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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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