Analysis

'Rogue Power All Along': US Has Never Strayed From Belief It Can 'Violate Any Agreement'

Last week, the US abstained from a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza for the month of Ramadan, allowing a ceasefire resolution to pass for the first time. The US subsequently claimed the resolution was non-binding, even though UN Security Council resolutions are considered international law.
Sputnik
The United States has been a “rogue power” since the end of the Second World War, Dr. Radhika Desai, a professor at the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba and director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Monday.
Desai described the US comments to undercut the power of the ceasefire vote as “typical US behavior,” and that “the US has been a rogue power all along.”

“Remember, the United States actually hates the United Nations. The Security Council itself was something it managed to put together with the cooperation of other major powers as kind of a limit on the recognition of the sovereign equality of all countries,” Desai explained. “The US did not create the post-world war order, the United States essentially used everything in its power … which was not unlimited, to prevent a truly equal world order from coming into being.”

Desai noted the US has always flaunted the rules of the UN system because “the rules were made by a body larger than” the US.
“The United States has always considered itself free to violate any agreement it likes, which is why it is a rogue state. But what I’m saying is that it’s been a rogue state all along,” Desai explained, adding that it has violated the “world order” it helped create after World War II “many times.”

“What the US wanted in the post-world war order was to create a world which would open itself up to the entry of US corporations for their own profit,” Desai said, adding that if it was powerful enough to craft the world without its allies “it would have never needed to violate the rules.”

Desai further pointed out the unipolar world the US claimed after the Soviet Union did not last nearly as long as they expected.
Recalling how economist Jim O’Neill's famous BRICS report was published in 2001 and came only a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, Desai highlighted how “already within a decade, the US aspiration to be the unipolar leader of the world was essentially gone.”
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Instead of leading, the US has been isolated because it is acting as a unipolar leader, while in reality the world is multipolar, Desai explained.
So, instead of following the rules of the UN it helped create, the US “effectively destroys the world order it created after World War II,” she said, referencing the blocking of WTO judges that neutered the organization, as well as the UN Security Council.
“The US has never got its way, and that’s what it can’t stand,” Desai concluded. “But you see, as Einstein said, you keep doing the same thing again and again and expect a different result, that's madness. Well, that madness of the United States is now reaching new heights. If anything is new about the situation, that's what it is.”
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