Everyone's evangelical warmonger of choice, Tony Blair reared his head again this week, holding forth on the imminent and pernicious threat of the Islamist ideology on our safety and our way of life, claiming that they 'represent the biggest threat to global security of the early 21st century', and that the time had come for the West 'to take sides' against them.
Reading through his speech/essay there is a lot that is rational and agreeable, and yet its difficult to divorce the sentiments being expressed about fundamentalist Islam 'spreading through the Middle East' from the statesman who, G.W. Bush aside, did the most to enflame the regional discontent. (The same crazed tactic currently under way with Obama's drone campaign - the most recent of which in Yemen killed 55 civilians - which has been proved to actively fan the flames of fundamentalism.)
Neo-liberalism, with which Blair is so intensely associated, cannot be exported wholesale as part of the inevitable spread of globalisation to foreign lands that have vastly disparate cultures and traditions from the West. Fundamentalism only arises as a backlash when there is deemed a considerable threat to a way of life. It is up to those civilians to combat and marginalise these oppressive ideologies as they see fit, and no amount of equally oppressive, slash 'n' burn Western intervention will solve the problem, least of all with Tony Blair as figurehead.
It was just one of many stories highlighting the rank hypocrisy of international relations over the course of the week.
Nikolai Gogol, in 'Dead Souls', wrote - 'there are many faces in the world, over whose formation Nature did not pause long in thought ... but simply hewed them out at full sweep of her arm'.
This came to mind upon seeing John Kerry, with his craggy, Mount Rushmore face, declare that Russia, by continuing to aggravate the situation in Ukraine in contravention to last week's hopelessly flimsy Geneva agreement, was making 'a very expensive mistake'.
It is incredible just how comprehensively Russia, at the behest of the West, has been demonised by the mainstream media, and is almost content to once again assume the well-worn 'villain' costume from the Cold War era.
Russia is entitled to feel a certain sense of antagonism from America's persistent imperialism through NATO's encircling of the former Soviet borderlands. Yet Russia has far from endeared herself, with acts of macho aggression, reports of kidnappings and torture, and persistent posturing on the part of Putin; all of which seems destined to lead to a bloody civil war that the US will condemn with both an insincere altruism and a sly smirk. As, by destabilising the region and isolating Russia further from the world stage and the global financial markets, NATO's influence can only be exerted more tangibly.
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The long term ramifications of these renewed Cold War hostilities have been illumined this week by Putin's threat to break up the global web, thereby creating a Russian-operated alternative.
If this happens then the guiding principles of the internet will have been deconstructed in favour of national cyber boundaries created as a means of containing and controlling the transnational informational flow; leaving our children to look back on the previous couple of decades as an Eden of naïve transparency, in which greedy American security agencies couldn't help but gorge on the forbidden fruit, consigning us all to paranoid oblivion.
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When it comes to the Ukrainian issue, America is merely repeating the same imperialist trick it has performed many times before, most recently in Venezuela - a country with relatively high levels of social democracy under Hugo Chavez - in which they are stirring up dissent amongst the populace in an attempt at destabilising the current Maduro regime.
And now the pivot towards asserting increased influence in Asia is at hand. By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will have been transferred to the Asia-Pacific area, with all their eyes firmly focused towards those worker bee Chinese in their rapidly expanding hive.
Obama expressed the US's commitment to come to Japan's defence should their supposed sovereignty over the clump of rocks known as the Senkaku Islands be compromised by China, despite urging the two nations to settle the matter through peaceful dialogue.
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It was peaceful dialogue this week, mediated by America, that fell apart between Israel and Palestine on the thoroughly elusive prospect of achieving a harmonious two-nation state.
America's response to this latest house-of-cards collapse is as yet unclear, but considering their heavy involvement over the previous months and their indications to Israel that long-term financial support may be subject to a successful resolution, it can only be assumed that they will express, not anger, but disappointment, and as in any relationship of power, that is a far less favourable reaction...
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