Our Wednesday News Analysis | Western leaders play their part in our charade democracies. Can you spot the tell?

Two pronounced – and inverse – trends in western societies have long been observable, and yet they are rarely noticed or discussed.

There is a reason for that. These trends tell us something deeply revealing about how our societies are shaped by structural forces – forces that individual office holders can do little to shape through their own values or personalities.

These forces operate rather like laws of nature – though there is nothing natural about them. They are the very opposite of how most westerners imagine power works – that is, that it derives from the will of the people and is democratically accountable.

The first trend is this: the nearer to power a politician or official gets, the more their behaviour has to align with the structural interests of the billionaire class. Or put another way, the only route to power for any individual in our societies is by subordinating their personal beliefs and values to the interests of a rapacious, predatory class of capitalists.

The second trend illuminates the first. The further a former office holder moves away from the centre of power, the more room there is for their humanity to resurface – assuming they were not a hollow vessel for power to begin with, or turned permanently sociopathic through years of service to elite interests.

Yes, Tony Blair – I’m looking at you.

Eradication process

Let’s begin with the second of these trends, which is easier to identify.

Fourteen years ago, Israeli film maker Dror Moreh released an Oscar-nominated film called The Gatekeepers, based on interviews with what were then the six surviving former heads of the Shin Bet.

The Shin Bet publicly describes itself as Israel’s domestic intelligence service. But that gives no sense of its real function.

Israel is not like other western states, whose internal intelligence services typically deal with homegrown threats of organised crime and subversion (or at least what they claim to be those things).

For decades, Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – an occupation judged in 2024 to be be an illegal system of apartheid by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court.

But as Israel has made clear for decades now, it does not regard the territories under its occupation as Palestinian. It regards them as lands divinely willed to the Jewish people and which it has a right to actively colonise – or as Israeli officials term it, “Judaise”.

The Palestinians are simply an obstacle to the full realisation of that colonisation. They are viewed rather like an infestation of termites. They need to be removed or eradicated.

Israel is at different stages in that eradication process, reflecting the degree of pushback it has received internationally. Gaza is near completion. The West Bank is well advanced. East Jerusalem is a work in progress...

Read more: Western leaders play their part in our charade democracies. Can you spot the tell?

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HOW ARAB WORLD SHOULD REACT TO US-CHINA POWER SHIFT

Source: The New Arab
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2644036

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud
Published May 18, 2026

Trump’s visit to China appeared to be more about a declining empire attempting to manage its own contraction (File/AFP)

US President Donald Trump’s state visit to China last week will go down in history as the moment the US finally acknowledged Beijing’s ascendancy as a global superpower. That acknowledgment does not need to be articulated in a formal statement; it can be clearly read in the subtext of diplomatic behavior, global perception and shifting media coverage.

During the summit, Trump’s delegation — which included prominent American corporate leaders — engaged with President Xi Jinping not from a position of absolute global dictation, but through a lens of defensive pragmatism. This transactional approach focused on securing bilateral trade commitments and preventing catastrophic economic friction.

The spectacle of the leader of the Western world navigating Beijing’s terms, while actively managing domestic economic anxieties, signals a profound shift. The traditional American posture of undisputed global hegemon has transformed into that of a major power among equals, seeking stable terms of coexistence with an unignorable rival.

The moment is comparable only with Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to Beijing, though the circumstances are entirely different. Back then, the US’ aim was to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and gain leverage over the Soviet Union in exchange for the normalization of diplomatic ties.

Trump’s visit to China appeared to be more about a declining empire attempting to manage its own contraction

Dr. Ramzy Baroud

In 1972, China was an economically isolated, agrarian society recovering from internal upheaval. Today, Beijing is a financial giant that boasts the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity, a critical hub of global supply chains, and a leader in next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence.

Militarily, the People’s Liberation Army has transformed into a powerful navy and high-tech force capable of denying access to the Western Pacific. This vast economic and military expansion translates into unparalleled global influence, altering the balance of power across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

With all this in mind, Trump’s visit to China appeared to be more about a declining empire attempting to manage its own contraction — a move that will likely lead to serious concessions.

Nowhere is the US’ dwindling status more apparent than in the Middle East. Decades of disastrous military campaigns, political alienation and the unraveling of traditional alliances have eroded Washington’s credibility. Regional powers no longer view the US as an indispensable security guarantor and are instead looking toward a multipolar future.

China is already the Middle East’s largest trading partner, with interests ranging from massive crude oil imports to sweeping infrastructure investments under the Belt and Road Initiative, cutting-edge telecommunications networks and multibillion-dollar clean energy grids.

Beijing’s approach to the Middle East is fundamentally different to that of the US. The latter inherited the colonial legacy of Britain and France. Though Washington resists seeing itself as a colonial power, it behaves like one: leveraging military might to achieve political dominance and economic privileges...

Read more: How Arab world should react to US-China power shift

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PAX SILICA, THE GAZA GENOCIDE, AND THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM

Source: Jews for Justice for Palestinians
https://jfjfp.com/pax-silica-the-gaza-genocide-and-the-crisis-of-global-capitalism/

William I. Robinson and M. Gürsan Şenalp write in Mondoweiss on 24 May 2026

Signatories hold up the declaration signed at the inaugural Pax Silica Summit held in Washington, DC on 12 December 2025

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has, for the moment, turned international attention away from Gaza as Israel moves from high- to low-intensity genocide. The genocide may be the horrific culmination of 75-plus years of Zionist settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, but in order to make sense of it, we must analyze the radical transformations that have taken place in the Middle Eastern and global political economy in recent decades.

The impulse to genocide has always been built into the Zionist project. But that impulse has been activated by the epochal crisis of global capitalism. The Al Aqsa Flood attack of October 2023 furnished Israel with the historic opportunity for which they had been waiting for decades. If the Zionists are still in pursuit of their elusive Eretz Israel, the United States has been heading up a much more expansive project, one that places Gaza in the very center of global capitalism and its epochal crisis. In the game plan of the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, Gaza is now to become an experimental field for a new and deadlier phase of global capitalism. It is this larger picture that we want to lay out in this article.

The contemporary crisis of global capitalism is multidimensional. Structurally it is a crisis of overaccumulation, which refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital (profits) are built up but this capital cannot find productive outlets for reinvestment. This overaccumulation crisis generates intense pressure for expansion as transnational capitalists undertake a predatory search for where to unload massive amounts of surplus capital and open up new spaces for profit-making. This violent expansion involves the seizure of markets and resources around the world through war, displacement, and repression. The U.S. state and beyond it, what we will call Global Trumpism, is its out-of-control instrument in this expansionary wave. At the core of Global Trumpism is the Washington-Tel Aviv axis.

The larger backdrop to the Israeli genocide is the transnational integration of capital over the past half century and the radical restructuring of global class relations and power blocs that capitalist globalization has brought about. Globalization in West Asia region began in the 1980s and accelerated with the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that followed the establishment in 1997 of the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) and a host of related bilateral and multilateral regional and extra-regional free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs and IMF-supervised austerity.

This integration unleashed a cascade of transnational corporate and financial investment in finance, energy, high-tech, construction, infrastructure, luxury consumption, tourism and other services. It brought Gulf capital, including trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds, together with capital from all around the world, involving the EU, North and Latin America, and Asia, inextricably enmeshing them all in emerging global circuits of accumulation. In this way, nationally-oriented Arab bourgeoisies transmorphed into transnationally-oriented bourgeoisies as the entire region became incorporated into the globally-integrated production, financial, and service system that came into being over the past half century...

Read more: Pax Silica, the Gaza genocide, and the crisis of global capitalism