TEHRAN - US President Donald Trump recently stated explicitly that the US Navy, in carrying out Washington’s so‑called naval blockade of Iranian ports, behaves “like pirates.”

This confessional speech by Trump once again proved that in the logic of the United States—which claims hegemonic power in the world—there is no such thing as international law, and the liberal democratic system has openly shifted from liberalism to the law of the jungle. Previously, Joseph Nye, the soft power theorist who passed away a few months ago, predicted that Trump would squander America’s soft power and governance credibility.

But the main focus of this note is to address Trump’s confession to committing piracy from the perspective of human rights.

Over the past nearly four decades (since 1990 and the era of the superpower’s global dominance), the US has always attached a human rights appendix to every political action and foreign policy move in order to maintain its human rights posture. It pursued this human rights maneuver with two main goals: first, to lend credibility to Washington’s soft power and a humanitarian image of the United States; and second, to use human rights as a lever to pressure independent states and exact concessions.

The fact that Trump has torn off the US mask and explicitly and openly regards Washington’s foreign policy governance as that of pirates carries several important implications from a human rights perspective.

First, human rights have undergone a paradigm shift; commitment and law have been removed from the text and essence of human rights, replaced by force and brutality.

Second, a view that regards power in international relations as akin to pirates, declares it openly, and in fact takes pride in this piracy, has a clear meaning: the return of Western human rights to Hobbesian theory, which sees man as a wolf to man. In this human rights puzzle, man is free to tear apart and be a vampire like a wolf. This is precisely where Trump and Netanyahu are tied together, becoming sympathetic and aligned with each other, because both have beheaded human rights to achieve their sinister interests.

Third, the current human rights order—based on UN human rights, whose foundation is Western human rights—has collapsed. If the UN’s human rights mechanisms and institutions had a real and tangible existence, Trump should have been prosecuted as a major violator of human rights and international law, or at least his statements should have been condemned. 
Therefore, we must hope that a new order is established, and that human rights claimants do not openly and clearly call themselves pirates in broad daylight.