International Law Never Lived and Yet It Is Dead

Trump’s speech at the UN was the death knell of the idea of international diplomacy and the concept of international cooperation as the post-war world knew it. The ashes of ‘45 were fertile grounds for the American century to spring from, much like a volcano’s pyroclastic flow; fertile ground for those who survived its destruction and opportunistically sought to benefit from it. The United Nations and International Criminal Court served as independent justification for the Western (capitalist) world in all its ventures against the East and South, very rarely transgressing its ultimate monetary benefactors. The genocide in Palestine, the incursions into the Middle East for the umpteenth time in a quarter century, and the rising fascistic and racist actions of the American state have led to a preemptive break by the lone global superpower from its legitimacy machine, one that proves it has depths still to plunge before the administration is done. It remains unknown whether this disavowal of international law and throwing of military weight will be the undoing of the American empire or a rejuvenation and transformation into a harder form of power to that previously seen.

Marco Rubio started the assault on the ICC at the Munich security conference. In his written statement he recounted the American government’s unwillingness to sign the Rome Statute that founded the body in 1998 as well as the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, which allows the US government to use any means, including military force, to prevent the arrest and prosecution of American citizens. Meanwhile, the neo-brownshirts in ICE patrol the nation, murdering any who step in their path without threat of retribution, all while missiles rain down on Iran for daring to maintain independence against American wishes. One must wonder why such a dramatic geopolitical stance is necessary. There is little to no salient justification, domestically, economically, or geopolitically for the break with the liberal international order other than personal wishes and enrichment. In fact, the global order has served American interests quite effectively in this era. The United States of America has never faced an effective challenge under international law; it is virtually impossible to try an American or one of their allies internationally.  At the same time, the US has benefitted immensely from its command of an international order that does not bind it. Standardizing international trade around the dollar has given the US unprecedented powers of economic coercion. Dressing up regime change operations as international peacekeeping and the furthering of democracy has made them more palatable, their military a global force for good. Why would the Trump administration seek to tear all this down?

One obvious explanation has been the ICC’s warrants out for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, both accused of using starvation as a method of war–a war crime–alongside a litany of crimes against humanity. These are notably the first warrants issued against a Western leader in the history of the organisation and one that no signatory of the Rome Statute has enforced. When Netanyahu lands in Germany, as he often does, the German government should be obliged to board his plane upon landing and arrest him on behalf of the ICC so he can be given a fair trial, yet Merz has not only visited Jerusalem to share a press conference and speak alongside one another, he has guaranteed that Netanyahu will be allowed to freely visit the country. The statement from Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, that he would arrest Netanyahu once he landed in New York if he had the legal recourse to do so was met with derision from both leaders and political commentators. That a moral stance, one that is in line with the ICC’s warrant and would be procedurally correct, is decried as an overreach of power is an indictment of the way in which the political world has drifted from not only the material reality we exist in but also the constructed one of a rules based international order.

If one had to guess the last time the United Kingdom or United States declared war, what would you pick? Korea? Vietnam? The Falklands? Operation Desert Shield, or Strike, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even Iran? The war on terror must surely count? The answer is actually 1942, when they declared on Siam and Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, respectively. This was approximately halfway through the Second World War, predating the formation of the UN. There has not been a war involving a Western power in over 80 years! Obviously this isn’t true, you can tell that to the over 100,000 American wooden boxes littering the globe and the military corpses they represent. It is clear then that we exist in a semantic unreality, one in which we can choose the words we use to describe things and as such they are. The Geneva Convention, signed in 1949, has never been in effect against a British, American or French soldier. Neither have any of the other rules dictating warfare or diplomacy. The charade of gentlemanly diplomacy isn’t even well acted because it has never actually been acted once. This is all while the President’s speech recounts the wars he has started against Iran, and most interestingly to me, Venezuela. 

“To the victor goes the spoils,” Trump said of his now completed and very short-lived war against their continental neighbours. This is a war with muddled public justification about ‘Narcoterrorists’ which has plainly revealed itself to be about securing the oil rights of Venezuela. The US Government now controls 20% of Venezuela’s oil reserves while the Pentagon has been given a 35% stake in NABEP, one of the largest private oil producers in the country. All for the small cost of abducting another nation’s sovereign leader. This was the first of two deposings (of sorts) that the Pentagon orchestrated within a month in 2026 after Iran’s ayatollah was assassinated in his home alongside a large number of his family including his 14-month-old granddaughter. After what is clearly an affront to the nation and its people – the Ayatollahs are believed to be direct descendents of the Prophet Muhammad in the Shia Islamic faith – now they are faced with surrender to a Western rebuilding as a client state to the West or being driven “into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” 

It seems fruitless to comment on the contents of a Trump speech at this point, we’re over a decade late to forcing civility or international cooperation onto him, but what’s more galling is that what the US is doing is not new to anybody who has studied 20th-century history. There is just a lack of grace being displayed to obfuscate the truth behind the American regime. I’m reminded of an interview with Al Jazeera in 2016 in which Chris Hedges described the fundamental difference between Trump and the rest of the political class as Oligarchy versus Corporatism. While Corporatism as represented by Obama or the Clintons or Bush represented stability and the maintenance of a status quo that allowed businesses to operate as smoothly as possible and continue earning their vast vast profits, Oligarchy benefits far more from chaos and deregulation. Chaos creates opportunity for abuse and profiteering, especially for the one orchestrating it. Trump manipulates geopolitics so that his son-in-law can be in charge of the redevelopment of Palestinian land, mopping up all the blood and sweeping children' s limbs under a rug in order to turn that valuable real estate into a new Dubai. He and his cronies invest humungous sums into companies directly affected by his decisions before that information is public and sell access to some of that information on the social media platform he owns. There is no longer the need for stability when volatility leads to greater profits for those inside the club. Ego certainly plays a part too when arbitrarily threatening Canada, Greenland, or Panama with annexation, plans that are quite unlikely but do allow Trump to flex some muscle. What is shocking to the newspaper-reading, sensible people around the Western hemisphere, however, is that this wanton threat of destruction and subjugation is finally being aimed at them or people like them. These are primarily white nations with service-based economies – holiday destinations – that’s not supposed to happen there!

What’s remarkable after a century of lip service to the concept of international governance is the lack of pretence as it is dismantled. The ambitions of the Trump regime and the brutality it intends to use to that end is evident in the manner of speech. It helps lay bare the thuggishness that to everyone not in the anglophone sphere was already so evident. Even the New York Times now wrings its hands about Trumpian “imperialism,” and the Washington Post went so far as to accuse Trump of running Venezuela as a “neo-colony.” But this ruling class faux-anti-imperialism serves largely as a critique of form, not substance. To score points, those in the traditional political establishment want to act offended by Trump and his overt bullying, but they cannot truly fault him for exporting violence in the name of resource acquisition when George Bush – now a liberal darling – used the same playbook with a bit more poise and grace little over two decades ago. Rather, it is the way in which Trump represents the greed and evil of the previously polite Western world that elicits criticism from once-complicit Democrats. 

In a sense I’m glad. Not to be an accelerationist or anything but to call the UN Human Rights Council craven hypocrites for the suggestion that the US military bombing a school and killing 120 children might be a war crime is so patently absurd that it might make people notice the absurd privilege and lack of accountability with which the United States and the West at large have operated in the post-war order, especially since the end of the Cold War and the demise of their only true adversary in the USSR. The Global War on Terror led to nearly a million casualties, around half of which were civilians. But these were peoples without an internationally acknowledged government or state and as such their murders were allowed to pass like blood under the bridge. It seems like that status quo is now ending, moving in a very 2020s way into a more bizarre and violent state of affairs. The hope is that now these inconsistencies are so obvious to anybody with a moral conscience that a newer, more egalitarian world may arise through collective will rather than violence. If, when US power falters, a more just coalition of interests assumes its mantle, there might finally be international law without diplomatic immunity.