US Hegemony In The Middle East Is Over | West Asia Will Define Its Own Future | US Amb. Chas Freeman

## The end of an era — and what comes next The conversation captured in the livestream crackled with a single, unsettling diagnosis: the era of unquestioned U.S. hegemony and the stabilizing fiction of a “rules‑based order” is unraveling. What used to pass for global governance—an American-centered set of norms, institutions and security guarantees—has been exposed as selective, self‑serving, and increasingly brittle. That rupture is not a single policy failure but a convergent set of dynamics: economic coercion rebranded as policy, military interventions justified by shifting narratives, and political elites who simultaneously proclaim universal principles and exempt themselves from them. The urgent question the discussion presses on is this: if the old scaffolding that held the transatlantic and global order together is failing, who shapes the emerging architecture — and on what terms? ## The rules‑based order: aspiration, hypocrisy, collapse A central thread through the exchange was a sharp distinction between “international law” and the chimeric “rules‑based order.” International law is codified, contested through institutions and legal processes; the rules‑based order, as the participants argued, has functioned as a political shorthand for U.S. dominance—an assortment of rules crafted, enforced, and waived by the hegemon. That asymmetry has always been present, yet recent decades have made the contradiction more visible. Where once the West could point to a blanket of public goods—security guarantees, access to markets, technological interconnection—as the price of acquiescence to American primacy, today those goods are being weaponized against allies and rivals alike. The discussion made plain how quickly instruments of integration—trade, finance, supply chains, and digital platforms—morphed into leverage. Economic interdependence that once promised mutual gain is now framed as a vulnerability to be exploited. When tariffs, sanctions and financial exclusion become regular tools of statecraft, the veneer of impartial norms peels away: selective enforcement reveals power politics. The result is a legitimacy crisis. Nations that once accepted a benevolent‑hegemon bargain are now reassessing whether that bargain still pays. ## Europe’s reckoning: from allied certainty to strategic reorientation Europe’s growing discomfort was a recurring motif. The conversation suggested that many European capitals are experiencing the late waking of a long‑running realization: the old transatlantic compact is not immutable. Leaders who once assumed the U.S. as a permanent security anchor are now publicly contemplating greater strategic autonomy. This isn’t simply rhetorical. The EU, Canada and other partners are discovering the political and material costs of being enmeshed in a system that can turn coercive tools inward. The exchange also highlighted a kind of cognitive dissonance in European policymaking. On the one hand, there is a renewed emphasis on international law and multilateralism when security matters touch Europe directly. On the other, there remains a tolerance for selective exceptions—recognitions, interventions and unilateral moves made for perceived strategic gain. That double standard breeds cynicism at home and instability abroad. If Europe seeks relevance in a multipolar environment, it will have to translate rhetorical independence into new institutions and realistic policies that accept trade‑offs rather than relying on American umbrellas. ## Narratives, contradictions and the politics of power A striking theme was the role of narrative in sustaining power despite glaring contradictions. The conversation compared the contemporary politics of fear and righteousness to earlier political moments: leaders issuing categorical moral claims while simultaneously exempting themselves from rules they promote. Whether the subject was Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, or Latin America, the pattern is familiar: actions framed as moral imperatives, inconvenient nuances ignored, and dissent dismissed as disloyalty. This rhetorical architecture depends on asking citizens to accept mutually incompatible assertions as part of a unitary truth. The example of public health messaging during the COVID pandemic was invoked as emblematic: claims that vaccines were both fully protective and dependent on universal uptake created an impossible logic that demanded faith. Likewise, the public is asked to accept that an adversary is both pathetic and existentially dangerous at the same moment. That cognitive contortion is not accidental. It reveals how power sometimes governs by manufacturing unavoidable contradictions and then demanding compliance with the simplified political script. The discussion also underscored how propaganda and poor persuasive skills compound the problem. When elites deploy heavy‑handed narratives without credible, consistent evidence or plausible policy frameworks, they erode trust. The consequence is twofold: adversaries gain moral and diplomatic space, and domestic audiences grow skeptical of grand claims about security and morality. ## Weaponizing economics: tariffs, sanctions and the erosion of interdependence One of the more practical and immediate causes of the system’s stress is the rise of economic coercion as routine statecraft. Tariffs, sanctions and controls on financial infrastructure now appear as default instruments in geopolitical disputes. This weaponization creates cascading costs: consumers pay higher prices, producers lose market access, and third‑party actors reorient supply chains to avoid entanglement. The livestream’s interlocutors observed another dynamic: the use of these tools against allied states reveals the fragility of the so‑called gated community. When countries like Switzerland or EU members are targeted with tariffs for political disobedience, the limits of American-led economic governance become clearer. At the same time, states targeted by these measures are incentivized to cultivate alternative market and financial channels. The longer this pattern persists, the more the integrated system atomizes into competing blocs and resilient hedging networks—precisely the outcome proponents of global integration warned against. Economics is not just a blunt instrument; it is also a testing ground. Coercive measures gauge the depth of allies’ commitments, the elasticity of supply chains and the durability of partnerships. But every test that succeeds at short‑term leverage loosens the long‑term ties that once underpinned a relatively stable international order. ## Color revolutions, covert influence and the agency question The debate returned repeatedly to interventions labeled as “color revolutions” and the broader toolkit of influence in contested states. The participants emphasized an important normative distinction: sovereignty and the right to internal political evolution do not vanish because external actors have preferences. At the same time, patterns of external support for dissidents, media campaigns and material aid often bear the imprint of strategic calculation. One lesson drawn from the discussion is that reforms perceived as authentic and sustainable must have domestic roots. External regime change operations, even when cloaked in human rights rhetoric, often produce clients rather than genuine, organic transformation. That is not to dismiss the moral imperative of supporting rights and democratic contestation where possible, but it is a caution against naïvely betting on external sponsorship as the primary engine of change. In short, agency matters: durable political shifts require internal legitimacy and social coalitions, not just external alignment with foreign patrons. ## West Asia and the chance for regional autonomy A crucial part of the conversation looked beyond the NATO‑Atlantic story to the Middle East / West Asia. The region’s states are not passive recipients of great‑power designs; th

End Of Hegemony In Davos: Live Stream With Michael Rossi Join me for a live-streatm with Prof. Michael Rossi for a breakdown of the Davos (WEF) madness, where we saw several Western leaders announcing the end of the US-led global order. #Pascal And I believe we are live. Welcome, everybody, to our first live stream in four years on neutrality studies. My name is Pascal Lottaz, and I am joined today by my friend and colleague, Professor Michael Rossi, who's teaching political science all over the place in the United States at the moment. Michael, welcome. #Michael Rossi Pascal, always a pleasure. I'm glad we're doing this live—sort of an impromptu conversation we're having a little late here on the New York side. It's about 9:30 p.m. What is it, about 9:30 a.m. Japan time? #Pascal Yeah. No, no, it's actually 11:30 in Japan—very, very reasonable. Thank you for doing this in New York's late evening, and for the rest of the United States, I believe it's a little bit earlier. You know, managing the time zones is chaos. #Michael Rossi Yes, yes, it's sub-zero here in New York. We're about to get another whopping amount of snow this coming weekend—nothing like Kamchatka that we saw in Russia. But yes, always glad, always a pleasure to be here. And we've got a lot to talk about. #Pascal We've got a lot to talk about. And just as an aside, thank you very much to everyone watching from Norway, and thanks for your comments in the chat. So, Michael, we want to discuss what happened in Davos. A lot was said there. I think the first thing that caught my attention this week was how the Prime Minister of Canada—what’s his name again? Mark Carney? Carney—actually said out loud what the game is all about. I don’t know if you can see this very well, but let me just try to play it for a second. -- 1 of 22 -- #Mark Carney Yeah. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon—tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. #Pascal Isn't this extremely rich—coming from a Canadian prime minister? But Michael, your thoughts? #Michael Rossi Well, it's great—too bad it's 20 years too late. I mean, I think most of these Davos forums kind of come and go over the years. One thing I have to give credit to my country's current administration for is that they make these routine conferences—whether it's Davos, the Munich Security Conference, or the G7—interesting, because they say the most outlandishly provocative things, just bold-faced realizations of where we are in the world today. So, you know, Carney’s statement—I have to give him credit. I absolutely need to give him credit. He’s not calling out the United States, but he’s clearly making a reference to it. But the thing I took away from all of that, aside from its honesty, is how selective this rules-based order happens to be. And it’s not something that was ruptured under Trump; it’s just that Trump made it so blatantly front and center that it’s hard for people within Borrell’s “beautiful garden” to ignore it at this point. #Pascal Yeah. And you know what? What struck me about this is that he basically said, “Oh, we knew the system was unfair. We knew that we were hypocrites, but it served a purpose.” And, you know, the rest is that the U.S. was providing global goods—stability, interconnection, business. So we took it that it wasn’t quite fair, but it was fine. But now, now that it’s being unfair to us—now that they’re turning the weapons against us—well, now it’s not working anymore. And we must give him credit: finally, somebody actually says it. On the other hand, it’s like, OK, so, you know, bombing Iraq was fine, attacking Iran is fine, invading Venezuela is fine, the Ukraine proxy was fine. We know it’s not fair, but the global goods were for us. #Michael Rossi Oh, let’s not forget turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Oh, the general side. -- 2 of 22 -- #Pascal Yeah, the general side. #Michael Rossi Don't mention that. You don't want to get on the wrong side of this thing, Pascal. Or how about this one? We don’t want Denmark’s territorial integrity to be violated, but we absolutely recognize Kosovo as an independent state outside of UN Security Council resolutions. So yeah, I mean, what this points to is something that Mearsheimer, in his work *The Great Delusion*, published in 2014, talked about. And that is: liberalism, as both a theory and a philosophy of international relations, works if and only if two things are present. Number one, everybody participating agrees to play by the rules of the game. Right. And number two, that the laws, the empirical thought, the philosophical foundations of liberalism are applied across the board—not selectively. Not selectively, because if you do, then congratulations, you’re cosplaying as a realist. And this is the reason why Mearsheimer has been taking his “I told you so” victory lap for the last ten years. So the Economic Forum was really, in my opinion—and feel free to agree or disagree with me—but it seemed to have been a wake-up call for everyone in the NATO alliance, sans the United States, about where they find themselves. And so, for the last couple of weeks—months, let’s say the last year or so—Europe, and by extension Canada, has come to the realization that the old transatlantic order is no longer, you know, to be trusted. We’re not going back to the status quo. I think even, you know, Chancellor Merz said, we cannot just simply expect the United States to be our permanent ally or something like that, right? He said, you know, the old ways are done. Okay, where do we go from here? And unfortunately, I’ve been on multiple channels. I’ve spoken with, you know, Piotr Kurzyn and James Kerlinzy about this— about, you know, whither Europe. Where is Europe going? Does Europe have a place in all of this? The problem we find is that you can talk about the sanctity of the rules-based order—and look, I get it, I absolutely understand the importance of international law for stability and security—but as you just pointed out, it’s only when Europe’s own security is put into a dilemma that they start to talk about it. Otherwise, we can absolutely worry that what happens outside the gated community is just, well, that’s just the world in and of itself. And so now we’re trying to figure out: where do we go, and what do we do? #Pascal Yeah, that’s the entire accusation of hypocrisy, which is absolutely true. Hypocrisy is to keep speaking in the language of international law—or even, as they recently shifted, to the “rules-based order”—but then, on the other hand, to just break those rules at will whenever you want. That’s also the big difference between the rules-based order and international law. International law is actually -- 3 of 22 -- written down. We have proper sources and whatnot, we have a proper understanding, and we have hundreds of years of development. And we know, more or less, what these rules are. And they’re contested, you know, just like any law—like any national law. You have disagreements about what the law says, and then you go to court and whatnot. So you have contested norms, but you have them. The rules-based order is, of course, one in which the United States constantly makes rules for everybody else, orders people to follow them, and then exempts itself from all of it. And Europe has been going along with that—and Canada as well—for the longest time, again because it was a beneficial fiction for them. This humanitarian glove over the United States’ iron fist, as Ronald Reagan said in the 1980s, right? But now it’s coming apart. It’s falling apart quickly. And, you know, it’s almost comical to see how the Europeans are realizing this, because while all of this is happening, you’ve also had now Mr. Merz, the chancellor of Germany, on that stage in Davos. I don’ t have the clip, but you’ve probably seen it, where he says, like, “We will defend Greenland from Russia.” #Michael Rossi Excuse me? Excuse me? I'm going to presume—I think you and I can agree on one thing. Friedrich Merz does one thing really, really, really well: look bad. He proved that Olaf Scholz was not the worst that Germany can provide. That's a feat. I mean, that's a feat in and of itself. That is an accomplishment. I have to give Merz this: you’d think we’d reached... #Pascal Okay, let's be honest. Olaf Scholz was the one who stood next to Biden when Biden said, you know, if Russia attacks Ukraine, then we're going to—well, Nord Stream’s going to be passé, right? It’s going to be gone. And he just stood there and took it, just like, blah. That was Olaf Scholz. And now we have Mr. Merz, who’s like, well, you know, the only one who actually has a claim on Greenland is the United States. But I’m just going to say we’re going to protect it from Russia. I mean, you could just as well stand there and say, “I will protect Greenland from Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea will not get its hands on Greenland.” That would make as much sense as saying we’ll protect it from Russia. #Michael Rossi I mean, you know, if somehow Papua New Guinea manages to pull off a successful amphibious landing and extend the Papua New Guinean Empire into Greenland—man, 2026 is going to be very interesting. Yeah. Look, let’s, let’s, you know, point out what a lot of this stuff is. Some people might regard it as just complete throwaway talk, but there’s a deeply entrenched sense of Russophobia -- 4 of 22 -- that’s permeating much of the European leadership. And I think we need to explain what that is. Russophobia isn’t just “I hate Russia” or “Europe good, Russia bad.” It’s this knee-jerk, almost automatic scapegoating—everything wrong gets attributed to Russia. And, you know, I’m drawing from Glenn Diesen’s work, *Russophobia*, which is an excellent study of all this. The narratives are often self-contradictory. Because on one level, you look at Russia—or the non‑West, or outside the European gated community—and the people are seen as not as civilized, not as intelligent. They’re incapable, they’re incompetent. You remember Ursula, in the first couple of months of the war in Ukraine, saying that the Russians were stealing washing machine parts to use for interchangeable components. You know, Russia’s on its last legs. And yet, at the same time, Russia is a threat to Western civilization—that if we don’t stop Russia in Ukraine, they’re going to take the Baltics, then Poland, then Germany, and then Kazakhstan. And, you know, before we know it, we’re going to be—so, you know, it’s like you need to pick one narrative and stick with it. Either Russia is this barbaric, Asiatic, incompetent horde, or they’re a threat to Western civilization. We have something very similar here in the United States. And it makes no sense except to those who honestly believe it. You know, on one level—and this is particularly true with the MAGA crowd—you have the “Don’t Tread on Me” Republicans, you have the “Don’t Tread on Me” libertarians, right? It’s “my guns, my freedom, my liberty.” And yet they’ll absolutely say, “Obey the law, do what the cops tell you, obey the security sector, and you won’t get shot.” So you’ve got the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on one side of the bumper and the thin blue line on the other. And you think, you’ve got to pick one. #Pascal What does that tell us? I mean, there’s a bigger phenomenon behind this, right? This contradictory political messaging. And we’ve seen it, in my view, most often—most ardently—during corona. You know, do you