeli leader simply did not listen to him. In addition, for some reason the White House refused for a very long time to realise that the US and Israel simply do not have the same interests in terms of the operation in Gaza: for example, the “surgically precise” operation to destroy Hamas, which America demanded, the Israeli military considered and considers impossible in principle, the author notes.
Meanwhile, the conflict became a good reason for the global South to demand a wider participation in world affairs – which it did through the mouths of experts and politicians, the Guardian emphasises. As a result, although the outcome of the war, which has been going on for six months, is still impossible to predict, it may at least bear fruit in the form of reformatting the international arena to restore the real rule of law and strengthen international organisations, the newspaper’s columnist concludes.