Europe and the End of the Post-War International Order

[Celerity]

As great powers abandon international law with impunity, Europe must unite or risk fragmentation and subordination.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/europe-and-the-end-of-the-post-war-international-order



The US military operation in Venezuela involving the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, who have been incarcerated in a notorious New York detention facility pending their trial in a US federal court, was in flagrant breach of international law. The UN Charter prohibits any violation of the territorial integrity or political independence of another state except in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. Like Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine or Israel’s disproportionate and often indiscriminate use of force in Gaza, the US’s armed intervention in Venezuela illustrates the growing disdain shown by militarily powerful states for the strictures of international law. If China has been more cautious than either Russia or the US in using armed force to achieve its goals, this reticence is likely temporary. The speed with which China is upgrading its armed forces and the massive scale of its military investment suggest that it is only a matter of time until Beijing employs overwhelming force, or the threat of such force, to achieve its strategic aims, including the annexation of Taiwan.

International legal norms investing states with rights such as sovereignty and territorial integrity are now openly flouted, while mechanisms designed to preserve or restore international peace and security are ignored. President Trump has boasted that the only meaningful constraint on his actions in the international sphere is not international law but his “own morality”, his “own mind”. An admittedly imperfect international legal regime for the maintenance of international peace and security, established in the wake of the Second World War, is rapidly giving way to an unstable, violent and fundamentally amoral world order reminiscent of the nineteenth century, composed of shifting political alliances, competing spheres of influence and powerful states largely free to pursue their interests unhindered by normative or institutional constraints.

In this “brave new world” that Trump and Putin have done so much to inaugurate, quaint but increasingly obsolete legal doctrines—the self-determination of peoples, the sovereign equality of states, the prohibition of the threat or use of force, the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries and the duty of belligerents to abide by international humanitarian law—can be ignored by any state that enjoys overwhelming military superiority over its adversaries. As in centuries gone by, might is once again right.

The costs of Hobbesian disorder

Even for the United States, the world’s foremost military and economic power, the likely costs of the new Trumpian world order—in reality a condition of Hobbesian disorder—are far from negligible, whether in terms of heightened insecurity, the need for increased defence spending or less stable trading relations with other countries. Robert Kagan has warned that “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II… with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict”.

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