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DMZ America Podcast Ep 169: Kamala Flagging as Trump Gains

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Ted Rall

Less than two weeks before Election Day, polls and a general sense of zeitgeist has many political commentators feeling that the tide is running away from Kamala Harris and toward Donald Trump in a razor-tight election campaign. Is it too late for Harris to solve her big problems: voters who don’t feel that they know her well enough to trust her with the launch codes, and her failure to articulate an enticing policy agenda they can easily understand? Political cartoonists and best friends Ted Rall (recovering Democrat, now Left) and Scott Stantis (recovering Republican, now Libertarian) walk you through the lay of this strange new land.

Watch the Video Version: here.

DMZ America Podcast, DMZ America, Ted Rall, Scott Stantis, politics, political podcast, politics podcast, editorial cartoons, political cartoons, cartoons, 2024 election campaign, polls, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris

New Talk Show: “The TMI Show,” with Ted Rall and Manila Chan

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Ted Rall

As I wrote in my syndicated column for Creators Syndicate yesterday, my radio show for Sputnik Radio came to an end a week ago due to the closure of the station by President Biden. As of last Thursday, however, I am doing a new show, livestreamed online daily Monday to Friday 10-11 am Eastern time: “The TMI Show,” with my original “Final Countdown” cohost Manila Chan.

“The TMI Show” is completely viewer- and listener-supported, totally independent of editorial control or interference, and delves not only into the current news of the day but also in some esoteric cultural and demographic stories that get short shrift in the media. We’re about to start an audio streaming version. The video version is available on YouTube and Rumble both as livestream and archived if you prefer to listen/watch later at another time.

Please check it out!

 

Biden/Harris, Fascist Media Censors

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Ted Rall

          Democrats centered Kamala Harris’ election campaign around the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump’s possible return to the presidency. The issue may not weigh on voters’ minds as heavily as the economy, but it does resonate; polls show that Americans trust Harris more to counter political extremism and preserve democracy.

When it comes to democracy, is there much difference between the two candidates? Not as far as I can see.

Yeah, Trump spews authoritarian rhetoric. “CBS should lose its license,” Trump wrote on Truth Social platform last week. “60 Minutes should be immediately taken off the air.” “We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” Trump said recently. “And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by [the] National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz called Trump’s comments “dangerous” and “un-American,” and of course he’s right.

But the Biden-Harris Administration is just as bad. In fact, they have already engaged in the kind of vicious censorship and suppression typically deployed by the world’s most repressive and dictatorial regimes—actions that go beyond anything Trump did or threatens to do.

The president is fascist. I know, because I’m a victim of one of his fascist actions.

On October 15 Sputnik News, where I co-hosted a radio talk show and for whom I had drawn political cartoons, was shut down. This media closure had nothing to do with market forces or funding problems. With the stroke of his pen, Herr Biden issued a set of legal and financial sanctions crafted to force the network off the air. Several dozen American journalists, consummate professionals at least as talented as many of their peers at “mainstream” outlets, are out of work. As leftists, we had been grateful to land jobs with a Russian-based company.

No American newspaper, magazine or broadcast network will consider hiring anyone among the 40% of Americans who fall to the left of the Democratic Party.

The First Amendment is supposed to protect everyone, including foreign media organizations like Sputnik, the BBC and CBC, from direct government censorship. Because the White House has frozen its bank accounts, however, Sputnik can’t hire a lawyer to fight in court.

The Administration and its media mouthpieces said that Sputnik spread propaganda. But U.S. law does not ban propaganda. Which is good, because who could define it? For my part, I have never been less censored or edited as a cartoonist or radio talker than when I was at Sputnik. And I’ve worked for scores of mainstream liberal and centrist publications and broadcast outlets.

No one, including the U.S. government, accused Sputnik of breaking American law or failing to comply with regulations. The brief against Sputnik boiled down to: Sputnik is Russian, Russia is at war with Ukraine, the U.S. supports Ukraine, Sputnik must die.

Government censorship of the news media is typically carried out by proxy. The LAPD pension fund bought controlling interest in The Los Angeles Times and ordered them to fire me as their cartoonist. Al Jazeera America, the Qatar-based news channel, was shuttered in 2016 in part because President George W. Bush had pressured major cable distributors not to carry it. Because the entities involved were private, the First Amendment didn’t apply. Trump and Biden’s persecution of Julian Assange relied on the fiction that Wikileaks was not a news media publisher.

The Democrats’ attack on Sputnik is radical and terrifying. Acting alone, the President—neither a regulatory agency like the FCC nor Congress acting as elected representatives of the voters—has shut down a news network.

Sputnik was Russian. You might not like anything it broadcast or published. (Though the few people who found it were pleasantly surprised at how little discussion there was about Russia and Ukraine, how it aired intelligent voices censored by corporate media and that it covered a lot of international news you couldn’t find elsewhere. It was by far the most prominent outlet for the real, actual, non-Democrat, U.S. Left. You can still listen to some of my old shows.)

If President Biden can close Sputnik, he can shut down CNN and The New York Times.

Censors’ first targets are always the softest targets: small, unpopular, demonized, fringe. Uptight prigs in Reagan-era America went after pornographers and edgy musicians. Politically-correct college students shout down right-wing speakers. Pro-Palestinian protesters are smeared as anti-Semites.

            As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, democracy cannot function without a well-informed electorate. For nearly a quarter of a millennium, Americans have preferred to have access to a wide spectrum of opinions. Whenever politicians, clerics or academics have suggested that unpopular and “extreme” ideas should be censored and that popular discourse would improve by being curated, censorship has ultimately been rejected in favor of free speech. In 2022, for example, a proposal by President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security to create a Disinformation Governance Board to combat misinformation and disinformation, headed by a woman who had previously claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “a Trump campaign product” faked by Russia, was shot down in a rare moment of Congressional bipartisanship.

            Yesterday’s conspiracy theories—Hunter’s laptop, the Wuhan lab theory, negative side effects of Covid vaccines—become today’s truths. So our cultural consensus remains: Don’t censor bad/false/disagreeable/offensive speech. Respond to it. Truth will usually out.

            After the European Union banned and blocked Sputnik in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, European Federation of Journalists General Secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez remarked: “This act of censorship can have a totally counterproductive effect on the citizens who follow the banned media.”

            I’ve been thinking about Gutiérrez’s statement. Who wins and who loses as the result of Biden’s dictatorial move?

            The main victims are the American citizens who followed Sputnik. They will not thank the government. They will think that all that government rhetoric about democracy and free speech is empty talk—propaganda. They’ll trust the government and corporate media less than ever.

            Ex-Sputnik employees, a brave and talented group, are likely to survive and even thrive—and be even less willing to believe the government when it claims to have Americans’ best interests in mind.

            As my show went off the air for the last time at noon, I waited to hear the music signaling the beginning of the next program, “Political Misfits,” with Michelle Witte and John Kiriakou. Instead, there was dead air.

            The irony was rich. Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower, spent nearly two years in federal prison for the “crime” of exposing the agency’s torture program. Once again, the government was trying to shut him up.

            Biden and his fellow fascists—including Vice President Kamala Harris, whose silence here speaks as loudly as her tacit support for Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon—are the big winners. Shutting down Sputnik sends a chilling message to any reporter or commentator who dares to oppose official narratives. We can and will keep you quiet, First Amendment be damned.

Corporations Are People. Punish Them Accordingly.

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Ted Rall

7-3-14            Corporations enjoy many of the same rights and protections as an individual citizen, the Supreme Court ruled in 2010. Not only may a corporation claim the right of freedom of religion to, for example, refuse to cover birth control under employee insurance, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that the First Amendment grants it the right of free speech.

            As every child knows and Spider-Man preaches, privileges come with responsibilities. The corporation, on the other hand, is antisocial nearly to the point of being psychotic. It exists primarily to protect its hidden puppet masters (its CEO, board of directors and other decisionmakers) from being held legally or criminally responsible if something it does or makes causes harm. If and when victims succeed at securing a substantial verdict or judgement, often after overcoming daunting hurdles, the corporation can and often does declares bankruptcy, leaving its principals free to slither off to their next endeavor without ever being held accountable.

            After a Left-led revolution, there would likely not be any place for the corporate structure, at least not one designed specifically for the purpose of avoiding responsibility. Until then, however, we are left with the problem of the corporation and how it should be modified in order to make it, if it must be considered a citizen under American law, a corporate “person” that (who?) doesn’t murder, poison and steal with impunity.

            The Left should begin with the reasonable demand that, if corporations enjoy personhood under the law, they ought to face analogous consequences when they do something wrong. When a corporation commits a serious crime, what for you and me would be a felony, it should face the corporate equivalent of what we would get slapped with: prison time, high fines, maybe even life imprisonment or capital punishment. The pain a criminal corporation faces, in other words, ought to be commensurate with what a convicted American individual would have to deal with if they were convicted of a legal offense.

            Beginning in 2012 and for the next ten years, Bank of America created fake credit-card accounts under their customers’ names without asking or obtaining their consent, charging them millions of dollars in fraudulent fees and hurting their credit ratings. They charged customers double bounce fees—one for insufficient balance and another for returning the check—which is also illegal. This, by the way, was their second offense; federal regulators caught them doing the same thing in 2014 and fined them $727 million.

            Clearly, those fines were like a cheap speeding ticket—not enough to disincentivize them from returning to their corrupt lifestyle. So what did the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren brainchild that was supposed to protect us from the worst excesses of scumbag capitalism, do this time? They fined them a third as much as the first time, $250 million.

            To put that penalty into context, Bank of America’s market capitalization is more than $325 billion and it has $3.2 trillion in assets. For acting like total degenerate maniacs for year after year, leaving a trail of hundreds of thousands of mugging victims in their wake, they were dinged less than one one-thousandth of their net worth.

            Let’s say that your net worth, including your savings, 401(k) and house equity, is the national average: $1 million. A thousandth of $1 million is $1,000. A $1,000 fine sucks, to be sure. But you can afford it and quickly put it behind you. Basically, it’s an unexpected car repair.

What would you get from even the softest, most liberal, kindest judge around, if you stole tens of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of people? Whether you held them up at gunpoint or hacked it out of their bank accounts like B of A, you’d be lucky to get out of prison before 20 years. You’d be ordered to make your victims whole and pay some hefty, life-altering fines. And you’d come out with a prison record that would guarantee that you would never find a good job—certainly not a finance job—again.

To punish B of A as a “corporate person,” then, you’d need to impose sanctions that looked something like this:

  • Not allowed to do any business for at least 20 years.
  • Fines amounting to at least half of market capitalization, in this case about $162 billion.
  • Stripped of its banking license.

Effectively, B of A would be put out of business.

But, I hear you saying, under this system of ours, as those of us who lived through the 2008-09 subprime mortgage meltdown recall, giant banks like Bank of America are “too big to fail.” They are essential to the economy. If one goes under, it takes many of us with them.

Fair enough. If that’s true, there’s a solution that does not allow rogue institutions to escape responsibility for their crimes: nationalization. The corporation lives. But it becomes government property.

The government owns it, runs it, appoints its CEO and Board of Directors, and sets its policies. The bank officials who broke the law are kicked out. And the government collects the profits.

Nationalization is economic blasphemy in the United States. But governments can and do run banks elsewhere. The three biggest banks in Norway, the entire Mexican banking system, every Finnish savings bank, four Israeli banks, also every Icelandic bank and a bunch of British banks are among the banks that have been nationalized by their governments. Even in the U.S., there are de facto nationalizations, as when the FDIC took over three-quarters of GMAC and the flailing insurance company AIG and a third of Citigroup. Nothing says that the FDIC cannot or should not seize an institution like Bank of America—or any other corporation—if it abuses its corporate personhood to commit crimes.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

DMZ America Podcast #168: Interview with Chase Oliver, 2024 Libertarian Candidate for President

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Ted Rall

2024 Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Chase Oliver sits down for a wide-ranging interview on domestic and foreign policy as well as the role and challenges of running as a non-duopoly candidate, with DMZ America podcast co-hosts, the political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right). Ted and Scott found Mr. Olver to be forthright, smart and engaging, and so will you!

 

Watch the Video Version: here.

DMZ America Podcast Ep 167: Megahurricanes and the Climate Crisis

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Ted Rall

In just two weeks, two huge Category 5 hurricanes slammed into Florida and North Carolina, killing hundreds of people and causing tens of billions of dollars in property damage. The new reality of climate change is that global warming is no longer in the future. It’s here now. The question is: what are we going to do to adjust in order to survive and mitigate the damage?

Two veteran political cartoonists who also happens to be best friends despite having diametrically opposed politics, Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right), focus on the hard decisions America and the world need to be taking going forward. Will some places have to become off-limits? Should insurance companies be allowed to deny coverage to people who live in dangerous place is vulnerable to climate change? What is our responsibility to people affected by these storms?

 

Watch the Video Version: here.

Why Won’t the Government Explain the Migrant Crisis?

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Ted Rall

            I fantasize about a government that really is, if not quite by the people, at least tries to act like it is for the people and thus internalizes the principle that the people deserve to be treated like fully-vested adults rather than idiotic children.

            Nothing about what the media calls the “migrant crisis” withstands the slightest scrutiny. This begins with something that right-wing conservatives and other nativists point out to such great effect that it was largely responsible for launching Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and their hostile takeover of the Republican Party: (a) no other country allows people to enter their countries without consequence and (b) if the United States wanted to keep people from crossing its border with Mexico, it could. Point (a) has the benefit of mostly being true; while we have witnessed mass refugee flows from, say, Afghanistan to Pakistan, these incidents occur sporadically, under specific circumstances like armed conflicts and revolutions and usually involve failed or weak nations in the developing world. Point (b) is, of course, completely true; poorer countries have managed to secure their frontiers even when they were longer and more hostile, as seen in China and the former Soviet Union. When the U.S. government alters its policies at the border, crossings drop.

            America’s border with Mexico has, for the most part, been porous since at least the 1970s. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan signed a blanket amnesty granting legal status to 3 million undocumented workers who could demonstrate they had been in the country since 1982. To obtain passage through Congress, however, the bill was stripped of its original sanctions against employers who knowingly hired foreigners who were not authorized to work. Since 1990, roughly 750,000 people a year have illegally crossed into the U.S., been apprehended by the Border Patrol and expelled either to Mexico or to another country. Many of these tried again and again until they successfully found somewhere safe to live, work and, in many cases, raise a family.

            Joe Biden’s decision to liberalize border entries from 2021 to mid-2024 has proven controversial for a variety of reasons: racism and nativism to be sure, but also the sense that, following the misery of the COVID pandemic lockdown and its associated economic misery, native-born American citizens who had trouble getting help from their government were being passed over in favor of new arrivals given free housing at hotels and preloaded debt cards, as well as smartphones. It came as little surprise that Donald Trump and the Republicans exploited these resentments by promising “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”

            “Open borders,” as Republicans call them, is a misnomer. Economic migrants, political refugee applicants and others who seek irregular entry via land across the Southern border are forced to sneak across all or most of Mexico and endure numerous physical hardships. The system during most of the Biden years was akin to Ellis Island, the iconic immigration processing center through which more than 12 million new Americans were admitted from major nations of origin like Ireland, Germany, Italy and France. These immigrants, who are the ancestors of most white Americans living in the U.S. today, boarded ships without holding an entry visa, hoping for the best. Upon arrival, they were quickly processed through medical checks and questionnaires and released into New York City, where many initially gravitated toward such communities as the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Similarly, Biden-era migrants appeared at border entry points like Eagle Pass, Texas, made appointments with U.S. Customs and Border Protection using a smartphone app, presented themselves when told to do so and were processed and released into the U.S. These are asylum applicants, not illegal immigrants who snuck in by avoiding contact with border patrols and local police.

            As was the case a hundred years ago, this rapid influx of millions of people has caused consternation that might be alleviated if the federal government were to create a more efficient system that managed migrant flows more intelligently, addressed Americans’ concerns, prioritized Americans’ needs and, most of all, explained the rationale for a liberal immigration policy.

            U.S. immigration has long been characterized by a series of fits and starts, in which long periods of relatively low immigration are suddenly interrupted by massive admissions, which prompt backlashes that result in yet another set of restrictions. Flows should be managed holistically and consistently, with a set number of people permitted to apply both at land crossings and at U.S. embassies and consulates overseas each year.

            Rather than allow clusters of immigration to aggregate in communities that may or may not be able to handle them, as we’ve seen in Springfield, Ohio (a city of 40,000 that took in 20,000 Haitian migrants in two years), the U.S. government should follow the example of the numerous countries that have bureaucracies designed to manage where new arrivals wind up.

            Though complaints that recent immigrants receive generous government resources have been overblown—a much-criticized pilot program in which New York City issued gift cards for food purchases amounted to $35 per day for a family of four, hardly enough to eat well to say the least—Americans with longstanding citizenship ought not to have to make do with paltry FEMA grants of up to $750 after losing their homes in a natural disaster. Nor should they be homeless, or see their unemployment benefits run out, or be denied job retraining.

            Most of all, most people would understand if the president or another top government official were to explain, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did with his “fireside chats” in the 1930s, how immigration not only benefits the economy but is absolutely necessary to sustain our current economic model in the light of our national fertility crisis. Until American families start having bigger families and giving birth to more babies, we are going to have to import them from abroad.

            And from a Left perspective, taking in a generous number of people who seek to enter the United States enables the fundamental human right of movement, which is a basic freedom for a species that wandered across great distances for most of our existence, as well as a move toward the world we desire, one in which we are equal and free to live where we please regardless of concern for the arbitrary political borders of randomly-evolved nation-states.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The Strategic Voting Fallacy

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Ted Rall

         Many people who typically vote Republican but dislike Trump, and others who typically vote Democratic but dislike Harris, are wrestling with a fundamental dilemma of the voter who lives in a duopoly.

A vote is an endorsement. A vote declares to the world: “I approve of this candidate.” There is no half-vote. A vote is binary: yes or no. If your vote helps someone win who goes on to do something awful, their sins are partly your fault.

If there are only two major-party candidates, and both seem likely to commit an atrocity if they win, the moral and rational alternative is clear: vote for a third-party or independent candidate whose odds of carrying out a heinous act appear to be low, or boycott the election.

For the 61% of Americans who oppose sending more weapons to Israel, this condition has been met. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Both have promised to send more bombs, more missiles, more money and more intelligence to the Israelis. A vote for Harris is a vote for more genocide. So is a vote for Trump. If you vote for either the Democrat or the Republican, the blood of every Palestinian who dies or gets maimed after January 20th will be on you.

I am not saying this to make you feel guilty. I am merely stating a fact.

If they care to vote at all, pro-Palestinian voters can support Jill Stein, Cornel West, Chase Oliver or someone else. But then they must contend with the strategic voting fallacy.

Strategic voting, or “lesser of two evils” voting, is the act of casting a ballot in favor of a candidate you do not support, in order to prevent a second candidate you oppose more, from winning. By definition, because non-duopoly candidates are unlikely to win, a vote for someone other than a Democrat or a Republican is a “wasted” vote that, de facto, supports the major-party candidate you hate most. Aside from the self-alienating cognitive dissonance of consciously endorsing a politician whose policies of which you do not approve, strategic voting is deeply illogical and mathematically ridiculous.

First and foremost, it is statistically impossible—beyond the point of winning-the-Lotto odds—that your single vote could ever change the outcome of an American election at the state or national level. This is not to say that an election can’t be close. The 2000 Bush v. Gore presidential race came down to 537 votes that determined the pivotal state of Florida; the 1916 contest between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Hughes boiled down to 3,420 votes in California. But the odds that one vote can change the result of an American presidential election are so vanishingly small as not to be worthy of serious consideration by anyone with more than two IQ points to rub together.

A statistical analysis of the 2008 election published in the academic journal Economic Inquiry by Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver and Aaron Edlin proves this point. “One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied in that event,” the authors noted. “On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election.”

If you vote to “make a difference,” you’d get better results from playing a classic Pick-6 Lotto game; odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 32 million. Unlike voting, it pays.

True, your vote might determine who sits in the Oval Office the next four years. It’s never happened before. It’s never even been close. Statistically, 537 votes in Florida was not close. Would you go to a job interview where your odds of getting hired were 1-in-537? It would be irrational, just as it would be crazy to avoid flying—even though the odds of dying in a plane crash (1 in 11 million) are much higher than your vote tipping a national election.

Strategic voting requires precise analysis of perfectly accurate polls capped by a completely subjective determination of whether a candidate has a viable chance of winning.

Setting aside the challenges faced by pollsters trying to sample a population’s opinions from mobile phones rather than landlines, a problem illustrated by the many polling organizations who failed to predict Trump’s 2016 victory, high-quality polls are subject to a margin of error of several percentage points. In a tight race, in which the margin of a win can be within that margin, a poll is as useful as a coin flip. Finally, strategic voters must ask themselves: assuming I can find a poll that I totally believe, where is the numerical tipping point where a race becomes so skewed in my state that I should free to vote my conscience, i.e. for a third-party or independent candidate, or not at all?

In Montana, where Trump leads Harris 56-39, it’s safe to say the former president has the state in the bag. Montana voters tempted to cast a protest vote against the Israelis’ genocide in Gaza needn’t lose much sleep by filling in the oval for Jill Stein. It’s a different affair in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Harris leads Trump by one point, 49-48, well within the margin of error—that is, of course, assuming these polls are right and that, if they are, they won’t change much between now and when you cast your vote.

What about a state where one candidate leads 55-45? A ten-point difference would be hard to overcome, and it wouldn’t be considered a swing state, but it’s not impossible—such things have happened before.

This is where the absurdity of strategic voting escalates even further.

What constitutes a close race? A close-enough race to believe (falsely, as Nate Silver and his friends proved in their study that your single vote could affect the outcome)? 51-49? Of course. (Though it’s not true.) 75-25. Of course not. (But that’s no less true than the 51-49 scenario.) 53-47? Maybe?

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

It’s Time to End Our Cynical Policy of International Disruption

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Ted Rall

           Mainstream American political leaders regularly argue that the United States adheres to, defends and promotes a “rules-based international order.” What’s that? It’s rarely defined.

            The best summary I’ve been able to find was articulated by John Ikenberry of Princeton University, introduced by The Financial Times as “an influential scholar whose former pupils populate the American government,” in 2023. “I think the rules-based order has a history that predates the U.S. and even predates 1945 and the great order-building efforts after World War II,” Ikenberry said.

He continues: “But if you were to try to identify what open rules-based order is, it’s a set of commitments by states to operate according to principles, rules and institutions that provide governance that is not simply dictated by who is most powerful. So it’s a set of environmental conditions for doing business—contracts, multilateral institutions—and it comes in many layers. At the deepest level it’s really the system of sovereignty. It’s the belief that the world has a kind of foundation built around self-determined states that respect each other. On top of that, you have these layers of treaties and institutions culminating really in the United Nations system, building rules and principles around aspirations for the inclusion of all peoples and societies. Everybody gets a seat at the table that has a membership based on statehood. And then on top of that, even more work-oriented rules and institutions that came out of World War II that are based on problem-solving, regulating interdependence: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO.”

If this is the rules-based international order, the U.S. is working overtime to undermine it.

At the core of an arrangement in which “self-determined states…respect each other” is formal diplomatic recognition. Countries open embassies and consulates on one another’s territory, exchange ambassadors and issue tourist and work visas so their citizens can visit one another. Most essentially, they acknowledge each other’s territorial integrity, right to exist and right to govern their populations as each sees fit.

At present, the United States neither maintains nor seeks diplomatic relations with North Korea, Syria, Iran, or Afghanistan. As the more powerful potential partner, the bulk of the blame and responsibility for the lack of ties lies with the U.S. Beginning in the 1950s, for example, the U.S. unilaterally imposed crippling economic sanctions against the DPRK for having committed the sin of not losing the Korean War. U.S. sanctions against Iran date to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the American-backed dictator, the Shah. After negotiating its withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, the U.S. closed its massive embassy in Kabul, ending consular services. (The U.S. also does not have formal diplomatic relations with isolationist Bhutan, but ties are friendly.)

The U.S. seems to view the establishment of diplomatic relations as a reward for good behavior. In fact, their purpose is to maintain means of communications to resolve conflicts and keep one another informed as needed. If the U.S. wanted diplomatic relations with the aforementioned countries, it could have them.

For “everybody [to get] a seat at the table that has a membership based on statehood,” the goal is a world in which every person on the planet has citizenship of an internationally-recognized nation-state. However, millions of people live in places that, as far as the U.N. and other international governing bodies are concerned, might as well as not exist, like Kashmir, Palestine, Taiwan and post-Soviet frozen-conflict zones like Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the Transnistria. Along with stateless people like the Roma in Europe, the Galjeel of Kenya and Burkino Fasans living in Côte d’Ivoire, the U.N. estimates that 4.4 million people on the planet don’t have a legal home and live in diplomatic purgatory.

The U.S.’ geopolitical policy of regional disruption—divide and conquer or at least divide and keep weak—helps maintain this state of affairs. The U.S. maintains favorable economic and political ties to smaller nation-states that feel threatened by their larger neighbors all over the world, especially outside Europe. Though the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign entity and officially maintains that it belongs to China, America sends billions of dollars of year in cash and weapons to Taiwan to try to keep China off-balance. U.S. military aid props up the government of Ukraine, which stripped many residents of the eastern, ethnic-Russian Donbas of citizenship, rendering them stateless until Russia annexed the region following the start of the war in 2022.

It goes without saying that the U.S. does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. It invaded Liberia in 1997, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Haiti in 2004, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2014, Yemen in 2015…the list goes on. None of these interventions were justified or legally approved by Congress.

            Further to the U.S.’ bullying other countries, it routinely weaponizes “institutions that came out of World War II that are based on problem-solving, regulating interdependence: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO.” In 2014, for example, President Barack Obama ejected Russia from the G8 group of the world’s biggest economies—now it’s the G7—to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea, despite reports by international observers and Western pollsters that the Crimean plebiscite vote was free and fair. The IMF kicked out Russia from consultation meetings after the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war began but those talks are now set to resume. And Russia was banned from the 2024 Paris Olympics. These sanctions all stemmed from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If invading another country is just cause for trying to turn a country into a pariah, however, what could be more ridiculous than the effort being led by the U.S.—which has invaded 10 countries over the last 20 years, most of them distant from its own borders.

            Mahatma Gandhi, asked what he thought of Western civilization, supposedly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” A rules-based international order? It would be a good idea—if there were some way for the U.S. to stop trying to kill it in its crib.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

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