Francesca Tavares | On War and the West: The crisis of values and the necessity of clarity

In the contemporary global landscape, a dangerous fog has descended upon the concepts of power, justice, and international order.

For the Caribbean – a region whose stability is inextricably linked to the "rules-based international order" – the erosion of Western resolve and the degradation of international institutions aren’t merely academic concerns; they are existential ones.

We are currently witnessing a profound crisis of clarity, where the moral distinction between liberal democracy and revisionist autocracy is being intentionally blurred.

As Shadi Hamid argues in ' The Liberal Case for American Power', the alternative to Western hegemony is not a peaceful, multipolar utopia. Rather, it is a vacuum filled by powers that do not share even a nominal commitment to human rights or democratic self-determination.

THE HEAD OF THE SNAKE: ESCHATOLOGICAL FANATICISM

To understand the current global instability, one must look past the surface of regional skirmishes to the ideological engine driving them: the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC is not merely a conventional military; it is an organisation fueled by eschatological fanaticism. Its mission is not territorial in the traditional sense, but the imposition of a radical, extremist version of the umma through the destruction of the West ("Death to America") and the annihilation of the Jewish State ("Death to Israel").

The IRGC has constructed a "ring of fire" around the Middle East, utilising a network of proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen (who currently threaten global maritime trade essential to Caribbean ports), various militias in Iraq, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza.

There is a painful historical irony here. The 2003 invasion of Iraq remains a traumatic memory for the American public – a strategic error that cost blood and treasure while destabilising the region. Yet, at that time, Israeli intelligence and leadership advised the West to focus on the "head of the snake" in Tehran rather than Baghdad. Had that advice been heeded, the world might have avoided the proliferation of Iranian-backed terror that now stretches from the Levant to the Red Sea. Instead, Iran was the primary beneficiary of the Iraq War, filling the power vacuum and refining its "export of revolution".

THE ‘DISNEYFICATION’ OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

This march of fanaticism is enabled by the decline of the United Nations. Once a forum for conflict resolution, the UN has become a theater of the absurd. The inclusion of Iran on human rights bodies, despite its documented atrocities against its own citizens, is a fundamental betrayal of the UN Charter.

We see a growing "false equivalence" in global discourse, where the tactical errors of Western democracies are equated with the inherent, ideological brutality of the IRGC regime. This moral flattening has led to the "Disneyfication" and "TikTok-isation" of international law.

Terms with profound legal weight, such as "genocide" and "war crime", are being watered down into political hashtags and marketing tools. When everything is a war crime, nothing is. This linguistic inflation allows actual perpetrators of mass atrocities to operate without scrutiny while the legal system is weaponised against those defending liberal values.

DECONSTRUCTING THE NARRATIVE: THE CASE OF ISRAEL

The persistent bias against Israel at the UN serves as a case study in this loss of institutional integrity. Recent reports – including detailed legal submissions to the UN regarding data inconsistencies – reveal a disturbing trend in how "settler violence" is recorded.

Rigorous analysis of OCHA data shows:

• Misclassification of Holy Sites: Incidents of Jews visiting the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism, upon which the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built – are often recorded as "incidents" to imply Jewish provocation, ignoring historical and religious rights.

• Law Enforcement as "Violence": Legitimate acts of law enforcement – such as police neutralising a terrorist in the act of stabbing passersby – have been categorised as "settler violence" to artificially inflate statistics.

• Geographic Distortion: Reports often include events occurring outside of Judea and Samaria, involving individuals with no connection to the "settler" movement, to fit a predetermined political narrative.

THE JUDICIAL IMPERATIVE: THE DEATH PENALTY FOR OCT. 7

This leads to the debate regarding Israel’s recent legislative moves to allow the death penalty for those involved in the October 7 massacre – a true act of genocide. Western media has criticised this as a regression. However, this critique ignores a brutal "Catch-21".

For decades, convicted terrorists have been used as bargaining chips in negotiations following subsequent kidnappings. The case of Yahya Sinwar is the ultimate proof of this failure. Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7, was released in a 2011 prisoner deal after murdering Israelis. His freedom resulted in the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust and the subsequent suffering of millions of Israelis and Gazans.

Seeking the death penalty for such perpetrators is not "hate-filled vengeance"; it is a defensible legal mechanism to ensure that those who commit unspeakable atrocities can never again be used to extort a sovereign state or harm more innocents.

THE GLOBAL CHAIN: FROM GAZA TO TAIWAN

The road to a secure and sovereign Taiwan – and by extension, a stable global economy – runs directly through the defeat of revisionist aggression in the Middle East and Ukraine. Taiwan is the world’s kingmaker nation; it holds the "Silicon Shield", producing 90 per cent of the world's advanced semiconductors. A conflict there would trigger a global depression that would devastate the Caribbean.

China and Russia act as the silent benefactors of the IRGC’s chaos, providing the economic and diplomatic cover that allows these regimes to bypass scrutiny. They are watching the West’s resolve. Victory in Iran, et al., is one of the more credible ways to signal to Beijing that the cost of an invasion of Taiwan is too high.

CHALLENGING THE ‘UNDERDOG’ FALLACY

To navigate this era, Caribbean readers must move beyond the knee-jerk "America bad, underdog good" reflex. This simplistic binary is now being weaponised by the most reactionary regimes on earth.

Is the "underdog" a regime like the IRGC, which hangs its own youth from cranes and throws acid in the faces of its women while preaching "resistance"?

Or is the true underdog the student in Taipei, the woman in Tehran, the kibbutznik in Haifa, the journalist in Kyiv; who seek the protection of a liberal order that, however flawed, recognises their inherent right to exist?

When we reflexively oppose Western power, we are not supporting "decolonisation"; we are inviting a more brutal, less accountable form of imperialism.

Justice requires the dispassionate application of power to ensure that those who organise slaughters cannot do so with impunity. If that clarity is lost, so is the world.

- Francesca Tavares is an Attorney-at-Law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com