“The danger of systemic US diplomatic malpractice throughout the world is highlighted by the continuing American support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza, as well as US support for other reckless and illegal Israeli policies in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the illegally annexed Golan Heights, southern Lebanon and neighboring Syria. 

The week long obstruction of the latest UN Security Council resolution, and its debilitating watering down at US insistence, coupled with other actions to shield Israel from war crimes accountability, is not just a moral blight but is the latest counterproductive move in a long history of counterproductive foreign policy decisions that is isolating the United States, bolstering anti-US alliances and making Americans less safe. 

Further, the U.S. is enormously damaging, perhaps permanently, international institutions through its obstructionism while giving a pre-text for other nations to violate international law by thoroughly ignoring it. The more the U.S. tries to rely solely on military solutions to maintain control, the deeper the fractures between the U.S. and the majority of the world. If there has been one thing demonstrated by the history of American foreign policy, especially since the end of the Cold War, it is that people will fight back. 

A militarized foreign policy, executed directly or through either vassal states or proxy forces, will be confronted by resistance. The insistence on not just maintaining but expanding an American empire based on 20th-century realities has resulted in millions dead worldwide, tens of millions displaced, and ever-devolving instability in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. 

With morally, intellectually and professionally indecent actions, such as today’s UN Security Council abstention, the US is giving the world reason after reason not just to seek alternatives to the American hegemonic order but to confront it directly. The possible blowback to the Biden Administration’s foreign policy may be greater than any we have experienced.”