Former US diplomat sounds the alarm on US policy

As students of human history, we have seen the images in Gaza and Ukraine before: they appear through the ages. However, this is a marked new phase of violence escalation in a new world built on the principles of human rights, after World War II.

We are alarmed, by the fact that patriotic Americans: diplomats, state department officials, former soldiers, are all speaking out about what appears to be the collapse of that Rules Based International Order. It is a sign of something wrong within the current system and of the inflexion point of economics, politics, and everything else that follows.

The US has been the hegemon since the end of the Cold War in the 1991. Though, something has changed - a plethora of patriotic, ex-policy-driving, Americans are telling us that today’s administration’s decisions are going awry. It seems to us the ‘canary in the coal mine’.

This is an online interview with Charles "Chas" W. Freeman Jr. ( born March 2, 1943) . An American retired diplomat and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years. Most notably, he worked as the main interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 China visit and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, where he dealt with the Persian Gulf War.

When policy stalwarts of this calibre are concerned, we should at least pay attention. This broad interview covers, the Middle East, Russia, China and the Global South.

The format of this article is (a) an interview question, (b) Mr Freeman’s response, and (c) our thoughts. This interview came out in early May 2024

Israel in Gaza and potential sanctions

Interviewer: We've learned from Turkish newspapers they're talking about that Turkey has seized all trade with Israel and we know that they recently started they put some restrictions on the export to Israel right now it seems that they're cutting everything and how do you see the situation right now in Gaza?

Mr Freeman: Well, I think this is merely the beginning, if this genocide continues we can expect more such actions. If these are the minimum actions that these countries can take to show their disapproval of Israel and its behaviour. They have domestic political reasons to do this, if they don't take some sort of action, they are vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy which is levelled against my own country, the United States, with considerable justification. Mr. Blinken has just said that our policy's been consistent is absolutely correct, but not in the way that he wants to be it's absolutely consistent in the sense that we have enabled and continue to enable genocide.

We are not taking effective measures to reverse the starvation of people in Gaza. The fact that the floating dock off or pier off the coast of Gaza is almost complete, will at the cost of $320 million, will not alleviate the hunger sufficiently. At the same time that happened, a convoy of aid food trucks passing through the crossing into Gaza was attacked by Israeli settlers and much of the food was lost. So we are dealing with a situation in which Israel and the settler population there remain determined to exterminate or expel everybody in Gaza, no change.

And I can understand easily how this evokes outrage not just in Muslim countries but in my own. We have demonstrations now protests by students throughout the country and now spreading throughout the world and these students are not motivated by anything but genuine moral indignation. They're not trying to avoid being drafted as was the case in the Vietnam War and when protests occurred they are attempting to persuade our country to cease aiding and assisting in a crime, the most horrible crime that international law can find which is genocide.

Our comment: We don’t entirely know if Mr Freeman is right. We think, Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wing may be betting that in the new Cold War with China, where they are indispensable: if that is their calculation, they haven’t been proven wrong yet. Previous bouts of Israeli ethnic cleansing took place under the cover of the last Cold War. That will also determine what sanctions are applied. South Africa faced its sanctions when it had an Apartheid Regime at the height of US power, as it sought to shape the new world order. That said, their bet on being able to ethnically cleanse, by moving over two million Gazans into Egypt, seems to have failed.

Interviewer: You talk about this new demonstrations in the United States, we've seen that speaker Johnson was talking with the students at the Columbia University and when you see speaker Johnson talking with students and repeating the same propaganda by the administration how do you see this the understanding on the part of speaker Johnson and the people in that type of thinking?

Mr Freeman: Well, I think there is a crisis in the United States more generally but this is a particular instance of it and that is that the political elite has lost the confidence of much of the public and certainly the confidence of young people generally the society is very polarised. Mr. Johnson can make those statements because there is a large number of Americans who see the world through the eyes of Israeli propaganda but they're now at least an equal number of people or perhaps more who regard that propaganda as utterly false and without merit and who are as the students were angered by the effort that Mr. Johnson made to pretend that nothing was happening.

We have a situation in which the United States Secretary of State Blinken others in the administration see genocide in Xinjiang and China where people are being re-educated without being killed perhaps forced assimilation is wrong it is not genocide and yet they see genocide there and they can detect no evidence of genocide when 442,000 people are murdered and another 12,000 or so are seriously wounded in Gaza with American weapons what distinguishes the human rights crisis in Gaza from that elsewhere is that the United States is paying for it you know as an American I may very well take issue with the behaviour of the Burmese in Myanmar to the Rohingya and consider that absolutely improper and verging on genocide but I'm not paying for it as a taxpayer I have a right as an American. Students have a right to object to policies that employ resources they contribute, or their parents contribute to evil purposes, and that is exactly what is happening.

Our comment: So we agree and disagree with Mr Freeman. By post World War Two definitions, the position vis-a-vis China is unclear. An investigation is needed to confirm it, which will likely never come. There is overwhelming evidence that Israel likely is committing genocide (by post WW2 definitions). Most importantly, and unlike in China, Israel’s leaders have repeatedly stated their intent to genocide (laid out from page 59 onwards of the ICJ Application). This is critical, as proving intent is usually quite challenging. There is also precedent for ethnic cleansing (in 1948 and again in 1967, and that is before addressing the continuous building of illegal settlements). The fact is that International Law is in flux, and its future is unclear due to shifting geopolitics. As Mr Freeman says, the issue for the US is that it is funding and politically backing Israel’s actions, and that is impacting US soft power most visible at the last vote at the UN on the issue of Gaza, where the US stands in a small minority, supported by some island states and a handful of Israel allies: Hungary, the Czech Republic and Argentina were the only states of any material size (small island states like Tuvalu, etc regularly back the US regardless of the issue due to their financial dependency) in the world to back the US and Israel.

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