22-04-2025
Panel discusses global power shifts, Western imperialism, Gaza conflict
An Egyptian navy in the Suez Canal on March 30, 2021 (AFP photo)
AMMAN — After the collapse of the Eastern Block in 1989, turbulent 1990s and even more turbulent 21st century, new geopolitical centres and their orbits are taking shape.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations continue the US 'expansionist' policies around the world, but new poles of power have emerged during the past two decades.
The war in Ukraine proved that Europe is not immune to full out military conflicts and after three years of a carnage it is still very difficult to predict the outcome.
One of the ongoing conflicts is going on in Gaza, where Israel for the second year in a row tries to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population by committing acts of genocide.
Gaza became the epicentre of the global resistance and the opposition dynamics of the globalisation that is dictated from the Western political centres.
"Israel 'has the right to attack' and the US is presumably support it," said a 'distinguished' fellow of the American University in Beirut and former editor-in-chief of The Jordan Times, Rami Khouri.
Khouri added that the conflict in Palestine has its history and continuation during decades. The international support is directed towards Palestinian equal rights and for the two-state solution.
A panel titled " Shifting Paradigms: Emerging Powers and the New Multipolarity" recently gathered regional and international pundits specialised in Globalisation. The event was organised by the Colombia Global Centres Istanbul and Amman.
Khouri maintains that the reason why the Palestinian struggle gains more international support is that many nations on the Global South understand what happens under a colonial imperial system because they experienced it in many ways.
Historical markers are unavoidable as imperial colonial dynamics persist.
Regarding the previous US administration, Turkish Professor Soli Ozel said that Bidenomics did not succeed because he could not bring back manufacturing to the US soil. Bidenomics could train the American workers to be more operational in an advance service economy.
'If the first revisionism is about the US no longer willing to be constrained by the rules and institutions that itself has set up. The second part of that revisionism is techno industry wanting to have no restrictions,' Ozel said.
'That's the reason for the US attack on the EU regulatory bodies," the professor underlined, adding that there is also intra-corporate struggle within the US society.
Regardless of their global roles, all political centres have their vulnerabilities and the difference between political systems is whose vulnerabilities are going to be better managed, Ozel said, noting that to approach Middle East as if it was a colonial playground is just not going to pay off.
After almost two years of constant killing of the Palestinians in Gaza, the US and Israel want to impose Pax Hebraica. Israeli forces are in Lebanon and Syria, and it seems that Zionists are not going to leave anytime soon but this occupation is not going to succeed on the long run, the Turkish expert said.
The British and French imperial projects in the Middle East had never worked said a British historian John Tooze, noting that in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Iraq it has been a zone in which imperial policy malfunctioned.
The Western order, which operated for the past five-six hundred years made moral claims but these claims have been buried in the Gaza ruble, Ozel stressed, adding that sheer violence is a norm of the so-called international order.
"Can Europe disassociate from the US?' Ozel asked, and rise as a moral power after being overlooked and silent. It would help establish a new world order and new balance where new actors will emerge or old actors will have different roles.
The post-Cold War world order was not in favour of Palestinians, underlined Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate fellow of the Chatham House Middle East and North Africa programme, adding that the two-state solution would take a place if the US adopted a different foreign policy model.
The more active role of other political centres in the world, instead of the US monopoly on the role of the mediator in the Palestinian struggle for an independent state, will happen in the future, Aboudouh said.
