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| Meta Title | Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole — On Trump, International Politics, and the Permanence of Power |
| Meta Description | Using a Yoruba proverb, the essay argues that international politics is governed by power, not justice. Trump’s bluntness exposes a longstanding reality: strong states act in their interests while weaker ones bear the consequences. From US military actions to global finance, legitimacy follows power, with moral language masking rather than constraining it. |
| Meta Canonical | null |
| Boilerpipe Text | I was talking with my parents about Trump’s foreign policy a while ago, about the particular chaos of watching a sitting American president start a war with
Iran
, kidnap the
Venezuelan President
, muse about
annexing Canada
and seizing
Greenland
, when my dad, a clever man with a fantastic sense of humour, said: “international politics is about
Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole
.”
The Yoruba anecdote translates roughly as:
the rich (Olowo) snatches (Gba) the wife (Iyawo) of the lazy (Ole)
.
In this context, the meaning is much darker because it is not really about laziness. It is pointing to the fact that if you have enough power, either in the form of money, strength, and/or influence, you can do whatever you want. The person whose wife is taken is not lazy so much as they are weak, and in the world the anecdote describes, weakness is not a misfortune that deserves sympathy. It is an opening that must and will be exploited. It is about power and the absence of it.
Olowo gba iyawo ole
perfectly articulates something that the field of international politics spends enormous effort either elaborating or obscuring: that
global politics, at its core, operates on the logic that power is legitimacy
. The rules of the international order are enforced selectively, by the powerful, in the direction of their interests.
This is not a fringe position;
African countries
have been saying it for years, and
Canada
and
France
figured it out in the last 6 months. It is, more or less, what realist
scholars of international relations
have argued since
Thucydides
- “
The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
As much as people like to think Trump is deviating from American foreign policy tradition, it is very important that you know he is not. What he is doing differently is that he is not applying the usual rhetorical scaffolding. He is not dressing up talk of annexation in the language of democracy promotion. Like the previous President
George Bush
. Donald Trump says the quiet part loudly, and this offends people, who have grown accustomed to the quiet part remaining quiet.
In my opinion, the reason these people, who are
predominantly white
Western liberal elites like those on
Pod Save America
, feel uncomfortable about Trump is a discomfort with brutal honesty rather than a discomfort with the underlying logic.
For example, Barack Obama, who won the
Nobel Peace Prize
and is widely considered a
“good”
president, oversaw 10 times as many covert airstrikes as his predecessor, George W. Bush. During Obama’s two terms,
563 strikes
targeted Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, compared to 57 under Bush.
Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those three countries.
This does not include Afghanistan, where US warplanes dropped 1,337 weapons in 2016 alone, a 40% rise on the previous year.
In simpler terms, Nobel Peace Prize-winning and generally beloved President Obama bombed the Middle East even more than George Bush, who, some would argue,
started
the war!
Obama’s first strike in Yemen killed 55 people.
21 were children, 10 of them under five. 12 were women, 5 of them pregnant.
Commanders thought they were targeting al Qaeda. They were wrong! The strike used cluster munitions. No one who ordered it faced consequences. In Pakistan, drone strikes killed at least 755 people in a single year, and
over the full Obama period, between 257 and 634 civilians died in a country the United States was not formally at war with.
The Pakistani government protested, but the programme continued run by the CIA.
Basketball-playing
,
ketchup-hating
and
generally hilarious
President Obama was
killing civilians
when his country was not at war with theirs!
In the face of this much murder, the international community did nothing consequential. The Nobel Committee did not ask for the prize back, even though they later said they
regretted the prize
. Europeans who
protested Bush’s invasion of Iraq
offered no comparable objection to Obama’s expansion of drone warfare. The same
Pod Save America people worked
for him!
Because the truth is, Obama was the perfect
Olowo (rich).
He spoke measuredly and advanced a theory of harm reduction that sounded serious and was wrapped in the language of proportionality and precision.
Even I, as I have learnt of the wickedness he unleashed on innocent people, continue to be won over by his charms, and I agreed with the people chanting
“come back”
at Jesse Jackson’s funeral.
Obama’s
Olowo
in
Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole
is the kind who speaks so well in a thoughtful language that the neighbours (the global community) ignored the fact that he was snatching up someone’s wife as they wailed in the courtyard.
With Trump, there is no pretence. The entire neighbourhood is shocked and unable to act as he loudly breaks down your door, drags your wife out of your bed, smacks you upside the head and takes your wallet on the way out.
As of March 22, 2026, the United States and Israel are in the
fourth week
of an active war against Iran. More than 1,400 Iranians have
been killed
, including at least 204 children. Iran was apparently in negotiations and had
signalled willingness
to make concessions; Trump said he was "not thrilled" with
the talks
, and the strikes began. Trump has since
said on social media
that he does
not want
a deal, that the US has "blown Iran off of the map." He is deploying thousands more Marines to the region while simultaneously suggesting the war may be "winding down." To manage the resulting oil price shock, the Trump administration has temporarily
lifted sanctions
on Iranian oil already loaded on ships.
This is
Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole
at full resolution: bomb a country that was willing to negotiate, choke the world's oil supply, and then issue a temporary licence for that same country's oil to stabilise your own markets.
You have taken the Ole’s wife, and you are going back for the jewellery.
The more durable and structural expression of
Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole
is the architecture of global finance, designed by the powerful and continues to operate primarily in their interest.
Consider what Barbados, one of the smallest states in the Western Hemisphere, has spent the last several years attempting.
The Bridgetown Initiative
, championed by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, is a set of demands addressed to the IMF, the World Bank, and G20 creditor nations. Its requests include fast-tracking $100 billion in Special Drawing Rights to support climate resilience in developing countries, suspending the IMF’s surcharges on heavily indebted borrowing countries, redesigning debt restructuring frameworks to include disaster clauses that let countries pause payments when a hurricane or flood destroys their economy, and committing $100 billion a year to cover climate-related loss and damage in developing countries.
These are requests for the basic conditions under which a small island state, which has contributed
almost nothing
to global carbon emissions, can survive the climate consequences of industrialisation it did not drive. The
IMF’s surcharges
, which Bridgetown asks to be suspended, are additional interest payments imposed on countries already in debt distress. The logic of charging struggling countries more to borrow because they are struggling is one that no domestic financial regulator in a functioning economy would permit a predatory lender to apply. At the international level, it is standard practice.
The
response to Bridgetown
has been what you would expect: sympathetic language, partial gestures, and no structural change. The same creditor nations that can
mobilise hundreds of billions of dollars
in weeks when a European banking system is under pressure have spent years deliberating over whether to include
disaster clauses
in loan agreements for countries that can be economically destroyed by a single storm.
I am not arguing that international institutions are worthless, or that there is no difference between better and worse conduct in global affairs. Imperfect structures can still provide meaningful constraints, and courts that deliver unequal justice are, in my opinion, still better than no courts. I am also not making the equivalence that because the United States has done bad things, all criticisms of Trump are hypocritical.
I am arguing that the international order has never been primarily organised around justice. It has been organised around the management of power, with justice invoked selectively, as a legitimating language for decisions already made on other grounds. And if you understand the system in this way, then you see that Trump is inevitable.
Structural adjustment programmes
that gutted public health systems across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s were implemented under the banner of fiscal responsibility, even as the same institutions that prescribed them maintained easy access to capital for their own
member governments in the North
.
Debt architecture
that extracts more from Africa annually in debt service than the continent receives in aid. These are features often mislabeled as aberrations.
Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole
is a dark and beautifully brutal international political truth.
It is the reality that must be understood before anything can be done about it. Treating the stated principles of the international order as its actual operating principles is how you end up genuinely surprised every time a powerful country acts in its interest at the expense of a weaker one.
Trump’s crudeness is, at least, clarifying. It strips the aesthetic layer from the logic and forces the question that the aesthetic layer was designed to prevent: has this (international politics) ever actually been about justice, and if no, what has it been about?
How do we get the Olowo to stop taking our wives?
Share
Leave a comment |
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# Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole — On Trump, International Politics, and the Undeniability of Power
[](https://substack.com/@fikayoakeredolu)
[Fikayo Akeredolu](https://substack.com/@fikayoakeredolu)
Mar 24, 2026
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I was talking with my parents about Trump’s foreign policy a while ago, about the particular chaos of watching a sitting American president start a war with [Iran](https://news.sky.com/story/iran-war-latest-trump-tehran-israel-strikes-us-drone-live-sky-news-13509565), kidnap the [Venezuelan President](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/4/we-just-witnessed-power-kidnapping-the-law), muse about [annexing Canada](https://time.com/7297490/trump-plan-to-annex-canada-51st-state-mark-carney/) and seizing [Greenland](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10472/), when my dad, a clever man with a fantastic sense of humour, said: “international politics is about *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole*.”
The Yoruba anecdote translates roughly as: *the rich (Olowo) snatches (Gba) the wife (Iyawo) of the lazy (Ole)*.
In this context, the meaning is much darker because it is not really about laziness. It is pointing to the fact that if you have enough power, either in the form of money, strength, and/or influence, you can do whatever you want. The person whose wife is taken is not lazy so much as they are weak, and in the world the anecdote describes, weakness is not a misfortune that deserves sympathy. It is an opening that must and will be exploited. It is about power and the absence of it.
*Olowo gba iyawo ole* perfectly articulates something that the field of international politics spends enormous effort either elaborating or obscuring: that *global politics, at its core, operates on the logic that power is legitimacy*. The rules of the international order are enforced selectively, by the powerful, in the direction of their interests.
This is not a fringe position; [African countries](https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/opinion/2024-01-28-icj-ruling-ruptures-international-order/) have been saying it for years, and [Canada](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/) and [France](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-emmanuel-macron-president-of-france/) figured it out in the last 6 months. It is, more or less, what realist [scholars of international relations](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2144235) have argued since [Thucydides](https://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.5.fifth.html) - “*The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”*
As much as people like to think Trump is deviating from American foreign policy tradition, it is very important that you know he is not. What he is doing differently is that he is not applying the usual rhetorical scaffolding. He is not dressing up talk of annexation in the language of democracy promotion. Like the previous President [George Bush](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/21/eu.usa1). Donald Trump says the quiet part loudly, and this offends people, who have grown accustomed to the quiet part remaining quiet.
In my opinion, the reason these people, who are *predominantly white* Western liberal elites like those on [Pod Save America](https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-america/), feel uncomfortable about Trump is a discomfort with brutal honesty rather than a discomfort with the underlying logic.
For example, Barack Obama, who won the [Nobel Peace Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/obama/facts/) and is widely considered a [“good”](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/barack-obama-joe-biden-favorability-00203578) president, oversaw 10 times as many covert airstrikes as his predecessor, George W. Bush. During Obama’s two terms, [563 strikes](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush) targeted Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, compared to 57 under Bush. **Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those three countries.** This does not include Afghanistan, where US warplanes dropped 1,337 weapons in 2016 alone, a 40% rise on the previous year.
*In simpler terms, Nobel Peace Prize-winning and generally beloved President Obama bombed the Middle East even more than George Bush, who, some would argue, [started](https://www.georgewbushlibrary.gov/research/topic-guides/the-iraq-war) the war\!*
Obama’s first strike in Yemen killed 55 people. **21 were children, 10 of them under five. 12 were women, 5 of them pregnant.** Commanders thought they were targeting al Qaeda. They were wrong! The strike used cluster munitions. No one who ordered it faced consequences. In Pakistan, drone strikes killed at least 755 people in a single year, and **over the full Obama period, between 257 and 634 civilians died in a country the United States was not formally at war with.** The Pakistani government protested, but the programme continued run by the CIA.
*[Basketball-playing](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/25408043-anthony-edwards-barack-obama-have-1-vs-1-contest-trending-video-after-viral-olympics-exchange), [ketchup-hating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjsj2i89HvU) and [generally hilarious](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36172823) President Obama was [killing civilians](https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data) when his country was not at war with theirs\!*
In the face of this much murder, the international community did nothing consequential. The Nobel Committee did not ask for the prize back, even though they later said they [regretted the prize](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34277960). Europeans who [protested Bush’s invasion of Iraq](https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2023/mar/21/iraq-war-global-protests-against-pictures) offered no comparable objection to Obama’s expansion of drone warfare. The same [Pod Save America people worked](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/26/pod-save-america-the-podcast-that-won-obamas-last-interview) for him\!
Because the truth is, Obama was the perfect *Olowo (rich).* He spoke measuredly and advanced a theory of harm reduction that sounded serious and was wrapped in the language of proportionality and precision.
Even I, as I have learnt of the wickedness he unleashed on innocent people, continue to be won over by his charms, and I agreed with the people chanting [“come back”](https://youtu.be/fRvaJANXkAI?si=CRrswUxOq_98b6XI&t=14) at Jesse Jackson’s funeral.
Obama’s *Olowo* in *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* is the kind who speaks so well in a thoughtful language that the neighbours (the global community) ignored the fact that he was snatching up someone’s wife as they wailed in the courtyard.
With Trump, there is no pretence. The entire neighbourhood is shocked and unable to act as he loudly breaks down your door, drags your wife out of your bed, smacks you upside the head and takes your wallet on the way out.
As of March 22, 2026, the United States and Israel are in the [fourth week](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/3/21/iran-war-live-trump-says-other-nations-have-to-protect-hormuz-from-iran) of an active war against Iran. More than 1,400 Iranians have [been killed](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/21/iran-war-what-is-happening-on-day-22-of-us-israel-attacks), including at least 204 children. Iran was apparently in negotiations and had [signalled willingness](https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/blog/inside-iran-us-negotiations-leverage-risk-and-zones-agreement) to make concessions; Trump said he was "not thrilled" with [the talks](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c309vz0z893o), and the strikes began. Trump has since [said on social media](https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/natanz-iran-nuclear-enrichment-site-rcna264576) that he does [not want](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate-ceasefire-deal-trump-kharg-hormuz-oil-rcna263474) a deal, that the US has "blown Iran off of the map." He is deploying thousands more Marines to the region while simultaneously suggesting the war may be "winding down." To manage the resulting oil price shock, the Trump administration has temporarily [lifted sanctions](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9d415g55nno) on Iranian oil already loaded on ships.
This is *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* at full resolution: bomb a country that was willing to negotiate, choke the world's oil supply, and then issue a temporary licence for that same country's oil to stabilise your own markets. *You have taken the Ole’s wife, and you are going back for the jewellery.*
The more durable and structural expression of *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* is the architecture of global finance, designed by the powerful and continues to operate primarily in their interest.
Consider what Barbados, one of the smallest states in the Western Hemisphere, has spent the last several years attempting. [The Bridgetown Initiative](https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/what-is-bridgetown-initiative-asking-paris-financial-summit-2023-06-20/), championed by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, is a set of demands addressed to the IMF, the World Bank, and G20 creditor nations. Its requests include fast-tracking \$100 billion in Special Drawing Rights to support climate resilience in developing countries, suspending the IMF’s surcharges on heavily indebted borrowing countries, redesigning debt restructuring frameworks to include disaster clauses that let countries pause payments when a hurricane or flood destroys their economy, and committing \$100 billion a year to cover climate-related loss and damage in developing countries.
These are requests for the basic conditions under which a small island state, which has contributed [almost nothing](https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/barbados-co2-emissions/) to global carbon emissions, can survive the climate consequences of industrialisation it did not drive. The [IMF’s surcharges](https://www.imf.org/en/about/faq/charges-and-surcharge-policy), which Bridgetown asks to be suspended, are additional interest payments imposed on countries already in debt distress. The logic of charging struggling countries more to borrow because they are struggling is one that no domestic financial regulator in a functioning economy would permit a predatory lender to apply. At the international level, it is standard practice.
The [response to Bridgetown](https://www.stimson.org/2025/the-bridgetown-initiative-at-cop30/) has been what you would expect: sympathetic language, partial gestures, and no structural change. The same creditor nations that can [mobilise hundreds of billions of dollars](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2009/html/sp091016_1.en.html) in weeks when a European banking system is under pressure have spent years deliberating over whether to include [disaster clauses](https://debtjustice.org.uk/blog/climate-resilient-debt-clauses-good-or-bad-for-the-global-south#:~:text=What%20are%20Climate%20Resilient%20Debt,to%20leaving%20through%20debt%20repayments\).) in loan agreements for countries that can be economically destroyed by a single storm.
I am not arguing that international institutions are worthless, or that there is no difference between better and worse conduct in global affairs. Imperfect structures can still provide meaningful constraints, and courts that deliver unequal justice are, in my opinion, still better than no courts. I am also not making the equivalence that because the United States has done bad things, all criticisms of Trump are hypocritical.
I am arguing that the international order has never been primarily organised around justice. It has been organised around the management of power, with justice invoked selectively, as a legitimating language for decisions already made on other grounds. And if you understand the system in this way, then you see that Trump is inevitable.
[Structural adjustment programmes](https://www.trocaire.org/sites/default/files/resources/policy/1989-structural-adjustment-africa-impact.pdf) that gutted public health systems across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s were implemented under the banner of fiscal responsibility, even as the same institutions that prescribed them maintained easy access to capital for their own [member governments in the North](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/09/1127611). [Debt architecture](https://data.one.org/analysis/african-debt) that extracts more from Africa annually in debt service than the continent receives in aid. These are features often mislabeled as aberrations.
*Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* is a dark and beautifully brutal international political truth.
It is the reality that must be understood before anything can be done about it. Treating the stated principles of the international order as its actual operating principles is how you end up genuinely surprised every time a powerful country acts in its interest at the expense of a weaker one.
Trump’s crudeness is, at least, clarifying. It strips the aesthetic layer from the logic and forces the question that the aesthetic layer was designed to prevent: has this (international politics) ever actually been about justice, and if no, what has it been about? ***How do we get the Olowo to stop taking our wives?***
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[16h](https://fikayoakeredolu.substack.com/p/olowo-gba-iyawo-ole-on-trump-international/comment/232482323 "Mar 24, 2026, 11:56 AM")
Liked by Fikayo Akeredolu
Thanks, Fikayo. To stop (or at least deter) Olowo, we need to get stronger and act in our own long-term self interest.
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[16h](https://fikayoakeredolu.substack.com/p/olowo-gba-iyawo-ole-on-trump-international/comment/232475389 "Mar 24, 2026, 11:35 AM")
Liked by Fikayo Akeredolu
Comically, maybe by not having a wife. However, more in depthly. Global south Countries should incentivise and double down on collaborations that they have. Whether it it is ECOWAS, AESEAN. It is said that a single broom stick can easily be broken. A collection not easily.
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| Readable Markdown | I was talking with my parents about Trump’s foreign policy a while ago, about the particular chaos of watching a sitting American president start a war with [Iran](https://news.sky.com/story/iran-war-latest-trump-tehran-israel-strikes-us-drone-live-sky-news-13509565), kidnap the [Venezuelan President](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/4/we-just-witnessed-power-kidnapping-the-law), muse about [annexing Canada](https://time.com/7297490/trump-plan-to-annex-canada-51st-state-mark-carney/) and seizing [Greenland](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10472/), when my dad, a clever man with a fantastic sense of humour, said: “international politics is about *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole*.”
The Yoruba anecdote translates roughly as: *the rich (Olowo) snatches (Gba) the wife (Iyawo) of the lazy (Ole)*.
In this context, the meaning is much darker because it is not really about laziness. It is pointing to the fact that if you have enough power, either in the form of money, strength, and/or influence, you can do whatever you want. The person whose wife is taken is not lazy so much as they are weak, and in the world the anecdote describes, weakness is not a misfortune that deserves sympathy. It is an opening that must and will be exploited. It is about power and the absence of it.
*Olowo gba iyawo ole* perfectly articulates something that the field of international politics spends enormous effort either elaborating or obscuring: that *global politics, at its core, operates on the logic that power is legitimacy*. The rules of the international order are enforced selectively, by the powerful, in the direction of their interests.
This is not a fringe position; [African countries](https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/opinion/2024-01-28-icj-ruling-ruptures-international-order/) have been saying it for years, and [Canada](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/) and [France](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-emmanuel-macron-president-of-france/) figured it out in the last 6 months. It is, more or less, what realist [scholars of international relations](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2144235) have argued since [Thucydides](https://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.5.fifth.html) - “*The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”*
As much as people like to think Trump is deviating from American foreign policy tradition, it is very important that you know he is not. What he is doing differently is that he is not applying the usual rhetorical scaffolding. He is not dressing up talk of annexation in the language of democracy promotion. Like the previous President [George Bush](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/21/eu.usa1). Donald Trump says the quiet part loudly, and this offends people, who have grown accustomed to the quiet part remaining quiet.
In my opinion, the reason these people, who are *predominantly white* Western liberal elites like those on [Pod Save America](https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-america/), feel uncomfortable about Trump is a discomfort with brutal honesty rather than a discomfort with the underlying logic.
For example, Barack Obama, who won the [Nobel Peace Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/obama/facts/) and is widely considered a [“good”](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/barack-obama-joe-biden-favorability-00203578) president, oversaw 10 times as many covert airstrikes as his predecessor, George W. Bush. During Obama’s two terms, [563 strikes](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush) targeted Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, compared to 57 under Bush. **Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those three countries.** This does not include Afghanistan, where US warplanes dropped 1,337 weapons in 2016 alone, a 40% rise on the previous year.
*In simpler terms, Nobel Peace Prize-winning and generally beloved President Obama bombed the Middle East even more than George Bush, who, some would argue, [started](https://www.georgewbushlibrary.gov/research/topic-guides/the-iraq-war) the war\!*
Obama’s first strike in Yemen killed 55 people. **21 were children, 10 of them under five. 12 were women, 5 of them pregnant.** Commanders thought they were targeting al Qaeda. They were wrong! The strike used cluster munitions. No one who ordered it faced consequences. In Pakistan, drone strikes killed at least 755 people in a single year, and **over the full Obama period, between 257 and 634 civilians died in a country the United States was not formally at war with.** The Pakistani government protested, but the programme continued run by the CIA.
*[Basketball-playing](https://bleacherreport.com/articles/25408043-anthony-edwards-barack-obama-have-1-vs-1-contest-trending-video-after-viral-olympics-exchange), [ketchup-hating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjsj2i89HvU) and [generally hilarious](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36172823) President Obama was [killing civilians](https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data) when his country was not at war with theirs\!*
In the face of this much murder, the international community did nothing consequential. The Nobel Committee did not ask for the prize back, even though they later said they [regretted the prize](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34277960). Europeans who [protested Bush’s invasion of Iraq](https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2023/mar/21/iraq-war-global-protests-against-pictures) offered no comparable objection to Obama’s expansion of drone warfare. The same [Pod Save America people worked](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/26/pod-save-america-the-podcast-that-won-obamas-last-interview) for him\!
Because the truth is, Obama was the perfect *Olowo (rich).* He spoke measuredly and advanced a theory of harm reduction that sounded serious and was wrapped in the language of proportionality and precision.
Even I, as I have learnt of the wickedness he unleashed on innocent people, continue to be won over by his charms, and I agreed with the people chanting [“come back”](https://youtu.be/fRvaJANXkAI?si=CRrswUxOq_98b6XI&t=14) at Jesse Jackson’s funeral.
Obama’s *Olowo* in *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* is the kind who speaks so well in a thoughtful language that the neighbours (the global community) ignored the fact that he was snatching up someone’s wife as they wailed in the courtyard.
With Trump, there is no pretence. The entire neighbourhood is shocked and unable to act as he loudly breaks down your door, drags your wife out of your bed, smacks you upside the head and takes your wallet on the way out.
As of March 22, 2026, the United States and Israel are in the [fourth week](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/3/21/iran-war-live-trump-says-other-nations-have-to-protect-hormuz-from-iran) of an active war against Iran. More than 1,400 Iranians have [been killed](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/21/iran-war-what-is-happening-on-day-22-of-us-israel-attacks), including at least 204 children. Iran was apparently in negotiations and had [signalled willingness](https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/blog/inside-iran-us-negotiations-leverage-risk-and-zones-agreement) to make concessions; Trump said he was "not thrilled" with [the talks](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c309vz0z893o), and the strikes began. Trump has since [said on social media](https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/natanz-iran-nuclear-enrichment-site-rcna264576) that he does [not want](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate-ceasefire-deal-trump-kharg-hormuz-oil-rcna263474) a deal, that the US has "blown Iran off of the map." He is deploying thousands more Marines to the region while simultaneously suggesting the war may be "winding down." To manage the resulting oil price shock, the Trump administration has temporarily [lifted sanctions](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9d415g55nno) on Iranian oil already loaded on ships.
This is *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* at full resolution: bomb a country that was willing to negotiate, choke the world's oil supply, and then issue a temporary licence for that same country's oil to stabilise your own markets. *You have taken the Ole’s wife, and you are going back for the jewellery.*
The more durable and structural expression of *Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* is the architecture of global finance, designed by the powerful and continues to operate primarily in their interest.
Consider what Barbados, one of the smallest states in the Western Hemisphere, has spent the last several years attempting. [The Bridgetown Initiative](https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/what-is-bridgetown-initiative-asking-paris-financial-summit-2023-06-20/), championed by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, is a set of demands addressed to the IMF, the World Bank, and G20 creditor nations. Its requests include fast-tracking \$100 billion in Special Drawing Rights to support climate resilience in developing countries, suspending the IMF’s surcharges on heavily indebted borrowing countries, redesigning debt restructuring frameworks to include disaster clauses that let countries pause payments when a hurricane or flood destroys their economy, and committing \$100 billion a year to cover climate-related loss and damage in developing countries.
These are requests for the basic conditions under which a small island state, which has contributed [almost nothing](https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/barbados-co2-emissions/) to global carbon emissions, can survive the climate consequences of industrialisation it did not drive. The [IMF’s surcharges](https://www.imf.org/en/about/faq/charges-and-surcharge-policy), which Bridgetown asks to be suspended, are additional interest payments imposed on countries already in debt distress. The logic of charging struggling countries more to borrow because they are struggling is one that no domestic financial regulator in a functioning economy would permit a predatory lender to apply. At the international level, it is standard practice.
The [response to Bridgetown](https://www.stimson.org/2025/the-bridgetown-initiative-at-cop30/) has been what you would expect: sympathetic language, partial gestures, and no structural change. The same creditor nations that can [mobilise hundreds of billions of dollars](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2009/html/sp091016_1.en.html) in weeks when a European banking system is under pressure have spent years deliberating over whether to include [disaster clauses](https://debtjustice.org.uk/blog/climate-resilient-debt-clauses-good-or-bad-for-the-global-south#:~:text=What%20are%20Climate%20Resilient%20Debt,to%20leaving%20through%20debt%20repayments\).) in loan agreements for countries that can be economically destroyed by a single storm.
I am not arguing that international institutions are worthless, or that there is no difference between better and worse conduct in global affairs. Imperfect structures can still provide meaningful constraints, and courts that deliver unequal justice are, in my opinion, still better than no courts. I am also not making the equivalence that because the United States has done bad things, all criticisms of Trump are hypocritical.
I am arguing that the international order has never been primarily organised around justice. It has been organised around the management of power, with justice invoked selectively, as a legitimating language for decisions already made on other grounds. And if you understand the system in this way, then you see that Trump is inevitable.
[Structural adjustment programmes](https://www.trocaire.org/sites/default/files/resources/policy/1989-structural-adjustment-africa-impact.pdf) that gutted public health systems across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s were implemented under the banner of fiscal responsibility, even as the same institutions that prescribed them maintained easy access to capital for their own [member governments in the North](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/09/1127611). [Debt architecture](https://data.one.org/analysis/african-debt) that extracts more from Africa annually in debt service than the continent receives in aid. These are features often mislabeled as aberrations.
*Olowo Gba Iyawo Ole* is a dark and beautifully brutal international political truth.
It is the reality that must be understood before anything can be done about it. Treating the stated principles of the international order as its actual operating principles is how you end up genuinely surprised every time a powerful country acts in its interest at the expense of a weaker one.
Trump’s crudeness is, at least, clarifying. It strips the aesthetic layer from the logic and forces the question that the aesthetic layer was designed to prevent: has this (international politics) ever actually been about justice, and if no, what has it been about? ***How do we get the Olowo to stop taking our wives?***
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