Tony Blair, Syria, and the Peace of Westphalia

R2P is a live trigger for thermonuclear war. What is R2P? The social media shorthand for "Responsibility To Protect", a new doctrine in international law that the United Nations is being pushed to apply to Syria. At the UN on Feb. 22, India's Permanent Representative to the UN, Hardeep Singh Puri, citing the use of the R2P by "over-enthusiastic members" of the international community in the case of Libya and Syria, charged the UN principle of responsibility to protect, or "R2P", is being used for regime change.

R2P is a tool in the British Empire's war against the sovereign nation-state. It is the culmination of more than a decade of campaigning by the now former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to shift international law, from a basis of respecting the sovereignty of nation-states, to one of active interventionism into the internal affairs of nations, under the guise of averting humanitarian disasters. On the surface of it, few people would argue in principle against intervening to stop a Rwandan genocide, or something similar. However, the Blair agenda is not humanitarian—far from it—but is a smokescreen to overthrow the cornerstone doctrine of international law that ushered in the era of sovereign nation-states, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.

The Peace of Westphalia was the treaty that finally brought an end to the 30 Years War, between nominally Catholic and Protestant states of Europe. The war had been a neverending cycle of violence, driven by religious zeal on both sides, in which all sides felt justified in exacting revenge, and invading their neighbours to defend communities of their own religious persuasion. After 30 years Europe was decimated, but there was no end in sight, until the Catholic Cardinal Mazarin brokered an extraordinary peace agreement wherein both sides gave up their decades of grievances, on a truly Christian basis: the advantage of the other. Both sides signed knowing that by doing so it would advantage their enemy, but in the knowledge that their enemy was signing on the same basis. The Peace of Westphalia enshrined the principle of non-interference as the foundation of national sovereignty—no longer could a Prince use claims of religious oppression of fellow Catholics, or Protestants, in a neighbouring state as an excuse to attack that state.

In 1999, British Prime Minister Blair started his campaign against the Westphalia principle by orchestrating the bombing of Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia. U.S. President Bill Clinton was embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal at the time, so Blair's ally in the U.S. was then Vice President Al Gore. Citing Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's persecution of the Muslim population of Kosovo—whose resistance was led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a group listed by the U.S. as a terrorist organisation (whose numbers included Australian convert David Hicks)—Blair and Gore orchestrated a transformation of NATO from being a defensive pact, to allowing offensive operations. Like today, the people of Kosovo were incidental to Blair's agenda—the real target was Russia, and China. China's Belgrade embassy was even bombed in the campaign, "accidentally".

Blair boasted that the Kosovo campaign was the first step towards ending the Westphalian era, even before 9/11 and Iraq. In a March 5, 2004 speech justifying the invasion of Iraq, he said, "Let me attempt an explanation of how my own thinking, as a political leader, has evolved during these past few years. Already, before September 11th the world's view of the justification of military action had been changing. The only clear case in international relations for armed intervention had been self-defence, response to aggression. But the notion of intervening on humanitarian grounds had been gaining currency. I set this out, following the Kosovo war, in a speech in Chicago in 1999, where I called for a doctrine of international community, where in certain clear circumstances, we do intervene, even though we are not directly threatened. .. So, for me, before September 11th, I was already reaching for a different philosophy in international relations from a traditional one that has held sway since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648; namely that a country's internal affairs are for it and you don't interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance...."

When the Blair-Bush-Cheney drive for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was in full swing in 2002, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in the Fall 2002 NPQ magazine, "The controversy about preemption... At bottom it is a debate between the traditional notion of sovereignty of the nation-state as set forth in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the adaptation required by both modern technology and the nature of the terrorist threat."

A decade later, Blair's doctrine in now enshrined in the UN's R2P principle, but it is more than ironic that its first test run was Libya and Gadaffi, it is revealing. Blair and the British had no problem with Gadaffi, whilst he was useful to their interests. It was Blair personally who repatriated the Gadaffi regime out of pariah status to be accepted by the international community, in 2010—there were no "humanitarian" concerns then. But the following year, Blair's R2P was used to launch an illegal war against Libya, and Gadaffi's murder. Blair's R2P, and the British-Obama agenda, is forcing Russia and China to prepare to defend their sovereignty. As expressed by India's Hardeep Singh Puri, they know R2P is a stalking horse for regime change, which is ultimately targeted at them. Those nations believe in the principle of national sovereignty. Incidentally, so too do the overwhelming majority of the people of the U.S., Australia, and even Britain. They are presently being sucked into going along with a war scenario on a lie—humanitarian concerns—when the real issue is one on which they would side with the nations who are being targeted.

Click here for more on the Treaty of Westphalia.