License for the new thugs

Yesterday's crimes as an alibi for today's crimes. This is the functional idea in the newly inaugurated multipolar world, where the emerging powers do not mince words. The treatment they give to international legality will not be different from that given to them by their main architect, which is the United States. It will be applied at convenience, with rigor to the adversary and extreme laxity to the friend and, naturally, to oneself. It is a new order, no doubt, but at the same time a retreat without horizon or purpose of straightening the crooked tree, on the contrary, with permission for each tree to obtain the recognition of its perversion.

The presidency of George W. Bush, as a synthesis and historical culmination of the excesses of the victorious side of the cold war, provides a superb catalog to the new thugs who suck the world: the invasion of Iraq; targeted assassinations, the atrocities of the global war on terror; the judicial limbo that is still Guantánamo... And if that is not enough, the old catalogues are useful, from the enormity of colonial and imperialist horror to the Pinochet coup and the Vietnam War.

With its American mirror in front of it, Russia always acts big. In Ukraine it is exhausting the catalogue of horror. China, stealthy, persistent and effective, is not lagging behind: Hong Kong is already subdued, punitive control over Xing Jiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia is total and the repressive assimilation of their populations, the siege on Taiwan is tightening. Both imperial nations aspire to homogeneity, ethnic (Russian and Han), linguistic (Russian and Mandarin) and even religious (Orthodoxy and Confucian communism), under the personal command rod of two autocrats.

They are the latest and disturbing model, emulated even in democratic India and infinite diversity. The assassination of a Sikh leader in Canada, organized by the Indian secret services according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is the language with which Narendra Modi speaks to the world about the power of a power essential for the balance of power against China. It is the same bloody vocabulary used by another autocrat, the Saudi prince, the world's leading oil producer and major sports sponsor, Mohammed bin Salman, who has made himself forgiven by all for the death and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist critical of the regime.

Unilateralism is fashionable. The rule is to skip the legality and breach the pacts. It gives meaning to Azerbaijan's action in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave under siege for months and now under threat of ethnic cleansing after its defeat and surrender to Baku's troops. In the bad streets of the world, the new ones demand the inhibition of those who until now acted as policemen, easier when the policemen are also gangsters, as is the case of Putin's Russia, invader in Ukraine and useless protector of the besieged Armenians.

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