Summing up the New Normal:
Chilling truth about our ‘new normal’ as Donald Trump pulls off the unthinkable
As the entire world is left to watch in horror as war continues to wage in the Middle East, there is one very scary truth about Trump’s latest move.
https://www.news.com...56c2dea41497d93
Jamie Seidel
ANALYSIS
What does a stolen uranium convoy in Nigeria have to do with the assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?
Welcome to the new ‘Mad Max’ world order.
They’re violent examples of an international system in collapse.
“A United States-led international order that prioritised rules and rule following is coming apart in real time,” warn global political analysts Steven Radil and Raphael Parens.
“Scrambles to claim control over energy, minerals, shipping routes, and a willingness to ignore the prohibitions of the old order is the new norm.”
The notion that a military junta could seize uranium from a French-run mine in Nigeria and sell it on the black market seems inconceivable.
The concept of seizing or killing national leaders and attacking nations without a clear and present danger was supposed to have been put to rest with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.
But it’s happening again. And the world is barely raising a whisper.
That’s sending a loud message to the world’s miscreants.
“The attacks – and the assassination of Supreme Leader Khamenei – create precedents for other countries seeking to resort to force without consideration for the rule of law,” warns Chatham House international law analyst Professor Marc Weller.
The world stood by and watched as Russia invaded Georgia in 2008.
It did so again when it seized Crimea in 2014. And attacked Ukraine in 2022.
China has snatched sandbanks and coral reefs, turning them into fortresses.
It insists, against international judgment, that it owns Taiwan and parts of the Philippines, India and Japan.
“With its actions, following its intervention in Venezuela and its threats against Greenland, the US has created multiple potential precedents which others may follow in different circumstances,” Professor Weller adds.
“It will not be easily possible to oppose further Russian aggression or potential Chinese expansionism if there are no clear principles left to rely on”.
Epic Fury Road
“Recognising that the world remains driven by power, it is clear that a strict—and I would even say reactionary—adherence to the so-called “rules-based international order” may lead to negative outcomes,” US President Donald Trump’s Trade Representative, Ambassador Jamieson Greer, told a University of Virginia School of Law presentation late last month.
“Do we need to let wars, conflict, or international crime drag on simply because the UN or another international body cannot come to full consensus?
The answer is obviously no.
“But excessively rigid adherence to the ‘rules-based order’ can sometimes imply exactly that: inaction in the face of serious economic, security, or humanitarian emergencies.”
But which laws are optional? Who gets to decide?
Rules require cooperation.
And laws need commitment.
What good is a football game without them? What if a red stoplight were suddenly just a suggestion? What if commerce could be conducted at knifepoint?
“Realism, as its name implies, is the cold, hard truth of reality - it is raw power,” Alexandra Desailly argues for the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA).
“Liberalism and cooperation are, by contrast, constructions. They can exist only if individuals and global powers recognise their value.”
But that value is being dismissed.
By Moscow. By Beijing. By Washington, D.C.
“The United States has taken a further, major step in unhinging the global order,” Professor Weller warns of the weekend assault on Iran .
“The core principle of that order is that no state can go to war in pursuit of its own national policy. Where use of force is claimed as necessary in the global interest, this can only be done through a mandate from the UN Security Council.”
But the global response, including from Canberra, has been muted.
“This reluctance to highlight unlawful conduct may encourage a broader sense that the use of force as a means of national policy is becoming acceptable again – at least to the most powerful countries.”
Last days of peace
“It may seem inappropriate to insist on compliance with the law even where laudable objectives – such as nuclear non-proliferation and freedom from repression – are being claimed as the attackers’ objectives,” Professor Weller concedes.
“(But) the US, and the states that have failed to identify its conduct as a violation of international law, may come to regret the loss of legal and moral authority this will bring.”
More than 80 years of consistent, if unsteady, global cooperation has produced a historically unprecedented era of prosperity.
A world operating under shared economic, legal and security guidelines has produced a surge in technology, prosperity and peace.
It’s been a far from perfect ride.
But the alternative is now looming large.
“As great power alliances have become unpredictable, middle powers and even small states have become more willing to gamble on rule-breaking, because penalties feel avoidable,” warn Radil and Parens.
Thus, Nigeria’s junta gambled that it could get away with seizing uranium yellowcake. And that there was a global black market willing and able to buy it.
Global inaction has made this true.
“The convoy is a case study in how the new international system now works,” Radil and Parens add.
“Resource extraction becomes a central arena of geopolitics. Logistics becomes national power. And the boundary between regular commerce and criminality becomes deliberately blurred.
“In this environment, the most revealing geopolitical stories are not summit speeches or treaty signings but the high-risk, high-reward wagers that move forward anyway.”
Such as bombing Iran. Invading Ukraine. Blockading Taiwan.
International law, treaties, standards and agreements make the world go around.
And 80 years of relative peace prove this.
“Unless we want to go back to a world in which, say, we have no Exclusive Economic Zone … and our offshore resources are up for grabs by whatever country or company has the military or financial muscle, then we might want to think twice before declaring the Law of the Sea to be a fiction,” warns former Australian diplomat Sandy Hollway in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter publication.
Beyond Thunderdome
“The deeper lesson of the ‘Mad Max’ convoy is not simply that West Africa is dangerous,” conclude Radil and Parens.
“It is that the US seems ready to look away while the world moves toward a system that rewards actors who can move strategic materials through dangerous spaces, while external powers hesitate, argue, or ignore such issues altogether.”
It’s a dog-eat-dog world Australia must learn to live in.
And it is more vulnerable to shocks that upset global shipping, trade and transport than most.
“Australia’s sovereignty and wellbeing are at stake,” warns Desailly.
“Protecting them will require belief in the cooperative spirit, which, now fragile, must be carefully nurtured.”
In the absence of a global order, old cooperative systems may serve as a fallback. The Commonwealth. The Indo-Pacific “backyard”.
These “need each other more than at any other point in the last 80 years,” Desailly states.
“If the superpowers return to realist imperialism, smaller and medium-sized states must form stronger bonds to protect their sovereignty and interests.”
Ultimately, order is a matter of mindset, argues Hollway. “We want a mindset in which our first thoughts when the world faces a new issue … is that maybe the best way of achieving our ends is constructive collaboration rather than disconnection, name-calling or reaching for the guns.”
The Trump Administration believes differently.
“International law cannot be a suicide pact,” argues Ambassador Greer. “International law cannot stand in the way of peace and prosperity. International law cannot undermine national sovereignty.”
It’s a quandary as old as civilisation itself.
Desailly points out that it was addressed centuries ago by the Greek philosopher Plato. In his treatise ‘The Republic’, the character Thrasymachus declares: “Might is right, justice the interest of the stronger: now praise me!”
Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill understood the implications.
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe,” he said shortly after World War II.
“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
"Fortune favors the bold, though statistics favor the cautious." - Indomitable Courteous (Icy) Fist, The Palace Job - Patrick Weekes
"Well well well ... if it ain't The Invisible C**t." - Billy Butcher, The Boys
"I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it." - Colonel Orhan, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City - KJ Parker
Help
QuickTidal, on 09 October 2025 - 11:17 AM, said:
