Washington ‘responsible for a global trail of havoc’

The United States’ history of extensive and often bloody interventions in other countries on the pretext of safeguarding human rights and democracy, and fighting terrorism, undermines the rule-based order, posing a serious threat to global security, according to experts.

They said that for a country that claims to put human rights at the center of its foreign policy, much can be said about the extent of this policy and at whose expense it is pursued.

The issue is brought into sharp focus in view of the documented list of US misdeeds and the trail of destruction that stretches from Latin America to Europe, as well as Asia and the Middle East.

Ahmad Ghouri, director of internationalisation at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, cited last week’s visit by Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives, to China’s Taiwan region as “an example of the interventionist policy of the current US regime” despite warnings from Beijing of gross interference in its internal affairs.

“Although legal liability for such violations of the principle on non-interference falls within the gray areas of international law, they undermine the rule-based international order and pose a serious threat to international peace and security,” Ghouri said. He added that alarmingly, the US has been able to avoid liability for most of its illegal interventions in other states.

Citing the 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration by the UN General Assembly, Ghouri said no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason in the internal or external affairs of any other state. He said this is recognized as the principle of non-intervention in international law.

“The principle is a corollary to the right of territorial sovereignty of each state,” Ghouri said.

Australian businessman and commentator John Menadue said on his blog titled “Our dangerous ally could drag us into war with China” that the US assumes a moral superiority it denies to others and is “blinded by its own ideological delusions of selfrighteousness”.

He also noted that the US “has never had a decade without war” since its founding in 1776, adding that it “has been at war 93 percent of the time”.

Ghouri said, “Unfortunately, the US has a persistent history of violating the non-intervention principle. It has repeatedly interfered in the internal affairs of other states to achieve objectives, from outright regime changes to changes in the economic and political choices of other states.”

To achieve this, Ghouri said the US has used military intervention, such as in Iraq, and nonmilitary intervention through placing economic sanctions on Iran and Russia, financial and military support for rebel groups in Syria, and a trade war with China, to “coerce other states into submission or compliance with its wishes”.