RICHARD HAASS, THE DISTINGUISHED GLOBAL ANALYST, ONCE WROTE: "Consistency in foreign policy is a luxury policymakers cannot always afford."
But, equally, glaring national hypocrisy can come with a high price tag, in terms of lost credibility, damaged global prestige and diminished self-respect.
So Joe Biden's decision to defend Israel's methods in Gaza so soon after, in a different context, condemning Russia's in Ukraine, is not just an occasion for hand wringing from liberals and lawyers.
It is already having a real-world impact on relations between the global north and south, and west and east, creating consequences that could reverberate for decades.
The Biden administration, reluctant to change course, may say the parallels between Gaza and Ukraine are far from exact, but it also seems to know it is gradually losing diplomatic support.
When the US and Israel are joined at the UN general assembly by only eight other nations, including Micronesia and Nauru, as happened when they rejected a ceasefire resolution for Gaza this month, it is harder to argue that America remains the indispensable nation - a phrase from former secretary of state Madeleine Albright frequently referenced by Biden. By contrast, Vladimir Putin, after a period of his own global isolation, "really feels everything at this point is trending in his favour", according to Fiona Hill, the former US state department official specialising in Russia.
In a context in which many rising nations anyway viewed the "international rules-based order" with scepticism, the script for Sergei Lavrov, the veteran Russian foreign minister, writes itself. Speaking at the Doha Forum this month, Lavrov complained: "The rules were never published, were never even announced by anyone to anyone, and they are being applied depending on what exactly the west needs at a particular moment of modern history."
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