Stephen Sefton, July 27th 2025
Among the vertiginous spiral of international current affairs, it is possible to trace the development of fundamental issues which have not yet come completely to a head but are leading to quite predictable outcomes. The most urgent and horrifying is the genocide in Gaza via the deliberate imposition by Israel and its allies of famine to annihilate a population of two million people. The enormous scale of this crime marks the categorical end of the old trick of the imperialist countries, cloaking and dissimulating their historical crimes of colonialism with the condemnation of Nazism by the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945.
The French writer Simone Weil expressed the historical reality in the most concise way in 1943 when she wrote, “Hitlerism consists of the application by Germany to the European continent, and to the countries of white races in general, of colonial methods of conquest and domination." Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has been the contemporary paradigm of historical European and US colonialism. The genocide of the population of Gaza by means of the merciless bombing of the civilian population, the complete destruction of hospitals, of water systems and now the imposition of famine is the purest and most extreme expression of this monstrous reality.
The majority world observes the ongoing genocide with deep disgust, frustration and impotence because the criminal Zionist regime is protected by the still imposing economic and military power of the collective West. The US and European countries have been complicit in Israeli crimes since the founding of the Zionist entity in 1948. They could force the Zionist regime to lift the satanic genocidal blockade immediately. But they do not, because, as the now Chancellor Freidrich Merz said last June 25th in relation to the Israeli aggression against Iran, Israel does the “dirty work” of the West. The same is happening to unimaginable extremes in the case of Palestine.
The final outcome of the Israeli genocidal campaign against hundreds of thousands of children and their families in Gaza remains to be seen, but it definitely marks the end of Western governments as reliable or credible interlocutors at the international level. In the current international scenario, this reality has its corresponding expression in the obtuse and boorish behavior of US President Donald Trump. His hateful behavior and the constant demented comments statements are a symptom of the desperation that now drives American foreign policy.
The US and European elites realize their categorical political-military defeat against Russia, their definitive lack of commercial competitiveness against China and their technological decline relative to both. The response of the anti-democratic Western ruling elites to this unquestionable reality has been to increase repression against their own populations, extensive militarization of their economies and a foreign policy of provocation and terrorism. Western governments maintain the appearance and forms of conventional international relations while sabotaging and destroying international territorial, commercial and humanitarian law at every opportunity.
The process that the Western elites fear most is the increasingly successful integration of the huge Eurasian region and the development by its main powers, Russia, China and India, of an alternative financial system to the international system controlled for centuries by the European and US elites. This fear lead them to take advantage of their still considerable influence through vassal countries such as Ukraine, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines or through local terrorist movements to provoke conflicts and crises across Eurasia. The most recent crisis has been the armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia which follows a long pattern of provocations by the ruling elites of NATO countries designed to slow down the region’s integration of the region.