Castigating NGO’s: An American Israeli-Surrogate on Gaza Reconstruction

Besides international law, international organizations, or NGOs, function internationally beyond the reach of the nation-state. From the standpoint of national sovereignty, the sheer existence of the NGO as an institutional arrangement can be viewed as a potential threat and thus smartly to be expunged. One strategy that a country’s government bent on protecting national sovereignty could use to discredit NGOs is to label them using the turbo-charged “T” word, even in the case of an NGO that is oriented exclusively to providing humanitarian aid. By 2026, Israel had decimated the infrastructure and buildings in its occupied Gaza strip, and Russia had been bombing residential buildings in Kiev and other large cities in Ukraine for four years, so it could not be said that humanitarian aid was not needed in the world. Parts of Africa ravaged by draught and war, such as in Somalia, were also in vital need of humanitarian aid. To discredit NGOs providing such assistance, whether in terms of shelter, food, or medicine, meant being open to the charge of callous disregard for the suffering of very large numbers of people.  The case of Gaza—in particular, the position of the Trump administration on NGO’s being involved in the reconstruction of the strip—demonstrates the harm that is involved in turning the NGO institution-type into a controversial and even suspicious thing in order to do the bidding of a belligerent ally while removing a potential external threat to national sovereignty.

The full essay is at "Castigating NGO's."

The U.S. Dismantling the International Criminal Court: International Law in the Cross-Hairs

The Rome statute, a treaty that went into effect in 2002, established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in order to bring accountability even to high officials of governments who flaunt international law by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of July 14, 2026, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the American high representative on foreign policy and diplomacy, announced the intent of the Trump administration to stop at nothing less than dismantling the ICC, the U.S. had not ratified the treaty and thus was not subject to the court’s jurisdiction. However, Americans on the soil of countries that had ratified the treaty could be arrested there and sent to the ICC in the Hague if charged with having violated international law abroad. Back on U.S. territory, any such culprits would be beyond the reach of the ICC and any of the governments that were obliged by treaty to make arrests on their respective soils to implement warrants issued by the ICC. I contend that U.S. sovereignty was neither diminished or threatened by the existence of the court and the governments obliged to implement the warrants. In fact, the Trump administration may have been acting as a proxy for a foreign regime, two high government officials (at least) had been charged by the ICC and yet were still flaunting their immunity in Israel and the United States. Protecting the accused in another country of such horrendous crimes as a holocaustic genocide and falsely claiming that the ICC was an existential threat to American sovereignty as Rubio claimed on social media are not in the best interests of the U.S. even just in terms of reputational (and political) capital in international relations. Political expediency geared to protecting culprits of such a severe crime is at the very least short-sighted. In steering a large ship, a captain should look beyond the bow, as per the fateful example of the Titanic in 1912 attests. Enlightened self-interest goes a long way, whereas a narrow, contractual self-interest is apt to be hit head-on at some point. In July of 2026, the E.U. warned the world of the reckless American steering, but like a drunk driver, full of hubris liquor, the warning would go unheeded in the Hobbesian ideological belief that there is no such thing as international law in the state of nature. The bigger picture considers whether international law itself would survive the collapse of the post-World-War-II world order, which includes the ICC as well as the enforcement-impotent United Nations even concerning its own rulings and votes! Such self-inflicted impotence evinces Nietzsche’s conception of weakness, which is epitomized by celibate priests who yet seek to dominate even the strong. Netanyahu and Putin could easily flaunt the U.N. and be confident in remaining untouched by the ICC and even the feckless governments that were obliged to enforce the court’s arrest warrants. The global order was backsliding ironically as progress in technology was revolutionizing daily life in the twenty-first century.

The full essay is at "The U.S. Dismantling the International Criminal Court."

Trade or Foreign Policy: The E.U. on Illegal Israeli Settlements

During the summer of 2026, the E.U. found itself at one point trying to make the unnecessarily arduous and utterly artificial distinction between trade and foreign policy as if they were mutually exclusive. This task was foisted on the Council of Ministers due to the domain-specific application of the state veto, which is to say, the requirement of unanimity. The sheer artificiality was outdone only by the absurdity of any of 27 states still being able to veto proposed federal law and policy in some but not all policy domains, and thus hamstring the E.U. even when the good of the whole, supported by the vast majority of states and E.U. citizens, supported action on the federal level. The global context at the time with respect to international relations belied a stark separation of trade from foreign policy.

The full essay is at "Trade or Foreign Policy."

California and the Eleven Dwarfs Take on the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith foresees that capitalist industrialists could collude with government at the expense of labor. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that keeping laborers to a subsistence wage is necessary for capitalists to have enough wealth accumulated to invest in culture. Rather than being immoral, exploitation is simply part of life and thus the resulting economic inequality cannot be removed at its source. Low wages may simply be a feature of how labor supply typically relates to business demand for workers, whereas highly educated professionals are not so numerous and can demand higher compensation. Meanwhile, what about consumers as capitalist industrialists continue to accumulate capital in part by being able to pay large workforces subsistence wages and engage in mergers and acquisitions, such that competitive markets are turned into oligopolies and even, as in the case of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the 1870s, monopolies capable of extracting “monopoly rents”? In the U.S., the Sherman and Clayton Acts in the early 1900s were oriented to safeguarding competitive markets from being undermined by business titans, but enforcing those federal laws would seem to fly in the face of collusion between capitalists and their respective governments. As a case in point, the U.S. Justice Department gave the green light to Paramount’s take-over of Warner Brothers/Discovery even as President Trump had a financial interest in the deal going through. In the American federal system, the state governments could act as a check, and on July 13, 2026, the announcement came that California plus eleven other states, led by their respective attorneys general, filed a lawsuit challenging the merger on the basis that it would violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act. American consumers had reason to be thankful that they were still in a federal republic of republics, even though the growth of power at the federal level had nearly eclipsed the federalism, at least as it was originally intended—as enabling checks by the feds on the states and vice versa.

The full essay is at "California and the Eleven Dwarfs Take on the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger."

Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

The full essay is at "Valkyrie."

Ben-Hur

By 2026, the world hardly needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being shown as  a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual standpoint.

The full essay is at "Ben-Hur."