There is something uniquely nauseating about watching the architects of global misery gather in a temperature-controlled room to lament the 'rupture' of a world order they spent decades meticulously sabotaging. The latest gathering of the world’s self-appointed custodians has produced a soundbite so dripping with unearned pathos that it deserves its own wing in the Museum of Failed Metaphors: 'If we're not at the table, we're on the menu.' It is a charming little sentiment, isn’t it? It suggests a world divided into diners and dinners, conveniently ignoring the fact that everyone in that room has spent their entire career serving up their own populations with a side of austerity and a garnish of state-sponsored surveillance.

Let’s talk about this 'table.' For the better part of a century, the 'table' has been a place where the powerful sit to discuss how best to partition the planet’s remaining resources while pretending to care about 'sovereignty' and 'human rights.' It is a mahogany altar where the high priests of neoliberalism and the warlords of the East occasionally trade insults before agreeing on whose peasants should starve this quarter. Now, suddenly, these luminaries are terrified. They look at the seating chart and realize that the spots are filling up with people who don't care for their etiquette, and the realization has sent them into a collective fit of the vapors. They warn us that 'international law' is being 'trampled underfoot,' as if international law was ever anything more than a polite suggestion used by the West to bully smaller nations into submission, only to be discarded the moment a strategic interest or a mineral deposit was at stake.

The hypocrisy is thick enough to choke a horse. To hear global leaders complain about 'imperial ambitions resurfacing' is like watching a group of arsonists complain about a draft in the building they just set on fire. Imperialism didn’t 'resurface'; it just changed clothes. It swapped the pith helmet for a designer suit and a venture capital portfolio. The current 'rupture' isn’t a breakdown of morality; it’s a breakdown of the monopoly on violence. The old guards are upset because they are no longer the only ones allowed to ignore the rules they wrote. When the West does it, it’s 'protecting interests'; when anyone else does it, it’s a 'threat to the rules-based order.' It’s a comedy of errors where the punchline is a drone strike.

And what of this 'menu' they fear so much? The irony, of course, is that the general public has been on the menu since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Whether you’re being devoured by the slow-grinding teeth of corporate greed in a 'democracy' or being swallowed whole by an autocrat’s ego in an 'empire,' the result is the same: you are the fuel for a machine that doesn't know you exist. These leaders aren't worried about *us* being on the menu; they’re worried about *each other*. They’ve realized that the predatory system they built is finally hungry enough to start eating its creators. The 'world order' they are mourning was never about peace; it was about a predictable, managed level of conflict that kept the dividends flowing. Now that the conflict has become unpredictable, they’re calling it a tragedy.

Consider the absurdity of the 'rupture' narrative. It implies there was once a cohesive, functioning whole—a golden age where the law was king and justice was the currency of the realm. This is a fantasy for the exceptionally dim-witted. The world order has always been a series of uneasy truces between predators, punctuated by the occasional massacre of the prey. To mourn its passing is to mourn a cage because it’s being replaced by a pit. The 'international law' they claim is being trampled was always a ghost—a convenient fiction used to provide a veneer of civility to the raw exercise of power. If it were real, the 'table' would be empty, as half the people sitting there would be in a jail cell in The Hague.

So, let them whine. Let them fret over their seating arrangements while the world they broke continues to spin toward its inevitable conclusion. They speak of 'global cooperation' while sharpening their knives under the silk tablecloth. They talk of 'the future of humanity' while they are the very reason humanity has no future. The truth is that there is no 'table' that can save us, and the 'menu' is already written in the ink of our own apathy. We are watching a group of vultures argue over the etiquette of picking a carcass clean. The only thing more pathetic than their performance is our willingness to believe that any of it matters. In the end, whether you are sitting at the table or lying on it, the house always wins, and the house is currently on fire.