At issue is due process, the rule of law and the division of powers that defines American democracy.
Four years after Romney lost to Obama, Trump, travelling in a private plane with a gold-plated bathroom, has been embraced by the working class as a man of the people.
The alternative is to recover the constitutive elements of the politics of accommodation, the core ideas of democratic public life mediated by the rule of law and accountable to all citizens.
In the short term, Europe can only survive as a way of solving common problems, worth having insofar as the EU stabilises crises and protects the economic wellbeing of its citizens.
These are policies that, whilst having a humanitarian veneer, radically exacerbate the burdens of migrants and displaced persons from and in countries like Libya, Syria, Eritrea, and Somalia, alike.
Snared by geopolitical interests, post-9/11 interventions have too easily been captured by leading states. A robust law enforcement process must serve enforcers of law, not agents of geopolitical interests.
Where stands now the ‘responsibility to protect’? Recent egregious intervention failures require simplistic nostra to be replaced by a more complex understanding.
European identity was the negative construct of a Europe torn apart by world war. It was a negative outcome of an attempt to forge a European identity in the Cold War, squeezed, as Europe was, by the rivalry of the USA and USSR. But negative cultural formation cannot carry the day.
The manner in which the Syrian crisis has been addressed by western polities signals a shift, at least for now, in how acts of war are deliberated by those governments considering military intervention. But how significant is this? There is both some good and bad news in this regard.
While the region slips further into instability, the rejection of military action over Syria by the US Congress would be a huge stepping stone to undoing the US and western way of war since 9/11.
