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Is it fair to say that it’s a situation which often boils over to genocides?
Yugoslavia, Greece-Turkey, the Hutus and Tutsis, etc.
I probably lack full historical literacy of all the details but any time a country sends their military to another to protect their ethnicity as a minority there, or try to annex them into their own I feel like it tends to end up in horrible bloodshed.
I think the principle of sovereignty, respect for territorial boundaries, and relative freedom of movement has been a good salve for this recurring pattern of warfare.
Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.
I think a significant tension in these debates that is seldom discussed explicitly is between the position that it is going to be inevitable that the hegemon (US) gets to bend/violate the principles a little and we should feel blessed with a hegemon that has been doing it so sparingly and judiciously on one hand, and the position that after a world in which 0 parties get to violate the principle the next best one is one in which 2+ parties get to on the other. I'm firmly in the second camp for what I'd like to think is a good assortment of reasons, while the majority of nuanced political thinkers in the West tends to be in the former. (There are of course also louder, and less interesting, positions, amounting to "the US never violated any principle, NATO is a defensive alliance, go back to your bot farm" and "America fuck yeah, cry about it". There isn't really much to discuss with the latter, and the former is hard to get through to.)
The difference usually boils down to questions of how sparing and judicious US violations really are, how reassuring it is to hope that they will always remain as sparing and judicious as they are now, and whether game theory does or doesn't mean that the understanding that the US alone could go on an unrestrained spree of conquest and meddling with impunity lets them reap many of the boons of doing so without actually having to transgress, much like nuclear-armed states reap benefits without ever firing a single nuke in anger.
I also tend to think that as a lowly civilian, my rulers facing adversity and competition is almost always good - if they can stand unopposed, they don't need to do anything for me, but if they are locked in a knife's-edge struggle with a mortal enemy, they are incentivised to buy my support lest I throw my minuscule worth in for the other side and tip the balance. ("For any German politicians reading this: Do I sound like a Putin bot? Are you afraid of losing the upcoming election to Putin bot parties? We can discuss terms!")
Odd choice of examples if those are your examples.
Different entities may not follow the principle as you'd prefer to understand it, but that doesn't mean they don't follow it as they understand it. Being different entities naturally they would understand with their own differences, even as those entities are themselves composed of different people over time.
Kosovo is a trivial example of sovereignty-principle compliance- the American (and many others) concept of the principle sovereignty is that sovereignty is not absolute. There are decades of internal law theory and practice as to why this is not only not at odds with international law, but required by international law to not consider sovereignty absolute.
Complying with the principle of [X] as it interacts with other principles is not an abandonment of a principle just because you have your own geopolitical preferences.
Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour, and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them. As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?
Supreme Court rulings that can be completely predicted by knowing the political alignment of the judges and valence of the possible rulings still come with a text, which you could think of as a sort of parallel construction, presenting the illusion that law is created by application of legal principles. This undoubtedly helps the peace-keeping function of national law (as the belief that procedurally impartial justice is available saps the will to take matters into your own hands), and I'm sure that the way that "decades of international law theory" tend to turn up afterwards whenever the US does what it must serve a similar function for those under its wing that wish to remain at peace with a situation they can't do anything about anyway. However, in a situation like this, at least those of us outside of the US are not actually so completely powerless that the best course of action is to believe whatever will make us the happiest. We're facing decisions that have some real impact on things like whether our country remains aligned with US goals and whether we personally help or subvert those goals every day, and for that purpose it would be useful to have a correct model of how the US would act in different situations.
As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure? Suppose I would not vote for them if I knew that this would happen, but I fall for the "sovereignty principle" as naively understood by me (and there's no doubt the cheerleaders are perfectly happy with me having this naive understanding!), or believe that the professed principles of European solidarity and mutual security assistance mean that if such a thing were to happen the other EU countries would help uncover and oppose it. They get elected by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles. Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?
Criteria met.
Criteria also met.
Yup. There are many ways to describe the US policies of the last century or so, but 'always act to maximize its own wealth and power' isn't a competent characterization of it.
Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.
Nope. Not unless you want to insinuate AfD or BSW voters are morally obliged to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories.
Do you? I'm pretty open that I think it was plausibly Ukraine, and I've written to that multiple times over the years, but then there are holdouts and you did insinuate 'more' US attacks, so your position is not particularly clear.
I am also not convinced you cannot coordinate a protest so much as your protest is sufficiently unsympathetic enough to garner support you feel you are owed in the way you want it. In so much that our economy is in shambles, some of that seems unavoidable to any reasonable agency and some of that is a well-earned consequence of sovereign prerogative to make bad macroeconomic decisions and take macroeconomic risks that turn bad, even against the advice of partners and allies.
Does your solace or lack thereof serve any relevant form of proof or disproof to whether the professed principles were actually held and adhered to or not?
There was nothing to argue with there - you said a thing that on its own means nothing other than "the principle constrains US actions less than you think it does" (which can mean anything from "the principle means sovereignty is absolute in all cases that are not the US attacking Serbia" to "actually the principle means nothing") and pointed at "decades of international law theory", which it is hardly reasonable of you to expect me to go read up on for the sake of this thread.
I don't get the sense that you really addressed my points at all. Can you spell out exactly what are the constraints on US behaviour that you believe result from this principle of sovereignty (not absolute) that the US adheres to? I understand that you predict in concrete terms that it will not physically attack German infrastructure even in the event of German rapprochement with Russia (of course assuming no additional contingencies), but that alone could be equally predicted from self-interest (an open attack could cause enough negative sentiment to reduce German cooperation with other US endeavours). Do you think the US would...
...do it if they were assured that mainstream media in all involved countries will refuse to entertain the theory that the US did it?
...provide material support to non-US actors to do it?
...ignore and conceal (and instruct allies to do so) evidence they obtained that non-US actors would do it? (I think this represents a minimum of what they almost certainly did for NS2; even WaPo asserted the first part )
...engage in economic warfare with the purpose of preventing operation of another country's infrastructure? (They explicitly threatened this for NS2.)
...do any of the above with some other country, whose support may be less important for them than Germany's?
...engage in other acts that are commonly seen as violations of sovereignty: arming and equipping a coup, funding a coup, funding opposition parties?
...any of the above, for countries whose support is less important and/or can be sufficiently assured by the coup or opposition election succeeding? (If you say no here, I could bring such a wall of counterexamples that the discussion wouldn't really be worth having.)
And, is there some compact representation of what the actual principle is that I could apply to generate the same predictions myself without reference to "decades of international law theory"?
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