How Double Standards & American Illiberalism are Undermining The Rules Based International Order.

Political hypocrisy has been around for as long as we’ve had politics, but does that make it okay? Should we just accept political immorality, the double dealing that underpins our world as ‘just the way things are’ or should we expect better from our leaders?

A gaggle of diplomats at the UN including the Palestinian Representative, Riyad Mansour (left foreground). Image from International Crisis Group.

‘High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.’

W.E.B. DuBois.

Hypocrisy has been around for as long as we have had politics; why is today any different?

In a commentary for the International Crisis Group, UN Director Richard Gowan, cautions us against too much hysteria in the ‘double standards,’ or the ‘hypocrisy’ — as I like to call it — debate. We’ve been here before, he says, many times since the UN’s inception; today’s debates in the chambers, whilst they may, at times, have descended into little more than rounds of ‘mudslinging,’ accusations of double standards have…