US believes its power matters more than international law, UN chief

59 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by treadump
(bbc.co.uk)

48 Comments

hshdhdhj4444

7 hours ago

It’s a little disturbing seeing the complete lack of historical understanding in the comments here. Yeah, international law isn’t perfect and certainly wasn’t perfectly followed.

But the U.S., and most other countries, did heavily constrain themselves by it, primarily for their own good.

Some of this is clearly evident from the fact that many of the actions the U.S. has taken, such as kidnapping Maduro, doesn’t really help the U.S. at all, or plans on taking, such as annexing Greenland, will end up being a massive net negative.

SanjayMehta

5 hours ago

The UN is a joke. The security council consists of the five states which happened to be the winning countries post 1945.

Africa is not represented. India is not represented. South America is not represented.

But we have the UK, which at that time included its "empire," down to two islands today.

And then someone came up with "rules based order" to replace international law. What rules? What order?

I have no respect for Trump, but give him credit for not being a complete hypocrite like his predecessors.

disgruntledphd2

3 hours ago

I don't really disagree with you in principle, but at least the notion of a rules based international order (no matter how hypocritical it was) was a good thing. We SHOULD all try to be better and not just focus on our own narrow self interests.

I think that the UN has been pretty crap (because of the security council and hypocrisy), but like a lot of unsatisfying compromises, we'll miss it when it's gone.

SanjayMehta

3 hours ago

The rules based order, as endlessly parroted out by mostly European and USAian talking heads, is meaningless.

There's international law, in the form of treaties, as ratified by groups of countries.

disgruntledphd2

2 hours ago

> The rules based order, as endlessly parroted out by mostly European and USAian talking heads, is meaningless.

It was never meaningless. It was rather like the rights enumerated in the US bill of rights back before the Civil War. Aspirational, rarely enforced but something that (some) people some of the time tried to live up to.

roody15

36 minutes ago

What exactly is international law these days? For example the ICC is ignored by the US, by Russia, by Israel, by China... among others. The UN does not seem to function quite like it did originally post WW2. In regards to Rule based order.. not sure exactly what this even means as well. Power in the world appears to be shifting or reshuffling and not sure these institutions and concepts apply like they once did.

graemep

7 hours ago

This has always been the case, and not just the US either.

International law has no enforcement mechanism - it depends on willingness of countries to follow it or force others to. It does not have a proper system of courts to decide the law. Different bits of it can clash with each other.

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...

dragonwriter

7 hours ago

> International law has no enforcement mechanism

International law has a number of enforcement mechanisms.

> it depends on willingness of countries to follow it or force others to.

All law depends on the willingness of its subjects to follow it, and failing that of its other subjects to force them to. This is not unique to international law.

Some systems of law (e.g., typical modern national criminal law) may have a particular group of people (usually with a formal heirarchy) who are expected to do the executive part of enforcement, and a similar (possibly the same or overlapping, but often distinct) group of people employed to do the adjudicative part of enforccement. International law has the latter (in several forms), but lacks the former. But anyone who is familiar with more than a narrow range of the most idealistic systems of national law will be aware that that that executive body can be a single point of failure—the real problem with international law isn't that it lacks such a single dedicated executive body, but that the important issues under it frequently involve significant conflicts of interest for any of the groups with the capacity to take on the executive role in the particular case, which is problematic under any system of law whether it has a single dedicated body for the executive part of enforcement or whether it relies on ad hoc case-by-case posses for that purpose.

utilize1808

6 hours ago

> International law has a number of enforcement mechanisms.

That's rather naïve.

How do you propose to enforce the law when the offender possesses the greatest military/economic/technological might, even compared to the rest of the (law-biding) world combined?

US, for quite some time, is the international law.

dragonwriter

6 hours ago

> That's rather naïve.

No, its factual.

> How do you propose to enforce the law when the offender possesses the greatest military/economic/technological might, even compared to the rest of the (law-biding) world combined?

Had you read the entire comment you were responding to, you would note that as well as pointing out that international law has enforcement mechanisms, that I pointed out how the executive part of those differs from what many national criminal law systems use (which is a real difference), and moreover the problem they have with conflicts of interests between any of the available executive agents with many important enforcement issues (a situation which also happens with national criminal law systems even where, unlike international law, they have a nominally-dedicated executive body for enforcement purposes rather than relying on the adjudicative/determinative body calling for an ad hoc posse the way that international law generally works.)

utilize1808

6 hours ago

I did. It's simply that it's not clear how the "difference" you described makes any difference here.

Was it you who wrote the lines for Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister?

LadyCailin

6 hours ago

What about when a police officer gets qualified immunity after murdering someone? Does this mean the US has no enforcement mechanisms?

dragonwriter

6 hours ago

Or what happens when crimes are committed by, or at the direction and with the protection of the President of the United States.

I think most people would not argue that “US federal criminal law has no enforcement mechanism”, they would argue that “US federal criminal law has a significant practical enforcement problem where enforcement of the law conflicts with interests of the chief executive”.

utilize1808

6 hours ago

Didn't see that one coming.

Not sure what your agenda is but that's just the law *enforcement* doing the enforcing part. You can argue that it is unjust, that's a separate issue.

LadyCailin

6 hours ago

My point is, the powerful nations are the enforcement mechanism in international law. When they are the ones breaking the law themselves, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an enforcement mechanism, it just means it’s a possibly unjust one, just like with national enforcement mechanisms.

utilize1808

4 hours ago

The difference is that in the national case, justice is expected; whereas in the international case, it must be understood that there is not supposed to be a "enforcement mechanism" that delivers justice.

dragonwriter

35 minutes ago

In both case there are enforcement mechanism that deliver the will of the enforcers collectively which sometimes correlates with justice or at least a reasonable reading of the letter of the law; in both cases there are a wide set of failure modes from the perspective of law and even moreso justice, because law enforcement (and, in the case of concern for justice, also law making) rely on institutions ultimately composed of people, and the interests of those people is often not in the law or justice.

If you see the difference as being “in the national case, justice is expected”, you either have an extremely naive view of national law, or at a minimum of an extremely narrow and privileged one.

fredley

7 hours ago

Yes, laws only matter if they are collectively believed in. International law just the same. This has always been the case, but largely speaking in the West, for the last century or so, the rule of law has been broadly believed in, including international law.

The story here is that the US seems to not currently believe international law is an effective tool for projecting its power. Whether correctly or otherwise, it has believed that up until now.

chii

7 hours ago

> This has always been the case, and not just the US either.

the difference is that the US used to pretend that international laws mattered - at least, they selectively only ignore some when it's advantageous, but pay lip service to it being relevant and claim to follow it.

Now, however, trump has blatantly disregard the norms without regards. While everyone knows that the US will get their way militarily even before trump, it used to be a negotiation with law and order at least being pretended to matter. After trump, the pretense is off. It leads to less trust, less negotiation and more hard-lining.

Within one term, trump has destroyed the trust that took more than a century to build.

holowoodman

7 hours ago

As they say, law is for the poor, little people.

International law even more so. For national laws, there are enforcement mechanisms. If you break a national law, there is a court deciding on punishment and an executive punishing you according to that decision. With international law, there might be a court, but often there isn't even a court. Sometimes there is the UN general assembly, UN security council or a similar body deciding on a political basis whether some violation might have occured. Usually those kinds of decisions are far from impartial, not even pretending any kind of neutrality or fairness.

So even if some international court or some council arrives at a decision that a violation of international law has occured, where is the executive? There isn't one. There is only the equivalent of old wild west dead-or-alive bounties: The decision is an authorization to go to economic war (like in sanctions or blockades) or shooting war. There might be states interested in doing that, but generally only if they think they can win and profit.

So international law is only ever enforced against powerless states without a coalition supporting them. For any larger power, there is no actual international law.

rich_sasha

6 hours ago

It's sort of true. I mean, factually true for sure.

Equally, I think international law was a useful reference point for everyone, including the US. My prediction is that US's intoxication with its own power now, and disdain for international law, will lead to a decay of its power, and more challenges that will be costly to fend off.

So while I agree to some extent international law was always a fiction, it's also true that the US will a real price for destroying it.

10xDev

6 hours ago

Always has. The US serves Israel first, big tech companies second.

The Democrats could have won if they didn't support Israel unconditionally. Unfortunately when you claim to support human rights but also support what happens in the middle east it creates cognitive dissonance among the population.

Many American pro-Israeli's are more concerned about Iran at the moment than any of the ICE/Greenland news.

Elixir6419

7 hours ago

US knows its power matters more than international law, UN chief.

title needs to be fixed as above and becomes BAU.

pendenthistory

7 hours ago

Knowing and acting on it will have grave consequences though. The US's main allies will stop buying American military equipment for one, trade will go down and the largest economic block in the world will align itself closer to China (who does not directly threaten them with invasion). What a self own.

As a European who's been as continue to be against Chinese authoritarianism, I have to admit that China looks like the better partner going forward.

surgical_fire

6 hours ago

What I find almost satisfying to watch is how the US throws away the soft power it spent nearly a century building for very little benefit in return.

The thing is that soft power is extremely effective. Many other countries, including China, try hard at acquiring a fraction of the soft power US naturally had.

Trumps administration, sooner or later, will pass. Whether it is voted away, or if it turns into a form of dictatorship, at some point in the future it will not be there anymore. The US won't be able to return to "how things were" when that happens. New trade deals, new alliances, a different ordering of things will be in place.

pendenthistory

6 hours ago

Trump not being a factor will help, but this whole ordeal shows that Europe cannot count on a reasonable person always being in power, and a single bad president can cause this level or mayhem. Even if the next administration backtracks on all this and apologizes profusely, it's too late.

BLKNSLVR

3 hours ago

Exactly. This administration has exposed the fragility of the very structure of the US form of government, and building a new, better structure is, in my opinion, practically impossible without revolution.

It appears to me that the US will continue to iterate downhill.

I'd prefer it weren't the case, but that's what my intuition is telling me.

And if it can start to restructure on the fly, it's going to be a long, difficult process. But it's still better than revolutionary structural / regime change.

SXX

7 hours ago

There is "international law", but no "international police". So the law only as good as long as everyone follow it - so not very good either.

Then you have major power like Russia that constantly abuse it while trying to cover its ass with "internatiomal law" once they themself get hit. This is whem you get system is broken.

I get it suck for people inside the US to see democracy dismantled, but honestly I dont mind Trump to deal with dictators and repressive regimes.

Putin, friends and alike put a lot of effort to prove that only power should matter so its a good irony to see Trump dealing with them their way.

iso1631

7 hours ago

> There is "international law", but no "international police"

Yet America just bust into a sovereign nation to arrest its president

SXX

5 hours ago

One less dictator. Good riddance.

consp

7 hours ago

> but honestly I dont mind Trump to deal with dictators and repressive regimes.

I don't get the impression this is or ever will be a goal. To an outsider it seems more like he wants to be one of the repressors.

defrost

7 hours ago

> its a good irony to see Trump dealing with them their way.

Accepting multiple massive bribes from Crown Prince MBS Bonesaw in plane sight, and giving Putin free rein to set terms for war and peace in Ukraine?

iso1631

7 hours ago

You'd think American defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan would have tempered them I guess the American view is that the problem was they didn't napalm the population enough.

I have no doubt that the international community will cave in an allow America to annex a land 1,200 miles away from it's nearest border, just like it allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia in 1938. Trump needs breathing room.

red-iron-pine

3 hours ago

ain't no "US" here, it's Bannon, Miller, and DJT. And the billionaires, of which the Saudis, Israelis, and Putin are the largest.

YetAnotherNick

7 hours ago

Better title: UN chief believes that any country ever believed that their power matters less than international law.

poisonarena

7 hours ago

There is no such thing as "international law", and never has been. Land belongs to people who can control it, and always has.

BLKNSLVR

3 hours ago

Not in a civilized society.

And I don't think there are many people that would prefer to live under 'might is right'.

Or at least they'd find out pretty quick that it's not exactly what they thought it might be.

watwut

7 hours ago

Nazi says that, yes. That was the cornerstone of that ideology and good people hope they will be defeated again.

poisonarena

6 hours ago

the word "nazi" has lost all meaning in the last 10 years because of redditors like you

YetAnotherNick

7 hours ago

Communist say that too as do socialist as do almost all ideology. Why do anyone want to give their power in your land to any other politically motivated entity.

defrost

6 hours ago

Why indeed.

And yet: https://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/HCA...

  The new doctrine of native title replaced a seventeenth century doctrine of terra nullius on which British claims to possession of Australia were justified on a wrongful legal presumption that Indigenous peoples had no settled law governing occupation and use of lands. In recognising that Indigenous peoples in Australia had prior rights to land, the Court held that these rights, where they exist today, will have the protection of the Australian law until those rights are legally extinguished.
~ https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/mabo-case

YetAnotherNick

6 hours ago

Did I say that? I just said no one wants to give power over their land. Countries would want international law to protect them. That's why international law exists.

I don't think there is any country which explicitly mentions that international law would supersede their law.

disgruntledphd2

3 hours ago

> I don't think there is any country which explicitly mentions that international law would supersede their law.

All EU countries agree on the supremacy of EU law, so that's not quite correct.

defrost

6 hours ago

The initial statement was:

* " Land belongs to people who can control it, and always has."

* @watwut asserted: "Nazi says that, yes."

* @YetAnotherNick expanded on that "Communist say that too as do socialist as do almost all ideology."

* @YetAnotherNick then "asked" (perhaps rhetorically) "Why do anyone want to give their power in your land to any other politically motivated entity."

* @defrost provided an example of a legal doctrine that returned significant areas of land to original first inhabitants after that land had been claimed by others with crown troops.

Now that land belongs to people that lack force to control it, and it was given to them by people that considered it their land by colonisation.

If you're interested in the answer to the question you posed "Why do anyone want to give their power in your land to any other politically motivated entity." (which isn't entirely well posed) then perhaps the reasoning of the judges in the Mabo case might give you some insight into their thinking.

YetAnotherNick

6 hours ago

Just to reiterate, countries want protection without giving up power. International law is middle ground where countries get protection by giving up some power.

Can you specify which part are you disagreeing with rather than give AI powered summary of thread.