WORLD ORDER AND ITS RULES

World Order and its Rules



World Order and its Rules

Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law. The U.S. made that clear in the debates that led to the NATO decision. The more closely one approached the conflicted region, the greater in general was the opposition to Washington's insistence on force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy). Again, that is not an unusual phenomenon: another recent example is U.S./UK bombing of Iraq, undertaken in December 1998 with unusually brazen gestures of contempt for the Security Council—even the timing, coinciding with an emergency session to deal with the crisis. Still another illustration is Clinton's destruction of half the pharmaceutical production of a small African country a few months earlier. It was dismissed here as a marginal curiosity, though comparable destruction of U.S. facilities by Islamic terrorists might evoke a slightly different reaction. Perhaps this is an example of the kind of "creative deterrence" advised by the U.S. Strategic Command, 1995, aiming at what "is valued within a culture," such as the fate of children dying from easily curable disease.

It should be unnecessary to emphasize that there is a far more extensive record that would be prominently reviewed right now if facts were considered relevant to determining the "custom and practice" that is called upon to confer upon the most enlightened state the right "to do what it thinks right" by force.

It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules of world order is by now of no significance, as in the late 1930s. The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order has become so extreme that there is little left to discuss. A review of the internal documentary record demonstrates that the stance traces back to the earliest days, even to the first memorandum of the newly formed National Security Council in 1947. During the Kennedy years, the stance began to gain overt expression, as, for example, when the eminent statesman and Kennedy adviser Dean Acheson justified the blockade of Cuba in 1962 by informing the American Society of International Law that the "propriety" of a U.S. response to a "challenge...[to the]...power, position, and prestige of the United States...is not a legal issue." "The real purpose of talking about international law was, for Acheson, simply 'to gild our positions with an ethos derived from very general moral principles which have affected legal doctrines'"—when convenient.

The main innovation of the Reagan-Clinton years is that defiance of international law and solemn obligations has become entirely open, even widely lauded in the West as "the new internationalism" that heralds a wonderful new age, unique in human history. Unsurprisingly, the developments are perceived rather differently in the traditional domains of the enlightened states; and, for different reasons, are of concern even to some hawkish policy ...