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The G7 summit is a manifest success. The Western powers and their circumstantial partners have demonstrated their ability to engage crucial strategic and security issues, outmaneuver the emerging monolithic blocs, and confront the rising totalitarianism and its incipient power architecture. The invitation of Pope Francis, as a religious leader, a moral authority and a major actor on the international scene, shows a Western world reasserting its leadership within the multipolar world, emphasizing its distinctive historical legacy, and reframing its policy course around the core values which have defined its humanism and political credos structured around the Universal Chart of Human Rights, and the institutions that have governed the international political life since WWII.
The tradition of natural rights (Jus Naturalis and Jus Cogens) was theorized by major Catholic philosophers, and theologians (Augustine of Hippo 354-430, Thomas Aquinas 1225-1274, Francisco de Vitoria 1483-1546, Francisco Suarez 1548-1617, Bartolomeo de Las Casas 1484-1566…) have laid the foundations of the modern State and the international State system.
The Western leadership was highlighted through the presence of Western powers alongside Japan, India, Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Algeria, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which have seemingly joined the chorus despite the political differences and the clashing and shifting agendas. The forum debates have tackled the issues related to Artificial Intelligence and the major conflicts punctuating the international landscape: Ukraine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Political alternation in several participating countries didn’t affect the pre-approved agendas or the structured consultation process. The success of the summit debunks the myth of a countervailing international order structured around the power bloc built by the Chinese-Russian duo. The meeting between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un attests to their growing marginalization and their determination to subvert the liberal political order and undermine its strategic security.
The security summit held in Switzerland brought back the Ukrainian conflict to the diplomatic table, and attendees emphasized the need to move forward with the negotiating process since Russia and Ukraine have tested their limits enough after three years of open warfare. The inclusiveness of the meeting demonstrates the urge displayed by the international community and the need to put an end to this conflict and its deleterious consequences. Russia’s absence requires further negotiations related to its readiness to abide by international resolutions and engage in open negotiations. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still hampered by ideological obstructionism, destructive power politics, and the use of the human shields war strategy. The United States’ truce proposal is unlike to upend the rules of the game in place unless the operational predicates correlate with the reconfiguration of power relationships, the containment of Iranian political expansionism, and the proposal of a working peace plan.
The latest elections in Europe have showcased the upheavals that have taken hold of the various national and political landscapes in Europe. The overriding theme that prevailed over the electoral contests is the unhinged migration dynamics and their overall destabilizing outcomes. The unanimity that cuts across the national and political divides and challenges the inevitability of despair migrations due to State failures and systemic socio-economic and environmental unraveling, to the portrayal of Europe as the caricatured Good Samaritan who tends to the evolving fractures within Africa and the Middle East, and accommodates the politics of subversion promoted by militant Islam in the various countries of the European community. Democratic constituencies through massive voting have displayed their open disagreement with the ongoing political scripts, the bureaucratic entrenchments of the EU and its undemocratic drifts, and opted for a new configuration between the European nations and the European Union and its institutions.
In addition, the masqueraded libertarian agendas, the manipulation of lifestyle, and gender politics are no longer in sync with the national political moods, and the various constituencies have amply demonstrated their unwillingness to adjust to the fait accompli. The political differences between the various aisles of the political spectrum, far from being moderate and accommodating, have witnessed the rise of a strident polarization between extremes: the radical left and its anti-national rhetoric and the National Rights and their emphatic souverainism. Aside from the fact that the structural transformations of the international division of Labor, the de-industrialization processes, the financialization of the economy, the mutations of the workplace and the socio-professional trajectories, and the entropies of economic and social malintegration have, altogether, become the main drivers of political positioning in resonance with the overall social, demographic and professional changes.
Otherwise, the Middle Eastern battlefields in Gaza, south Lebanon, and their ancillary platforms point to profound geostrategic changes, international re-alignments, and crystallization of conflicts around the abscesses plaguing their decaying geopolitics. The simmering political conflicts have lost their autonomy and mutated into platforms for surrogate warfare. One can hardly see how the conflicts in Gaza and south Lebanon are amenable to negotiated solutions and whether they are likely to be addressed as distinctive issues. How can the shattered theaters of an imploding Middle East be converted into levers and platforms for negotiated solutions and reinvented social contracts in conflict-ridden societies with no overlapping consensuses to palliate the absence of common political and civic narratives and national loyalties and remedy the structural deficits of failed states and their self-defeating politics?
