A World Without Rules |
From the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump has threatened to destabilize the international legal order. Early in his second term, he claimed he would “take back” the Panama Canal, make Canada the 51st U.S. state, acquire Greenland, and “own” Gaza. Foreign policy experts shook their heads, reluctant to take Trump seriously. After all, his declarations seemed erratic and poorly thought out. Yet even speaking the words did damage. As we argued in Foreign Affairs last summer, Trump’s threats reflected a troubling lack of commitment to the legal structure the United States and its allies created 80 years ago. The norm against the use of force, embodied in the UN Charter, was already under strain. But Trump’s open disregard of this prohibition threatened to trigger its collapse.
That was before the United States invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, on January 3. The military operation, undertaken without UN Security Council authorization, without congressional authorization, without a claim of self-defense, and without even a plausible legal rationale, represents the most harmful attack yet on the rules-based order. It is not just the existing international legal system that is in jeopardy now. At risk is the survival of any rules at all—and with them any constraints on the exercise of state power.
Before countries renounced the right to war, first in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and then again in the UN Charter in 1945, waging war was perfectly legal and legitimate. It was the main way in which countries resolved their disputes with one another. But even during this time, war was constrained by law. War, in its lawful conception, was understood as a last resort undertaken to enforce or defend a state’s rights. Killing, seizure of property, and destruction were permitted only if the entire endeavor was justified by law.
At the beginning of the twentieth century and for centuries before that, a country could not simply say it wanted another’s land. According to customary international law, as interpreted and popularized by the so-called father of international law, Hugo Grotius, in the early seventeenth century, a state had to offer a........