For much of the 20th century, the answer was: a glimpse of humanity’s political future. Long before the body’s creation, H. G. Wells imagined the eventual emergence of a world state, arguing that technological interdependence and the destructiveness of modern war would ultimately make the old system of competing sovereign states untenable. 

The advent of nuclear weapons made such predictions appear urgent. Albert Einstein became one of the most prominent postwar advocates of world government, warning that “there is no [other] possibility of control of the atomic bomb.” In his 1961 Inaugural Address, delivered a decade and a half after the United Nations was established, JFK described it as “our last best hope.” New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember the UN flag flying next to Old Glory at their public schools.

The expectations made their way into midcentury popular culture: a powerful United Nations, with its own army, oversees interplanetary colonization in many of sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s novels of the 1960s and ’70s; Star Trek likewise took it for granted that future politics would belong to a planetary federation.   

Whether utopia or nightmare, world government seemed inevitable, and the United Nations looked like its beginning. How things change. Today, the United Nations looks very different from the 20th century’s imagined world state. The annual General Assembly still draws world leaders, but midcentury-style “world government” seems like a distant dream.

But that’s not such a bad thing. When the United Nations tries to reach deep inside how individual sovereign states are governed — what’s implied by true “world government,” as imagined by barmy midcentury visionaries — resistance to its authority waxes, and the real-world outcomes are often disastrous. The better path is for the United Nations to embrace its current, more limited role as a symbolic forum for sovereign states.

The theater, in short, is precisely the point. While many once saw within the UN Charter an opportunity to transcend the nation-state, the body produces its best results when affirming the sovereignty of its member states, not superseding them.

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The Boomer-uncle war

By Heather Penatzer

For years, the United Nations has been the subject of critiques from both ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, the core critique is that the organization is nothing more than a veil for American imperialism. As Noam Chomsky says, “the UN is considered favorably to the extent that it follows US orders.” From the Right, the United Nations is disparaged for being either all-powerful or politically impotent. After serving as Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, writing for the Heritage Foundation, claimed that the UN was “too bureaucratic, too remote, and too difficult to hold accountable, too involved in issues unrelated to our interests.”  

More recently, a February 2025 executive order from President Trump claimed that UN agencies have been “infiltrated by members of groups long designated … as foreign terrorist organizations,” and that UN employees “were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel,” building upon a 2024 Israeli accusation (for which scant evidence has been provided).

So does the organization have a purpose in the year 2026, or should it be sent to join its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, in the graveyard of failed international projects?

Like the league, founded in the wake of the Great War, the United Nations was born from the devastation of a world war. The original wartime conception of the United Nations enshrined the four great Allied powers of World War II — Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — as permanent members of what would become the UN Security Council, with France added postwar. With these five states holding veto power over the council’s resolutions, the United Nations was constrained by the rivalry of the Cold War.

As historian Mark Mazower notes, the United Nations did not emerge “like Aphrodite … from the Second World War, pure and uncontaminated by any significant association with that prewar failure, the League of Nations.” Those responsible for creating the body were not only heavily influenced by the league’s structure and mission, but also carried forward many of its institutional practices. The league’s mandates system, for example, provided an important precedent for the UN trusteeship system, which assumed responsibility for territories transferred from the defeated German and Ottoman empires. Indeed, many of the institutional arrangements through which the league had sought to manage and legitimize empire survived into the United Nations.

These imperial links create an interesting duality around these institutions. The United Nations was initially designed in ways that accommodated, and often protected, the interests of the existing colonial powers. Over the following decades, however, the same institutional machinery became an important vehicle through which anticolonial states challenged imperial rule and advanced the principle of national self-determination. The history of the UN trusteeship system thus illustrates a broader paradox: an organization built in significant part upon the institutional inheritance of empire became, over time, an important instrument in dismantling it.

Particularly striking is that the United Nations’ first armed peacekeeping force was created in an effort to uphold national sovereignty, not undermine it. After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Israel invaded Egypt, and Britain and France quickly followed the Jewish state. The British government was the Canal Company’s largest single shareholder, while French investors held most of the remaining shares. Both governments regarded Nasser’s nationalization as a direct challenge to their economic and strategic position in the region. Their objectives went considerably beyond restoring access to the canal: British and French leaders hoped that military intervention would also bring about Nasser’s downfall.

Soviet supreme leader Nikolai Bulganin quickly threatened to join the fray on the side of Egypt, warning that the Soviets were “full of determination to crush the aggressor and re-establish peace in the East by using force,” while also making a pointed comment about Britain’s inability to defend itself from “modern weapons.” The Americans also objected to the invasion. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon later summarized the contradiction facing Washington: “We couldn’t, on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.”

London and Paris both vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw its military on Oct. 30, then joined the invasion the following day. An emergency session of the General Assembly quickly convened and established the UN Emergency Force, composed of soldiers from countries outside the permanent members of the Security Council, which deployed to the Sinai with Egypt’s consent. 

Britain and France agreed to withdraw within weeks, while Israel took longer. The danger that Soviet intervention might transform the crisis into a much wider war was averted, and Egypt’s sovereignty over its territory was restored. When Nasser demanded the departure of UN forces in 1967, they left — as the consent-based character of the mission required. The episode was ultimately consistent with the principle articulated in Article 2 of the UN Charter: that the organization rested upon the “sovereign equality” of its members and that it wasn’t authorized to intervene in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

In the following decades, however, something shifted. Rather than treating state sovereignty simply as a foundational principle of international order to be defended, the United Nations increasingly developed institutions and practices that allowed international authority to reach inside states. Sovereignty became conditional: only states who met the standards of “good government,” as enumerated by the United Nations, could expect territorial exclusivity. 

Governments that failed to meet emerging international standards of governance, human rights, or civilian protection could find their domestic authority challenged by international intervention. UN personnel were no longer just establishing ceasefires between states, but also administered elections, supervised police, rewrote institutions, governed territory, and used military force within states’ sovereign bounds. Steadily, the United Nations began to assume those functions that earlier advocates of supranational government had imagined would eventually migrate upward from states to international institutions.

Such interventions have led to a wide range of adverse outcomes, the costs of which have largely been borne by local populations rather than by the United Nations itself. The 1992-1993 UN Transitional Administration in Cambodia, which endowed its high commissioner with the extreme status of “final arbiter of Cambodian law,” has been linked to the spread of HIV in the wartorn country through peacekeepers’ exploitation of Cambodian women and the enormous expansion of the local sex industry that accompanied their arrival. Similarly, the United Nations has admitted its role in the 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti, introduced by peacekeepers and ultimately responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians and the infection of hundreds of thousands more. 

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MAGA’s samurai justice in Venezuela

By Michael Lind

When critics, Left and Right, assail the United Nations, it’s these “global-governance” failures — and many others of the kind — that they have in mind. There is another side of the United Nations, however, that is easy to dismiss because it can look unserious: its role as a stage. This seemingly superficial side is precisely where the institution shines.

Some of the most famous moments in the organization’s history are acts of political theater. Khrushchev banging the desk at the General Assembly and, according to the famous account, brandishing his shoe; Adlai Stevenson confronting Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the like. While such episodes may provoke a chuckle, the spectacle is itself part of diplomacy. The General Assembly and Security Council give states a forum in which to make claims, present evidence, denounce adversaries, rally coalitions, and communicate before a global audience. 

Stevenson’s confrontation with Zorin didn’t resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it did give Washington a venue in which to publicly establish its case against the Kremlin, while the actual resolution of the crisis remained a matter of negotiation between sovereign governments. What looks like the United Nations’ weakness — its dependence on argument, rather than enforcement — is also one of the things it was built to provide.

The United Nations is at its best when acting as a forum for states, rather than as a higher authority over them. Some of its most consequential achievements have come not from governing states, but from helping them negotiate rules governing their relations with one another. Nuclear nonproliferation provides an especially important example. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created an international framework in which nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states accepted reciprocal obligations concerning proliferation, peaceful nuclear technology, and disarmament. The International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, provided a mechanism through which states could submit to inspections and demonstrate compliance with safeguards. These arrangements didn’t eliminate sovereignty or place nuclear policy under a world government. They instead allowed sovereign states to make bargains that would have been considerably harder to sustain without common rules, monitoring, and institutions.

This more modest role is less dramatic than the world government imagined by Wells or Einstein. However, an institution needn’t govern the world to serve a purpose within it. The United Nations provides states with a place to negotiate, to establish common rules, to monitor agreements, to publicize violations, and to take appeals to the world public. Suez demonstrated what the organization could accomplish when international action reinforced, rather than supplanted, sovereign authority. Arms-control and nonproliferation agreements demonstrate the value of institutions that help states make and monitor bargains without pretending to replace them.

The United Nations may not be the beginning of the world state that Wells and Einstein and Dick imagined. Its more durable achievement may be precisely the opposite: making a world of sovereign states somewhat more capable of living with itself.

We yell things like “We have rights!” when we feel that somebody might be trying to take one of them away from us. But where does it say we have them in the first place? It’s not in the Bible, or any other religious source. Yes, yes, I know there is a Bill of Rights in America, and any country worth its salt can point towards a number of things that their own countrymen (and even their women, on occasion) should enjoy as members of that particular society. But is that an absolute truth — or is it just hot air?

I’m starting to think it’s as much the latter as it is the former: just ask the Taliban… or the Mennonites… or…

For without the right to die — to decide how, when and where — what else do we have? In the United States, we have the right to make a will, to be of “sound mind and body”, and to say how we want to divide up our earthly possessions. But in very few states is that sovereignty afforded us upon the hour of our death. Even if we’re awake and aware and able to coherently make that decision on our own, the law and the state and even modern medicine itself steps in and tells us, “Not so fast…”. And what we want, as the patient, is often swept aside in the drive to keep us alive for as long as possible, even if that means in pain and despair and even if it’s the absolute opposite of our own wishes and desires.

And that sucks.

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There's no dignity in assisted dying

By Kathleen Stock

I wrote a play, How to Fight Loneliness, which is on at the Park Theatre in London, in which one of the characters, a roughneck, blue-collar American named Tate, is asked by a young couple for his help in ending the life of the wife, a cancer patient named Jodie. Tate has been tapped for this duty because it is whispered that he helped an ailing step-brother pass away when he was younger. And, in the present, Tate is open to doing the same for Jodie. Is this because he believes so fervently in “assisted suicide”?

Hardly.

Is it because he’s a man of great religious conviction and he’s sure this is what God would want if only He would make His will evident to his followers?

Absolutely not.

Tate is willing to support Jodie because they went to school together and she was nice to him and, most of all, because she’s asking him to do it since no one else in her life is willing or able to, including her husband and herself.

So Tate does it because he believes he’s helping her, not hurting her, and because he believes it is Jodie’s right to make that decision and no one else’s. Simple as that.

When my mother passed away not long ago, she begged me for my help in her final days, but I was only able to read to her and whisper kindnesses and hope for the best. In the end I signed the papers for her to go to a hospice and that was that. She passed away in due time and in relatively little pain by that point, but long after the time when she wanted all the agony and suffering to go away but no one listened to her: not the doctors nor the specialists nor the many nurses who bustled in and out of her room, asking her to “be quiet and stop shouting”.

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What the death bill tells us about life

By Graeme Archer

And there I stood, hoping and wishing and praying but not really doing anything at all. Did I make a fuss? Yes, some… but not enough.

So this woman who never wished ill on anybody in her lifetime was denied the right to die, to be relieved of her misery and to leave this Earth when she decided it was time — Socratic oaths be damned — which is what leads me to ask how many rights we really do have and what those rights might be.

Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hate anybody. Talk if you want to and vote for whomever you care to. At least until somebody tells you otherwise or your government decides you really don’t or shouldn’t have those rights and then they’re changed. Is that Orwellian of me? Not really — and I had to name-drop somebody because this is an essay, after all, and it’s supposed to sound important and researched and all the shit that people do when they write these things.

But not this one, not this time. This is simply a question, straight from the gut: if we Earth-dwellers honestly have rights, why wouldn’t “the right to die” stand chief among them?

According to my country, I do have “the right to peaceful assembly” but that doesn’t seem to include putting up a tent or overstaying my welcome. And depending on how a university or the police or even the White House is feeling, that right can be revoked in a dizzyingly short period of time, along with my ass being kicked off campus and maybe even suspended.

Depending on where you live, you can believe that you have a right to love whom you want and to vote for whom you want — but one quick governmental overthrow and some junta will laugh in your face when you screech “free love!” and “free speech!” and all the rest of the 30 “rights” you have on that UDHR list (as they’re applying battery clamps to your nipples or nether regions). Thanks for the effort, United Nations, but a lot of the time that list of yours doesn’t actually mean a damn thing. And it’s great when human rights organizations like Amnesty International jump in when they can to help out — but sometimes there’s absolutely nothing they can do, and you know it and I know it and they know it. Sometimes the baddies win and there’s no justice for it and that’s just the way it is.

I know, I know, I’m preaching to the choir and these all seem like such obvious points, but obvious is what we sometimes overlook or forget about… until it’s too late. I don’t think we have 30 rights. I don’t think we have half that many and, on a bad day (or a bad presidency), we probably have far fewer. They slip away, they get brushed aside and, sometimes, they even get violently taken away. We have rights until somebody bigger or stronger or meaner says we don’t and then we hopefully rise up, we march or talk or scream or fight and sometimes we even win…

And sometimes we don’t.

And another “right” is gone… and another… and another… and pretty soon we’re right back where we were, 50 years ago, or maybe even 100 years ago. Don’t believe me? Just ask any woman you know.

The truth is you’re born and you die (and sometimes you don’t even live long enough to pay taxes), and everything in-between is simply happenstance and luck, good or bad, and to put the rest of it in the hands of “beliefs” and “rights” and what you are “owed” for simply being here with the rest of us is just plain foolishness.

Appreciate what you’ve got, hope you have it again tomorrow, and wish all of it on everybody else. You can’t do much more than, but if you do at least those few little things, then you are so much further ahead of most people in the crowd that it’s not even funny.

And when you really think about this, any of it, for even a second, it’s not really very funny at all.

Of course, you have the right to your own opinion about any of this…

Or do you?

Any number of religions have passed through this cycle of birth, growth, decay, reformation and renewal. The latest is a religion born 75 years ago this week — the religion of human rights.

Sadly, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the manifest failures of the human rights framework as we know it today, and its grotesque contributions to the evil it is meant to fight, are not a bug of the system, but a feature. For decades in the Middle East, the UN’s countless Declarations, Covenants, Reports, Commissions and disproportionate denunciations of Israel did nothing to stem the chain of conflicts, cruelties and injustices that led to the horrific massacres of October 7, the subsequent flattening of much of Gaza, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and innocent hostages buried alive in tunnels. Indescribable butcheries and tortures, and even documented gang rapes, were met by UN bodies, human rights NGOs and women’s organisations with thunderous silence. It took nearly two months for UN Women to even acknowledge these horrors at all.

Elsewhere, responses were more insidious. On 18 October, Human Rights Watch announced that it had verified “three incidents of deliberate killings” taking place during “the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas-led gunmen”. Three. In a statement issued on 8 November, it called on the US, UK, Canada and Germany to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel, detailing what it described as “widespread, serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians”, with scarce mention of Hamas, other than one line calling on “Iran and other governments” to stop arming them. A week later, any lingering benefit of the doubt vanished after an outgoing senior editor there explained that this bloodless response to the bloodiest day for Jews since 1945 “did not happen in a vacuum”. Rather, “Human Rights Watch’s initial response was the fruition of years of politicisation of its Israel-Palestine work that has frequently violated basic editorial standards related to rigour, balance, and collegiality.”

In fairness, Human Rights Watch’s passing mention of Iran, though the kind of perfunctory ritual that gives insincerity a bad name, was still better than most anything coming from Amnesty International. But, then, Iran has long assumed a peculiar role in the world of human rights. Just last month, Hamas’s most prominent sponsor, a regime that openly imprisons and tortures dissenters, was allowed to chair a meeting of the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Yet few eyebrows were raised: over the decades, we have learned to shrug off such quirks with cockeyed optimism, convincing ourselves that they don’t really matter. But they do. And even by the comically degraded standards of UN human rights bodies, this was breathtaking.

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Stonewall doesn't understand human rights

By Kathleen Stock

More to the point, the Iranian regime is able to participate in the world of human rights institutions precisely because, like the Soviet Union before it, it does not believe in them at all. Not that the Iranians, Hamas and other Jihadists don’t have principles. They certainly do, and we discount them at our peril. In the moral universe of Jihadism, the well-being of individuals, and certainly of infidels, dissolves into nothingness in the face of the divine; and the violence of October 7 was its own kind of worship. Oscar Wilde’s quip that “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” turns out to have been tragically optimistic. When it comes to human rights, hypocrisy is the Devil’s method of rotting goodness from within.

How did we end up here? The concept of human rights feels both extremely old and extremely new. It echoes messages of justice, ethics and respect for human personhood known throughout history, and yet it also propounds a notion of universal rights not enunciated until the end of the Second World War. The year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, was also the year of the Genocide Convention, the desegregation of the US Armed Forces, the creation of the State of Israel, and the Berlin Airlift. It saw the birth of the American-led international order that would define our lives in terms of human rights, free trade, aspirations to racial justice, and the creation of nation-states for oppressed minorities. It was that year, more than 1945, which in many ways gave birth to the world order that is now collapsing before our eyes. But the idea of human rights was also built on the past.

Notions of the sacredness of human personhood and the unique claims of human dignity have been with us for millennia. Our modern understanding of human rights, though, first emerged from ideas of “natural rights” that had fuelled Europe’s and America’s political revolutions in the 18th century. Those revolutionaries, as well as the Abolitionists and Humanitarians of the 19th century, synthesised rich religious legacies of moral reflection and the sacredness of human life with modern concerns for individual well-being and nations’ aspirations for self-determination. During the heat of the Dreyfus Affair, Émile Durkheim wrote that this concern for individual well-being was a new kind of religion, a new moral order around which society would hopefully convene.

A number of the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration were committed to the religious traditions on which they drew, East and West, translating their ideas into the depersonalised, secular idioms of international law. It was hoped that unmooring these ideas from their theistic foundations would make them universally relevant to the making of a better world. Later, however, amid the pressures of the Cold War, the impulses of the human rights creators diverged. Some favoured strengthening decent government and rule of law at the levels of individual states, while others leaned towards creating transnational versions of individual states’ legal systems, along with the vast panoply of councils, committees, rapporteurs and subcommittees made necessary by the absence of decent government and rule of law in so many UN members states.

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It was not until the Seventies, once the failures of Soviet and Chinese communism and the disappointments of decolonisation were beyond dispute, that human rights returned to the stage in what Samuel Moyn calls “the last utopia”. Alongside this rose a vast network of human rights advocacy, forced to tack between the genuinely noble idea of transnational standards of justice with the inevitable necessity of choosing sides. Though they advocated a kind of anti-politics, they inevitably ended up as political actors in the global arena.

As always, the great sticking point was the Jews. As James Loeffler has brilliantly shown, the same Jewish jurists were deeply involved in the Universal Declaration and in Zionism, seeing in both an answer to the disastrously failed minority rights treaty system of the League of Nations.

But the roles of Jewishness and antisemitism in the larger story of human rights go even deeper. For millennia, Jewish existence has been a puzzlement to others, and regularly to ourselves. From Biblical times to today, the Jewish people have proclaimed a universal God with ethical demands on the basis of a particular covenant with Him and one another. In other words, Jewish existence always puts into question the relations between the national and the universal, the powerful and the powerless, the religious and the secular. We never fit into standard categories. There have been moments when this Jewish synthesis has risen magnificently onto the world stage, such as the Soviet Jewry Movement, lasting from the Sixties to the Eighties, in which universal rights, national identities and the larger causes of democracy and freedom all came together. But those times are exceptions.

The theological-political tensions of human rights — between the sacredness of individuals and the just claims of collectives — are well illustrated by the path of Amnesty International’s founder, Peter Benenson. A British Jew who worked hard to help Holocaust refugees, he eventually converted to Catholicism. Crucially, the Catholic doctrines he espoused were not the Thomist natural law teachings that played a large role in the post-war formulations of human rights, by which personhood, if ultimately beyond the state, is nonetheless enmeshed in webs of obligation and social order, which makes democratic states qualitatively different from others. Instead, they were rooted in the Augustinian teachings of the irremediable sinfulness of this world, and the lonely purity of the individual, no matter the state or social order against whom they rise, be it democracy or dictatorship.

These seeming abstractions had powerful real-world effects. For Benenson and Amnesty International, the violation of any one individual’s human rights is unacceptable, no matter the larger political and social system in which that person lives, be it democracy or dictatorship. That is a noble judgment, and a beautiful one. It is also, sadly, an invitation to the mindless legalism that can lead to Iran chairing a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council.

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The Soviet Union, for its part, freely signed any number of human rights documents because it had no intention of keeping them, and Leninist ideology said it didn’t have to. That not just dissidents, but the United States itself, would hold them to those obligations as they did in the late Seventies came as a bitter surprise.

With Western victory in the Cold War, human rights seemed poised finally to become a universal dispensation and a culmination of the best impulses of history. But this turned out to be a deeply destructive delusion. Today, the religion of human rights is as badly in need of reformation as was the priestly religion of ancient Israel, the Catholic Church in the time of Martin Luther, and, yes, Islamic thought after the frenzies of Jihadism will finally, hopefully, have exhausted themselves.

A reformation need not spell the end of human rights, but their re-birth. Human rights embody the precious notion, wrested from centuries of awful suffering, that there are certain things no state may be allowed to do ever, to anybody. Around the world, there are people standing up to dictatorships with unbelievable bravery and nothing legally to interpose between their governments and themselves but the human rights treaties and conventions that their governments have signed.

But a reformation is still necessary. Partly, this is a question of disaggregation. The term human rights has become linked to many noble and useful concepts: representative government, international humanitarian law, social and economic justice. These are all worlds away from the increasingly unhinged abstractions of human rights as preached in Geneva. And all connote a turning away from airy abstractions to face concrete realities on the ground — one small, usually compromised, step at a time.

The core idea of human rights — of ensuring respect for every single person’s fundamental dignity in processes of government and law, without exception — is not to be discarded. But we have to be brave enough to admit that the iterations of human rights as we know them have failed — and that if they are not drastically revised, conceptually and institutionally, they will do more harm than good. 

His language was spare, his descriptions factual — and yet, his bosses didn’t want to broadcast the report. A compromise was only reached after he threatened to resign and his script was cut in half. The reason, his son Jonathan later revealed, was that “the BBC needed more sources to support what had happened to Jews and worried that if you mentioned one group of people and not others, it might seem biased or wrong”.

The events of October 7 do not compare to the Holocaust, but a similar reluctance to consider both its primary victims remains. We see it in the defaced posters of kidnapped Israelis by people who claim they are “propaganda”, in the antisemitic disinformation peddled online, and in the weekly pro-Palestine demonstrations that fail to call out Hamas’s terrorism. But perhaps most peculiarly, we also see it in the silence of organisations and activist groups dedicated to fighting for women’s safety.

After Hamas terrorists set about murdering, raping and abducting as many women as they could, one might have expected widespread condemnation from the West’s feminist groups. After all, Hamas had provided enough evidence of its crimes — within hours, they were posting footage of abducted young women in bloodied trousers being paraded around Gaza. Even beforehand, its feminist credentials were hardly glowing: it mandates the hijab, has made it illegal to travel without a male guardian, and refused to ban physical or sexual abuse within the family.

The response among the majority of groups committed to ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) was threefold: to keep quiet, to disbelieve the victims, or to insinuate they deserved their fate. In the words of 140 American “prominent feminist scholars”, to stand in solidarity with Israeli women is to give in to “colonial feminism”.

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Here in the UK, this approach is perhaps best embodied in the work of Sisters Uncut, a charity that boasts its own “Feministo” committed to “taking direct action for domestic violence services”. Until this month, the activists’ work has generally taken the form of media-savvy stunts: dyeing the water of Trafalgar Square’s fountains red, setting off rape alarms outside police stations, occupying the roofs of council buildings. Yet all paled in comparison to the demonstration it organised earlier this month: a call for Israel to put down its weapons that ultimately shut down London’s Liverpool Street Station.

Afterwards, the charity issued a 600-word statement, filled with references to “apartheid”, “genocide” and disproved reports that the IDF had bombed Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital. There was no mention, however, of the 239 abducted Israelis, roughly 100 of whom are believed to be women, or the sexual assaults that took place on October 7. When journalist Hadley Freeman pointed out this wasn’t terribly feminist of them, the group responded by claiming reports of Hamas’s sex attacks amounted to “the Islamophobic and racist weaponisation of sexual violence”. Towards the end of their rambling statement, they concluded: “no people would ever accept being murdered, humiliated, dispossessed, racially targeted, oppressed, cleansed, exiled and colonised without resisting.”

Other feminist groups fell into a similar victim-blaming step. Southall Black Sisters, another charity committed to ending violence against women, did at least mourn the loss of life on both sides, but blamed it on “the Israeli government’s declaration of war on Gaza”. Elsewhere, Women for Women UK, which specialises in helping “women survivors of war” and calls itself a “non-partisan organisation”, has decided to raise money only for Palestinian women. Even Women’s Place UK, once viewed as an outlier for its brave campaigning for women-only spaces, decided to call for an “immediate ceasefire” without mentioning sexual violence.

In fact, the only VAWG charity in the UK to call out Hamas’s sexual violence was Jewish Women’s Aid. “Such acts have a permanent impact on survivors and damaging psychological effects on women, particularly women who are victim-survivors of sexual violence,” it said in a statement. “The public silence from many UK domestic/sexual abuse sector organisations further impacts the isolation and fear our clients are experiencing.”

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For one British Jewish VAWG worker, who has been in the sector for 20 years, the silence of other organisations was to be expected: “I have seen this become a real thing in the last few years — where ideas are imported from America: that if you are white, you will always be the oppressor. If you are working for one of these charities, you are used to a victim/perpetrator narrative which is normally true in the domestic violence context, but not when it comes to geopolitics.”

She describes how, during mandatory training at the last charity she worked for, her team was told that Jews don’t experience racism. “Incredibly, they used the Second World War as an example of racism, but of anti-black racism because of how people from the West Indies were treated.”

For those whose daughters have been abducted by Hamas, the sense of betrayal is palpable. “It is unbelievable that groups like the Red Cross and UN Women are doing nothing to help our people,” Keren Sharf Shem, whose 21-year-old French-Israeli daughter Mia was kidnapped from the Nova music festival, tells me. “It is right that the people of Gaza are getting humanitarian aid, but we deserve the same… I know from a message Mia sent to a friend that she was shot in the leg. She also has a medical condition, and the hostage video showed her after surgery for an operation on her arm. That was weeks ago — I don’t know whether she is still alive. And there are other sick people there, as well as babies and a pregnant woman. Too many people seem to have forgotten them.”

To remedy this, Israeli feminists this week launched #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew, a campaign calling for the UN Women group to focus on the gender-based violence against Israeli women. “The UN Women is turning a blind eye to Hamas’s vicious war crimes by remaining silent,” they said.

In a similar vein, Claire Waxman, London’s first Victims’ Commissioner, wrote to Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, to ask why the organisation has stayed silent. In response, Waxman tells me, Alsalem claimed the evidence was “not solid” enough to warrant a statement. An incredulous Waxman points out that November 25 is the UN’s International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls: “How can we talk about eliminating violence against women and girls if we are tacitly saying it’s acceptable to rape Jewish ones?”

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Gen Z has an Israel problem

By Samuel Rubinstein

To counter this narrative, the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children was also founded this week, and is currently collecting testimony about Hamas’s atrocities, ranging from victim reports and eyewitness accounts to footage released by Hamas itself. Many of those raped are dead or abducted; others are too traumatised to speak. But the story that has begun to emerge is unbearable in its horror — one of gang rape of women and children, of the dead bodies of women being hacked during or after sexual assault, and of genital mutilation.

Nachman Dyksztejna, a Ukrainian-Israeli, is one of those whose testimony bears witness to these horrors. A volunteer first responder with an organisation called Zaka, he was sent to several scenes of the massacre, including the site of Nova festival and several kibbutzim. To avoid repeating his trauma, Zaka recorded his statement alongside psychological support and sent me a written translation. Zaka also provided photographs that corroborate his descriptions. (The editors of this publication have also seen them.)

Dyksztejna’s testimony — reproduced in the next two paragraphs — is among the most harrowing I have read, and can be skipped if necessary:

“In Kibbutz Be’eri, I witnessed bodies of two women with their hands and legs tied to a bed. One of these bodies we found was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed. After brutally violating these women, Hamas detonated the house on them, so we found them beneath a pile of stones.

“The mini shelters scattered from the Nova party site to road 34, shelters that had been broken into, were filled with piles of women. Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked. Piles and piles of women, dead bodies, lying this way. When you took a closer look at their heads, you saw a single shot straight to the brain of each.”

In 1945, Dimbleby broke down several times while making his report about Belsen. “I passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of a nightmare,” he explained. But he knew he had to bear witness to the horror — just as Israelis today feel they have no choice but to report what they have seen. But when videos created by the perpetrators aren’t deemed “solid” evidence, is that enough? For so long the mantra for feminist organisations has been to “believe her”. Yet as the past month has revealed, it only goes so far — and becomes meaningless if you live in Israel.

Though forgotten by the media in the face of more immediate Middle-Eastern tragedies, a UN mission is attempting to restore order. But such ambitions, reasonable in theory, fundamentally depend on the domestic political situation and whether the government in charge is competent or, as in Libya’s case, broken. Such analysis of Libya as a “failed state” is a longstanding characterisation in the West, and has similarly been revived in recent months as an explanation for the renewed flow of refugees to Europe.

But while blaming this on the breakdown of governance in Libya is a logical first step, we mustn’t stop there. That would be to ignore the roots of the dysfunction, which can be traced to the Nato-led intervention launched on 19 March, 2011. Libya’s state didn’t passively “fail”; the West triggered its failure through its programme of so-called humanitarian interventionism.

This isn’t to say that the description of state failure inside Libya is incorrect. It’s undeniable — indeed at present there isn’t a “state” to speak of. Not only does the country contain two rival governments (one in the capital, Tripoli, the other in Tobruk), but a Gaddafi-era general, Khalifa Haftar, acts autonomously and answers to neither administration, though he nominally backs the one in the east. Beyond him, a multitude of armed militias dominate fragments of the country and thrive by running illicit businesses. Terrorist groups and drug and human trafficking networks add to the mayhem. Outsiders — including Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Syria and the United Arab Emirates — have worsened the turmoil and violence by backing different Libyan clients.

These circumstances have made even the minimally competent governance needed to manage disasters such as Derna impossible. The nation’s infrastructure, especially Derna’s dams, had fallen into a state of disrepair, some of it damaged by the persistent violence. This was no secret: Libyan engineers had long been sounding the alarm. But institutions capable of taking responsibility for such critical tasks have become scarce since Libya’s state disintegrated in 2011.

For 42 years before that event, Muammar Gaddafi, a military officer who toppled the Western-supported monarchy of King Idris in 1969, ruled Libya in a brutal, authoritarian manner. But the country did at least have a central authority capable of policy-making and state action. Everything changed once the sudden shockwaves of the Arab Spring reached Libya and Gaddafi faced a popular uprising, which he promptly sought to crush. But as it gathered strength, clashes between protestors and security forces led to increasing bloodshed, and Western leaders, notably France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, demanded intervention to protect Libyan civilians.

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Within a month of the intervention, some 600,000 people had fled, seeking safety in adjacent countries, most of them migrants from sub-Saharan Africa originally lured to the country by the prospect of finding jobs. But economic desperation soon induced migrants from neighbouring countries — the bulk of them from Niger, Egypt, Sudan and Chad — to head to Libya again, some seeking work, others a passageway out of Africa. It did not take long for Europeans to feel the ripple effects. Though there were refugee flows from Libya to Europe even during Gaddafi’s rule, the country’s coast was more effectively policed because there was a functioning government. Gaddafi also cooperated directly with European leaders to reduce the exodus in exchange for cash: at one point he had demanded €5 billion annually, but in 2010 settled for €50 million over three years. But once the intervention put an end to Gaddafi’s regime and mayhem ensued, migrants from Libya and other African countries started crossing the Mediterranean to Europe in far larger numbers, many in makeshift boats.

Since then, this movement has ebbed and flowed, but never ceased. In March a legislator from Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, citing intelligence reports, claimed that nearly 700,000 people are in Libya awaiting the opportunity to get to Europe. Though UN officials dismissed that figure, this much seems certain: whatever the precise number, Libya will remain a launch pad for destitute people eyeing Europe, no matter the EU’s payments to various African countries, and even Libyan militias, to stanch the flow. And the arrival of droves of refugees on Europe’s shores has aggravated the discord within the EU as member states bicker over how the burden ought to be shared. The first refugee crisis peaked in 2015, but it is once again remaking European politics as far-Right parties exploit xenophobic tropes and play upon public anxieties to increase their appeal. Libya’s “state failure” has washed across the Mediterranean and into the countries of the leaders who precipitated it back in 2011.

In seeking a prime mover for the disaster in Derna and the refugee crisis however, we must return to the Nato-led intervention and the mindset that drove it. As I show in my 2016 book, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, the 2011 uprising in Libya was never as peaceful as was widely reported; nor, as was often alleged, did Gaddafi’s forces train heavy weapons on demonstrators with abandon. Gaddafi’s opponents also exaggerated the number of civilians that were killed by his security forces, as did Western advocates of armed intervention. The frightening estimates of those who were still in danger of being killed ultimately amounted to guesswork. (White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross’s warning that 100,000 people in Benghazi — which then had a population of about 674,000 —  would die was an egregious example.) Likewise, as US intelligence officials subsequently stated, the claim of Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN that Gaddafi had distributed Viagra to his troops so that they could commit mass rape lacked evidence.

Still, as the violence in Libya continued, demands for forceful action to stop it intensified, in part because the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), which offered a plan to stop mass atrocities, was in its heyday. Its principles had even been included in the Outcome Document the UN adopted in 2005, its 50th anniversary. The essence of R2P — elaborated upon in a report from December 2001 — was that state sovereignty was not unconditional. When governments proved demonstrably incapable of fulfilling their basic responsibility to protect their people, or worse were subjecting them to atrocities, the international community was duty-bound to step in, using military force if other means had failed. This was the moral reasoning that led the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1973 on 17 March, 2011, as Gaddafi’s crackdown continued.

The resolution authorised a military operation — led by Nato but including states outside the alliance — whose remit was to protect Libyan civilians. But the campaign quickly morphed into one that, whether by design or default, overthrew Gaddafi, who was eventually murdered by rebel forces. The power vacuum was soon filled by the anarchy and violence that persists to this day. That denouement was preventable. R2P didn’t merely call for military intervention, as a last resort, to save civilians from harm; it also stressed the importance of establishing order and helping to promote economic recovery thereafter. But the countries that spearheaded the 2011 intervention were not nearly as enthusiastic about the former as they were about the latter. Ironically, one of R2P’s originators later described the intervention as a “textbook case of the R2P norm working exactly as it was supposed to”.

In the event, it proved to be a wrecking ball that shattered the Libyan state and saddled its people with the task of making their broken country whole again. Strikingly, while the major Western powers vigorously called attention to the dangers facing Libyan civilians in 2011, they do not display the same fervour today, never mind that the confirmed deaths in Derna alone far exceed the total for all of Libya in 2011. Nor have the high priests of humanitarian intervention outside officialdom demanded action in Derna or even publicised its plight with the passion they summoned back in 2011.

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Samantha Power, now the head of the US Agency for International Development, then a National Security Council staffer, visited Armenia and Azerbaijan recently to take stock of the refugee crisis that was created by the Azerbaijan’s army conquest of Nagorno Karabakh, the country’s Armenian-majority enclave that declared its independence in 1992. Derna, however, was not on her travel schedule, even though she was among the prominent voices that called for the 2011 humanitarian intervention that left Libya in the disarray that soon earned it the “failed state” moniker. As for the press, after an initial spate of reportage, the coverage of Derna’s suffering has trailed off, even though the miseries of its people are still very much in evidence.

The humanitarian intervention movement, and R2P, its programme, was motivated by a high-minded mission: eliminating or at least mitigating  the persistent, serious harm of mass atrocities committed mainly by governments. Yet the lesson offered by Libya — and Iraq and Afghanistan too — is that deploying military force in other countries in order to stop bloodshed and oppression can unwittingly promote prolonged disorder and violence, upending the lives of the intended beneficiaries. Perhaps Western leaders have learned this lesson. Then again, the hubris produced by overweening power dies hard. Some neoconservatives and liberal internationalists of a markedly millenarian mindset continue to believe that their earlier failures were rooted not in extravagant ambitions but in deficiencies of planning and implementation that can be fixed. As long as this delusion continues, more Libya-like interventions animated by visions of benevolent social engineering await.

What I didn’t expect was a local food bank, which last year gave out more than 5,000 emergency supplies to hungry people. Statistically, Richmond has some of the lowest rates of poverty of any London borough. If there is a food bank here, the Tories are toast.

Last Sunday was our Harvest Festival. We brought hoop spaghetti, toothpaste, and health care products to the altar. At lunchtime, 60 of us sat down in the church hall for shepherd’s pie and trifle, raising several hundred pounds for the food bank. Every spud peeled, every carrot scraped was another reminder of the failure of trickle-down economics. If people are going hungry in an area as posh as this, I don’t give the Tories a sniff of winning the next election.

Not that the food was that appealing at the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham, judging by the looks of those who laboured through their tasteless Starbucks sandwiches. The tone was funereal. They have lost their appetite, not just for bread and cheese, but for government too apparently.

Pacing about those gloomy halls, it was good to see the friendly face of Danny Kruger, MP for Devizes, and, not unrelated to the purpose of my trip, the son of restaurateur and food critic Prue Leith. I told him I was at conference to argue for restoring Britain’s 0.7% aid target: once an international standard of generosity for rich countries. He smiled at me, sympathetically: “Good luck with that.” The Tories had other things on their minds. Much more pressing issues, apparently.

But what could be more pressing than this? “Do we care, do we act, and do we lead? The promise of 0.7% meant that we — Global Britain — answered ‘yes’ to all three,” said David Cameron in 2020. But the current Tory party seems to have forgotten all this precisely at a time when it is most important.

“Growth, growth, growth” intoned the Prime Minister at her conference speech, obviously pleased with herself at presenting so succinctly the holy trinity of Trussian economics. With harvest hymns still ringing in my ears — “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” — I wondered how her philosophy of growth related to the growth of real living things — being rooted, being fed and watered, being tended. For her, growth seems to be the thing that happens when the gardener, aka the state, stops interfering. But the state of my garden tells me that when you do this, the weeds will always win. It is not insignificant that the people most upset by the bright idea of “economic development zones”, which means tax breaks and planning liberalisation, are those who point out the environmental impact. There is good growth and bad growth.

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To be fair, the Tories can’t be blamed entirely for the current crisis of food insecurity. Putin’s wicked invasion of Ukraine has devastated the breadbasket of Europe. Russians have been deliberately shelling agricultural lands with incendiary shells, burning down crops, using food and hunger as a weapon of war. Because of this — and yes, for other reasons too — 40 million people in the horn of Africa are on the edge of starvation. In many places, fertiliser has become too expensive for the poor to buy, leading to low crop yields. Farmers in Somalia are surrounded by the white bones of their dead cattle. Many have abandoned their fields looking for more fertile lands. But despite their arduous travels, they find the famine wherever they go.

I sat on a panel with Vicky Ford, the new Development Minister and Emma Revie, the CEO of the Trussell Trust, which runs the Richmond Foodbank along with 1,300 others in the UK. A handful of people attended our event. Outside the meeting, groups of young men in the ubiquitous Tory uniform of blue suits and open-neck white shirts walked past at West Wing pace, obviously going somewhere terribly important. But they weren’t coming in here.

I do believe Vicky Ford gets it. She was off to Ethiopia on Tuesday. But there were few answers to the challenges that now face the poorest people in the world. New technology could be leveraged to help, she explained. And the Qatari’s are being very generous too. The Tories have promised that they will return to the 0.7% target once the economy is back on track. “Good luck with that,” I said, perhaps a little too sharply. “Be nice,” replied the Minister. But I am not in the mood for being nice about this. We should be far angrier.

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In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, which aimed to eliminate hunger by 2030. But we are nowhere near hitting that goal: in fact, global hunger levels have risen since 2015. Today, nearly 9% of the world’s population are hungry.

The Harvest Festival looks very different in church these days. Instead of giant leeks and corn dollies, we pile up baked beans in front of the altar. And when we pray “give us this day our daily bread”, we think of combine harvesters in Ukraine dodging enemy tank fire and desperate families trekking across the Sudan, with a child in one hand and a packet of seeds in another.

But we also think of families in Britain struggling to afford their weekly food shop. Hunger has never just been an issue for the developing world, and now that it’s found its way to the door of places like Richmond, the tin-eared Conservative party will finally have to take note. It may be politically convenient to ignore starving children in Sudan, but it’s foolhardy for politicians to turn their backs on a hungry electorate. If the party has any hope of winning the next election, it will have to find itself a moral compass.

Today marks three weeks since Putin launched his invasion and already thousands have been killed — perhaps significantly more, if the latest estimates from Mariupol are to be believed. There are mass graves, bodies strewn in the streets, desperate attempts to survive by melting snow for drinking water.

We have all marvelled at the Ukrainians’ bravery as they fight to defend their country and people. But the price of their heroism has been terrible suffering. Right now, the United States and its Nato allies are focused on targeting the Russian economy with sanctions, as well as sending weapons and other forms of military aid into Ukraine. Both efforts must continue. But there is also a dire need to help civilians no longer in the country — those who have decided to flee the daily barrage of missiles, bombs and bullets.

This week, the UN estimated that more than 2.8 million people have now escaped. With Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 required to remain and help with the war effort, most leaving are women, children, and the frail, running from the relentless shelling of their cities and villages. More are expected to leave in the coming weeks: the UN’s High Commission for Refugees has estimated that 12 million people still inside Ukraine will need help.

European countries have already taken moderate steps to accept refugees. The Schengen zone has dropped visa requirements, requiring only a biometric passport to enter. The EU has granted the right to stay and work in the EU for up to three years. But more needs to be done.

First, the West can prove its continued support of Ukraine by conducting a large-scale humanitarian airlift to save those trapped in encircled cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, or captured ones such as Kherson. Getting them out and to a safe country should be the top priority. We attempted this in Afghanistan last year; there’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same now.

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Once these people have left, we need to ensure they can reach host countries across Europe, especially the wealthier northern European countries. For years, the European Union has constantly spoken of the importance of “burden sharing”. Now is the time for it to demonstrate it knows what the term means. As things stand, the burden on Poland — there are 1.8 million refugees there — is too great. This is a crisis for all Europe, and should be treated as such.

In 1992, after fleeing a forced marriage in Somalia, I spent 11 months living in an asylum-seeker centre in Lunteren, the Netherlands, with individuals from around the world. One group in particular stood out: those from the former Yugoslavia. Given the proximity of the conflict to the European Union, those running from the Balkan states were bussed into the centre from the border. I cannot recall another refugee group being treated this way, but it sets a clear precedent that asylum seekers escaping a European conflict should be provided with transport to reach safety.

Once there, Ukrainians deserve protection and accommodation. Those who fled in the first weeks of the conflict often had friends in foreign countries who provided them with housing. But as the scale of evacuees continue to rise, that is no longer the case. People today are desperate: a family may have a suitcase between them, but no plan for what comes next. This is where European governments need to step in.

And so far, they are failing. This week, the British government announced its Homes for Ukraine scheme, which will pay volunteers £350 a month tax-free for opening their homes to those fleeing the conflict. The response was undeniably heartening: more than 100,000 people signed up in the first day. But even with the best of intentions, such enthusiasm can’t hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick, designed to fill headlines rather than remedy the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Ukrainians don’t need shelter, safety and accommodation next week, or the week after. They need it today. Every European country should be expediting this process. With the recent passage of the European Commission’s “Cohesion Action for Refugees in Europe” proposal, which allocates €10 billion humanitarian aid for Ukrainians, there is no reason we can’t immediately guarantee accommodation for those fleeing.

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If we don’t, in the coming weeks they could be forced to substitute one type of inhumane barbarity for another. Already there are reports of trafficking gangs waiting near the border for young women and children. One man has been detained in Poland, suspected of raping a 19-year-old refugee he had ensnared with an offer of shelter. Another was heard attempting to lure in a 16-year-old girl before authorities intervened. In the UK, meanwhile, the National Crime Agency estimates that there are at least 6,000 modern slavery offenders in the country. “We can be certain that some of this number will be seeing the Homes for Ukraine scheme as an opportunity to turn a profit,” one expert has warned.

This must not be allowed to happen. Young Ukrainian women must not end up in red-light districts across Europe because they fled their homes and fell into the wrong hands. Nato and the EU may not deem it appropriate to support the Ukrainians with a no-fly zone — but surely we can protect them from being further dehumanised by opportunistic criminal syndicates. It is the least we owe them.

And then there is the need for a long-term plan. It is all very well offering citizens a wad of cash to take in refugees, but what comes next? For those entering Europe, the sooner we reintroduce them to a normal life the better. Asylum-seeker centres are often like human holding pens — they provide food, shelter and basic healthcare. But, as I discovered in the Netherlands, life as a refugee is a waiting game. Typically, refugees spend their days waiting for paperwork to be approved, waiting to be allowed to go to school, or waiting to be allowed to work.

It is cruel and dispiriting to keep any human in this condition of uncertainty — and especially so with the people fleeing Putin’s bombs. Once the Ukrainians arrive, we need to rush them into language and skill-building classes immediately. We need to help them find jobs and put their children in schools. This is the only way they will be able cope with the mental and emotional trauma that is the aftermath of the war.

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But we must also start planning for their repatriation, closely tied to the swift rebuilding of Ukraine. After all, most of the refugees will want to return to their homes, if they can, as soon as possible. With the mass destruction of cities and towns, significant investments — nothing less than a new Marshall Plan — will be needed to rebuild the country.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has failed Ukraine time and again. They were persuaded, in 1994, to give up their nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They’ve been strung along for years with the promise of joining Nato and the EU. And they were left to fend for themselves when Putin started to amass tanks on their doorstep.

The only moral course for the West now is to stop making hollow promises — and to start supporting the refugees. Perhaps it is too late to save their country, but it is not too late to save them. Every day the invasion continues, Ukraine shows the West the cost of freedom and the courage needed to take on tyrants. It’s now our turn to step up and start bearing some of that cost.

But rather than go out of business, Nato has ramped up its operations. And as a result, what was once a major contributor to global security has increasingly become an instrument of global instability.

Nato’s mission creep started almost immediately in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union with its decision to expand into the newly configured Russian Federation’s borders in the early Nineties. This was followed by repeated bombing campaigns in the former Federation of Yugoslavia (a Russian ally), and the 2011 military intervention in Libya. It is worth noting that, with Libya, Putin’s stance was not one of unremitting hostility to the West. Russia did not exercise its UN Security Council veto, despite opposing the bombing. Moscow also initially supported the United States’ War on Terror, going as far as providing logistic support for the US forces in Afghanistan.

Yet Nato’s activities have become increasingly adversarial. Largely through Washington’s control, Nato has heightened tensions on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine, a slowly percolating war threat that could well lead to destruction of Nato itself in the process.

To read Western commentary, one would be led to believe that the root cause of today’s current tension in Ukraine comes from Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Ominously, there appears to be a mounting bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill on how we must defend Ukraine, rather than tamping down the inexorable march to war. As one would expect from the New York Times and Washington Post, the prevailing consensus is that only the political, economic, and military strength of the United States can facilitate a diplomatic solution to a crisis engineered by an increasingly corrupt and autocratic Putin regime.

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But as is so typical of most American commentary on Russia, the charges against Moscow lack historic context and continue to mix up cause and effect. As the Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently indicated to Russia’s TV Channel One in advance of last week’s video meeting between Presidents Putin and Biden: “The Augean stables in our bilateral relations can hardly be cleaned out over several hours of negotiations”.

The reference to the labours of Hercules should not be dismissed as Moscow’s fanciful indulgence in Greek mythology. Rather, it reflects legitimate longstanding Russian grievances pertaining to Nato’s broken promises about not expanding eastwardly. These assertions have been vigorously contested by various American government officials, who firmly denied that the topic of extending Nato membership to former Warsaw Pact countries was raised during the negotiations with Moscow on German reunification, much less that the United States made a “pledge” not to pursue eastward expansion.

Declassified US, Soviet, German, British and French documents from the national security archives, however, provide conclusive evidence of breached promises made to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterrand, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990: not to expand NATO eastward, and not to extend membership in the Nato alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact. As Professor Melvin Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, recently argued, absent these pledges, the reunification of Germany could well have marked a dangerous new escalation of the Cold War between the West and Moscow, rather than bringing about its cessation.

The end of the Cold War could well have ushered in a new partnership between Washington, the EU and Moscow. Instead, the expansion of activities into areas where the West has had no compelling strategic interest has brought forth renewed conflict. Of particular note was the mooted promise to extend Nato membership to Ukraine in 2013, along with the European Union’s offer of a formal economic association to then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych hesitated to sign when he saw that the exorbitant terms resembled less a partnership, more an attempt at economic colonisation. In the wake of Yanukovych’s prevarication, protests erupted in Kyiv, centered on Maidan Square, which in turn led to the overthrow of the Ukraine government. The Ukrainian president was then replaced by a pro-Western coalition government made up of his political opponents.

Supporters of the uprising argue that the protests, and the corresponding offer of associate membership in the EU, offered a way out of the corruption and kleptocracy allegedly brought about by the Yanukovych administration. Of course, this version of events conveniently ignores the role played by US government officials in shaping the ultimate outcome, as well as ignoring the fact that Viktor Yanukovych himself had become Ukraine’s democratically elected president in response to the corruption of previous administrations (even if he did little himself to alleviate the same problem, sadly a longstanding feature of post-independence Ukrainian politics). In any event, what has since been termed the “Maidan coup” almost certainly induced Putin to annex Crimea, which in turn has led to today’s low intensity civil war between Russian and Ukrainian nationalists, backed by Moscow and Washington respectively.

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The Western media has rendered judgment: their accounts warn that Putin is laying the groundwork for an imminent Russian military invasion. The tabloid-like reporting of the Sunday Times  confidently asserts that Putin’s ultimate goal is no less than the reclamation of the old Soviet empire, conveniently ignoring Nato’s ongoing attempts to expand its own force projection to Russia’s borders. Meanwhile in the US press, there has been much approving commentary for the Biden administration’s tough talk with Moscow last Tuesday, even from his traditional media opponents.

In response, Putin has demanded explicit guarantees that Nato will not continue to expand further eastward or put missiles in Ukraine that could target Russia. The Western press seems shocked that Moscow isn’t simply passively accepting what it perceives to be existential threats to its own national security. Given the conflicting claims surrounding previous Nato pledges, Putin understandably wishes to avoid any future ambiguity regarding the West’s future intentions toward Russia and the Ukraine, which seems like a reasonable means of de-escalating the conflict, as well as addressing Moscow’s legitimate security concerns.

The counterargument to Putin’s demand is that a genuinely sovereign and independent Ukraine should be able to establish its own defence and national security arrangements; in any case, goes the argument, responding in the affirmative to such a request in the face of a major troop build-up on Ukraine’s borders would be tantamount to acquiescing to extortion, thereby encouraging further aggression on the part of Moscow.

But these arguments are somewhat undermined by the actions of the Biden Administration, which has reportedly told the Ukrainian government that a Nato membership is unlikely to be approved within the next decade. This concession implicitly concedes legitimacy to Putin’s demands, but does beget the question: why restrict the pledge to ten years, given that this encroachment represents an ongoing existential threat to Russia? Do we seriously believe that Washington would have accepted a time-limited constraint by Moscow on putting offensive missiles in Cuba to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962?

Looming over all these considerations stands one crucial fact: that Nato is a collective defence pact, and membership carries with it reciprocal obligations that go well beyond the aspirations of the Ukrainian government. Being drawn into a Russo-Ukrainian conflict has implications for all Nato members. This is not merely a decision for Kyiv to make on its own.

Article 5 of Nato’s founding treaty states that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all its members. Is the US (or Nato’s European members) seriously prepared to risk thousands of lives to defend Ukraine as a newly enshrined member of this club? If the answer is no, then why perpetuate this unnecessarily provocative situation with Moscow?

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It is also worth noting that Ukraine is far more profoundly divided than any of its Nato counterparts. It has a substantial Russian population, especially in the east, many of whom wish to retain close ties to Russia. Accession to Nato, therefore, could well create the conditions for civil war, as the recent conflict in the Donetsk Region of eastern Ukraine has illustrated.

And then there’s the problem of Crimea. According to every Nato member, as well as the current government of Ukraine, Crimea is still part of Ukraine. Therefore, if Ukraine joins Nato, one of three possibilities must follow: Nato goes to war with Russia over Crimea; or Nato recognises the Russian annexation of Crimea; or  Article 5 is a dead letter.

Which will it be? No other alternatives exist. Given that an activation of all-out warfare versus Russia would certainly create the conditions for World War Three (featuring several nuclear armed powers), it is most probably that Article 5 would not be invoked. In which case, Nato as a collective defence treaty would be dead. In effect, those who are arguing to bring Ukraine into Nato are arguing for its destruction.

Senator Lugar’s old observation about Nato has never seemed so prescient. For Nato to remain true to its goal of promoting peace and international security, it is time to put it out of business once and for all.

Here are the facts: in Europe, emissions in 2020 were 26% below 1990 levels. In the United States, emissions in 2020 were 22% below 2005 levels. Emissions are likely to start declining, too, in developing nations, including China and India, within the next decade. Most nations’ emissions will be bigger this year than last, due to post-Covid economic growth. But global emissions are still likely to peak within the next decade.

And the result will be a much smaller increase in global average temperatures than almost anyone predicted just five years ago. The best science now predicts that temperatures are likely to rise just 2.5-3°C above pre-industrial levels. It’s not ideal, but it’s a far cry from the hysterical and apocalyptic predictions of 6°C, made just a decade ago. A 3°C increase is hardly an existential threat to humanity.

Not that you’d know it, if you had half an eye on the headlines this summer. The floods, fires and heatwaves that plagued the world were, for many observers, proof that the impacts of climate change have already become catastrophic. In Europe, more than 150 people died in flooding. In the United States, wildfire season started earlier and lasted longer, razing hundreds of thousands of acres. Around the world, hundreds died from heatwaves.

But again, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the facts: there has been a 92% decline in the per decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. Globally, the five-year period ending in 2020 had the fewest natural disaster deaths of any five-year period since 1900. And this decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled — and temperatures rose more than 1°C degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

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By Tom Chivers

But then, 1°C is not that much. What determines whether people die in heat waves is not whether temperatures rose to 110°F — or even 115°F— instead of 109°F. It is whether or not they have air conditioning. Heat-related deaths have halved in the US since 1960 — even as the population expanded and heat waves grew in frequency, intensity, and length — because more and more people did.

Though climate alarmists steadfastly ignore it, our capacity to adapt is extraordinary. We are very good at protecting people from natural disasters — and getting better. To take just one example, France in 2006 had 4,000 fewer deaths from a heat wave than anticipated thanks to improved health care, an early-warning system and greater public consciousness in response to a deadly heat wave three years earlier. Even poor, climate-vulnerable nations like Bangladesh saw deaths from natural disasters decline massively thanks to low-cost weather surveillance and warning systems and storm shelters.

And today, our capability for modifying environments is far greater than ever before. Dutch experts today are already working with the government of Bangladesh to prepare for rising sea levels. The Netherlands, of course, became a wealthy nation despite one-third of its landmass being below sea level — sometimes by a full seven meters — as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes.

Global sea levels rose a mere 0.19 metres between 1901 and 2010. But the IPCC estimates sea levels will rise as much as 0.66 meters by 2100 in its medium scenario, and by 0.83 meters in its high-end scenario. Still, even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.

Where the secondary effects of climate change do cause catastrophe, it’s often due to failures on the part of authorities. The extent of the devastation wrought by wildfires on the West Coast of America was, for instance, preventable. California has mismanaged its forests for decades — including by diverting money that the state’s electric utilities could and should have spent on clearing dead wood.

Given how good we are at mitigating the effects of natural disasters, it’s ironic that so many climate alarmists focus on them. It’s perhaps because the world’s most visually dramatic, fascinating events — fires, floods, storms — make their cause stick in the minds of voters. If it were acknowledged that heat deaths were due to lack of air conditioning and forest fires were due to the buildup of wood fuel after decades of fire suppression, alarmist journalists, scientists and activists would be deprived of the “news hooks” they need to scare people, raise money and advocate climate policies.

And not all climate alarmists are altruists. Elites have used the cause to justify efforts to control food and energy policies for more than three decades. Climate alarmists have successfully redirected funding from the World Bank and similar institutions away from economic development and toward charitable endeavours — which don’t power growth.

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Is this the end of the world?

By Doug Coupland

This is part of a common pattern: the people who claim to be most alarmed about climate change are the ones blocking its only viable solutions, natural gas and nuclear. This year’s increase in coal production is a case in point. China has been widely criticised for waiving environmental and safety regulations on its mining recently, in a mad rush to meet winter heating demands. But less attention has been paid to the fact that the increased demand is mostly due to climate activists’ efforts to prevent oil and gas development in Europe and the United States. Lack of natural gas is what led directly to China having to reopen coal mines — and to Europe, North America, and the rest of Asia having to burn more coal. Had climate activists not fought fracking in America and expanded oil and gas drilling in Europe, then we would not be experiencing its worst energy crisis in 50 years.

Meanwhile, the organisations claiming that climate change dooms poor Africans to war, drought and poverty — including the WWF, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations — are the ones seeking to deny poor Africans life-changing natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, and funding for fertiliser, roads and tractors. It goes without saying that all those organisations are dominated by rich, white Westerners.

The truth is that prosperity and environmental progress go hand in hand. Reductions in carbon emissions came from fracking and off-shore natural gas drilling; both lowered electricity prices, too. Technological innovation like this lowers energy prices, which reduces natural resource use, moving humans from wood to coal to natural gas to uranium. So it’s better to see growth — such a bogeyman to Team Green — as a solution, rather than a problem.

Instead of putting the brakes on, we should be facilitating more innovation, prosperity and wealth. For instance, the melodramatic UN’s own Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concludes, as do all reputable analysts, that future food production, especially in poor African nations, will depend more on access to technology, irrigation and infrastructure than on climate change — these are the things that made all the difference, last century, in today’s rich nations. Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25% surplus. And even the FAO suggests that we’ll produce even more, under a wide range of climate change scenarios.

Indeed, the best available economic modelling finds that, by 2100, the global economy will be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4°C) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product by just 4.5%. Why kill ourselves trying to eliminate a problem that just isn’t that severe?

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Eco-fascism is our future

By Paul Kingsnorth

Consider the other threats humankind has recently been forced to cope with. In July 2019, NASA announced it had been caught by surprise when a “city-killer” asteroid passed by — just one-fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon. In December 2019, a volcano unexpectedly erupted in New Zealand, killing 21 people. And in 2020 and 2021, four million people died from coronavirus.

While nations take reasonable actions to detect and avoid asteroids, super-volcanoes, and deadly flus, they generally don’t take radical actions — for the simple reason that doing so would make societies poorer and less capable of confronting all major challenges. Richer nations are more resilient, which is part of the reason why disasters have declined. When a hurricane hits Florida, it might kill no one, but when that same storm hits Haiti, thousands can die instantly through drowning — and thousands more subsequently, in disease epidemics like cholera. The difference is that Florida can afford to prepare properly, and Haiti can’t.

The richer the world gets, the better it will cope, then. But the climate alarmists have taken against economic growth. According to their holy scripture, the industrial revolution, powered by fossil fuels, was our fall — and the consequence is, according to the United Nations, “extinction.” The only alternative is puritan: don’t eat meat and don’t fly. There are even indulgences, for the wealthy who feel guilty, in the form of carbon offsets sold through the airlines.

This is the heart of the matter: climate alarmism is powerful because it has emerged as the alternative religion for supposedly secular people, providing many of the same psychological benefits as traditional faith. It offers a purpose — to save the world from climate change — and a story that casts the alarmists as heroes. And it provides a way for them to find meaning in their lives — while retaining the illusion that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy.

Naturally, as a religion, climate change has a fraudulent aspect. Some offsets pay rich landowners not to cut down trees they could not profitably cut down anyway. Exposed, the climate religion seeks to censor. The American government’s Forest Service has repeatedly silenced one of California’s most published and respected scientists, Malcolm North, who stressed to me and other reporters that the cause of high-intensity forest fires is not climate change, but rather wood fuel. The Center for American Progress, which raises tens of millions from natural gas, renewable energy, and financial interests, has been pressuring Facebook to censor critics of renewable energy.

It’s working: few people have a realistic understanding of climate change. Few consider whether, at its current rates, it might be less dangerous than efforts to mitigate it.

Much of his time has been spent in the media, often praising China for its response to an epidemic that emerged last year in the central city of Wuhan. Aylward led a WHO mission there last month and was clearly impressed, even saying if he had the virus he wanted to be treated there.

He has talked in glowing terms of China’s ‘rigour’ and its ‘aggressive response’ in controlling the disease. “China is really good at keeping people alive,” he told the New York Times, complaining that sceptical journalists see the nation as “some evil fire-breathing regime that eats babies.”

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China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

China’s leaders do not eat babies. But they do run a very repressive autocracy that banned families from having more than one child, controls citizens with the world’s most sophisticated state surveillance system, jails critics and locks up Muslim minorities in horrific prison camps.

Like it or not, they merit criticism also for their failure to clamp down on the wild animal markets that almost certainly sparked our current dystopian nightmare — despite the seemingly similar emergence of SARS in 2002 — while officials stymied efforts to warn about the outbreak for several crucial weeks.

Yet Aylward, raised in one of the world’s most benign societies, panders to the crude narrative of Communist Party chieftans, who now pose as heroes of this pandemic. So when a Taiwanese journalist asked about her country’s laudable response to the virus, he paused for several seconds, pretended not to hear the question and then appeared to hang up on her call. The reporter dialled back, but was brushed off with the reply that “we’ve already talked about China — and when you look across all the different areas of China, they’ve actually done quite a good job.”

Such words could have spewed from the mouth of a tremulous Beijing bureaucrat. China wants to reunite Taiwan with its ‘motherland’ seven decades after it became a refuge for Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists, defeated by Mao’s Communist forces. This desire has hardened under President Xi Jinping, who uses his nation’s growing muscle to bully any country, firm or institution showing the slightest sign of support for its minnow of a neighbour. Yet the island remains fiercely independent, as shown by recent elections, and an admirable beacon of democracy, freedom and rule of law.

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Is Xi losing his grip on Taiwan?

By Bill Hayton

Aylward’s response was significant because it spotlights the pitiful way in which WHO — a branch of the United Nations heavily funded by Britain and the United States — has appeased China and failed in its central task to co-ordinate a global response to public health threats. Such is the absurdity that Taiwan’s 24 million citizens can travel around the planet on their own passports — yet not enter a United Nations building. It is far from unique in its approach to this nation, which remains unrecognised by other international bodies such as those governing civil aviation and the Olympics. But when it comes to coronavirus, this approach raises questions over the point of this global body.

Taiwan has one of the world’s best healthcare systems. It has responded well to coronavirus, learning valuable lessons from the SARS epidemic, like some other nations in the region, and reacting fast to keep down its death toll. Yet the country, which is barred from attending key WHO summits, was excluded from emergency meetings and expert briefings on the disease. It has accused the global body of ignoring its request for information when the virus broke out, arguing that this put lives at risk at a time when global co-operation was crucial.

Meanwhile Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general and Aylward’s boss, has gone out of his way to praise China’s “extraordinary” efforts to curb the deadly virus. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response,” he said at one point. He also insisted the country deserved to be “congratulated” for protecting its people, along with “the people of the world”.

Just days later, the views of those citizens in China were glimpsed: the death of a doctor who was arrested for trying to warn about the outbreak sparked a rare outburst of open anger against the system.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Tedros endorsed this autocratic regime. He was, after all, health minister for seven years under Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, who ran one of Africa’s most brutal one-party states, which jailed journalists, tortured dissidents and shot pro-democracy protesters. He was accused of covering up cholera outbreaks. Then shortly after defeating his British rival to win WHO’s top job, he tried to honour Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe by naming him a “goodwill ambassador”. Mugabe, bear in mind, so devastated his nation that life expectancy plunged by 26 years at one point; meanwhile, the elderly dictator flew abroad for treatment as his health deteriorated, before dying in Singapore last year aged 95.

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How did Mugabe get away with it?

By Douglas Murray

This ridiculous idea was cancelled after a storm of protest. Human rights groups noted that Mugabe, an ally of China, was head of the African Union when it helped manoeuvre Tedros into the post. The Washington Post also pointed out that China “worked tirelessly behind the scenes” to help his cause, saying his success would be “a victory for Beijing” and for Xi’s desire to demonstrate his nation’s growing strength.

Does this explain why WHO echoed China’s opposition to travel restrictions in the early days of this crisis and now promotes the flawed idea that this nation is a role model for fighting the virus?

It gets worse. WHO was told about the disease on the last day of 2019. There are allegations China already knew about human-to-human transmission even as it was detaining doctors who were trying to protect the public over following days. Yet on January 14 WHO’s twitter account claimed that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.” Just three days later, one of its officials publicly intimated the new virus was being transmitted among humans, a critical revelation that highlighted the epidemic’s dangers — then this was confirmed by China after another three days.

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152

Taipei officials said in late December they tipped off WHO — through a warning system designed for exchange of such facts — that medical staff in China were becoming ill: a clear indication of human-to-human transmission. But this critical information was not shared, since Taiwan was excluded from a key WHO platform; indeed, the body did not even bother to reply. “An opportunity to raise the alert level both in China and the wider world was lost,” Chen Chien-jen, Taiwan’s vice-president and an epidemiologist, told The Financial Times.

It took until the end of January before Tedros finally proclaimed coronavirus to be a public health emergency of international concern — by which time it had spread to 19 nations on four continents. Some experts defend his pragmatic need to work with China to contain the outbreak, despite scepticism over data. And despite WHO’s sluggishness to declare a pandemic, the body has been hailed for subsequent work to marshall global efforts to contain the virus. Yet when this crisis is concluded, there needs to be accountability for actions that have again damaged its credibility.

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What I learned about freedom in Xinjiang

By Geordie Stewart

WHO was guilty of disastrous inaction over the deadly ebola outbreak six years ago, when its slack approach was accused of fuelling death and suffering. The terrible epidemic killed more than 11,000 people in three west African nations, provoking fear and paralysing these countries, as I saw for myself in Liberia.

Yet when Médecins Sans Frontières begged the world for help and warned the disease was out of control, it was rebuked by a WHO spokesman on social media. Only after four more months did this body, which is supposed to show global leadership, concede that  there was an international health emergency. A devastating inquiry by British and US experts accused it of “the most egregious failure” for failing to sound the alarm.

Reach back further in time and there are other examples of this body’s flaws, not least the inept way it coped with the Aids crisis that led the UN to set up a separate body for the disease. Possibly it was restrained in this new crisis by fear of seeming alarmist, having been criticised for calling the 2009 swine flu outbreak a pandemic when it turned out milder than expected. This could explain why, at the end of last month Tedros, still downplayed the disease. “Using the word pandemic carelessly has no tangible benefit, but it does have significant risk in terms of amplifying unnecessary and unjustified fear and stigma, and paralysing systems,” he said.

Like other UN bodies, this organisation has a tough job balancing a big leadership role with systemic flaws and competing national interests. Set up in 1948 to help the world attain “highest possible level of health”, its strategic scope ranges from curbing smoking and tackling child obesity through to antibiotic resistance and preparing for emergencies. Unfortunately, again like some other UN bodies, it is bloated, bureaucratic, struggles for funds, suffers from organisational dysfunction and is stuffed with political stooges.

When we emerge from this dark cloud, the world may look very different. Yet one thing is certain: this cruel pandemic has exposed with the most terrible clarity that we need a global health body free of politics, unfettered by diplomatic restraints and fearless about telling the truth.

To use the military expression, humanitarian aid has always been expeditionary. And if there were echoes of Western missionaries during the heyday of European colonialism, this was anything but a coincidence. Relief work tends to attract idealistic young people on the Left, but its origins lie partly in the imperial notions of “uplift” through missionary activity, and partly in the ambitions of the Red Cross movement to mitigate the most terrible effects of warfar

The would-be relief worker joined a non-governmental organisation such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or Medicins sans Frontières and would then be assigned – again, very much like a priest or a soldier – to a crisis zone. And, again like a 19^th-century European missionary or a soldier, the decision about where to deploy was made either by the NGO, or by rich donor governments, or within the framework of the United Nations and its development agencies, which themselves were largely controlled by these same governments – by anyone, in short, but the people in the places where the emergency was unfolding.

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That’s not to say that humanitarian aid is ‘imposed’ on those who benefit from it. If anything, it is usually the opposite: a human being in dire straits does not have the luxury of rejecting assistance because of its provenance. And institutionally, the NGOs could not operate without at least the consent of the governments in the affected areas.

But consent should not be confused with having had much of a say in how a decision to launch a humanitarian intervention was arrived at. As with economic development – also largely imposed from without by the World Bank and the IMF – it was taken for granted that governments in affected areas would cooperate. If they didn’t, it was assumed to mean, as it did in the case of the government of Sudan during the Darfur crisis, or the government of Sri Lanka during the Tamil Tiger insurgency, that the government in question was either responsible for or complicit with whatever dire situation had drawn the NGOs in in the first place.

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Don't knock Stacey Dooley

By Robin Aitken

The aid agencies, however, did not believe they were the solution to the emergencies. Most relief workers felt that Sadako Ogata was speaking for them when, as High Commissioner of the UNHCR in the 1990s, she declared there were no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. Nonetheless, when they were in the field most humanitarian NGOs claimed to be acting purely on the basis of the needs of populations affected by war, refugee emergencies, epidemics and natural disasters. They viewed themselves as politically neutral, their actions concerned only with alleviating the sufferings of their beneficiaries.

Those who engage in what, in less linguistically-sensitive times, was called charity claim to be impartial. Striving towards that goal is a way for individuals and organisations to ring-fence their activities from politics. An NGO that renounces the pretense of neutrality might be able to perform many of the technical tasks of a humanitarian agency such as medical aid, water and sanitation, but they would be considered a solidarity organisation, outside the UN-supervised system. That means operating with fewer resources, fewer protections and more restrictions on where they can work.

The vast majority of NGOs have never wanted to operate like that. But working within the system has its own frustrations. It is human nature to want to solve problems, not simply alleviate them. To insist that this is all that can reasonably be expected of them, as I did in my book on humanitarianism, A Bed for the Night, seems to many aid workers to be morally intolerable.

The problem is that there is scant evidence to suggest that humanitarian action can change the world. It is possible that the international human rights movement can do this. But despite the overlap between human rights work and humanitarian action, they are very different activities.

A human rights activist must be a rights absolutist; there is no room for compromise on basic principles. In contrast, the relief worker must resign themselves to making deals with warlords or dictators. Short of military intervention, they must shake hands with the devil if they want to achieve anything concrete.

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By Bidisha and Daniel Howden

In my book, I described two acute threats to the humanitarian project. The first was this alliance with the human rights movement, which I argued would benefit human rights groups, since relief agencies would end up serving as their eyes and ears in places where humanitarians could go but human rights rapporteurs would never be permitted to enter; but would actually be detrimental to aid agencies, since it would endanger their ability to keep working.

The second was the co-optation of relief work by powerful governments because the prestige of humanitarian action was valuable as a moral justification for imperial ventures. The most grotesque example of this I know was George W. Bush justifying the continued American occupation of Afghanistan on the quasi-feminist rationale that the Taliban oppressed women. And shortly before the 2003 Iraq War, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell told an assembled group of representatives of American humanitarian organisations that they were a tremendous “force multiplier” for the US military.

I wrote the first version of A Bed for the Night in 2003. In the intervening 16 years, these two tendencies have come to largely define what is expected of aid agencies both by governments and activists, and how these agencies construe their own project. What has changed, though, is that the context in which relief groups work has grown far, far worse.

The “Global War on Terrorism” has meant that, much as relief workers might wish it otherwise, humanitarian aid is an integral part of the war effort. At the same time, the ideology of human rights has attracted the allegiance of the ‘best and the brightest’ within the relief world. Humanitarian action has always had a legitimacy problem: what gives an NGO in Barcelona or Geneva or New York the right to intervene in Chad or Yemen or Myanmar? The law-based claims of the human rights movement have seemed to offer a way forward.

The problem, though, is that across the globe human rights norms are in crisis. After having been in decline for more than half a century, the number and lethality of wars throughout the world is once more on the rise. And global warming will inevitably result in resource wars in the areas most badly affected by it. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

A world in which Russia, China, India, Brazil and the United States are ruled by authoritarian populists is not a world in which human rights are likely to flourish. Syria and Yemen have shown that the laws of war can be ignored at will, while Venezuela and Myanmar are emblems of the new freedom with which dictatorial regimes can create migration crises without anything being able to stop them.

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Not a population bomb, more a damp squib

By Peter Franklin

All of these developments have made the job of humanitarian relief organisations more difficult, but they have not changed its essential characteristics. It took a migration crisis closer to home to do that.

Much like the Rio Grande, which separates the United States from Mexico, the Mediterranean has long been a frontier between the Global North and the Global South. Given the size of the migratory crisis in the Mediterranean, it was inevitable that the relief agencies would become involved. But in doing so, the approach that had marked the humanitarian project since Biafra was unsustainable.

It’s one thing for a relief worker to go from London to Liberia and resist taking a political stance on the conflict there, claiming only to have come to alleviate its effects. But when the crisis is unfolding in the countries where the NGO workers come from, that stance is impossible to maintain.

Aid workers may claim that all they are doing in the Mediterranean, or on the Italian-French border, or in Calais, is helping migrants in need of assistance. But the reality is that in doing so, these aid workers are taking a political position vis-à-vis their own governments. The “neutrality” and “impartiality” to which relief groups could lay claim in the Global South makes neither moral nor operational sense now that the crisis has come home.

Not all relief groups are willing to admit this yet. But they will be forced to confront the fact that their actions are political. The anti-migrant politicians – Salvini, Orbán, Le Pen, etc – recognise the humanitarian agencies as their enemies, and they are right to do so. The challenge to relief groups is to decide how to respond effectively. And this can only happen if the humanitarian world finally abandons the pretence that its actions are not political. Aid agencies will be political actors like all the others. But the choice they face is politics or irrelevance.

Numinous objects of piety and reverence, rights carry an authority no moral or political argument can match. As a result, questions in ethics and politics to which in the past there could be a variety of reasonable responses are now seen as having only one correct answer. If you find that answer unsatisfactory, you are not just disagreeing with other people. You are rejecting an imperative from which dissent is not permitted.

The position of rights is particularly incongruous in this country. More than in any other modern state, Britain’s constitution consists of precedents and conventions arising from historic political settlements. There is no body of rights codified in law that can constrain the sovereignty of parliament, while parliament itself is governed by precedent and accepted procedures.

The European Convention of Human Rights was incorporated into UK law in the Human Rights Act of 1998, and since then, the judges of what has become Britain’s Supreme Court can determine whether the rights recognised in the Convention are being respected by governments and legislators. But authority and legitimacy still reside in parliament rather than in any judicial body, and the ultimate determinant in any major public issue remains a political decision, not a legal interpretation.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

A situation in which major issues are resolved through the compromises of politics is intolerable to contemporary liberal thinkers. For them, law is a repository of moral truth, which can be determined beyond reasonable doubt. Disagreement on basic moral issues is evidence of error, which law should correct. If you think like this, British institutions are fundamentally defective.

So it is that there are continuous demands from legal scholars and journalistic commentators that our constitutional arrangements be overhauled so that human rights can constrain what any government can do. In this way, Britain can approach the higher rationality that is evident in countries such as the US, where law has a far greater role in the political process.

Jonathan Sumption’s Reith lectures on “Law and the Decline of Politics” present a considered response to these demands. His argument throughout is that inflating human rights beyond a baseline guaranteeing individual security and freedoms of expression and association imposes too great a burden on law, and leads to a dangerous shrinkage in political participation. Effectively, law is usurping politics:

“The problem about the legal model is that it marginalises the political process. When a judge identifies something as a constitutional, or a human, or a fundamental right, he is saying that it derives from a higher law than the ordinary decision-making processes of the state. He is declaring that its existence and extent are not to be determined by political choice. Yet, very many judicial decisions about fundamental rights are themselves political choices only made by a smaller and unrepresentative body of people.”

Here, Sumption captures the chief failing of the prevailing doctrine of rights. Politics is not constrained but confined to a small body of people. Judges are assumed to be able to provide answers to questions that the political processes of a democratic state are unfit to decide. Over time, the range of these questions has expanded to the point that practically every public issue is framed in terms of rights. More and more issues are taken to law, while ever fewer are settled by public political choice. As the empire of rights expands, politics shrivels away.

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By Giles Fraser

There is more wisdom in Sumption’s five short lectures than could be gleaned from reading innumerable volumes of political and legal philosophy that have appeared in recent decades. Listening to them, I was reminded of an academic seminar I attended some 30 years ago. It was addressed by one of the leading lights of American jurisprudence. During the discussion that followed the paper, the speaker was asked how people with HIV/AIDS should be treated. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied: “They should be accorded the full protection of their rights under the constitution.”

While sympathising with the speaker’s concern for the wellbeing of people with HIV/AIDS, I could not help noting a certain absurdity in his response. The seminar was taking place in Oxford, and there were no embedded rights in the British constitution at the time. His response made sense only if he was invoking the American constitution (as he interpreted it) and took for granted that its authority was universal. None of the other participants questioned this assumption or gave any sign of finding it strange. I left shortly afterwards.

At that point in the late Eighties, an American discourse of rights had already displaced the British liberal tradition embodied in the work of John Stuart Mill. It tends to be forgotten that Mill is not a theorist of rights. It is true that his celebrated principle of liberty, which forbids curbing individual liberty except when harm to others may be done, stakes out a protected zone of individual freedom. But the scope of that zone is not determined by rights. It is identified by a calculus of utility, the results of which will vary according to changing circumstances.

What is forbidden in one place or time many not be prohibited in others. It may make sense to legalise drugs if the harm done by drug use is mainly to small numbers of drug users. If the number of drug users is large and there are harmful effects on society at large, the calculus may point to other policies. The background to Mill’s liberalism is not a supreme court interpreting human rights but a body like the House of Commons (where Mill himself served as an MP for some years), which frames and amends legislation in the light of its changing impact on general welfare.

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As an attempt to revive this British tradition, Sumption’s lectures make a pivotal contribution to public discourse. We need reminding that the empire of rights is recent and comes with large costs. Whether Sumption’s argument will be heeded is doubtful, however. The hollowing out of politics that has occurred, along with the expansion of rights, is hardly inadvertent. It reflects the anti-political liberalism that is in vogue in English-speaking countries.

As formulated by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin among others, American liberal legalism understands politics as a sphere of collective decision-making containing only what is left over once the demands of justice and rights have been met. The marginalisation of politics is the principal objective of the new liberalism that has come to power over the past generation.

Of course, politics cannot actually be eradicated from the judicial process. It is clearly visible in the appointment of American Supreme Court judges. Bret Kavanagh was appointed in a hideously embarrassing spectacle of naked and crude political partisanship. But politics is pervasive throughout the judicial process. When competing interpretations of rights are being adjudicated, what is being decided is which among a range of rival political outlooks will prevail.

Jurisprudential disputes between ‘originalists’ who aim to stick to what the constitution was intended to mean, and others who want the freedom to apply its principles in new conditions, are political conflicts pursued by legal means. The underlying questions have to do not with law but the proper functions of government. Theories of rights cannot offer an escape from politics because they are themselves political ideologies.

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What's so illiberal about debating abortion?

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

At times, Sumption seems to hark back to a time when law was less politicised because more scope was allowed to democratic choice. But law is inevitably shaped in some degree by prevailing political ideas, and today it cannot avoid the formative influence of the ruling version of liberalism. In his first lecture, Sumption observes that ours is “a censorious age”, the product of “growing moral and social absolutism which looks to produce conformity”, not unlike the stifling climate in Victorian England after the Evangelical Movement transformed the lax sensibilities of Georgian times.

But he fails to note how liberalism has mutated from being a philosophy of tolerance that allows individuals and communities with different values to live together peaceably, to one that aims to enforce what are judged to be the correct values on everybody. Along with the practice of public shaming and ostracism, the proliferation of rights is one of the central strategies adopted to achieve this end.

The result is a culture of conformity in some ways more repressive than that of Victorian times. John Stuart Mill may have complained bitterly against the tyranny of public opinion, but what he had to contend with was chiefly unpleasant gossip about his irregular friendship with Harriet Taylor. He was not threatened in his career or livelihood, whereas dissidents from today’s orthodoxies may face being driven from both.

The censoriousness of rights-based cultures today is not accidental. The inflation of rights endangers not only democracy but also personal freedom, for it de-legitimates what was once an accepted diversity of moral viewpoints. If only one view of a contentious issue — abortion, say — is judged to be in accord with human rights, all other views are not only mistaken, but criminal. My own views are strongly pro-choice. But where societies are deeply divided it is worth seeking a compromise, never fixed or final, which most people can live with, and on this basis a liberal abortion regime has been achieved in many countries. If the US remains polarised on this and other issues, one reason is that they have been framed in terms of rights.

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Liberal individualism is killing the planet

By James Bloodworth

An over-extended empire of rights comes with a number of disadvantages. It hollows out democracy by removing ever more issues from public political choice. It imperils personal freedom by criminalising what used to be legitimate moral differences and polarises society by turning those differences into conflicts that cannot be settled by reasonable compromise. In all of these ways, the empire of rights has the effect of undermining social acceptance of liberal values.

But the illiberal empire of rights has another and more fundamental disadvantage. It is inherently unstable. There are many ways of understanding populism, but one that seems plausible to me is that it is a reaction against an attempt to remove certain issues from the domain of democratic decision-making. If only one view of immigration is deemed rational and morally tolerable, the issue is effectively excluded from public debate. At the same time, a space is created for demagogues.

Denying expression to a widespread public concern is rarely sustainable for long in a functioning democracy. If those who feel this concern are dismissed as retrograde and racist, they will soon flock to leaders who mobilise and accentuate their fears. Populism is a backlash against the expanding empire of rights and a warning that the empire is in danger of bringing about not only its own downfall, but that of liberal societies themselves.

In the late-1990s, I witnessed North American United Nations (UN) personnel visiting a local brothel in Pristina, Kosovo. Despite warnings that anyone caught frequenting such places would be disciplined and sent home, the men were never called to task, and buying and using women and girls for sex became embedded within so-called peacekeeping culture.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2003, there were 150 allegations of sexual assault by peacekeepers at MONUC (the new name for the United Nations Mission there). These allegations included rape, child abuse and prostitution. Reports also alleged instances of torture, the pornographic filming of Congolese women and children by UN peacekeepers, and the fathering of babies by these men. One case even included an employee who filmed himself torturing and sexually assaulting naked young girls.

The exposure of this abuse in 2004 by a number of UN peacekeepers in the DRC resulted in UN staff admitting they had seen male colleagues exploiting young and vulnerable locals during overseas missions. This sparked the start of a genuine effort to end such corrupt practices. But the problem hasn’t gone away.

More from this author

Britain's honour crime shame

By Julie Bindel

In 2016, there were 65 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse against civilians, and 80 allegations against female colleagues by male UN personnel. There were at least 311 known victims, of whom 309 were female. Not enough is being done to protect these vulnerable individuals from the very people whose job it is to help them.

Some of the vile acts committed by UN personnel are not even criminal, such as paying for sex in countries where the sex trade is so normalised that the punters are free to do whatever they want to prostituted women. I have spoken with several people close to the UN who even use the casual term ‘transactional sex’ to sanitise the act of sexual exploitation that takes place via prostitution. One UN woman told me: “I have heard men justify buying sex from desperate, teenaged women in [African countries] by claiming that they are helping her feed her kids.”

The problem, of course, is not confined to UN personnel. A seasoned aid worker who asked to remain anonymous says that sexually abusing or exploiting people in developing countries is fundamentally inconsistent with the UN’s obligations to improve the human rights of citizens. “But this applies as much to employees of oil companies or accountancy firms [based in developing countries] as it does to aid workers or peacekeepers,” she says. “Often we find that private contractors are not held to account anywhere near as vigorously as are international civil servants or NGO workers. An evening spent in a bar in Abuja, Accra or Baku reveals the massive level of men buying sex from local girls, boys and women, yet men in general, never mind the UN, are subject to very little scrutiny or accountability.”

Suggested reading

Western aid undermines African democracy

By Ian Birrell

In January 2017, UN Secretary General António Guterres established a high-level task force within the UN to identify and eradicate sexual exploitation and abuse. This was in response to the scandal in the Central African Republic in 2017 when several children were sexually abused by a French peacekeeping force that was under UN control. Since then, more cases have emerged.

One senior staff member tells me: “It is almost impossible for victims to report such incidents because they are either not believed or not adequately supported through a criminal trial, and are often stigmatised and punished by their family members and wider communities for speaking out.”

The 2017 appointment of Jane Connors, the first Victims’ Rights Advocate for the UN is a positive step. I recently visited the UN and saw Connors in action. I was told by several people involved in combatting sexual abuse that Connors is passionate about giving victims a voice, and holding perpetrators responsible. Connors has made a tangible impact in encouraging victims to come forward, and so far, has visited the Central African Republic, Haiti and South Sudan in order to train Victims’ Rights Advocates, which she describes as “the operational reflection of my policy”.

Connors has driven home the need for a victim-centred, child-sensitive and non-discriminatory approach in dealing with those who have experienced sexual violence and exploitation.

More from this author

Why tackling slavery is such big business

By Julie Bindel

While the UN is obviously taking abuse by its peacekeepers seriously, it seems at a loss as to how to end it. My personal view, informed by almost four decades of campaigning against sexual abuse of women and girls, is to put in place hard-hitting, no-nonsense sanctions in order to deter potential perpetrators. That means stringent, public and internal disciplinary proceedings in cases where there is any corroborating evidence, and the threat of criminal sanctions and job losses.

In his 2018 report on special measures for protection from sexual abuse, Guterres said: “I have repeatedly affirmed that sexual exploitation and abuse will not be tolerated by the United Nations.” He added: “No individual serving under the United Nations’ flag should be associated with sexual exploitation and abuse.” It is outrageous that that still needs to be said.

The extent of sexual abuse during UN missions is shocking and disturbing. The very men who are tasked with making life better for these already traumatised women are making their lives infinitely worse. The UN must be held to account for its employees’ behaviour. It must take responsibility for the fact that the vast majority of sexual assault and exploitation is by humanitarian workers in unregulated NGOs. Strong words are not enough.

Paul Lay 

Until recently, I had assumed that democracy in the UK was safe and assured. That now feels like a misperception and, for obvious reasons, a perilous one. Ultimately, democracy depends on those on both sides of the political divide – and in the UK, historically, we tend to view politics though a binary lens – being ready to lose. Yet, for the first time in my lifetime, intelligent, decent democrats, such as Lord (Andrew) Adonis and Professor A.C. Grayling, among others, are calling this consensus into question.

This is particularly ironic given the celebrations in the UK of the centenary of suffrage for (some) women and all men. The suggestion that a Brahmin class knows best argues against the general belief in the stress-tested wisdom of a British electorate, which rarely gets things wrong and remains supremely un-ideological.

It is worth recalling, though, some of the reasons women got the vote in the first place. Certain politicians argued that women, particularly those from the upper and middle classes who got the vote in 1918, would act as a counterweight to the socialist demands expected from the newly enfranchised male working classes. And they were right, so much so that all women were given the vote by a Conservative government a decade later. 

Cynicism is one thing, however. Nihilism, quite another.

Victoria Schofield

The idea that the United Nations ever had any mandatory authority to resolve the conflict between India and Pakistan over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir is a dangerous one. For 70 years, the bogey of potential UN involvement has hung over the conflict between those two nuclear neighbours, India and Pakistan.

There are those (mainly in Pakistan) who support the UN’s involvement, believing that it has the authority to hold a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, there are those (mainly in India) who reject the UN’s involvement because they think it would force a referendum or plebiscite on the state, whose outcome might prove unacceptable to India’s national interest.

But both viewpoints are incorrect. The belief that the UN resolutions (passed in 1948 and 1949) which urged the holding of a plebiscite in order to confirm or negate the state’s temporary accession to India, had any mandatory authority, is misplaced. The resolutions were only ever recommendations which outlined certain measures that both countries should undertake before a plebiscite could be held. Once one or other government reneged on its commitments, the UN had no authority to force that country either to hold a plebiscite.

By misunderstanding the UN’s role, alternative avenues for resolution have been not been sufficiently explored. People in both countries have become frustrated and  attitudes have hardened; in such a volatile situation, the potential for another military confrontation remains – most probably  instigated by an act of terrorism using the unresolved dispute over Jammu and Kashmir as the pretext.

Allan Mallinson

The most troubling misperception for me is that the EU has been the both the builder and the guarantor of peace in Europe. 

In 2012, the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution over six decades to “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”, and being instrumental in “transforming most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace”. The problem with the award’s parameters – the prize is meant for those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” – suggests that the EU’s contribution to peace has been greater than Nato’s. Indeed, that by not reducing its standing armies, Nato is itself endangering peace.

I have no difficulty with acknowledging the EU’s role in peacebuilding (a United Nations term), but the absolute guarantor has always been Nato. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty stipulates that “an armed attack against one or more of [the members] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…”, promising dire consequences for the perpetrator. To misunderstand this, wilfully or otherwise, is to exalt the EU to the point of hubris, and to denigrate Nato to the point of undermining Article 5 – which is precisely President Putin’s aim.

Eliot Cohen

So many misperceptions! The largest and most consequential though is the failure to accept contingency. It is difficult to study political or military history without concluding that things did not have to be the way they were. Commanders, diplomats, activists – all have their role to play, as does sheer accident. Abraham Lincoln stops a bullet in 1862 (and there were those trying to kill him) and the Civil War probably ends with two countries (at least) in what is now the United States. Halifax becomes Prime Minister in 1940, as he wished and Neville Chamberlain, not to mention the largest bloc in the Conservative Party, would have preferred, and it is difficult to believe that Britain would have avoided a peace treaty, or at least a substantial truce, with Nazi Germany.

There is a tendency in our age to think in structural terms about trends and underlying facts, and there is something to that. Particularly in democracies, crowds matter. All of us witness large phenomena – the spread of personal digital assistants, for example – that no one really can control. Big data is the absorbing interest of the moment. But it is still the case that particular people make a difference. A Kagame or an Erdogan are consequential people – a Trump, Putin, or Xi Jinping even more so.

And sometimes things blow up. There may have been structural preconditions for the so-called Arab Spring, but surely it mattered that a fruit seller in Tunis was so maddened by desperation and rage that he set himself on fire. There is a danger that we will forget just how contingent events can be. In this centennial of World War I, after all, it bears remembering that had Archduke Franz Ferdinand decided that one brush with an assassin was enough, and returned to his hotel in Sarajevo, the slaughter of millions might not have followed.

Tomorrow our History Jury will select the lessons of history that are being ignored to greatest cost.

“So bring it on – the dull small island life, grey, inward, with shops full of pies and chips and blue passports in our bags. Groan.”

Her words contain a curious echo of something that Emma Thompson said in the run-up to the referendum campaign. After declaring her preference to remain in the EU, the British actress gave a rather tart description of her country:

“…a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island.”

The British people may be no strangers to a carb-heavy snack; but do we really rely on Europe to save us from small-minded, mean-spirited isolationism?

As a citizen of two nations – France and Britain – it seems to me that the latter has a remarkably global outlook. And, yes, that does extend to our dietary habits – we don’t just consume British fare with enthusiasm, but also the food of other nations: China, India, Turkey, Italy, America, Mexico, we invite the world to clog our arteries.

There’s further evidence of the UK’s willingness to engage with the planet in a report by John McArthur and Krista Rasmussen for Brookings. It takes the form of a systematic survey of national funding for international organisations, including various UN bodies such as UNESCO and the World Health Organisation as well as a number of non-UN bodies such as the Global Environment Facility and the Council of Europe:

“The 53 multilaterals in our sample received around $63 billion per year in estimated direct, recurrent grant funding during the 2014-2016 period… In absolute terms, the U.S. is the largest overall funder at $14.1 billion per year, providing 22 percent of the sample’s resources. The U.K. is the second-largest funder at $7.6 billion (12 percent), followed by Japan at $5.4 billion (9 percent) and Germany at $4.4 billion (7 percent). These four countries contribute approximately 50 percent of the total funding…”

(An interesting aside is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the 17th largest funder, contributing more than either Saudi Arabia or Russia do.)

Of course, America, Britain, Japan and Germany are large, rich economies that one might expect to provide much of the money. But how generous do they look when funding levels are calculated on a per capita basis?

From this perspective, the Scandinavian countries (plus Switzerland and a number of very small countries like Monaco and the Vatican) are the biggest givers:

“The graph shows that Norway contributes by far the most per person to the multilateral system, at $399 per year, followed by Sweden at $229 and Denmark at $160.”

Nevertheless, the UK’s record is nothing to be ashamed of:

“Among the top three absolute funders… the U.S. ranks 20th overall in per capita terms at $44, the U.K., is eighth at $116, and Japan is 21st at $42.”

Thus the UK is not only the second biggest donor in absolute terms, it is also the biggest per capita donor among the G7 and G20 nations.

None of this depends on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Indeed, the Brookings study does not include the UK’s big net contribution to the EU budget. Nor does it cover the Commonwealth (though it does include the Francophonie group of French speaking nations). And let’s not forget Britain’s vital role in what is still the most important international organisation in the world today, NATO.

Not too bad for a “grey” and “inward” little island. I shall celebrate with a generous slice of cake.

It was seventy years ago that the former Broadway actor Garry Davis strode into the US Embassy in Paris and renounced his US citizenship. He was a “citizen of the world”, he declared. Nation states are an alien imposition. They create poverty and war. Garry Davis’s brother had been killed in the Second World War. Davis himself had flown B-17s, dropping bombs on people he knew nothing about, and with whom he had no personal quarrel.

Six months after deciding to live without membership of any nation state Davis interrupted a session of the United Nations General Assembly with a passionate protest: “We, the people, want the peace which only a world government can give,” he preached. “The sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the abyss of total war.” John Lennon may have sung about it – “Imagine there’s no countries … nothing to kill or die for” on his white Steinway (yes, “imagine no possessions” too) – but it was Garry Davis that spent his life outside the nation state. And by renouncing his citizenship, Davis did more than imagine. Amongst other things, he invented the world passport.

I am, of course, only half-serious in urging Remainers to consider the Garry Davis option. But then again, why not? Davis’ argument that nation states divide people and lead us into conflict is one that those who want us to stay in the European Union are making all the time. Brexiters, they say, are endangering the long post-war peace. And by re-asserting the desire for greater national sovereignty, we have become inward-looking Little Englanders – or little Britishers – and are setting ourselves up against our neighbours.

Yet from the wider Davis perspective, Remainers are hardly any different. They are simply little Europeans, recreating all the evils of the nation state just at a slightly more collective level. Not unless Remainers imagine the EU continually increasing in membership, reaching out beyond Europe proper – like the Eurovision song contest bringing in Kazakhstan – eventually to include everyone? But of course they don’t. Which is why, from the Davis perspective, the denial of Turkish membership of the EU, the barbed wire borders of Hungary, and the disgusting refugee camps of Lesbos are precisely the sort of sins that one expects from the nation state at it worst.

So from the Davis perspective, Brexiters and Remainers are little different – it’s just that Remainers prefer to be a part of some European nation state because they feel they have more in common with the pan-European enlightened travelling class than they do with the plebs that make up so much of the United Kingdom outside the M25.

Garry Davis may not have been a major world leader – though he stood (unopposed) to be world president a number of times. But there have been several world leaders who have shared his dream. United States president Harry Truman, who helped set up the United Nations after the war, carried around in his wallet a passage of poetry from Tennyson:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, 

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be … 

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1837)

And here is the problem with world government in a nutshell: when Tennyson speaks of a world government, what he really means is a world government with the English in charge. The author of The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, is imagining the ultimate triumph of the British Empire, with the globe coloured completely in red. In Tennyson’s vision, the war drum will throb no longer only because the British empire has destroyed all its enemies. This is peace in the same way that Supreme Leader Snoke from the new Star Wars movie imagines peace: it comes when all resistance is crushed. It is the fantasy peace of total control.

OK, let me wind my neck in a bit. I’m really not trying to accuse anyone in the present debate about Europe of fascism. I simply want to insist, against what some Remainers like to argue, that the eradication of national sovereignty is no answer to the problem of war – and nor is that of pooling sovereignty in such a way that borders effectively disappear. Nation states are the upper limit of democratic legitimacy; they make it possible for ordinary people to feel connected to the politicians that represent them. Even if the people of Sunderland had a vote in a world government, the fact that it was based in Beijing would make any law passed from there feel like some distant, alien imposition. That would mean many of us joining the resistance.

And so it is with laws that are made in Brussels. Garry Davis was a well-meaning crank. But the idea that he lived by was more dangerous and sinister than he could ever imagine.

In 2005, the UN established an UN Ethics Office, which is supposed to protect UN whistleblowers from retaliation. However, as the Washington-based Government Accountability Project (GAP) has found, more than 95% of UN whistleblowers’ complaints to the Ethics Office never get investigated, and whistleblowers receive little support from this office.

Unfortunately, UN whistleblowers are in for an even harder time.  A revised whistleblower protection policy adopted in January 2017 says that whistleblowers face the threat of being “disciplined” if their allegations or complaints are found to be false or based on “rumours”. This means that if a staff member suspects wrongdoing in his or her department, and makes a complaint so that further investigations can be carried out, and then it is determined that there was no wrongdoing (which usually happens as the UN rarely admits to wrongdoing), that staff member could face disciplinary action.

In essence, the revised policy is a gagging order on UN whistleblowers and a significant step backwards in improving accountability and transparency within the UN.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

What has been under-reported, however, is the quiet transition of leadership on the peace process. The United States and the United Kingdom spearheaded efforts from the start of the war until very late in the Obama presidency. Today, Russia, Iran and Turkey are now in pole position, leading the Astana Process. Who can reasonably argue that Russian and Iranian aspirations for a post-war Syria will cohere with those of the West, and especially the Syrian people?

President Trump inherited this situation from President Obama, who did not exert enough energy to end the conflict, wary as he was of getting the United States bogged down in another Iraq-like war or even another Libya, after the NATO bombing campaign. He held fast to this commitment, even after Asad crossed the red line in Autumn 2013. Yet, one lesson that should have been learned years ago – in Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere – is that we ignore (or discount) unpleasant parts of the world at our peril. As the war in Syria dragged on, nasty side-effects of the conflict festered, and spread further afield. In addition to the migration crisis, hundreds of civilians have been killed and injured in several dozen ISIL-inspired and ISIL-directed attacks in Europe and North America. Populist politicians in Europe and the United States deftly exploited these issues to their benefit.

President Trump has in fact continued the Obama policy of taking a back seat, despite his one-off event of launching 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian air base near Homs in April 2017. This was not followed by any meaningful diplomatic push to get all parties to the table and promote a fair settlement. Instead, he too stepped back, while Russia, Iran and Turkey have deftly manipulated the situation to their advantage.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

The size of the whole of Western Europe, DRC is home to huge mineral wealth which, amongst other things, is vital for mobile phone technology, and to a huge swathe of rainforest – one of the world’s most important “lungs”. The scale of untapped human potential is vast and, if stable and well governed, the country could grow enough food and generate enough clean energy to serve the whole continent.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals cannot be met if poverty in Congo isn’t addressed. The future of the whole of Africa is tied up in the future of DRC and it is a future we should all be concerned about.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

Of course you had to click on the piece to discover that Trump’s UN speech had not been described as ‘Hate speech’ by any international arbiter of hate-speech (whether or not any such entity is imaginable or desirable).  Instead the clicker would learn that it had only been described as such by ‘some of the member nations he [Trump] singled out for criticism’.  Specifically it had been criticised by the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who said, “Trump’s ignorant hate speech belongs in medieval times, and not the UN.”  To which one might only reply, as Mandy Rice-Davies immortally put it, “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

The BBC’s reporting (they subsequently thought better and chose “Trump’s first UN speech met with criticism from some leaders” as the headline) was not an aberration.  It was in fact the perfect embodiment of a central problem – a problem which sits not with the BBC but with the UN and simply seeps out from there.  There should be a term for it.  UN-itis, or UN-thinking perhaps.  Because it is a specifically UN-centred thought-disease.

The problem that the UN suffers from today is the same problem it has suffered from since its inception in 1945.  In principle it is a very good thing to have a place where the world’s leaders can meet: a physical embodiment of the concept of the ‘community of nations’.  In reality a problem emerges from the first time they meet.  On the one hand you have, say, the elected President of the United States and the other governments of the world’s democracies.  And then you have the other countries: the states led by countries which have meaningless, engineered or rigged elections (Iran, for instance), and the governments of countries which don’t even bother to go through with that charade (e.g. North Korea).

What are the world’s democracies to do in this chamber when they meet the world’s dictators?  Are they to regard themselves as a cut above the others – as indeed they are?  Or would this be terribly impolitic?  The consensus forever is that it is impolitic.  If the delegates of the world’s democracies at the United Nations were to regularly turn to the world’s despots and remind them of their true moral and representative standing then the business of the UN would break down daily.  Instead a form of diplomatic politesse exists, where people listen thoughtfully to the latest eruption from the noble representative of some satrapy or other and grants its emissions a similar weight and judgement as it would accord to representatives who are elected by and accountable to their people.

Throughout its history the UN has occasionally hit obstacles so grotesque that the world has paid attention to this inbuilt problem.  The most striking was in 1975 when the UN passed the infamous Resolution 3379 which declared that ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’ which was ‘a threat to world peace.’  This motion – supported by a panoply of racist and dictatorial regimes across the Middle East and Africa – was led by the genocidal wife-eater Idi Amin.  The night after it was passed there was a party to celebrate the motion, thrown in Idi Amin’s honour, by the then UN Secretary General – formerly SS Oberleutnant – Kurt Waldheim.  And so the old racism met the new.

It was the UN’s usefulness as a mouthpiece for the world’s dictators that led a growing distaste for the institution in the country which gave it a berth on 1st Avenue New York.  One low point in relations was reached in 1983 when the then deputy chief to the UN mission, Charles Lichtenstein, responded to a proposal to move the UN from New York by saying, “We will put no impediment in your way, and we will be down at the dock bidding you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset.”

As President Trump found out this week, all these now almost ancient problems continue.  The Iranian regime – which has regularly called for the destruction of one UN-member state in particular, and has even done so from the podium of the UN itself – gets to present itself as some kind of arbiter of moral judgements.  And it is presented as such in the world’s press.  Only in UN-world can the American President condemn the Iranian and North Korean regimes only for those same regimes to be given equal or greater weight to sit in judgement on the American President.  And the effect of this seeps out.  After Trump’s UN speech the distinguished British journalist Michael Crick asked ‘When was the last time a world leader threatened to destroy an entire country?’ Only for his Twitter timeline to fill up with reminders of the various threats from the Ayatollahs among others.

But that is one of the things the UN’s strange moral universe propels.  It begins by embedding the idea that the world’s governments are effectively on a moral equilibrium.  And then in time people forget that the pretence is just that and judge the democracies worse than they judge the autocracies and dictatorships.  Nobody expects the Iranian regime to behave well and so they forget that it behaves badly.  Everybody expects the democracies to be better than they are and ends up judging them to be worse than they imagined.

The resulting 1st Avenue cocktail was appropriately summed-up some years ago by the writer Mark Steyn: “It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former.”  Indeed it does.

The UN tastes more of North Korea and Iran than it does of the country in which its headquarters sit.  All of which is an ongoing irritation for the world’s democracies but a tragedy for the community of nations.

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Donald Trump’s UN speech was discussed in UnHerd’s new weekly podcast.