Much attention was paid recently to the guitar skills of the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who travelled to Kyiv to reaffirm U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. While there, Blinken took time off to visit a bar, where he played Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” with a local band. The message in his choice of song was obvious enough that it didn’t require much explanation. However, everything in the Biden administration’s behavior lately over Gaza shows the extent to which the notion of a “free world” appears to be relative for decisionmakers in the White House.
One of the major takeaways from the ongoing conflict in Gaza is that leading countries in the West, the United States above all, have abandoned the liberal principles they invariably recite whenever they lecture countries around the world. The Americans have portrayed the Ukraine war as a fight for democracy and freedom against an autocratic Russia, so it made perfect sense for Blinken to pick the tune that he did. But one has to wonder: for Americans, are some people more meritorious of freedom and liberal values than others? Many might answer “yes.”
Gaza represents a fundamentally new moment in international relations. Many things have come together to undermine the liberal vision behind the global order that has predominated since the end of the Cold War. First, it involves a country, Israel, that in many respects emerged from World War II as the embodiment of everything that opposed the criminal states vanquished in that inferno. The Nazis’ most identifiable victims, Jews, had not only revived themselves in a democratic state (at least for their coreligionists), they were in the final stage of a trajectory of national self-determination. By its very existence, Israel seemed a rebuttal of everything the Allies had fought against.
Many things were conveniently ignored in that heroic version of history, not least that what Israelis called “independence” in 1948 was, in fact, built on the denial of independence and self-determination to the indigenous Arab population, which was soon forced out of Palestine altogether. But that didn’t matter much in the Western narrative, and so, decades later, it didn’t disrupt the satisfaction over the presumed triumph of liberal values in the post-Cold War period—a conclusion that Francis Fukuyama would label, rather too confidently, “the end of history.”
The late 1990s and early 2000s allowed Western states to add a new brick to their edifice of a rules-based international order, namely the concept of humanitarian intervention. The decade began with a bloody war in Bosnia and ended with another in Kosovo, both in the Balkans. That little was done to end the Rwandan genocide (which Bill Clinton later regretted) suggested the motivation was primarily one of containing conflicts in Europe, a region at the heart of the new liberal world order, and doing so in such a way that its values would be bolstered to better resist the purported atavisms of a darker time.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq, and its many negative outcomes, did much to damage the credibility of the U.S.-led global system, even if a number of the Americans’ leading Western allies strongly opposed Washington. But what the invasion did was bring home that the “liberal West” was really, in fact, just an American axle surrounded by unusually fragile European spokes. U.S. allies could complain all they wanted, but the United States would set the direction of international politics as it desired. It was lost on nobody that the Europeans had earlier tried and failed to resolve the conflict in Bosnia, only for the United States to intervene successfully under Clinton, following the Srebrenica massacre.
How strange then that, in the same way that U.S. intervention after one massacre helped reinforce the credibility of a rules-based, liberal international order built on humanitarian principles, another massacre, that of the Palestinian population in Gaza, has reflected a complete abandonment of humanitarian values by Western elites. Israel has killed tens of thousands of people for eight months, without interruption; has starved the population of Gaza and allowed extremist hoodlums to routinely attack food and aid convoys; has tried to implement a strategy of ethnic cleansing with European help, and when that was impossible, so obliterated large areas of Gaza as to make them uninhabitable.
Worse, supporters of Israel have picked up on a random United Nations figure for identified fatalities in Gaza, calculated at just under 25,000, to spin that the numbers announced by the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, estimated at around 35,000, were far too high. Though the UN subsequently issued a statement saying it had not revised the total death toll downward, no correction was issued by Israel’s devotees. Their point was clear: Palestinians don’t even enjoy the privilege of being believed when it comes to their own victims. Come to think of it, they were only echoing what the leader of the free world, President Joe Biden, had said last October, when he publicly doubted Palestinian casualty figures, before one of his own senior diplomats told Congress the death count was probably higher than reported.
One has to admit it. There is not much room for Arabs in the Western liberal imagination, let alone the global order it has fostered. While hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were welcomed by Western European nations after the Russian invasion in 2022, the European Union nearly shattered when the German chancellor Angela Merkel tried to welcome refugees from Syria, and encouraged her EU counterparts to do the same. But then, in August 2013, after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against its own population, a New York Times/CBS News poll recorded a remarkably callous reaction. While 75 percent of those polled said they thought Bashar al-Assad’s forces had indeed been responsible for using such weapons, 60 percent of respondents opposed any military retaliation. In contrast, an October 2023 poll by Quinnipiac, soon after the Hamas attack in Israel, found that 76 percent of U.S. voters believed that supporting the Israelis was in the U.S. national interest.
So, back to that sizzling bar in Kyiv and Antony Blinken’s freedom riffs. Wherever the secretary of state lands, he takes on a different identity. When visiting Israel soon after October 7, he declared, “I come before you as a Jew.” In Kyiv, he came before us as a tuneful champion of freedom. One has to wonder how Blinken will come before us when, or more likely if, he visits Gaza, Khartoum, or Sanaa. Will he bring his guitar? If so, he might want to play “I Never Loved You Anyway,” by The Corrs.
