00:00You know, one, I think what Sir Michael just said about the United States and the way it has conducted
00:05its policy to suggest that what President Trump has done is a continuation of what the United States did in
00:12the past, to my mind again, is extremely generous to the current Trump policies.
00:18And the example I'd like to cite is that after 9-11, September 2001, when the United States was attacked
00:27by a terrorist group, the way in which the U.S. responded was that it was able to persuade the
00:34global community that it needed to act in a certain manner, and which is why we had the U.S.
00:39bombing of Afghanistan and whatever followed in the global war on terror.
00:44Now, that is very different from the unilateral action that President Trump has taken and accorded unto himself that he
00:51will be the judge, jury, and the executioner, as it were, when it came to the Middle East or what
00:56we refer to as West Asia.
00:58Yes, Hamas, October 7, was absolutely tragic, dreadful, to be deplored, to be condemned.
01:05But why I come back to deviance and deviant behavior is that if the United States endorsed tacitly or otherwise
01:12what happened in Gaza, to me, as an outsider, as an analyst, it is lowering the bar of rectitude of
01:21how a country like the United States, which was always held up as being a global leader, had conducted itself.
01:30Now, you can add what happened to a president who was abducted, and there were various other instances where the
01:37U.S. just unilaterally decided that it would act, for instance, against Iran.
01:41So that is what I mean by deviance and deviant behavior.
01:45This is not a moral judgment.
01:46I mean, we are often told that big powers will do whatever they want to do, whatever they wish to
01:51do, and all the lower and smaller powers will accordingly trim their sales and accommodate and come to terms with
01:58that.
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