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There's this thing where a few European countries sign a treaty, let's say agreeing not to use cluster bombs (not that they have any or were going to start using them), and then declare that the US and Israel are violating international law. High minded talk about rules based international order, etc, which seems to me to be a few countries making up rules America never agreed to and then trying to impose them onto us. A strange backwards situation in which the feeble try to tell the mighty what is allowed. At this point I roll my eyes when I see claims that America or Israel is violating international law.
So yes: I don't much believe in a rules based international order and I especially don't believe in one imposed onto us by some European countries.
I know I'm coming in hot on this one, but it is such bullshit. The Hague Invasion Act is the correct expression of our contempt.
Of course, it happens all the time. That's why Britain refused to sign a convention on maritime warfare in the early 1900s, and why America refused to sign one preventing the use of poisonous gases. It's classic Great Power behaviour. But it seems to me that any system of law which doesn't, to some extent, allow the feeble to constrain the mighty isn't law. It's just a formalisation of raw power. As if we allowed members of parliament to opt out of rules about corruption and murder.
My original post was trying to point out, quickly and perhaps cack-handedly, that America still derives a certain amount of respect by posing as a high-minded defender of justice and that resorting to explicit threats when weaker countries try to constrain its allies damages this image. In my opinion, it would have been wiser to simply point out that the court is being inconsistent and leave it at that. America is powerful enough that it can afford to be polite.
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Interestingly, when one considers the relationship between the US and Israel, a straightforward interpretation is that the mighty would be the US.
Yet who is telling who what is allowed? Whose billionaires are broadcasting Superbowl ads and emptying their government's coffers to fight whose wars?
Was mid-century Germany justified in telling the feebler Eastern-European countries how to treat their civilians?
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