Tag Archives: Analysis

Five points on Triple Lock issues by Anthony Coughlan

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INNATE introduction: Sometimes you can be wandering in the forest for so long you can’t see the wood for the trees. The issue of the Irish government, and in particular Micheál Martin, striving to get rid of the Triple Lock on the deployment of Irish troops abroad – as part of slowly abolishing Irish neutrality while denying doing so – has been simmering for a number of years. As a result we can be confused and forget. In this short summary of some of the background and issues, Anthony Coughlan sees the wood and the trees –

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Five points worth thinking about in considering the Triple Lock and Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s latest proposal to abolish it –

1.     Ireland’s UN Obligations: Ireland is bound by international law and by the rules of its membership of the United Nations to abide by the UN Charter and every provision thereof, including the right of the permanent Security Council members to outlaw military operations they disapprove of, and authorise military operations they approve of, by unanimous vote under the Charter. In view of  this, talk of the veto power of  particular UN Security Council members being in some way a restraint on Irish “sovereignty” is sheer demagogy, legal nonsense and aimed at gulling the ignorant.

2.     Ireland’s “National Declaration” on Neutrality and the Triple  Lock: In 2002 the Bertie Ahern Government issued a solemn National Declaration by Ireland – always referred to with capital letters by the Government – to the effect that in view of Ireland’s neutrality policy the State would not engage in any foreign military operation involving more than 12 soldiers unless that was authorised by the United Nations.  This National Declaration was made because a majority of voters had  rejected the EU’s Nice Treaty in the 2001 referendum on that –  many of them out of concern at Nice’s effect on Irish neutrality.  The existence of the National Declaration and the Government’s Triple Lock commitment in it was mentioned in the publicity material that was sent to voters by the statutory Referendum Commission to inform citizens what the Nice Two referendum was about in 2002. This National Declaration by Ireland was supported by all parties in the Oireachtas at the time. It was formally responded to by the other EU Member States in their Seville Declaration of that year. These Declarations persuaded enough people to change their votes so that in the 2002 Nice Two referendum a majority agreed  that that treaty could be ratified, without any change being made to the treaty itself.  Ireland’s National Declaration and the EU’s Seville  Declaration were associated with the Nice Treaty when that was formally registered later with the United Nations.

3.     The National Declaration was repeated for Lisbon Two: A similar procedure was followed  by the Brian Cowen Government when a majority of voters rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008 and the EU Constitution that Lisbon brought into being – again partly out of concern at its possible effects on neutrality.  Ireland’s National Declaration on Neutrality and the Triple Lock was reiterated by the Brian Cowen Government along with some other issues. It was again highlighted in the Referendum Commission’s Explanatory Guide sent to voters on the occasion of the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in 2009.  Again voters agreed to the ratification of an unchanged Treaty, in part because of this Triple Lock commitment. Again the National Declaration was associated with the Lisbon Treaty when that was formally registered with the UN.  

4.     The Triple Lock commitment in this unique National Declaration by Ireland has thus acquired a constitutional or quasi-constitutional character: No Irish Government has ever issued a National Declaration like this on any other topic throughout the history of the State. The Triple Lock commitment set out in the National Declaration by Ireland and its use to influence the votes of citizens in the Nice and Lisbon Treaty referendums has given the Triple Lock such a constitutional or quasi-constitutional character that it cannot be constitutionally set aside by the current crop of Government politicians without  a referendum of the People. The attempt to repudiate the solemn  commitments given in it may also raise legal issues under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

5.     Abolishing the Triple Lock would have the unintended effect of subverting comparable commitments in any future Border Poll: Even if people deny that the Nice/Lisbon Triple Lock has acquired constitutional force by the manner of its adoption and use in two referendums, its repudiation by the present generation of Government politicians would be a profound breach of political faith with Irish voters past and present. It would mean, for example, that any constitutional commitments or policy guarantees that might be given to Northern Ireland Unionists in the context of a future Border Poll could be repudiated just as easily by a later crop of Irish politicians and would show that such commitments could in no way be relied on.  Principled and sensible politicians in the Oireachtas will be sensitive to possible unintended consequences such as this when considering what the Coalition Government is now proposing.

Understanding Trump’s interventions: How regional imperialism generates World War

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By Richard E Rubenstein of TRANSCEND Media Service

When Donald Trump was first elected U.S. president almost ten years ago, part of his appeal to many voters were his promises to reduce the level of US involvement in international conflicts and to avoid the costly “endless wars” fought by his predecessors. But his recent attack on Venezuela on the heels of U.S.-financed genocide in Gaza, as well as US air strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Iran, and the Caribbean/Pacific high seas, represents a major turn toward military intervention in his foreign policy.

What obscures this reality at present and muddles much media coverage of the situation is Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine (aka the “Don-Roe Doctrine”) to justify his activities in the Western Hemisphere.  Yes, he abducted the Maduros, killed Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers, declared himself the owner of Venezuela’s oil, destroyed or captured ships and crews sailing from Venezuelan ports, threatened the rulers of Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil, and promised to take over Greenland. He has also intervened overtly, covertly, and through proxies on every inhabited continent.  Even so, many commentators conclude that Trump’s intention is to exercise military power primarily in the U.S.’s Caribbean and Latin American “backyard,” while other regional hegemons such as China and Russia do as they wish in their own spheres of influence.

This bully-boy version of multipolarity may satisfy members of the MAGA coalition who want to believe that the would-be Nobelist will remain true to his original isolationist promises.  It has even gained acceptance among some analysts at the mainstream foreign policy journals and NGOs. To accept this regional focus, however, means shutting one’s eyes to the history and dynamics of imperialism, especially as illustrated by the imperial wars of the 1930s

Amid the deluge of articles and broadcasts covering Trump’s recent Latin adventures, one finds few analyses comparing U.S. aggression with the imperial wars of the 1930s that are now recognised as significant steps in the run-up to world war.  In 1931, Japan conquered Manchuria after manufacturing a false-flag incident at Mukden and then attacked China, seizing Beijing and Shanghai.  In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and two years later defeated Haile Selassie’s outgunned regime.  Around the same time, Hitler invaded the demilitarized Rhineland.  He would soon move to overthrow the Austrian and Czechoslovak governments and send military forces to aid General Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

Of course, these events took place almost a century ago – but the analogy is startling.  Like Trump’s recent actions, these were short-lived, asymmetrical assaults by imperialist powers against nations resisting their hegemony. Their impact was minimized by characterizing them as limited wars conducted within some Great Power’s sphere of influence.  But today we understand that they were also significant steps toward world war.

Why doesn’t this sort of violence remain in the regional backyard instead of generating global conflict?  The first reason is that interventions like these always target imperial competitors, not just local resistors. Italy’s war in Ethiopia was aimed at British interests in the Horn of Africa, Japan’s aggression in Manchuria at Chinese and Western interests, and Germany’s machinations in Europe at Western and Russian interests. The pattern of targeting an imperial competitor’s local “agents” persisted long after the end of World War II.  In the 1970s Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger overthrew the Allende regime in Chile and installed Pinochet’s dictatorship there because they considered Allende a potential Soviet (and Cuban) ally. Similarly, Trump’s overarching aim in Latin America is to limit the growing influence of China (and the less substantial influence of Russia) on that continent.

In short, the apparent local focus of operations like the Venezuela attack is an illusion. The fact that the major target is a competing empire compels other nations in the affected region to choose sides – a polarizing process that tends to create armed multinational blocs and a bipolar world order.  Barbara Tuchman’s classic work, The Guns of August, shows exactly how this operated to produce the unbelievably destructive “war to end all wars” in 1914. We are likely to see such polarization take place with increasing intensity over the next few years in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia.

But that’s not all. Imperial powers prevented from acquiring essential industrial resources in regions claimed by their competitors tend to retaliate by seizing control of other regions where those resources can be obtained. In the 1930s, Western attempts to weaken and contain the Japanese Empire led the Tokyo regime to seize Manchuria’s coal and iron. A decade later, the Japanese conquered Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaya to secure the oil, rubber, tin, and other industrial materials monopolized by French, Dutch, and British empires in what had been considered up to then a European backyard. Today we see the same sort of competition over resources such as rare earths, industrial minerals, oil, and natural gas inflaming conflicts between imperialist powers on a global scale.  (Indeed, with the advent of climate change, the list of scarce resources grows to include essentials such as water and breathable air.)

The moral?  All modern empires are global. The U.S and its rivals are not like the ancient empires that conquered weaker nations as a kind of sport, extracting tribute from their rulers, but generally leaving subject peoples to their own devices.  Modern empires are late-capitalist powers driven to compete globally for essential industrial materials, markets, and investment opportunities, and compelled to “develop” or transform the societies that they dominate.  There is no way that their ruling classes can remain in their own backyards – and when they go abroad (as they must, to maintain their own viability), they go armed to the teeth.

Liberal as well as conservative commentators may hate to admit it, but Lenin’s work on imperialism got this right. For limited periods of time, while issuing threats of violence and engaging in covert operations, the empire-builders may manage to negotiate their differences “peacefully.”  But these periods of relative quiescence do not last. Unable to solve global problems that their own profit-dominated systems exacerbate – problems like radical social inequality, human-caused climate change, and mass migration – they employ threats of war and war itself as their favored methods of conflict management. They call this strategy “peace through strength,” but we understand that what they really mean is Empire First, by any means necessary.

The fact that warfare is now entirely industrialized and that weapons of mass destruction, including nukes, are proliferating at a dizzying pace does not alter these dynamics.  Nor does the existence of a sadly weakened United Nations provide much hope that inter-imperial conflicts can be controlled before they become part of another run-up to global violence. Once again, history sets off alarm bells that anyone not deafened by present-day cacophony should be able to hear. It was precisely when the League of Nations proved unable to stop Japan’s, Italy’s, and Germany’s localized aggression that the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy – a treaty signed by almost all the world’s nations – became a dead letter. Then and now, intensified regional imperialism was a symptom of impending global war.

Donald Trump’s interventionism thus represents a major escalation of inter-imperial conflict – but its significance is already being minimized not just by MAGA cultists, but also by a large cross-section of establishment liberals, centrists of both parties, foreign policy mavens, and the corporate media. Devoted to the dogma of “peace through strength,” Democratic Party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are unable to criticize Trump’s military adventures, except to complain that he doesn’t consult Congress as he should and sometimes acts “recklessly.”  With Iraq in mind, the New York Times editors warn that attempting to occupy nations that don’t want to be occupied is a bad idea.  The liberal critics of military intervention rest their arguments on the tendency of interventions to produce Iraq-style occupations that trigger mass rebellions requiring lengthy, costly, and brutal counterinsurgency campaigns.

Trump’s answer to this, up to this point, has been to rely on covert operations, proxy wars, air strikes, and commando raids to avoid the necessity to deploy massive occupation forces in subject nations. The Venezuelan coup represents an attempt to use a “decapitated” existing regime with substantial mass support to guarantee U.S. control of that nation’s resources without provoking a local insurgency. This tactic may not work, but even if it does, the imperialist dynamics that we have been describing will continue to drive the world toward war as they did in the thirties.

After all, Japan quickly suppressed rebellion in Manchuria, which became the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo, and the Nazis took over Austria and Czechslovakia without provoking mass rebellion. The world system does not become more pacific because an empire succeeds in pacifying its newly acquired subjects.  If Trump gets away with seizing Venezuela’s oil without provoking a guerrilla war, destabilizing Cuba without a new Bay of Pigs attack, setting up his colonialist “Board of Peace” for ruined Gaza, or absorbing Greenland by means of threats and bribes, we will not hear a word of serious criticism from the advocates of U.S. “world leadership.”

Whether anti-Trump or pro-Trump, our imperial misleaders and their corporate partners ignore the connections between regional warmaking, the militarization of domestic society, and the increasing likelihood of world war.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that Trump’s increasingly unhinged and unapologetic interventionism is waking people up on a wide variety of fronts.  Empire, imperialism, and military-industrial complex are no longer taboo words and concepts. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, formerly one of Trump’s most passionate supporters, understands that his promise to be a good isolationist was a lie and that the current frenzy of U.S. military interventions is a symptom of an empire in decline.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Minnesota, California, and several other US states are learning what it feels like to be subjects of imperial domination. The masked, armed agents of ICE, acting out of fear and rage in an increasingly hostile environment, could as well be descending on Fallujah as on Minneapolis. It will take a while longer before an US awakening becomes general, but this will happen, I hope and pray, before Trumpian violence generates an irreversible movement toward world war.  To quote the banner that appears at the conclusion of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 anti-nuke movie, “On the Beach,”

“THERE IS STILL TIME … BROTHER.”

l This piece appears as the editorial in the 26th January – 1st February issue of Transcend Media Service (TMS) (2026 Week 5) https://www.transcend.org/tms/2026/01/understanding-trumps-interventions-how-regional-imperialism-generates-world-war/ TMS is always worth looking at and the same issue includes a long video interview with Norman Finkelstein by Chris Hedges on Deconstructing Trump’s ‘Peace’ Plan for Gaza.

Readings in Nonviolence: New Patterns of Conflict and the Weakness of Peace Movements

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Introduction

Just as military generals can often be portrayed as fighting ‘the last war’, so peace activists can be caught out in thinking which is outdated and inadequate to address current realities. In this thoughtful and insightful editorial from the 29/8/22 issue of Transcend Media Service, Richard Rubenstein addresses some of the questions and issues arising from the Russian-Ukrainian war and from ongoing global conflicts or rivalries. His thoughts on imperialism are also very relevant to Ireland and the question of neutrality; is Ireland simply going to buy in wholesale to EU and NATO imperialisms or neo-imperialisms? Avoiding being a world at war is a difficult task but we need clear analysis to take the right paths in working for peace.

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By Richard E. Rubenstein – TRANSCEND Media Service

No.760. https://www.transcend.org/tms/

The beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022 dramatized a transition already underway to a new and highly dangerous period of global conflict. The war itself was mainly a Western affair, of primary interest to the immediate parties and the Ukrainians’ European and North American suppliers. But it erupted in the context of a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the United States, which continues to claim global hegemony, and its former Cold War adversaries, Russia and China. As a result, a regional conflict that might have been resolved either by conventional negotiation or problem-solving dialogues between the immediate parties became relatively intractable, with no immediate solutions in sight.

Temporarily, at least, the struggle between Russia and Ukraine solidified the relationship between the United States and Europe, while reinforcing the U.S.’s dominant role in that “partnership.” While the parties to what some termed a “new Cold War” increased their military spending and ideological fervor, other aspirants to Great Power status such as Turkey, India, Iran, and Japan maneuvered for temporary advantage. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war began to assume the status of a “frozen conflict,” with Russia succeeding in occupying most of the restive, Russian-speaking Donbas region, while the U.S. poured billions of dollars in high-tech weaponry, intelligence, and training into the Kiev regime’s armory.

As often happens, the emergence of new patterns of conflict caught analysts by surprise, their theoretical equipment having been designed to explain earlier forms of struggle.  As a result, the changed environment was not well understood and conflict resolution efforts were virtually nonexistent.  With regard to the Ukraine war, for example, the conventional wisdom was that a “mutually hurting stalemate,” with neither party able to win a total victory but with each side suffering greatly, would render this sort of conflict “ripe for resolution” via negotiation. (see I. William Zartman, Ripeness Promoting Strategies). But there were two problems with this formulation:

  • New forms of limited warfare featuring the relatively restrained use of high-tech weapons, while killing or wounding thousands and causing serious damage to property and the environment, still lessened the amount of suffering that might otherwise have been expected in a war between neighbors. While the Donbas region exploded, consumers dined out in Kiev. While Russian casualties mounted and the West imposed sanctions on the Putin regime, citizens of the RFSR enjoyed a relatively peaceful and prosperous existence.

Moreover, contrary to Western propaganda, with a few tragic exceptions Russia did not undertake large-scale indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population of Ukraine, nor did the Ukrainians launch many attacks on targets outside the Donbas. This relative restraint on both sides (not to understate the horror caused by thousands of unnecessary deaths) appears to have reduced the massive “hurt” needed to produce a “mutually hurting stalemate.” This movement toward what might be called “partial warfare” can be seen as a feature of the military transformation that began in the U.S. following the Vietnam War with the replacement of conscripted soldiers by “volunteers” and the replacement of ground troops by high-tech air, artillery, and naval weapons. Ironically, limiting the intolerable suffering caused by war has opened the door to partial warfare as a tolerable, potentially permanent feature of Great Power foreign policy.

  • The local struggle in Ukraine intersected with a revival of imperial conflicts globally, particularly when the United States decided to embrace the anti-Russian cause and to pour billions of dollars in advanced weapons and intelligence into the Kiev regime’s coffers. The stated reason for this militancy, according to top officials of the Biden regime, was to “weaken” Russia as a global competitor and to warn China that the U.S. would resist any Chinese moves against Taiwan or other Asian targets that it considered aggressive. Its result was to embolden the Ukrainian leader, Zelensky, to declare that his nation would never compromise with Russia on disputed issues (not even on the issue of Crimea), and that his nation’s goal was “victory.” One never knows, of course, when a leader who preaches victory at any price will decide that his/her nation as paid enough and that it is time to talk about cutting losses and maximizing benefits.  Nevertheless, at this writing, neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Zelensky is willing to say a word about ending this apparently endless conflict.

This second theoretical deficiency has proved even more costly to the cause of peace than the misunderstanding of partial warfare. While advocates of Western hegemony find ways to justify U.S. and European military support of “democracies” against “autocracies” and Russian ideologues such as Alexander Dugin dream of a revived Great Russia, most peace and conflict studies scholars remain devoted to the analysis of identity-group struggles as a way of understanding both global conflict and internal polarization. Some peace scholars have identified important new sources of conflict such as environmental destruction, global medical crises, and climate change, but a great many continue to ignore the problem of empire and the emergence of new conflicts between would-be hegemons. (An outstanding exception to this shortsightedness is the work of Johan Galtung, whose 2009 book, The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What? TRANSCEND University Press, now seems prophetic.)

This general lack of attention to imperialism and its vicissitudes has reasons rooted in the history of the conflict studies field, but its political dimensions need to be identified if we hope to overcome the obvious weaknesses of peace movements when confronted by conflicts like Russia vs. Ukraine and NATO or the U.S. and its allies vs. China.  Particularly in the West, the current polarization of politics tends to produce two major tendencies: a right-wing populism whose ideological commitments are ethno-nationalist and isolationist, and a left-leaning centrism whose ideology is cosmopolitan and globalist. Neither tendency understands the emerging patterns of global conflict or has any real interest in creating the conditions for global peace. The Right advocates avoiding unnecessary wars, but its nationalism trumps its isolationism; thus, right-wing leaders preach maximum military preparedness and advocate “defense” against traditional national enemies. The Left is consciously or unconsciously imperialist, a view that it expresses using the language of international “leadership” and “responsibility” as well as under the rubrics of “peace through strength” and “responsibility to protect.”

Most Democratic Party supporters in the U.S. fail to recognize that the current Biden Administration is a ferocious advocate of American imperial interests and  supports war preparations aimed at China and Russia; or else they do understand this, but view it as a minor issue compared with the threat of domestic neo-fascism a la Donald Trump. Similarly, most supporters of left and left-center parties in Europe fail to understand that NATO is currently a branch of the U.S. military machine and potentially the military-industrial establishment of a new European empire. Or else they suspect this but view the rise and expansion of NATO through lenses of hatred and suspicion of the Russians and fear of right-populist movements like those of Viktor Orban and Marine Le Pen. In either case, the result is that advocates of global peace tend to be separated from the domestic constituencies with which they might otherwise ally.

This isolation has been particularly notable in the case of the movement for peace through negotiations in Ukraine, which has yet to obtain any real traction in any Western nation. Indeed, the strongest advocates for immediate peace negotiations, aside from officials of the United Nations, tend to be figures associated with Middle Eastern and Asian nations like Turkey, India, and China.  From a Western perspective, then, the question most vexed and most in need of an answer is how to overcome the isolation of peace movements.

Two answers suggest themselves, but each produces problems that generate a need for further discussion:

The first answer: establish an alliance between left-wing and right-wing peace advocates. Anti-war liberals and socialists could unite with conservative isolationists and libertarians to create a cross-party coalition against foreign wars.  In fact, this sort of coalition sometimes comes into existence spontaneously, as in the United States during the period following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The difficulty, of course, is that this is precisely what Marxists call a “rotten bloc” – a political organization that, because it finds common cause on only one issue, is bound to break apart when other issues become salient. In addition, if anti-war work means uprooting the causes of war as well as opposing some current military mobilization, the elements of a “rotten bloc” are unlikely to agree on how to identify and remove those causes.

The second answer: convert the left-liberal party to the perspective of anti-imperial peace advocacy, or split the putative left into pro-war and anti-war constituencies and work to secure the latter’s supremacy. The obstacle to doing this is not only the general fear of a right-wing takeover noted above but the weakness of the peace camp within the left-wing milieu. In the U.S., most “progressives” (including self-anointed Democratic Socialists) have been eerily silent on the war in Ukraine, either out of fear of isolating themselves on domestic issues or because they accept the conventional justifications for a war against “Russian aggression.”  This suggests the need to break with the empire-builders and to build anti-capitalist organizations committed to ending imperialism and making global peace. This is the solution to the problem, at least in theory, but whether people can be mobilized in large enough numbers to enact it during the period of “partial war” is doubtful.

This suggests a connection between the two emerging forms of violent conflict discussed earlier. Partial wars of the sort being fought out in Ukraine can intersect inter-imperial struggles like that between the U.S./Europe alliance and Russia. When this occurs they become “frozen” conflicts which, however, have the capacity to escalate dramatically – that is, to move toward total war – if either side faces a disastrous defeat, or if inter-imperial conflict intensifies significantly. Inter-imperial conflict itself can be conceived of either as a revival of the Cold War manageable, to some extent, by the processes of mutual deterrence developed during the earlier era, or as a new type of struggle posing new risks, including a much greater danger that nuclear arms (starting with low-yield weapons) will be used either by the major parties or by their allies. My own view, to be presented in a later editorial, is that it represents a new type of struggle that greatly increases the danger of all-out nuclear war.

The immediate conclusion that one may draw from this is that there is an urgent need for peace scholars to recognize emerging forms of global conflict, analyze the new conflict dynamics, and draw practical conclusions from this analysis.  At the same time, peace activists urgently need to identify the causes of their current weakness and isolation and to devise methods to increase their influence greatly among members of the public and reachable decision-makers. In these efforts international conversations and actions will be of critical importance, since the world as a whole is finally, and rightfully, slipping out of the control of the West.

https://www.transcend.org/tms/2022/08/new-patterns-of-conflict-and-the-weakness-of-peace-movements/