Jeffrey Sachs’s Moral Shortcuts in His UN Speech |
Professor Jeffrey Sachs came to the Security Council with a familiar performance: an oration on the sanctity of the UN Charter, delivered with pious optimism and a practiced air of sanctimony. His central manoeuver is to treat American force as the defining threat to the international order, while speaking as though other great powers merely endure history rather than manufacture it. He lists US bombing operations and threats, calls them unlawful, and then invites the Council to behave as if it is a neutral tribunal that can command the powerful into obedience. Elegant, yet wrong.
The boring part first. Sachs presents a bundle of legal conclusions as settled fact. The honest way to handle claims about strikes and self-defense is to go country by country, with skeptical precision and forensic clarity. Ask if force was conducted with host state consent. Check if Article 51 letters were filed. Compare the legal arguments invoked, and admit where serious lawyers disagree. The task is not to prove Washington right. The task is to show that he has smuggled contested legal territory into moral certainty.
China did not drift into Tibet like fog. The........