It’s notable that ‘international law’ is the first resort of bleating globalist authoritarians. When it suits them, anyway. As Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, when the pearl-clutching globalists shrieked about ‘international law’ over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, how was it any different from when they invaded Iraq? Or when they bombed the Gaddafi regime in Libya?
Sure, you can argue that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were bad people, but how we, or anyone, feels about any leader is irrelevant. Either international law applies to everyone equally, or it doesn’t. If it is illegal for Vladimir Putin to invade a country that hasn’t attacked his, then it was just as illegal for the “Coalition of the Willing” to invade a country that hadn’t attacked them, either.
There are three broad schools of thought in international relations: realism, liberalism and constructivism. Realism is supposedly the bad, old way of doing things, where might makes right. It’s hard to see how, though, that has changed at all. Not when the UN and the globalist powers treat their supposedly sacrosanct ‘international norms’, including international law, as mere conveniences to be used or ignored as it suits them.
The conduct of great powers is largely immune from any notion of international law because other nations are not strong enough to resist their actions. This reality is reflected in, for example, the annexation of Tibet by China in 1951, the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 and the Russian seizure of the Crimea in 2014.
Even more obviously, the organs of international law are too often shown up to be hollow puppets, their strings pulled as the great powers see fit, but in the long run essential hollow and toothless. China will run bleating to the Hague when it suits, but give it the middle finger when it tells them to stop illegally claiming international waters.
Then there’s the so-called International Court of Justice.
One of the current cases before this Hague-based body is a claim by South Africa seeking a declaration that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza. As a matter of theory, any orders made by the court can be enforced by military action on the part of the UN Security Council but, not surprisingly perhaps, this has never occurred. One reason for this is that such an exercise could be vetoed by any one of the five permanent members of the council – the US, Russia, China, Britain and France. It might be expected that in any given situation the subject of the court’s orders would be an ally of one of these members and so protected by their veto.
This was why in 1999 the bombing of Serbia – in order to force the withdrawal of the Serbian army from Kosovo – was undertaken by Nato as Russia would have vetoed any action by the United Nations. Because the bombing was not authorised by the UN Security Council, it was itself a breach of international law but this question was never raised by the US or any other Nato members. It was also a breach of Serbia’s sovereignty because Kosovo was at that time one of its provinces and not another country.
Sovereignty is, supposedly, the fundamental principle of the United Nations. According to its own charter, “The organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.” Tell that to Libya. Even former Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted that high-minded talk of sovereignty from the UN was just so much humbug.
Nowhere more so than in the ICJ.
There are those in all Western countries, including Australia, who would prefer the notion of international law, as promulgated by the UN and the International Court of Justice, to override domestic law where there is a conflict between them.
Yet that, as outlined above, directly contravenes the UN’s own charter, let alone the whole notion of state sovereignty that has been the backbone of international relations since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
Nowhere does the essential hollowness of ‘international law’ get laid bare than in war.
Israel’s bombing of Qatar’s capital Doha, in an effort to kill some of the leaders of Hamas, has been widely condemned as a breach of international law on the basis that this was an attack on the territory of a sovereign state. But Hamas has been designated by many nations, including Australia, as a terrorist organisation. Why should any country that harbours terrorists be immune from an attack that is designed to eliminate the leaders or members of such an organisation? If the harbouring state suffers some collateral damage, that is a risk it has assumed by knowingly taking in the terrorists.
The Allies almost certainly breached ‘international law’ when they bombed German and Japanese cities to smoking ruins in WWII, particularly with atomic weapons.
But these events raise the question of how to deal with an aggressor, here both Germany and Japan, that observes no rules of any kind and is determined on the total annihilation of its enemies. These were opponents who, in the case of Germany, set up a network of extermination camps in Europe and, in the case of Japan, worked prisoners of war to death on the Burma railway.
Similarly, by what lights does an organisation so obviously monstrous as Hamas (who, unlike the Nazis, do nothing to conceal their enormities: indeed, positively revelling in them) even deserve to hide behind ‘international law’? In such a case, ‘international law’ seems to do nothing but empower the savage and barbarian, while forcing the civilised to fight with one arm behind their back and their shoelaces tied together.
It is something of a puzzle that the concept of international law, given its rather ineffectual history, is treated with such a degree of reverence by some politicians and officials in the West. It certainly plays no part in the conduct of nations in most parts of the world.
Realism – brute force – might not sound ‘nice’ to the twittering idiots of the ‘international law’ brigade, but the real world is rarely ‘nice’. The real world is where, to use Robert A Heinlein’s blunt words, “Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.”
