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The trouble with ignoring the sentiment is that you always have to deal in the reality of limited resources. You simply cannot do everything and as such you need to set priorities that make some sort of sense. And really we don’t have the ability to police the world while also dealing with a major crisis. The same soldiers cannot both be preparing to deploy to the Middle East and mounting search and rescue in the Heléne hurricane zone. Of the two, I think any sensible leader would choose to at least delay until the S&R stuff is finished before packing them up to sail overseas.
As for the post WW2 consensus, I think it died the minute Russia invaded.
It died at least two decades prior, when the US waged war to claw an internationally recognized region away from Serbia.
I don't recall any Serbian territory being annexed by the US or any other country. A territory becoming its own country is a different matter, as otherwise India and most of the countries in Africa would have to be considered illegitimate.
If Russia funded Cascadia to secede from the US on the ground that they are oppressed by Californians, would that not violate the post WW2 consensus? And if not why not?
It would depend on whether, in that time-line, Californians had massacred Cascadians.
So all they have to do is quite simple: set up some paramilitaries, hide them amongst the civilian population, wait until the doorkickers fuck up and do some atrocity then denounce publicly the oppression of the Cascadian people.
This is such a common pattern I can name dozens of examples of the top of my head, multiple of which are matters of US foreign policy.
Texas is a US state through this very mean.
No it is not. Texas is a US state because the republic of Texas voted to join the USA. The republic of Texas kicked off due to complaints about mistreatment by the Mexican empire of the Anglo settler population(among other reasons), but the Texas war of independence succeeded without US support and occurred during a preexisting Mexican civil war, allied to other seceding regions(some of which are part of Mexico today and others of which are other Latin American countries).
The republic of Texas army was mostly repurposed defense against commanches militias and not a U.S. poison pill, and Anglo settlement in Texas opened because the Spanish empire invited in borderers to fight commanches for them.
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It's specifically hostile annexation that's banned, where you take territory/people by force over their wishes. There's some degree of grandfather clause for existing state boundaries, but supporting rebels to get what the rebels want (as opposed to what you want) is generally OK (at least as far as the norms go; the state being rebelled against can retaliate).
The Donbass rebels were fine as far as the norms went; other states were free to back the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian government had some degree of cause of action against Russia (not that Russia cared), but Russia wasn't breaking the norms. Russia coming into Ukraine under its own auspices to chop off bits of it and annex them to Russia, that's breaking the norms.
Who defines hostility? Russia had "referendums" that were as phoney as the ones held in the Balkans. And they're still maintaining the same sort of pretense of a special military operation to help their clients against a larger foe, much like the US did in Vietnam with similar language.
The only discernable difference is which GP backs which intervention.
The norm or "international law" has nothing to do with legalisms and everything to do with the will of the British Empire, the USA, the Soviet Union or whomever happens to be hegemon at the time.
I protect minorities. You use salami tactics. They are a bloodthirsty empire that must be stopped.
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