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Western power, and the United States in particular, often present themselves as guardians of democracy, human rights and the international order, while many of the regimes they condemn today were once supported, armed or tolerated by them.
A long-view reading of international relations since 1945 dreams a more discurbing pattern: many regimes now denounced in the name of morality were previously funded, equipped, protected or indirectly manufactured by the same powers that now claim to oppose them.
From Iran to Guatemala, from Chile to Iraq, from Libya to Cuba, the same geopolitical mechanism reappears: raison d'état prolées monsters, then later condemns them in the name of principals. Strategic interest comes first; moral language follows.
In this theater, the United Nations is regularly accused of impotence, even though the veto system itself allows dominant power to block the consist enforcement of the very international law they invoke elsewhere. This episode offers a critical reading of that contradiction, with particular attention to recent developments involving Venezuela, Iran and Cuba.
