The devil rules mental metaphors and games like this.

Sometimes, the teacher is the devil of reality. How many months have we been without the verb of the famous “rules-based international order”? This “rules-based international order”, which accompanies him: RB(I)O.

Look: "At the closing press conference of the NATO Summit in Madrid, [Biden] warned Russia and China that global democracies would defend a "rules-based order" (RBO). […] On 12 October 2022, the president of EE.UU. published its National Security Strategy, which insists on the RBO as "the basis of peace and prosperity in the world." The expression 'rule-based order' is so often used by American political leaders, such as President Bide and Antony Blink's Secretary of State, that, according to Professor Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School at Harvard University, 'it seems that it has become a working condition to occupy a high position in the apparatus of American foreign policy'.

The massacre in Gaza begins. Now it seems that you can't talk about RBO. Because it would be quite a sarcasm of rules and order, right? Sometimes its substitute is the “right to defend oneself”, which has the same demonising.

Other times the devil of logic comes into play, which is no better. Blinken, which we will almost always find, meets him. Because ten days ago at the Munich Security Conference he came up with the launch: “And if you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu.” Translated into Basque: at the international level, if you are not eating, you will be a dish.

It is nothing new nor in the foreign policy of the United States. And it's clear that it's transparent: if you don't eat your neighbor, he'll eat you.

Perhaps too transparent: the table metaphor barely blurs the aggressiveness of the message. So far it was used for the household, “in company”. “He might be as in the case of ORONA, but he is our ORONA”, etc.

Blinken, however, does so in a high-level announcer. And also, when he talked about relationships with allies: Jaishankar and Baerbock were their interlocutors at the time. Would it be clear to them that the United States intends to eat at all times sitting at the table? And the alternative offered to them is also quite obvious: jankide (but nobody says everyone eats the same) or meat.

Others who would be food have understood it immediately.