The gruesome killing of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul at the beginning of last month is but one symbol of the new era of realpolitik into which 21st century international relations is sinking like quicksand. The nation state is back with a vengeance, baring its claws and teeth, just as the soothing post-Cold War notion of an “international community” fades further from view.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, consumed by the Brexit process, is stuck in old and increasingly redundant modes of thinking about the world – torn between a brash, overconfident and underdeveloped idea of itself as a sovereign nation reborn, and a cosmopolitan lament about the passing of a liberal international order in which the boundaries between states were supposed to melt away and nationalism was to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Having covered its hands in blood, the Saudi regime has proved itself inept at washing it off. So flagrant was the violation of basic human rights and diplomatic conventions that it allowed Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose human rights record is diabolical, to preach from the moral high ground. So cack-handed was the cover-up that even Donald Trump, with his famous brass neck, had to concede that his friends in Riyadh had made an awful mess of it.
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