The G-Minus World

The World Order Nobody Ordered

“How many more charred corpses does he have to see before the president considers a policy change?”

CBS correspondent Ed O’Keefe’s question hung in the White House briefing room on May 28, 2024. John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, bristled. “I kind of take a little offence at the question,” he replied.

Two days earlier, Israeli strikes on a tent encampment in Rafah had killed 45 Palestinians. Images of charred bodies and videos of parents burning alive as their children screamed for help ricocheted across social media. The weapons used were American-made GBU-39 bombs, manufactured by Boeing.

Twenty days before, President Biden had drawn a red line. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah... I’m not supplying the weapons,” he told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

Now, with Rafah burning, the White House insisted Israel hadn’t crossed that line. It was a “limited operation,” not the “major ground offensive” Biden had warned against.

This moment—a journalist asking about charred corpses while an administration spokesman took offence at the question rather than the corpses—captured something fundamental about how power works in the contemporary world.

Not the power of great nations over small ones, but the reverse: how ostensibly dependent clients have learned to manipulate their patrons into complicity.

This is not Ian Bremmer’s G-Zero world of absent hegemons but a G-Minus where minor powers play the powers that prop them up.