International Law Solvency Answers

All major powers violating international law

Sadat, June 3, 2022, The author is Senior Assistant Professor in International Law at the Indian
Society of International Law, New Delhi, Not only Russia but all great powers disrespect
international law, https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/not-only-russia-but-all-great-
powers-disrespect-international-law/2547499/
One does not need to spend much time on defining great powers. It is safe to consider five permanent members of the United
Nations Security Council (UNSC) – United States, Russia, Great Britain, China and France- as great powers. Article 24 of the UN
Charter says that on behalf of the members of the UN they are primarily responsible for maintaining international peace and
security. They are permanent members of the UNSC owing to the fact that they were victorious powers during the Second World
War. Although no third world war has taken place so far, the world war like consequences have been borne by innocent people
attributable to acts of omission and commission by the great members which they defend on the ground not defendable in
international law. Russia and International Law Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a clear-cut violation of international law. Russia is
trying to manufacture legal basis by arguing that there is a purported genocide in Eastern
Ukraine. In utter violation of the principle relating to prohibition of war enshrined in the Kellogg-Briand Pact (also called Pact of
Paris 1927) and Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter, Russia invades Ukraine and wants to win war by violating all the norms and customs
of war enshrined in the four Geneva Conventions 1949. Likewise other great powers, Russia
did not pay the slightest
attention to an ICJ judgment delivered just before its decision to launch an attack on Ukraine
on 9th February 2022 in Armed Activities on the Territory of Congo . The judgment decried Uganda for
violating the fundamental principle of non-use of force and of non-intervention, international humanitarian law and basic human
rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One must not forget that Russia annexed Crimea forcibly in violation of the UN General
Assembly resolution in 2014. China and International Law China
does not condemn Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine. Rather it has helped Moscow in continuation of war by abstaining in the crucial UNSC
voting. China’s disrespecting of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in the South China
Sea has serious implications for international legal order . While asserting a nine-dash line area which covers
most of the South China Sea and overlaps with the exclusive economic zone claims of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines,
Taiwan, and Vietnam, China disregards the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS). China passed the
Maritime Traffic Safety Law which requires all foreign vessels entering Chinese territorial waters to notify maritime authorities, carry
required permits, and submit to Chinese command and supervision. Prior to this, China passed a new law which authorizes the
Chinese coast guard to use force on foreign vessels infringing on Chinese sovereignty. Both laws have serious implications upon the
provisions of the UNCLOS which grant states the right of innocent passage without requiring permission from the coastal state’s
government. United States and International Law In the case of the United States also, it has been clearly observed that compliance
with international law has been influenced by Realpolitik. The Case Concerning Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against
Nicaragua is a turning point. In 1984, the International Court of Justice decided to hear the dispute arising from military and
paramilitary activities in the US. Activities that the US conducted in and against Nicaragua. The US raised an objection that the ICJ did
not have jurisdiction over that dispute. Although it participated in the jurisdiction phase, it was absent at the merit phase. In 1986,
the ICJ finally determined that the US. violated its international obligations toward Nicaragua. The latter sought to enforce the ICJ
judgment through bilateral negotiations firstly with the US and then through recourse to the UN Security Council and General
Assembly. The US was able to block any related proposals in the UN Security Council. The US along with Britain went to war against
Iraq without the UN Security Council consent in 2003. The then US president Bush Jr. warned in his speech to the General Assembly
of September 12, 2002, the organization is “irrelevant”. The US did not wait for the Security Council approval
for launching an attack on Iraq. In the eyes of international law, the US flagrantly violated the UN Charter and waged an
illegal war against Iraq in 2003. It sounds contradictory that the US, not a party to the Rome Statute
establishing the international criminal court (ICC) has declared the Russian President a war
criminal to be subjected to prosecution. The US is not keen either to join the ICC with an intent to
protect its service personnel from facing trial at the ICC. In Russia’s viewpoint, its war against Ukraine is a “special military
operation”, not armed attack, which is aimed at deNazification. The Great Powers give such excuses to undermine Article 2(4) of the
UN Charter. The US military moved in 1954 against Guatemala describing it as a peaceful invasion; its deployment of naval forces to
blockade Cuba in the name of “peaceful deployment” in 1962 and the occupation of Dominican Republic in the name of “peaceful
occupation” in 1965 had the effect of undermining Article 2(4). In international law, the right to self-defence is permitted as per
Article 51 of the UN Charter, which allows the right to self-defence in a situation of armed attack. Right to self-defence does not exist
if an armed attack has not yet occurred. In a departure from Article 51, the former US President George Bush (jr.) favoured the idea
of pre-emptive self-defence doctrine- a doctrine not defined uncontroversially. The eminent jurists often condition the legitimacy of
pre-emption on the existence of an imminent threat-most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air forces preparing to
attack. It leaves scope of misuse as the right to self-defence might be resorted to on the ground of generalized concerns attributable
to a fear that a terrorist group is in sight of possessing Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) or a terrorist group might acquire or
transfer WMD to another state or group. The UK and International Law The UK along with the US justified going to
war in Iraq despite the absence of any UN authorization on the basis that Saddam Hussain
possessed WMD. The UK’s intention might be pious but its violation of international law is not
excusable. On the question of Northern Ireland, Britain always treated it as its internal matter and it consistently objected to
placing the issue in the UN on the ground as it is precluded by Article 2(7) of the UN Charter. Britain never viewed the violence in
Ireland from the lens of humanitarian law. Britain objected to potential applicability of common Article 3 to the four Geneva
Conventions which governs non-international armed conflicts. It is also important to mention that the UK ratified 1977 Protocols in
its early stage but did not ratify it for many years. It ratified with many reservations denying its applicability with respect to Northern
Ireland. France and International Law International
law ranks genocide as jus cogens norm from which no
derogation is allowed. France has been actively involved in Rwanda since 1975 by giving
political support to the Hutu government, the government who planned and carried out the
genocide of the Tutsi minority in 1994 and by providing military training and armament to its
forces and to militia. France has been accused of complicity in the genocide, a charge which French national authorities have
denied. In response to genocide charge, the French Parliamentary mission submitted a response in 1998 that rejected any charge of
criminal responsibility. The independent commission set up by the UN Secretary General which carried out inquiry into the actions of
the UN during the 1994 genocide referred also, though partly, the role of France in the events leading to genocide. The independent
commission of eminent personalities, instituted by the Organization of African Union, in its report submitted in 2000, labelled France
as major villains, which could have prevented, halted or reduced the slaughter.
 International Law Solvency Answers – Russia Kills

Russia will never accept the liberal world order

Remchukov, 7-6, 22, What Vladimir Putin Is Really Thinking,

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-vladimir-putin-really-thinking-203422?
page=0%2C1

Putin does not recognize the familiar, but legally vague concept of the “rules-based
order.” He says that Russia does not understand these rules, did not participate in
the development of these rules and will not follow them. He is convinced that the
Yalta-Potsdam peace is over thanks to perpetual violations of international law and
the UN Charter by Western countries. He cites the bombing of Belgrade, Iraq,
Libya, and Kosovo as examples.

Russia will never accept international law, their internal link to ILaw is absurd

Mankoff, Summer 2022, Jeffrey Mankoff is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the US

National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies. He previously
served as an adviser on US-Russia relations at the US Department of State during the
Obama administration. He is the author of the recently published Empires of Eurasia:
How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security (Yale University Press). The views
expressed in this article are those of the author and are not an official policy or position
of the National Defense University, the Defense Department, or the US government, The
Washington Quarterly • 45:2 pp. 127–147,
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.gwu.edu/dist/1/2181/files/2022/07/Mankoff_45-
2_TWQ-1.pdf

The very anachronism of their views helps explain why the invasion of Ukraine has
been such a shock outside of Russia. The kind of imperial expansion Russia is now
pursuing has a long history—in Eurasia and beyond. It largely vanished, though, in the
decades after World War II. By 1991, Russia found itself belatedly confronting the same
dilemma that Eurasia’s other three post-imperial states had been grappling with for
decades: how to build a territorially bounded state and nation amid the wreckage of
empire. Putin has now abandoned that challenge, choosing instead the quixotic path of
seeking to rebuild Russia as a truly imperial state. Ukraine is the principal target, but
Moscow’s reversion to imperial geopolitics appears equally threatening to Russia’s other
neighbors. Despite the existence of formal agreements committing Moscow to respecting its
neighbors’ sovereignty and territorial integrity, Putin is demonstrating that Russia has no use
for agreements belonging to a post-imperial world it has reject ed. The outcome of Russia’s
war in Ukraine thus has implications far beyond the region itself. Putin’s Russia has long
claimed an exemption from a “rules based” international order allegedly designed by and for
the West.43 With its war in Ukraine, it is seeking nothing less than a new set of rules—rules
designed to accelerate the shift to a world safe for empire.
Rampant Russian violations of international law

Lindsay Maizland, June 14, 2022, Exploring Ties Between Two Authoritarian Powers,
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-russia-relationship-xi-putin-taiwan-ukraine

Russia, on the other hand, has flouted many international laws and norms in its actions abroad
—such as its election meddling, political assassinations, and cyberattacks—and experts have
described it as a rogue state. “Russia is much more provocative, while China is taking a more
careful, long-term approach when it comes to global competition with the West,” Georgia State
University’s Maria Repnikova says. She adds that although both China and Russia are
contributing to authoritarian trends globally, there is limited evidence that they carry out
coordinated activities to undermine democracies together.
 International Law Solvency Answers – China

China violating international law and no one cares

Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch, June 20, 2022,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/20/beyond-russia-real-threat-human-rights-china, Beyond
Russia: The Real Threat to Human Rights is from China
Can international human rights and humanitarian law survive when the major powers ignore it? That is the question posed by
Russian forces’ widespread summary executions and indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Ukraine. In the case of Ukraine, at
least, many governments seem determined to reinforce international standards. Forty-three countries so far have requested an
International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation of the alleged perpetrators of these war crimes and possible crimes against
humanity, which the ICC prosecutor has begun. The United Nations General Assembly and Human Rights Council have condemned
the atrocities, and the council has opened a parallel inquiry. But we have not always seen such resolve in the global response to
grave abuses by the most powerful nations. The reaction to Russian atrocities in Ukraine stands in stark
contrast to the lackluster response to the Chinese government’s repression in Xinjiang. There,
aided by the world’s most intrusive surveillance system, Beijing has detained one million Uyghur and other
Turkic Muslims to force them to abandon their religion, language, and cultur e. Human Rights Watch
and others have concluded that these mass detentions and other systematic abuses amount to crimes against humanity. And that is
just one aspect of the worst repression nationwide in China since the 1989 massacre of Tiananmen Square pro-democracy
protesters. There has been some international response to this repression. Groups of governments have repeatedly condemned the
Chinese government’s abuses in Xinjiang – most recently, in a joint statement by 47 governments from all regions of the world
including Germany. And the representatives of 50 UN special procedures – that is, independent experts rather than collective UN
bodies – have issued parallel condemnations. But the main United Nations institutions have been understated at best. Neither the
UN Human Rights Council nor the UN General Assembly has held a debate, adopted a resolution, or started an investigation on
Xinjiang. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres‘s
cautiously worded statements of concern about
Xinjiang have fallen far short of the seriousness of the persecution. The UN high commissioner for human
rights, Michelle Bachelet, continues to withhold a long-promised report on Xinjiang that her staff has completed. Her spokesman
said in December 2021 that it would be published within weeks. Instead, she agreed to visit China for what the Chinese government
insisted would be a “friendly visit” and dialogue rather than the unfettered investigation in Xinjiang that she had rightly asked for.
The trip was a gift to Beijing. Bachelet held various quiet conversations with Chinese officials including Xi Jinping but exerted none of
the public pressure that alone has a chance of forcing the Chinese government to ease its repression. She issued no forceful
condemnation, praised other aspects of China’s human rights record, adopted Beijing’s false “counterterrorism” narrative, and
despite contrary evidence, accepted without question Beijing’s claim that the detention centers were now closed. She trumpeted a
new dialogue with the Chinese government, but it has long been Beijing’s strategy to substitute such quiet backroom conversation
for any public criticism. The US government has barred all imports from Xinjiang as presumptively tainted by Uyghur forced labor
unless the importer can prove otherwise (which given the opacity of supply chains in Xinjiang is virtually impossible). But the
European Union has yet to follow suit. The United States, Britain, Canada, and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions
regarding the repression in Xinjiang. But European Union leaders, with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the EU
presidency, tried to push through an investment agreement with China without demanding an end to the forced labor. It took the
European Parliament to quash that idea. The problem isn’t only China.
The US government also has been reluctant
to hold itself to international human rights standards . When the ICC seemed posed to investigate US torture in
Afghanistan, the administration of Donald Trump outrageously imposed sanctions on its prosecutor at the time. The ostensible
reason was that, while Afghanistan had joined the ICC treaty, the United States had not, even though the treaty confers jurisdiction
over crimes such as torture committed by anyone on the territory of a member country. President Joe Biden has since lifted those
sanctions. In the case of Ukraine, which has granted the ICC jurisdiction over crimes on its territory, Biden has endorsed and said the
US government would cooperate with the ICC investigation of potential war crimes by Russian forces, even though Russia has also
not joined the ICC. It remains to be seen how the US government will react to any potential future ICC investigation of US personnel
in a country where the ICC also has territorial jurisdiction. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress are now endorsing
the ICC investigation in Ukraine, laying bare the hypocrisy of the past US position. The US shift was undoubtedly facilitated by the ICC
prosecutor’s announcement that, as he continues his Afghanistan investigation, he intends to de-prioritize for the time being his
inquiry into alleged US crimes. More imminently, the US position will be tested by the ICC investigation of Israeli war crimes such as
its illegal settlements in Palestine, given that Israel has never joined the court, although Palestine has. Yet the good news is that,
even without the major powers, a broad array of governments has repeatedly supported and even advanced international rights
standards. The ICC is the product of a large coalition, even though the United States, Russia, and China never joined. These major
powers were similarly absent as the rest of the world banned anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions. Yet, today, the ICC
enjoys international credibility, and the norms against landmines and cluster munitions, both indiscriminate weapons that endanger
civilians, remain strong. In short, it may be in the nature of major powers to seek to exercise their power unconstrained by the
enforcement of international law, but strong global support for those standards, and the institutions to enforce them, can generate
intense pressure to comply regardless of major-power proclivities. Yet we should not be complacent at the strong international
response to Russian outrages in Ukraine. Russia is a significant military force — though apparently a less impressive one than most
The
people thought before its invasion of Ukraine. But the Kremlin has relatively little economic influence. China is another matter.
Chinese government is an economic powerhouse that has shown no reluctance to use its clout
to oppose scrutiny of its conduct and to undermine the international human rights system.
When the Australian government proposed an independent investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, Beijing
responded with punitive tariffs. It earlier had retaliated against Norway when the Oslo-based Nobel Committee awarded the Peace
Prize to the imprisoned Chinese pro-democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo, even though the Norwegian government has nothing to do
with the decisions of the private Nobel Committee. And the Chinese government threatened to withhold Covid-19 vaccines from
Ukraine until it removed its name from a joint statement criticizing Beijing’s repression in Xinjiang – a blackmail tactic that UN
diplomats told Human Rights Watch the Chinese delegation has used to scare other countries into silence as well. Similarly, Chinese
President Xi Jinping has used the trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, ostensibly an infrastructure development program, to
purchase support for his anti-rights positions at the United Nations. The
lack of transparency for Belt and Road
loans, like financing from other Chinese institutions, make them ideal vehicles for Beijing to
buy the outcomes that it wants. Beyond trying to silence critics of its repression and to undermine broader
enforcement of human rights standards, the Chinese government is trying to weaken the standards
themselves. In its view, human rights should never be enforced by pressure, just by “win, win”
(for the abusers, not the victims) polite conversation. If Beijing had its way, human rights would be reduced to
a measurement of growth in gross domestic product. It would brush aside economic and social rights, which require examining how
the worst-off segments of society are treated, as well as civil and political rights, which are needed to ensure that a government
remains accountable to its people. Russian atrocities in Ukraine are appalling, but given the world’s reaction to them, they do not
pose a threat to global standards. Indeed, they may even end up consolidating support for those standards. Rather, the real threat
to rights comes from Beijing, which appears determined to undermine those standards altogether. So far, the world’s response has
been inadequate. The economic cost of standing up to the Chinese government is real, but it is a cost worth bearing, because the
very foundation of the international human rights system built over the past 75 years is at stake.
 International Law Solvency Answers – General

I-law fails – it’s unenforceable and countries selectively ignore it

Dr William Partlett 18, Associate Professor, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne,
4-1-2018, "Does it matter that strikes against Syria violate international law? ," Pursuit,
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/does-it-matter-that-strikes-against-syria-violate-
international-law
** edited for clarity

Despite this clear illegality, many of the richest and most powerful countries in the world have
supported the attack [on Syria]. This includes all members of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), as well as Israel and Japan. Most have voiced this support by arguing that,
with a deadlocked UN Security Council, the only effective way to deter the future use of
chemical weapons is through the limited use of force that punishes a state for using such weapons against its
citizens. Australian Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull praised the attacks, stating that “the Assad regime must
not be allowed to commit such crimes with impunity.” But this is not a legal argument, and
according to some legal experts, the language has the flavour of armed reprisals which is clearly
unlawful. All that is left really of this argument is that the attacks are “illegal but legitimate.” But
if “illegal but legitimate” becomes an accepted principle, then the Charter’s limits, at least on
the use of force, become meaningless. WHAT SHOULD WE DO? So, how should we respond to this gap between the
use of force and the international law regulating it? One option is to continue to disregard international law
and justify the illegal use of force in the language of morality. This would essentially continue the
status quo approach and further the slow degradation of Article 2(4)’s prohibition against the
use of force in the international legal system . This approach might be well-intentioned but would come with
considerable cost. International law - without a centralised institutional mechanism for
enforcement - already faces significant problems of enforcement. The less respect countries
pay to the letter of international law on the use of force - particularly Western countries - the
more likely it is that other countries themselves will not choose to follow it. In fact, it becomes
far harder - if not impossible - for the United States, the UK, and France to condemn the use of
force by other countries when they themselves grossly flaunt it. So if we care at all about the “rules-based
order”, we should worry about ignoring international law constraints on the use of force. Otherwise we are admitting that
international legal regime on the use of force has completely broken down.

Broken windows theory – mass violations of international law make it

infeasible to use as an international enforcement mechanism
Ingrid Wuerth 17, the Helen Strong Curry Professor of International Law at Vanderbilt Law
School, where she also directs the international legal studies program. She is a leading scholar of
foreign affairs, public international law and international litigation. She serves on the State
Department’s Advisory Committee on Public International Law, she is a Reporter on the
American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) on U.S. Foreign Relations Law, and she is on the
editorial board of the American Journal of International Law. She has won Fulbright and
Alexander von Humboldt awards permitting her to spend substantial time in Germany and she is
an elected member of the German Society of International Law, 4-10-2017, "Does International
Law Have a “Broken Windows” Problem?," Lawfare, https://www.lawfareblog.com/does-
international-law-have-broken-windows-problem

Many norms of international law, especially international human rights law, are widely
violated. The international legal system as a whole may suffer as result. International human
rights law has changed international law. The two primary sources of international legal
obligations—treaties and custom—have become more expansive and looser so as to bring more
human rights norms into the ambit of international law, despite wide-spread non-compliance
with those norms. In one sense, the success of the effort is clear: international law now regulates a
vast array of human-rights-related conduct. Whether the expansion is an effective way to
promote human rights is widely-debated. The broader, unacknowledged problem, however, is
the potential effect of the expansion on international law as a whole, as I discuss in detail here.
Today, international law includes a broad range of human rights norms which are routinely
violated, from the U.N. reporting requirements to gross violations of human dignity . Wide-
spread violations of some legal norms may, in turn, make it harder to enforce others . As a
(very) imperfect analogy, consider the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention:
widespread violations of human rights law may be a symbol of unaccountability, a signal that
no one cares about violations of international law and that no one is in charge . Accountability
is a fundamental concern of public international law because the system lacks a centralized
enforcement mechanism. Whatever the merits of the “broken windows” argument in the
context of domestic law enforcement, behavior which signals a lack of accountability may be
especially damaging to international law writ large. Theoretical literature on compliance with
international law suggests that non-compliance in some areas makes other norms of
international law harder to enforce. Work on rational choice posits, for example, that states
comply with international law in part to protect their reputations. If states as a whole tend to
expect non-compliance from each other, the costs of entering into treaties or developing norms
of customary international law become higher for all states. A baseline reputation of non-
compliance among states generally harms interstate cooperation because it means that states
will have to do more in a treaty agreement to generate trustworthy commitments (such as
monitoring non-compliance), and because it makes some agreements not worth the time or
effort. To be sure, these effects depend upon states having reputations for compliance which are not entirely issue-specific or
compartmentalized, a plausible assumption for reasons explained here (pages 103-06). Other theories of compliance
with international law, including constructivism and organizational sociology, also suggest that
widespread non-compliance with human rights will make the rest of international law less
effective. For example, constructivists Jutta Brunnée and Stephen Toope argue that international legal obligations
arise from communities of practice which have shared understandings and which generate
norms with specific characteristics of legality . Lack of congruence between a norm and behavior
impedes the development of a community of practice. They reason in the context of torture
(page 232) that “a widespread failure to uphold the law as formally enunciated leads to a sense
of hypocrisy which undermines fidelity to law.” Research from domestic law and social psychology, including the
work of Tom Tyler, suggests that widespread lack of faith in government and its ability to solve problems undermines peoples’ sense
of their own obligation to follow the law. If international law does have a problem along these lines, one solution is to more
effectively enforce international human rights law: Doing so would not only benefit human rights, but also international law as
whole. Yet creating
a truly effective international human rights enforcement system seems
unlikely. A more complicated possibility is to find ways to promote and protect human rights
that do not depend upon binding norms of international law, including regional human rights
courts and tribunals, domestic statutes and constitutions, capacity building and iterative
interactions with review bodies, the enforcement of soft obligations, and so on. Thanks to the
successes of the international human rights movement, there are a wide variety of tools designed to improve global human rights
practices. While we have yet to see whether those mechanisms will work if they are de-coupled from binding international legal
commitments, it is clear that we should understand international human rights law as part of a broader international legal system.
The debate around international law and human rights should be re-framed to consider not just potential benefits to human rights
but also the potential costs to international law as a whole.

No impact or impact uniqueness – AND state legislatures will block it

Eric A. Posner 17, Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
Law School. Thanks to Adam Chilton (10/10 Torts Prof) “Liberal Internationalism and the
Populist Backlash,” 49 ARIZ. St. L.J. 795 (2017). UChicago Law Libraries.
We can summarize this backward movement by noting that international security-as embodied in the UN charter's
prohibitions on use of force-and human rights are the
two most significant pillars of international law
since the end of the Cold War. And both are in shambles. The United States and Russia have
repeatedly violated the use of force prohibition. And human rights have worsened over the
last decade.6 Meanwhile, tribunals and other international institutions are contributing little
to international order, and there have been no major efforts to advance international
legalization for more than a decade.∂ Meanwhile, international economic cooperation is also
in decline. Here, we should point out something that most debates about international law leave out: the persistent
unhappiness of major developing countries with what they regard as their coercive and unfair treatment under the major
international economic institutions-including the austerity policies of the IMF, and the trade policies of the WTO.68 ∂
Combine these events with the populist backlashes within countries and the overall
impression is one of significant backsliding and retrenchment something that international law
scholars have not, as far as I am aware of, predicted or even discussed as realistic possibilities. What went wrong? The simple
answer is that the benefits of globalization-greater wealth and freedom-failed to materialize as promised,
with most of the gains going to a small fragment of the global elite, or to vast populations of workers in places like China, with
cheaper consumer goods in the West failing to compensate people in their minds for the economic dislocation they
experienced.6 9 Human freedom has not advanced since 2000, and has very likely declined. Meanwhile, the
costs of
globalization turned out to be highly visible. These costs included the spread of
international terrorism, disease (such as the SARS epidemic in 2002-2003), and economic instability,
represented above all by the financial crisis of 2007-2008, whose causes and effects were global in nature. As in the 1930s, the
natural reaction has been to abandon global commitments in favor of familiar tribal and national loyalties. But modern
international law, born out of that era, was supposed to prevent a return to it by binding nations
ever more closely together. Why did that not happen?∂ III. WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE BACKLASH?∂ The
answer to this question is speculative but clues lie about, and they can be put together into a suggestive theory. The
overwhelming impetus to backlash lay in popular opinion across countries. Many ordinary
people, left behind by globalization, have united in their opposition to further
international legalization. They have lost faith in international institutions (as illustrated best by
Europe) and in the national leaders who supported them. They now seek new national leaders
who will advance the national interest rather than global ideals.∂ The backlash should not
come as a complete surprise. As we saw, worries about the democratic deficit in Europe are as old as European
integration. While most scholars supported European integration, either because they believed that the democratic deficit was
mythical, or that the benefits of integration exceeded any costs to democracy," the dissenting view persisted if only because it
was impossible to ignore the evidence."' Public opinion surveys showed that many Europeans distrusted European
institutions. European politicians successfully ran on anti-Europe campaign promises. Voters in some European countries
rejected the European constitution and the Lisbon Treaty. And pro-integration mainstream leaders took the democratic deficit
seriously enough to try to address it by strengthening the European Parliament. Brexit only ratified a longstanding worry. ∂ In
the United States, the debate took place in a lower key. The
United States is not bound by any
international institutions whose strength and authority is comparable to that of the
European institutions. Indeed, the United States has disproportionate influence over most major international
institutions, and nearly always can protect itself with veto rights. However, from time to time, a relatively minor question of
international law erupted into public consciousness. Thepossibility that the International Criminal Court
could have jurisdiction over American soldiers provoked Congress to pass a law in 2002
that appeared to authorize a military invasion of the Netherlands if an American was ever
held for trial. 2 Roper and related cases caused a public outcry, leading some state legislatures to pass
statutes that blocked courts from relying on "foreign law."" 3 The American political
system is suspicious of human rights treaties, and the Senate has become increasingly
reluctant to give its consent to any treaty at all-although this is partly an artifact of a 2/3
majority rule and the disproportionate influence of rural populations in that body.

Selective application of international law kills solvency. One more instance is

just another selective application

Beate Jan, January 2018, International Affairs, Liberal internationalism: historical trajectory and
current prospects, 43-61 Beate Jahn is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the
Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The
Cultural Construction of International Relations (2000) and Politik und Moral (1993).

The establishment of a liberal world order also undermined the crucial distinction between a
liberal and a non-liberal camp that had informed, and was used to justify, liberal foreign policies.
In the absence of a serious non-liberal camp, policies of liberal cooperation and integration fell
apart. The Iraq War was backed not by a liberal alliance, such as NATO, but by a ‘coalition of the
willing’—states motivated by a variety of interests (ranging from aid to American support in
other matters). Multilateralism lost support in many liberal states. Humanitarian intervention
and democracy promotion were selectively undertaken and openly justified with reference to
the interests of powerful states,79 undermining liberal principles such as the commitment to
stop genocide80—and generating resistance within target populations.81 The selective
adherence to human rights (Guantanamo Bay) and international law in general (Iraq) and
accusations of bias (ICC) undermine the standing of international law. In the absence of an
alternative to capitalism, protectionism and the consequent competition between liberal states
are on the rise. Increasing economic inequality within and between states belies the liberal
promise of general prosperity and generates increasing resistance to further liberalization on
the part of developing states (as in the WTO Doha Round).

Border prosecutions violate international law

Fullerton, June 2018 (The Hill, 6-28, Criminal Prosecutions at the Border Violate International
Law, Maryellen Fullerton is professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. She is an expert on asylum
and refugee law, with years of experience conducting research and working in Europe. She has
been a consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and has been active
in projects providing support to Refugee Law Clinics in Eastern Europe. Twice she has received
Fulbright awards, and she has served as distinguished chair in law at the University of Trento in
Italy. A prolific author, she has published two casebooks, Forced Migration: Law and Policy and
Immigration and Citizenship Law: Process and Policy, which are used by more than 100 law
schools and universities throughout the United States.
http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/394634-criminal-prosecutions-at-the-border-violate-
international-law)

In the ashes of World War II, the international community came together to create a response
to the refugee crisis created by persecution, war and genocide. Remembering the visa barriers
and other immigration control measures that prevented refugees from escaping Nazi Germany,
the 1951 Refugee Treaty set forth clear obligations on nations where refugees flee to seek safe
haven. The treaty defines refugees as people with a well-founded fear of persecution and
requires nations to refrain from returning refugees to lands where their lives or freedom are
threatened. Recognizing that refugees often must flee their homelands on short notice without
obtaining travel documents, the Refugee Treaty forbids countries from imposing penalties on
refugees on account of illegal entry so long as they present themselves promptly to
authorities and show good cause for their unauthorized entry. More than 145 nations have
also ratified the treaty, making it one of the most important human rights treaties in effect.
With the shameful memory still alive of U.S. officials refusing to allow German refugees to
disembark from the St. Louis because they lacked immigration visas, the United States also
ratified the international refugee treaty and agreed to its provisions. Therefore, it is absolutely
clear that international law protects people who enter the U.S. without papers, if they
promptly go to Border Patrol officers and ask for asylum. Prosecuting individuals at the
southern border for illegal entry violates the international laws that the United States
expressly adopted and agree to uphold. These criminal prosecutions violate U.S. law also. Title
8 of the U.S. Code states that all non-citizens who arrive in the U.S. (whether or not at a
designated port of arrival, including people stopped in international waters before getting to the
U.S.) have a right to apply for asylum, irrespective of the non-citizen’s status. This means that
whether they have a visa or not, whether they entered at a regular border crossing or not,
whether they entered surreptitiously or not, they have a right to apply for asylum. A related
statute, 8 U.S.C. 1231(b)(3), states that the U.S. cannot remove non-citizens to a country where
their lives or freedom would be threatened. If U.S. officials prosecute individuals or turn people
away who want to apply for asylum — without giving them a hearing to see if they qualify for
asylum — they are violating two U. S. statutes: the right to an asylum hearing and the obligation
not to return people to countries where their lives or freedom would be threatened.
Simultaneously, they are violating international refugee law. Nations have the right to control
their borders and to impose immigration measures. But both U.S. law and international law
recognize that refugee situations involve great peril and require nations to allow human beings
— however they crossed the border — to demonstrate that they have

Even if they solve a significant list of alt causes, accountability is fragile and the
remaining violations will still undermine the fundamentals of the system
Ingrid Wuerth 2017, Law professor at Vanderbilt Law, 12-12-2017, “International Law in the
Post-Human Rights Era”, Texas Law Review, https://texaslawreview.org/international-law-post-
human-rights-era/
Changes in the doctrine of sources to accommodate human rights have made international law
more elastic; it now permits the adoption of norms despite greater noncompliance and more
nonconforming behavior. And beyond the changes to the formal sources of international law,
there are other widespread violations of international human rights law, such as a failure to
abide by even those treaty norms to which no reservation was made . Such failures extend
even to ministerial tasks, such as filing required reports to treaty-monitoring bodies .256 There
is a parallel development in the mandate of the U.N. Security Council, which has grown to
include many human rights issues that the Council cannot remedy or prevent . These changes to
international law may encourage noncompliance with other international legal norms , not just
those governing human rights. The intuition here is an imperfect analogy to the “broken
windows” theory of crime prevention: widespread violations of human rights law may be a
symbol of unaccountability, 257 a signal that “no one cares” about violations of international
law and that “no one is in charge.” 258 Accountability is a central concern of public
international law. The system lacks a centralized enforcement mechanism, and as a result,
compliance and effectiveness pose important—some would say fundamental—challenges to
the relevance of public international law.259 In this context, behavior that signals a lack of
accountability may be especially damaging to the enforcement and deterrence of international
law writ large. To some extent, this intuition has already been voiced within the human rights
discourse.260 The domestic broken windows theory argues that “mere” “disorder” or “victimless” crimes lead to more serious
violations of the law.261 Human rights violations are not victimless and can impose significant costs to human lives and dignity. As
well, the broken windows theory of domestic law enforcement may depend upon and itself create certain subjects or categories of
people, such as the “honest” versus the “disorderly,” upon which social influences operate differently.262 Although
the
analogy is thus imperfect— and despite great controversy over the domestic broken windows
theory and its relationship to domestic policing263—the question remains: if states are in
widespread violation of, or noncompliance with, international human rights law, are they (and
other states) more likely to violate other norms of international law? Models of state
compliance with international law— rational choice, constructivism, the sociology of
international organizations—answer this question affirmatively,264 and so do empirical
studies of social psychology and domestic law.
 One Instance of Application Won’t Solve

Selective application of international law kills solvency. One more instance is

just another selective application

Beate Jan, January 2018, International Affairs, Liberal internationalism: historical trajectory and
current prospects, 43-61 Beate Jahn is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the
Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The
Cultural Construction of International Relations (2000) and Politik und Moral (1993).

The establishment of a liberal world order also undermined the crucial distinction between a
liberal and a non-liberal camp that had informed, and was used to justify, liberal foreign policies.
In the absence of a serious non-liberal camp, policies of liberal cooperation and integration fell
apart. The Iraq War was backed not by a liberal alliance, such as NATO, but by a ‘coalition of the
willing’—states motivated by a variety of interests (ranging from aid to American support in
other matters). Multilateralism lost support in many liberal states. Humanitarian intervention
and democracy promotion were selectively undertaken and openly justified with reference to
the interests of powerful states,79 undermining liberal principles such as the commitment to
stop genocide80—and generating resistance within target populations.81 The selective
adherence to human rights (Guantanamo Bay) and international law in general (Iraq) and
accusations of bias (ICC) undermine the standing of international law. In the absence of an
alternative to capitalism, protectionism and the consequent competition between liberal states
are on the rise. Increasing economic inequality within and between states belies the liberal
promise of general prosperity and generates increasing resistance to further liberalization on
the part of developing states (as in the WTO Doha Round).

Law useless—States have found moral justification for its violation.

CFR 13

Is humanitarian military intervention against international law, or are there exceptions?

Question submitted by Sebastian de Armas, from Trinity Prep School, June 27, 2013
http://www.cfr.org/international-law/humanitarian-military-intervention-against-international-
law-there-exceptions/p31017

As a matter of international law, humanitarian intervention—such as the use of military force to

protect foreign populations from mass atrocities or gross human rights abuses—is permissible if
authorized by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Although many Western
governments have taken the position that such intervention may in some cases be morally
justified even if not authorized by the Security Council, most states and international legal
experts do not regard that as lawful. The main source of international law on this issue is the
United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of military force against or in another state
without its consent except when authorized by the UNSC or in self-defense against armed
attack. The UNSC has authorized humanitarian interventions in cases such as Somalia and Haiti,
but it is often difficult to obtain the necessary votes in the UNSC and to overcome resistance by
permanent members Russia and China, which are generally opposed to these actions. In the
1999 Kosovo crisis, NATO launched military strikes to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing, despite
opposition from Russia, China, and many states of the global South. Although many Western
states regarded the action as morally legitimate under the circumstances, many other states
criticized it as violating the principle of state sovereignty. In recent years, states have reached
general consensus that they have a "Responsibility to Protect" populations from mass atrocities,
and that when a government fails in this responsibility towards its own people, international
action is appropriate. Many states, however, maintain the position that only the UNSC can
authorize armed intervention. I consider these issues in a 2009 Council on Foreign Relations
Special Report,
 Impact Answers

Ukraine proves realism is true and international cooperation fails to prevent

conflict 

Poast, 6-15, 22, PAUL POAST is Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Chicago and a Nonresident Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs,

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-06-15/world-power-and-fear

Request Reprint Permissions 

Among the collateral damage of the war in Ukraine is a school of thought: realism. This
intellectual tradition insists that the pursuit of national interests trumps higher ideals, such
as the commitment to open trade, the sanctity of international law, and the virtues of
democracy. Realists focus on how states, particularly major powers, seek to survive and
retain influence in world politics. As such, realism appeared well suited for explaining
the imperatives and calculations behind the Russian invasion. Instead, it found itself
caught in the crossfire. After realist arguments seemed to excuse the Kremlin’s actions,
critics in Europe and North America have variously called prominent individuals
associated with realism—and realism itself as a doctrine—irrelevant, callous, and even
morally reprehensible.

The political scientist John Mearsheimer drew much of the opprobrium for his claims
about the origins of the war in Ukraine. An unabashed advocate of realism,
Mearsheimer has insisted that the United States and its allies are at fault for
encouraging NATO and EU expansion into what the Kremlin sees as its sphere of
influence, thereby threatening Russia and provoking Russian aggression. Criticism
of Mearsheimer mounted after the Russian Foreign Ministry itself promoted his ideas in
the wake of the invasion. The urgings of another realist, former U.S. Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, exhorting Ukraine to give up territory in order to appease Putin have
also led to a barrage of attacks on the tenets of realism.

But realism’s critics should not throw out the baby with the bath water. The invective
directed at realism misses an important distinction: realism is both an analytical school of
thought and a policy position. The errors of the latter don’t obviate the utility of the
former. In explaining the war in Ukraine, realism, like any theoretical framework, is
neither good nor bad. But even when its prescriptions can seem unsound, it retains value
as a prism through which analysts can understand the motivations and actions of states in
an inevitably complex world.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the field of international relations was riven by the so-called
paradigm wars. Scholars feuded over the best way to think about—and how to study—
international politics. These debates were nuanced, but they essentially boiled down to a
clash between those who held a realist view of international politics and those who did
not.

Realism comes in many hues. Some realist approaches emphasize the importance of
individual leaders, others stress the role of domestic institutions, and still others focus
squarely on the distribution of power among countries. There is classical realism (human
nature compels states to pursue security), structural realism (the lack of a world
government compels states to pursue security), and neoclassical realism (a combination
of internal and external factors compels states to pursue security). These approaches have
their own subvariants. For instance, structural realists are divided between a defensive
camp (states seek security by preventing the hegemony of any single power) and an
offensive camp (states must seek hegemony to achieve security). Some realists would
disavow the label altogether: the work of the British historian E. H. Carr is clearly realist
in its leanings, but he would never have identified himself as such.

Rather than being a strictly coherent theory, realism has always been defined not by what
it prescribes but by what it deems impossible. It is the school of no hope, the curmudgeon
of international relations thought. The first work of modern realist thought and the
precursor to Mearsheimer’s own work was The European Anarchy, a short book written
by the British political scientist G. Lowes Dickinson in 1916. It emphasized that states,
out of fear, will seek to dominate and, indeed, gain supremacy over others. During the
1920s and 1930s, realists (although not yet referred to as such) pointed to the futility of
arms control and disarmament treaties.

Realism is the school of no hope, the curmudgeon of international relations thought.

In 1942, the American scholar Merze Tate published The Disarmament Illusion, a book
that argued that states will inevitably seek to retain their arms and whose ideas fit
well with the claims made by the later realists Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth
Waltz. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Kissinger and Morgenthau pointed to the
impracticality of hoping for a single world government or even peaceful coexistence
among countries. In the 1970s and 1980s, realists were primarily identified (either by
others or by themselves) as those who derided the hope that international regimes, such
as the United Nations, could solve global problems. By the 1990s, realists were
criticizing the expectation that international institutions and the spread of democracy
would usher in a golden age of global peace and prosperity troubled only by the
occasional rogue state.

Realism fared quite well compared with an alternative theory that gained prominence in
the 1990s and continues to receive attention in policy circles: the notion that geopolitics
would become a “clash of civilizations,” as advanced by the American political scientist
Samuel Huntington. Like Mearsheimer’s core realist work, Huntington’s thesis was
written in the wake of the Cold War, as analysts and scholars sought to anticipate what
the end of superpower bipolarity would mean for the world. While Mearsheimer focused
on the return of great-power politics, Huntington claimed that it would be cultural,
largely religious, differences that would drive the conflicts of the future. Huntington was,
in effect, rebutting the work of Mearsheimer. In contrast to the statist emphasis of
realism, Huntington’s culture-based theory predicted peaceful relations between Ukraine
and Russia, countries that in his view belonged to the same overarching civilization. That
prediction has not aged well.

What ultimately unifies the branches of realism is the view that states bristling with
arms are an inescapable fact of life and that international cooperation is not just
difficult but fundamentally futile. In essence, it is foolish to hope that cooperation
will provide lasting solutions to the intractable reality of conflict and competition as
countries pursue their own interests.

That is the framework that characterizes realist thought, including the work of
Mearsheimer. Realism sees international politics as a tragic stage in which the
persistence, if not the prevalence, of war means that governments must focus on
guaranteeing national security, even at the expense of liberties and prosperity. Tate
captured this sentiment well in The Disarmament Illusion: “Dissatisfied powers may not
actually want war, may even dread it, and may be quite as unwilling to run the risk of an
appeal to arms as the satisfied states; but in spite of this, they will not voluntarily shut off
all possibility of obtaining a state of things which will be to them more acceptable than
the present.”

Realism as a theory gains power by highlighting the mechanisms that constrain

human agency, be they the innate nature of humans (as emphasized by
Morgenthau) or the distribution of global power (the focus of Waltz). To draw an
analogy, realism’s role is to continually point to the gravity that undercuts human
attempts to fly. Realism can be used to explain the foreign policy choices of certain
countries or why an event, such as a war, occurred. As a theory, realism can be very
effective in explaining relations among states. But it becomes something different when it
journeys from the realm of description to that of prescription. When brought into policy,
realist theory becomes realpolitik: the position that states should balance against their
adversaries and seek relative gains rather than accept supranational and institutional
constraints on their freedom of action in international affairs.

The distinction between realism as theory and as policy appears in the historical debate
over nuclear proliferation. In the early 1980s, Waltz argued that the spread of nuclear
weapons would lead to greater peace. He cut against the conventional wisdom that
insisted that only limiting the spread of these weapons would ensure a safer world (the
logic behind the creation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970). His claim was
subsequently debated by those who, to put it simply, pointed out that the proliferation of
nuclear weapons would make the world more dangerous.

In making his arguments, Waltz took a descriptive and theoretically informed observation
(the likelihood of war decreases as deterrent and defensive capabilities increase), applied
this to nuclear weapons (nuclear weapons dramatically improve a country’s deterrent and
defensive capabilities), and then deduced a recommendation for how policymakers
should view the spread of nuclear weapons: that more should be welcomed, not feared.
It is in this last step that Waltz goes from describing international politics (here is why
states seek nuclear weapons) to prescribing international politics (here is why states
should seek nuclear weapons). One is a description, the other is a justification. They are
both valid intellectual enterprises, but they should not be confused. A particular
understanding of world events does not inevitably lead to a particular policy response. In
this case, the same factors that led Waltz to justify the spread of nuclear weapons could
have led him to offer the opposite prescription, in that a state’s security goals could be
achieved without them (for instance, by sheltering under the nuclear umbrella of a major
power). Realist theory helps describe the world, but such prescriptions reflect the
interpretations of individuals, not the overarching theory itself.

Realism as policy also manifests itself in debates over restraint in U.S. foreign policy.
Proponents of U.S. restraint aim to counter liberal internationalism, the view that the
United States must be involved, militarily if necessary, in foreign arenas for the sake of
promoting and maintaining a rules-based international order. By contrast, restraint calls
for the United States to reduce its global footprint and avoid getting involved in issues
that are marginal to U.S. national interests. As with the debate over nuclear proliferation,
realism’s role in debates on how the United States should behave in international affairs
must not be confused with using realism to describe U.S. foreign policy. Realism can
explain why the United States finds itself in a particular geopolitical situation, but it
doesn’t offer an obvious answer about how the United States should behave in that
situation.

REALISM AND UKRAINE

The debate regarding Ukraine has long featured realist voices. In 1993, Mearsheimer
wrote in Foreign Affairs that Kyiv should retain the stockpile of nuclear weapons it
inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union because Moscow might one day seek
to reconquer Ukraine. Some 20 years later, Mearsheimer wrote of how NATO
enlargement and the promise of bringing Ukraine into the alliance provoked
Russian aggression, namely the seizing of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Both
pieces were focused on policy prescription: rather than simply describing what Russia,
Ukraine, the United States, the European Union, and NATO were doing, they focused on
what they should do.

Although one can disagree with those arguments, it is worth pointing out that they reflect
realism as policy, not realism as theory. Realism as theory would have limited itself to
explaining why the crisis is happening, perhaps focusing on how the desire of major
powers to dominate their region means that Russia would eventually seek to militarily
coerce (or even invade) its neighbors, or that conditions were conducive to a former
empire seeking to reestablish itself, or that in their search for security, states can act in
ways that can be perceived incorrectly as being aggressive.

None of this is to say that realism or any one theory offers the best explanation for the
war in Ukraine. Alternative explanations abound, including the power of nationalism, the
differences in regime types, and the traits (one might say, quirks) of particular leaders.
But realism offers a useful frame for understanding this war’s onset. Indeed, the
enduring power of realism is its ability to offer a clear baseline for coming to grips
with why the world is and will likely remain a world full of pain and despair

I-law fails – states only abide by international law when it helps them – the aff
can’t create an effective enforcement mechanism that forces states to abide by
international norms when it doesn’t suit them.
Patrick Porter 16, academic director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of
Exeter., 8-28-2016, "Sorry, Folks. There Is No Rules-Based World Order.," National Interest,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/sorry-folks-there-no-rules-based-world-order-
17497?page=0%2C2

It would be one thing if the “rules-based” cliché were harmless. It is not harmless. It suffers from
three defects. Firstly, its claims about “how things are” is untrue, historically and today . Contrary
to those nostalgic for a rule-based liberal order that the United States bound itself to after
World War II, there was never a golden era of rule adherence to which we can return. As
Stephen Walt observed, historically “we mostly made up the rules, and chucked them or ignored
them when they got in our way. . . there are rules, but we don't define the system in this way . For
starters, defining the system as ‘rule-based’ doesn’t make much sense if the leading state(s) can
ignore the rules whenever they want to.” The United States was not an umpire above the fray.
Umpires don’t overthrow governments, assassinate rulers or blockade countries. Every major
power, past and present, including every permanent member of the Security Council, has on
occasion significantly violated international law, or rejected the rulings of international courts,
or even denied their authority. Jacques Chirac’s France, like Gerhard Schroeder’s Germany, opposed the invasion of Iraq
on the grounds of opposing “unilateralism” and upholding the Security Council’s authority. Yet France itself flouted the
same rule, participating in NATO’s unauthorized and illegal bombing of Serbia in 1999 to rescue
Kosovo Albanians from genocide. As an American hawk observed, “if there ever was an
international order of the kind they describe, then Europe undermined it in 1999, too.” In 1985,
France sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior , agreeing to arbitration but refusing to
submit to the International Court of Justice. The United States has not even ratified the
international Law of the Sea that it urges China to observe. In the 1980s, when Nicaragua
successfully sued America before the International Court of Justice over the mining of its
harbors, Washington refused to pay reparations and refused to recognise the authority of the
court. America’s UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s rationalization was inflammatory, and
true: the ICJ, she claimed, is a “semi-legal” body that “nations sometimes accept and
sometimes don’t.” Secondly, the “rules-based” ideal cannot be realized in future , because of
the tragic nature of international life. There is no transcendental impartial authority that can
enforce rules in a disinterested and consistent way . There may be global governance, but there is no
global government, and when states feel enough pressure they will rely on themselves if they
can. Rules themselves, like norms, can conflict . We have already noted a case in point: the
collision between the authority of the Security Council and international humanitarian law
against the targeting of civilians. Consider a provocative suggestion: sometimes states are right to act illegally. Our own
Western states violate international law from time to time, and with justification. Though our preference is for international
authorization, we have compelling interests that at times will be threatened, so compelling that we won’t hold them hostage to the
cause of international consensus. Indeed, we
may believe, with good conscience, that the welfare of world
order itself obliges the occasional breaking of rules. The same President Obama who invokes the “rules-based
order” carries out extrajudicial assassinations of Islamists, and not always with the prior consent of host countries or the Security
Council, thus infringing both sovereignty and due process. In principle, he is right to do so. American citizens are not entitled to
decamp to remote countries and, unmolested, urge their compatriots to slaughter other Americans. Armed Islamists from other
countries, likewise, are not entitled to prepare aggression against American civilians without disruption. The states where they find
sanctuary may be either too weak, or too passive, to apprehend them. In such circumstances, it is reasonable for America to treat
armed adversaries as armed adversaries, without relying on others’ permission. “Rules-based,” however, is a stretch. The issue came
into sharp focus for Britain’s former prime minister, David Cameron, who had urged China to buy in to the “rules-based world.”
Confronted by the outrage of Syria’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, Cameron in the autumn of 2013 discovered powerful
reasons to set formal rules aside. Making the case for punitive airstrikes against the regime, to punish and deter future WMD
atrocities, Cameron insisted, “if we’re saying there can only be a response if the UN Security Council votes positively, we are in fact
contracting out our foreign policy, our morality, to the potential of a Russian veto. Now I think that is a very misguided approach.”
For a government that talks so often about the rule of law, all of a sudden morality and rules were distinct, and Britain could reject
rules for the sake of other valued things. Neither is this apparent doctrine an isolated case. Unless we are claiming an Anglo-
American privilege, if one major power can selectively refuse to submit to the Security Council or courts, why can’t others? Major
states will invoke rules, and at their discretion, will break them. Theirs is a great-power
privilege. This is the world we live in. Thirdly, attempting to bring about a world of consistent
rules, enforced by an international authority, will harm the West’s ability to navigate its way
ahead. It is not the case, as some argue , that better rules or reformed institutions will
adequately address the problem. The problem is more intractable. The world is a tragic place,
where not all good things go together, and cannot offer dilemma-free clarity and consistency .
Even doing good or principled things may require accommodation with oppressive regimes. Recall the celebrated case of Chile’s
dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was put under house arrest in London in 1999. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was widely
condemned for her unyielding support for Pinochet. As her critics fail to note, when Thatcher’s Britain fought to recapture the
Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982, it relied on Chile’s covert assistance , in particular early warnings of air attacks on British
naval forces, warnings provided by long-range radar. On the one day the radar were switched off for maintenance, two British
transports were sunk. Pinochet played a vital role in Britain’s victory, and took grave risks to do so. Were we to take legalists’ advice,
and commit to arresting and trying the leaders of oppressive regimes, how confident could we be of their help in future? At the
dawn of the postwar era, Hans Morgenthau identified the legalist vision, that conceived of the world in absolute terms of peace, law
and crime. This would make “compromise, the virtue of the old diplomacy, the treason of the new.” As Morgenthau’s critique
implied, “rules” and “order” are distinct and conflicting concepts, just as “illegal” and “immoral” are concepts wrongly conflated.
“Rules” suggest strictness, nonnegotiability and clarity, and above all a supreme umpire empowered to enforce the rules. Order,
though, depends on compromise, negotiation and trade-offs, in the absence of a referee . Many
of these require hard value judgements, in a world so messy that rules themselves can collide.
My own experience is that, off the record, government officials agree that their master concept is a
charade. Yet, they reason, it is still worth pursuing . Is it, though, wise to pursue the impossible?
There is no value pretending the world is anything other than it manifestly is . Instead of
wishfully invoking a fictitious order that even our own states are likely to reject at critical
junctures, our decisionmakers should consider how to negotiate a rougher world, the
compromises they are willing to make, the violations they will tolerate, the principles they will
need to stretch. If there is a pathway to peace, it is not the competitive invocation of rules, or
the lawyerizing of foreign policy. Neither can solve the inherent dilemmas of power and order.
The alternative need not be “mere anarchy.” If there is a workable world order to be forged, it will be made
primarily by diplomats who go beyond reading international documents. It will rely on
compromise, adjustment, mutual concessions and a continually negotiated universe, backed by
deterrence and material strength. That may not be an attractive world . It is at least a realistic
one, in which prudent diplomacy has sometimes succeeded. It is also the only world we can
have. It’s sad that it needs repeating, but we can’t have it all.
There is no reform that can fix a system based on fundamentally flawed ideals –
power determines international interactions, and major powers will always
selectively ignore the rules they make – there’s no international enforcement
mechanism that can change that – that’s Porter

It will always get violated when it gets in the way.

Waxman 09

Intervention to Stop Genocide and Mass Atrocities International Norms and U.S. Policy Author:
Matthew C. Waxman, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Law and Foreign Policy Council of Foreign
relations. http://www.cfr.org/genocide/intervention-stop-genocide-mass-atrocities/p20379

Another important part of this debate concerns the international legal system governing the use
of force in situations of actual or potential atrocities. In this Council Special Report, Matthew C.
Waxman asks whether this legal regime is effective in preventing and stopping such crimes. The
report notes that international legal practices constrain swift action and require extensive
consultation, especially in the United Nations Security Council, before particular steps can be
taken. Waxman, though, argues that the system has certain benefits: it can confer legitimacy
and help actors coordinate both military and nonmilitary efforts to prevent or stop atrocities. He
also contends that different arrangements of the kind some have proposed would be unlikely to
prove more effective. He therefore opposes wholesale reforms but recommends more modest
steps the United States could take to improve the current legal regime. These measures include
expressing strong but nuanced support for the responsibility to protect and working with other
permanent members of the UN Security Council to discourage the use of vetoes in clear cases of
mass atrocities. But the report also argues that the United States must be prepared to act alone
or with others in urgent cases without Security Council approval. With thorough analysis and
thoughtful recommendations, Waxman points the way toward an international legal system
capable of promoting timely and effective action in cases of mass atrocities. This is a topic
central to ongoing debates about the limits of sovereignty and the responsibility of states for
their own citizens and others. It is also a subject that must be addressed if "Never Again" is to
become a reality rather than a slogan.

Enforcing i-law differently won’t change anything – the specific provisions of

ilaw allow for military action making any attempt to restrain conflict
impossible.
Damon Linker 18, senior correspondent at The Week, PhD in Political Science from Michigan
State University, MA from NYU, 4-17-2018, "International law won't save us," The Week,
http://theweek.com/articles/767687/international-law-wont-save

International law will not save us from stupidity or hubris in the conduct of American foreign
policy. That much should be obvious to everyone 15 years after George W. Bush launched a war
against Saddam Hussein's Iraq that was justified as an effort to enforce international law while being
simultaneously denounced at home and abroad as such an egregious violation of international
law that leading members of the Bush administration deserved to be hauled before The Hague as war criminals. But alas, it isn't
obvious — or at least not as obvious as it should be. Just look at the reaction of leading members of
Washington's foreign policy establishment to the decision of the Trump administration (along with
the governments of Great Britain and France) to launch a punitive strike against Syria in retaliation for the
government of Bashar al-Assad allegedly using chemical weapons against his own people in his country's
interminable civil war. Many of the people cheering on this show of force have taken this tension or
contradiction to a whole new level — somehow embracing both positions at once, maintaining
that the American-led attack probably violated international law (whether under the 1997 Chemical
Weapons Convention or the vaguer humanitarian imperative to protect the victims of violence and injustice) but was
nevertheless welcome and perhaps even long overdue in order to uphold and enforce …
international law. The instinct to appeal to an extra-political, universal legal standard to hem in
the actions of states is very deeply embedded in the thinking of Western elites . As a recent,
illuminating book explains, it has roots in early modern just-war theory, picked up momentum in the years following World War I,
when several writers, thinkers, and political actors attempted to pass laws that would effectively outlaw war at the international
level, and then gained decisive traction after World War II, with the creation of the norms and institutions of the liberal international
order. Today the legitimacy and wisdom of the attempt to devise and enforce a body of
international law is taken for granted across the West by almost everyone on the center left and
center right. Yet this project is also riddled with conceptual confusions that render it far less
salutary than is commonly recognized and could well doom it to eventual irrelevancy . Those
who would like to forestall that fate would be well advised to take note of these defects so they
can respond with eyes wide open. Although international law was first devised to bind the
actions of states on the world stage and make them less likely to start wars, in reality
international law is often invoked as a justification for launching military attacks . Hence the
arguments in favor of bombing Assad's forces in Syria in order to enforce international laws against the use of
chemical weapons and in favor of protecting civilians in the name of humanitarianism. That's because international law
is modeled on the only kind of laws with which human beings are familiar : the laws that abide
within particular states. And those laws obviously work in both ways as well. They do not simply outlaw certain actions on
the part of individuals and groups. They also punish those who transgress the law, uphold certain ideals of justice, and seek to realize
the common good of the political community, including the maintenance of order. Under certain circumstances, all three can require
the use of force by the government. Similarly,
international law doesn't just outlaw certain kinds of wars . It
also establishes conditions under which war is authorized and required . And that's where the
trouble starts. The citizens of a particular political community frequently disagree with each
other about the nature of justice and what it demands in particular circumstances. That disagreement
helps to set politics in motion, as different factions seek political rule, including the power of settling the question of justice (at least
for the time being — until another faction takes power). Liberal democratic government is an elaborate institutional mechanism for
regularizing to this clamor for power on the part of competing factions. If
international law is going to authorize and
require war to enforce the law, including the meting out of punishment to states that wage the
wrong kind of wars or wage them in the wrong ways, then the question immediately arises of
who is writing the laws and making the decisions in particular cases — and whether both are
being done justly. Those are political issues. To get a sense of how quickly they can become intractable in an international
context, consider a tweet by foreign policy analyst Emma Ashford that posed a series of pointed questions shortly after the bombing
of Syria commenced: "Why Syria, not Yemen? Why Libya, not Myanmar? Why chemical weapons, not barrel bombs?" The answer, of
course, is that international
law is primarily written and enforced by Western powers, and Western
powers (like all state actors) have distinctive interests that shape their priorities in international
affairs. But then the enforcement of international law isn't truly international at all. It's an
expression of the outlook of one part — the most powerful part — of the global community of
nations. This sets up the conditions for justified accusations of double standards , as critics of
Western, and especially American, foreign policy accuse the West of turning a blind eye to
Israel's violations of international law, or ignoring the criminal acts of senior members of the Bush administration, or
engaging in hero worship of the mass murderer Winston Churchill. This implies that the problem could be solved
by enforcing international law more consistently and fairly. But the problem runs deeper than
that. Liberal politics has stringent standards for establishing the legitimacy for law : The governed must
give their consent, public opinion must be consulted through the medium of elections for representative offices, and the people
must also be given a say in who gets to serve as judge, jury, and executioner of violations of justice. But
of course the
international system doesn't work like this at all. As the world's most powerful nation and
primary founder of the international system itself, the U.S. has assigned itself the role of
authoring the laws and enforcing them as it sees fit, with a little help from a few relatively
powerful friends. And that brings us to a final, potentially fatal paradox in the international
system. Even when the United States and its allies act to enforce international law — as NATO
did in Libya in 2011 — the results are often disappointing and sometimes outright horrifying ,
with people formerly living under an abusive despot faced with the prospect of life in a
Hobbesian civil war, defending themselves any way they can in the ruins of a crumbling state. This isn't what the U.S.
aimed to achieve in Libya, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. But it's what we've bequeathed to each of them —
because breaking a nation is far easier than building one . The idea of international law only
makes sense in the context of a single political community of worldwide extent . Yet if the
international order as it currently exists were a single political community, it would be a failed
state led by a powerful, well-meaning, but extremely capricious and often clueless tyrant who
governs without consent, metes out punishment inconsistently, and loves to make sweeping
moral pronouncements that raise expectations for justice while failing to secure it for most of
those living under its rule. "International law" sounds good. But that doesn't mean it makes
sense.

And countries are realists – they won’t abide by norms

Patrick Porter 16, academic director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of
Exeter., 8-28-2016, "Sorry, Folks. There Is No Rules-Based World Order.," National Interest,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/sorry-folks-there-no-rules-based-world-order-
17497?page=0%2C2

If there is one concept, endlessly recalled, that rings through debate about foreign affairs, it is
the “rules-based” international order. The notion that all are bound by a global set of rules, an international law above
power, is foundational to the UK National Security Strategy and the Australian Defence White Paper , and to the United States’
National Security Strategy . The
United Nations itself was created to end the scourge of war and erect a
rule of law in its place. This was always difficult, especially so now in an age of greater multipolarity
and contestation, where the claims of sovereignty and the claims of human rights conflict, and
observers worry that the very idea of rules is being eroded . “Rules-based” has become an
incantation, summoned often and automatically, as though repeating it will make it so . Order is
better than chaos, obviously. A degree of regularity and process is better than the arbitrariness of power untamed, and it is better
for states to formulate rough principles for the road, even if the road is unruly. The
problem is not law. The problem is
legalism, the ambition that formal rules can supplant power politics and substitute for wider
judgement, that politics itself can be obviated by codes and institutions. If faithfully observed,
the idea that the world should revolve strictly around laws and their enforcement would quickly
destroy a country’s ability to have a foreign policy. Five years ago, Amnesty International
demonstrated where such doctrines lead, when it insisted that the Canadian government arrest
former President George W. Bush for his part in torture while on a visit. Canada, surprisingly,
resisted the temptation, deciding that it had other interests at stake in its relationship with a
neighboring superpower—such as survival . Like other concepts that attempt to reduce the
world to one big thing, legalism is of limited value . We can’t have a rules-based world order.
Indeed, a fetish for rules is more the problem than the answer. “Rules-based international
order” is a seductive phrase. It sounds enlightened. It is part of the lingua franca of an
internationalist class of lawyers, officials and commentators . It rolls off the tongue like other
high-minded concepts, from “global governance” to “international community .” It is tailor made for the
graduate lounge, the petition, the press release or the debating chamber. The concept is also a weapon that tempts
major powers, its mantle offering their activities the exalted stature of police action. Tested in
the unforgiving world of actual decisions, it doesn’t live up to its billing. The absolute insistence on
rules compliance is at the heart of a doctrine developed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and reasserted in the wake of
the Iraq War. Annan, another advocate of the rules-based order, insisted that the United Nations is the “sole source of legitimacy”
for the use of force. Annan’s doctrines rose to prominence in the days when the main focus of complaints about illegality was
America’s Bush administration, whose invasion of Iraq without a final, second Security Council Resolution allegedly tore up a widely
respected rule book, turning a built-up lawful order into a lawless world . For Annan, the lesson of Iraq was the need to work
together through the UN. Unfortunately for that argument, most of the violence that occurred in post-Saddam Iraq took place after
the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1546 in June 2004, unanimously authorizing the continuing presence of a
multinational force. Iraqi insurgents had already showed what they thought of the “sole source of legitimacy” blowing up the UN
headquarters in Baghdad.
Is it possible that UN authority is not quite so all-important as legalists think
it is? Nevertheless, the idea has become contagious that military action can only be legitimate
with the assent of the UN, an organization that once had Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya as chair of its Human Rights Commission,
and whose Security Council includes regimes responsible for atrocities in Tiananmen Square and Tibet, or Chechnya and Crimea.
Applied consistently, this doctrine would have blocked interventions that were justified morally
and strategically, such as Vietnam’s intervention to end the Cambodian genocide, or Tanzania’s intervention against Idi Amin
in Uganda. As the socialist intellectual Norm Geras suggested in his challenge to legalism, given the human weight of what is at
stake, international law must take its chances “with the other pressing moral considerations that govern life and death.” If that
applies to human rights, why not also national security or, indeed, international order itself? Syria
today raises the issue.
Britain’s former secretary for international development Andrew Mitchell recently denounced the
Russian-Syrian bombardment of Aleppo. Demanding international action to end the slaughter, he insisted
that only the UN could “symbolise the authority of the international community.” Mitchell did
not acknowledge that the Security Council has Russia as a permanent member, an active
belligerent wielding veto power. The obvious problem is that one arbitrator of the rules is also
a bloodstained aggressor that is unwilling to intervene against itself . In effect, Mitchell is asserting
strict adherence to the very institutional obstacles that prevent the intervention he claims is
morally urgent. If only there were no tradeoffs between the cause of international institutions’
authority and righteous military action. If only we could have it both ways. China’s aggressive
expansion into the South China Sea has restaged the problem of global rules. Observers,
understandably enough, object to China’s exorbitant “nine-dash line” territorial claims , its
incursions into disputed waters, islands and shoals, and its repudiation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s recent unanimous
ruling against it. Again, critics complain
that China’s misbehavior undermines a rule-bound order,
demanding U.S.-led resistance to defend the rule of law. As when President Vladimir Putin bit off
the Crimea and fell on the Ukraine , those who write so irenically about international “rules”
suggest that geopolitical thuggery is a thing of the past , a nineteenth-century regression in a law-
bound twenty-first century. This ahistorical assumption, of a recent past of rule observance and
consensus, explains some of the unwarranted surprise of critics , some of whom expected China
to take up America’s invitation to submit to the rules of the Pax Americana . A rising China’s
attempt to dominate its neighborhood, bully its neighbors and reject a tribunal’s verdict may
offend. It should not shock. It is, historically, unexceptional. Neither does China show any sign of
capitulating in the face of the verdict. It has responded with threats and escalation, and its own
population if anything is more belligerent on the issue than its government. If a major power with the pressure of a
multitude of nationalists will not submit to the “rules-based” order that apparently prevails,
that order must have been fragile, or fictitious, to begin with.

I-law generally fails and U.S. leadership doesn’t matter and is a bad standard for
it
Pollack 14 - Professor of Political Science and Law and Jean Monnet Chair @ Temple
University; Ph.D. from Harvard University [Mark “Who Supports International Law, and Why?
The United States, the European Union, and International Law” The International Journal of
Constitutional Law, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2014)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark_Pollack2/publication/280786025_Who_Supports_I
nternational_Law_and_Why_The_United_States_the_European_Union_and_International_Law
/links/55c6bdfe08aebc967df53997.pdf]

If we examine the recent literature on the US attitude toward international law, we encounter a common
charge that the US has withdrawn from its postwar leadership role, acting not as a leader but as a
laggard in the negotiation of international treaties.13 By contrast, it is often argued that the mantle of leadership
has passed to the EU in a number of issue-areas such as the environment and climate change.14 While such leadership
can be important in the development of international law, leadership is clearly not required for a state to be
considered supportive of the rule of international law. Indeed, the assertion of diplomatic leadership may represent not
so much a commitment to international law per se, but simply a vigorous effort to shape the content of international law in
line with one’s own substantive preferences. Furthermore, to state the obvious, failure to provide leadership does
not constitute a violation of international law.

2. Consent A second dimension of support is consent to be bound by international rules, or what political scientists
sometimes refer to as commitment. That is, even in the absence of leadership, a state may demonstrate a consistent
willingness to be bound by the provisions of international law, or conversely that same state may refuse to be bound, in
various ways. With respect to treaty law, the most obvious expression of consent is signature and ratification of a treaty –
or lack thereof. At the extreme, a state may refuse to sign a given treaty, indicating that the executive of
the state in question has no intent to become a party to the agreement . Examples of such refusal in the
US case include such landmark agreements as the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) and the 1997
Land Mines Treaty, which have been signed and ratified by 162 states (plus the EU) and by 159 states, respectively, but
neither signed nor ratified by the US .

Alternatively, a
state may sign a treaty, indicating an initial intent to be bound, but subsequently fail to ratify the
agreement. Examples from the US case are legion, cutting across a variety of issue-areas including
arms control (the SALT II accords, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty), humanitarian law (Protocols I and II to
the Geneva Conventions), criminal law (the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court),
environmental law (the Kyoto Protocol, and many others), human rights law (the Convention on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilities, and many others), trade law (the International Trade Organization), and
other agreements such as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT).
Looking more broadly at the ratification behavior of multiple states, Elsig et al. have demonstrated that states vary
dramatically in their willingness to ratify multilateral treaties negotiated since the end of the Cold War. Examining state
ratification rates for 76 post-Cold War multilateral treaties open to all states and spanning a wide range of issue-areas, the
authors find that the top nine ratifiers are all European, as are 16 of the top 20. By contrast, the US is ranked 76th, with
a ratification rate of only 45.05%, notably behind China (69th) and India (71st), but ahead slightly
ahead of Russia (97th). 15

Judging from these data, it appears as if the US does indeed have what we might call a consent, commitment, or
ratification problem, demonstrating, at least in the post-Cold War era, a far lower rate of consent to multilateral treaties
than European countries. Even where a state signs and ratifies treaties, it can limit the nature and extent of
its consent to be bound through a variety of flexibility mechanisms , which include provisions
such as limited duration (sunset) clauses, exit clauses, safeguard clauses, and reservations, understandings,
and declarations (RUDs).16 The literature on the US has primarily emphasized two of these flexibility
mechanisms, exit and RUDs. Prominent US examples of exit include the Bush Administration’s unilateral
denunciation of the bilateral Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the temporary US withdrawals from the
International Labor Organization and UNESCO, among others, although Helfer’s data indicate that the use of exit
remains relatively rare for the US and for other countries.

Reservations are more common, and the US has actively availed itself of its right reserve away from treaty provisions that
would require significant changes in policy or that are considered to violate the provisions of the US Constitution. Indeed, it is this
pattern of US reluctance to sign and ratify treaties, together with the use of reservations and other flexibility mechanisms,
that Michael Ignatieff calls “American exemptionalism,” in which the US seeks exemption even from international
rules that it supports.17 The few comparative studies of reservations to treaties, however, suggest that the US is not
unique in seeking reservations to human rights or other treaties, and a particularly interesting study by Eric Neumayer
suggests that, at least in the area of human rights, it may be democratic countries with the strongest commitment to the
rule of law, including European countries as well as the US, that are most likely to adopt reservations to
international treaties, since they are most likely to avoid being bound by treaties that violate their
domestic constitutions or with which they have no intention of complying. 18 If so, then the adoption of reservations might be
interpreted as a sign of support for the rule of law, rather than a rejection of it.

Structural uncertainty makes i-law ineffective.

Goldsmith 9—Jack Goldsmith, Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Daryl
Levinson, Fessenden Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Harvard Law Review, May 2009, vol.
122, no. 7, "LAW FOR STATES: INTERNATIONAL LAW, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, PUBLIC LAW",
1792-1868

A. International Law

I nternational law lacks a centralized and hierarchical lawmaker akin to the legislature inside a state to
specify authoritative sources of law and the mechanisms of legal change and reconciliation. It also lacks
centralized and hierarchical judicial institutions to resolve the resulting legal uncertainty. As a result, its
norms are imprecise, contested, internally contradictory , overlapping, and subject to multiple
interpretations and claims. International law’s inability to resolve this uncertainty has fueled
skepticism about its status as law; law that is unclear or unknowable, many believe, cannot be described as a
real legal system, and in any case cannot be effective.32

States coordinate public understandings of what counts as law largely through the institutional mechanism of an authoritative
legislature. But of course there exists no global legislature. International legal rules are created through two decentralized
mechanisms: treaties and customary international law (CIL). A treaty results from the consent of two or more nations, and binds only
those nations that ratify it.33 A small handful of treaties — the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions, for example — have been
ratified by practically every nation in the world. But even these universal laws are laboriously constructed through the same
decentralized process of negotiation and consent. CIL also originates through a decentralized process; its content is derived from
those customary state practices that states follow out of a sense of legal obligation (opinio juris).34

These decentralized lawmaking processes give rise to fundamental uncertainty about the content
of international legal norms. The problem of uncertainty is most severe with respect to CIL ,
which lacks any clear rule of recognition. Little agreement exists as to what types of state action
count as state practice.35 Official pronouncements, certain types of legislation, and diplomatic correspondence are
relatively (but not entirely) uncontroversial sources of CIL, but international law has no settled method for
weighing or ordering these sources or for determining when they count as evidence of opinio
juris. Bilateral and multilateral treaties are sometimes invoked as evidence of CIL, though rarely consistently or coherently.36 The
writings of jurists are a secondary source of CIL, but jurists rarely agree even on supposedly settled rules.37 Nonbinding statements
and resolutions of multilateral bodies, most notably the resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly, are also invoked as a basis for CIL,
as are moral and ethical claims. Needless to say, each
potentially relevant source of CIL may point in a
different direction, and there is no formula or agreed-upon set of principles for reconciling them.
Nor is there any authoritative institutional mechanism — the equivalent of a legislature or supreme court — for
definitively resolving CIL’s content. The unsurprising result is frequent and persistent
contestation over the content of CIL.
By comparison, the secondary rules for treatymaking are relatively well-settled, and there is much less disagreement over what
counts as a treaty.38 But there
is still a great deal of disagreement about the content of treaty-based
international law because the relationships between different treaties, and between treaties
and CIL, are subject to no settled rules. The U.N. Charter is among the most fundamental of
international laws, and its Article 103 provides that Charter obligations trump other international law obligations.39 But
when NATO countries bombed Kosovo in violation of the U.N. Charter ’s prohibition on the use of force,
many scholars contended that there was a developing CIL exception for humanitarian
intervention, and there has been much disagreement — among both scholars and nations — about this point ever since.40
There are also many unsettled questions about the validity of important treaty obligations that conflict with the Charter. 41
Similarly, different human rights treaties (for example the European Convention on Human Rights42 and the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights43) contain different and in some respects contradictory rights, and there is disagreement among courts,
legal institutions, and scholars about which prevails.44 The same is true of obligations imposed by the World Trade Organization that
conflict with obligations imposed by other treaty regimes.45

Thus, even when the relevant rules of international law can be clearly identified , it often remains
unclear how overlapping and inconsistent rules are to be reconciled and systematized . In
theory, the international legal system has a set of meta-rules — rules of nonretroactivity, last-in-time, the
priority of lex specialis, and normative hierarchy (prioritizing the U.N. Charter or jus cogens norms) — that are supposed to
help sort out these conflicts.46 But in practice these rules are often contested and
indeterminate.47 Lacking a centralized legislative process, the international legal system commonly allows for
the unbridled proliferation of contradictory norms.
 Federalism Turn

International law crushes federalism

Drezner 1 [Daniel W., Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago, *Advised by Jack Goldsmith, “ARTICLE AND
RESPONSE: On the Balance Between International Law and Democratic Sovereignty,” Chicago Journal of International Law, 2 Chi. J.
Int'l L. 321]

Another disturbing ramification is the effect that this wave of international law could have on federalism.
International law imposes mandates on national governments without mention as to how they
should be implemented. Central governments could use these laws as tools to strip power away
from local authorities. Even the United States, which has advocated these laws, is not immune to this problem. The
OECD Principles of Corporate Governance, for example, have the potential to conflict with Delaware's laws
governing the incorporation of businesses. If federal regulators had a choice, they would prefer to see Delaware's laws compromised rather
than the OECD Principles. Given the uncertain case law on this subject, the threat of the federal government

using international law to bypass state and local institutions is very real .

Federalism solves European, Balkan, and Chechen conflict

Gordon 96 [Mark C., Associate Professor of Public Policy – Columbia University, “Differing Paradigms, Similar Flaws: Constructing
a New Approach to Federalism in Congress and the Court,” 14 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 187, l/n]

Rarely has a concept so difficult to define as federalism been so venerated . Justice Kennedy has called federalism
"the unique contribution of the Framers to political science and political theory." 7 It has been referred to proudly as "Our Federalism." Such praise is not limited to the judiciary.
It has been echoed by politicians, historians, and political scientists. K.C. Wheare asserted decades ago that American federalism had determined "the modern idea of what
federal government is," 8 while Felix Morley termed it a "distinctively American contribution to political art." 9 Similar claims have been made more recently: "Ours is the

Indeed, the triumphs of American federalism have been

prototypical federal government. We invented the form." 10

trumpeted as a model for resolving numerous conflicts overseas, 11 whether the issue is
European unity, the division of power among Bosnians, Croatians, and Serbs, or the relationship
of Moscow to Chechnya.
 Democracy Turn

Judicial incorporation of international law destroys democratic accountability

and wrecks the credibility of the US model
Kochan, 06 (Donald, professor of law at Chapman University, 29 Fordham Int'l L.J. 507,
“SOVEREIGNTY AND THE AMERICAN COURTS AT THE COCKTAIL PARTY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW:
THE DANGERS OF DOMESTIC JUDICIAL INVOCATIONS OF FOREIGN AND INTERNATIONAL LAW”,
February, lexis)

Finally, in terms of activism, reliance on extraterritorial "law" is a run around Congress's ability,
prerogative, and responsibility to define U.S. law. 161 Indeed, some cases have relied on certain
international or foreign "laws" despite direct evidence of Congress's intent that such documents
not create legal obligations or liabilities and are not drafted as "law." 162 When courts have
discretion to look beyond the United States for the foundations of their decisions, serious
dangers arise to the rule of law  [*546]  and the sanctity of the concept that the law is known
and ascertainable by persons subject to it. Congress has failed to ratify the vast majority of
human rights treaties sponsored by the United Nations. 163 This record indicates a general
unwillingness on the part of the United States to recognize broad principles of human rights as
controlling legal authority. 164 For the courts to ignore this reality and insist that these
documents form a foundation for ascertaining the applicable law in the United States
demonstrates disdain for recognized lawmaking processes. 165

D. Democracy Concerns

Related to sovereignty and the rule of law are democracy concerns. Lawmaking power, in
democracies, lies with the lawmakers as selected and directed by the people. 166 Judges do not
fit that role in the United States. 167 Many scholars have  [*547]  noted the tendency of
international law to erode sovereignty, to the detriment of democratic lawmaking. 168 Thus,
resort to international or foreign laws is uniquely un-American and un-democratic. It runs
completely afoul of the observations by Alexis de Tocqueville regarding the primacy of the
"sovereignty of the people" in the United States 169:

At the present day the principle of the sovereignty of the people has acquired in the United
States all the practical development that the imagination can conceive. It is unencumbered by
those fictions that are thrown over it in other countries, and it appears in every possible form,
according to the exigency of the occasion. Sometimes the laws are made by the people in a
body, as at Athens; and sometimes its representatives, chosen by universal suffrage, transact
business in its name and under its immediate supervision. 170

Tocqueville continues to describe how U.S. democracy looks internally for the source of its laws
- not outside, as some today advocate. He articulates positively that laws foreign to the U.S.
system are non-controlling:
In some countries a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body,
directs it, and forces it to pursue a certain track. ... But nothing of the kind is to be seen in the
United States; there society governs itself for itself. All power centers in its bosom, and scarcely
an individual is to be met with who would venture to conceive or, still less, to express the idea of
seeking it elsewhere. The nation participates in the making of its laws by the choice of its
legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of the agents of the executive
government; it may almost be said to govern itself, so feeble and restricted is the share left to
the  [*548]  administration, so little do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power
from which they emanate. The people reign in the American political world ... . They are the
cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in
them. 171

These historical references underscore the idea that democracy demands that the people be the
masters of their own domain. Judicial injection of foreign and supposed international law
violates this principle and denigrates the reverence many have had for the uniqueness of the
U.S. system. Federal judges are largely unaccountable to democratic controls. 172 Thus, the
allowance for judges to adopt or import foreign laws presents them with un-democratic
lawmaking power. The foundation of democratic governance lies in the people's ability,
responsibility, and power to create law or control the mechanisms by which law is created. 173
Democratic control is lost when sources outside the domestic political processes serve as the
bases of decision. Kenneth Anderson accurately opines that the government in the United States
receives its consent from the people and should be constrained by their expressed judgment as
to what laws should and should not exist:

Without fidelity to the principle of democratic, self-governing provenance over substantive

content in the utilization of constitutional adjudicatory materials, a court becomes merely a
purveyor of its own view of best policy. Yet this is not solely an issue of an unconstrained Court.
It is, more importantly, a violation of the compact between government and governed, free
people who choose to give up a measure of their liberties  [*549]  in return for the benefits of
government - a particular pact with a particular community, in which the materials used in the
countermajoritarian act of judging them nonetheless have, in some fashion, even indirectly,
democratic provenance and consent. 174

Incorporation of international law destroys democratic accountability

Kochan, 06 (Donald, professor of law at Chapman University, 29 Fordham Int'l L.J. 507,
“SOVEREIGNTY AND THE AMERICAN COURTS AT THE COCKTAIL PARTY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW:
THE DANGERS OF DOMESTIC JUDICIAL INVOCATIONS OF FOREIGN AND INTERNATIONAL LAW”,
February, lexis)

A Nation has the right to make its own laws and to define the means by which those laws are
created and interpreted. 144 In the United States, laws are not created by the judiciary, but
instead, by collaboration between the elected branches. "Sovereignty denotes independence. A
sovereign [State] is one that acknowledges no superior power over its own government." 145
Indeed, sovereignty was the basis for the revolution and the independence of the United States.
146 Yet the idea of sovereignty is under attack in today's society - in part by judges who rely on
extraterritorial authority.  [*541]  Some prominent authorities lead the fight against its sanctity:
"In the spring of 1994, Louis Henkin, then the president of the American Society for
International Law, urged that the word 'sovereignty' should be 'banished from polite or
educated society.'" 147 Judges who recognize this concept of sovereignty clearly overstep their
role in the United States when they resort to "law" that has been developed outside the
constitutional processes for law through U.S. institutions. 148 As one author states:

The case against transnational law is sometimes made purely in terms of sovereignty: giving
force to transnational rules laid down by non-American decision makers surrenders U.S.
sovereignty. The reasoning appears self-evident: sovereignty as a "final say" is a sine qua non of
statehood, and it is indivisible. To the extent that a state is subject to law made elsewhere, it has
lost its sovereignty and, perhaps, in some deep way, its right to call itself a "state." 149

It is primarily a matter of control. 150 A Nation should have the freedom to control the
development of its own laws. 151 The elected branches, which develop U.S. law, lose that
control if  [*542]  judges are able to exhort extraterritorial and extra-constitutional sources for
the determination of legally applicable standards.

xt concentrates judicial power

International law increases the likelihood of judicial activism—it’s on the decline in domestic
courts

McGinnis and Somin, 2004 (John, professor of law at Northwestern, and Ilya, professor of law at
George Mason, “Against International Law a Part of Our
law“,http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/int-law/mcginnis-somin.pdf)

3. The Judiciary as a Cosmopolitan Restraint on Local Democracy. A final explanation for the rise
of raw international law may be the decline in the credibility of sources previously relied upon
for domestic judicial activism. It is frequently observed that the Supreme Court in particular and
the federal courts in general are no longer in the vanguard of movements for social change.
One of the consequences of the waning enthusiasm for judicial activism has been to shrink the
domestic legal materials available to the Court to displace domestic democratic decisionmaking.
It simply is not as acceptable as it was in the Warren Court to base decisions on the judges’ own
notions of justice or on some contestable claims about the world. Thus, the use of raw
international law offers a substitute for former sources of judicial activism that have fallen into
disuse. International law provides a category of binding norms, not simply the stuff of moral
intuitions. Moreover, by its nature, it has universal claims and cannot be dismissed as some
parochial empirical study, as can some of the material on which the Warren Court relied for its
famous decisions changing society. And yet, as we will discuss below, international law is
popular with groups seeking social change because its content is not strongly constrained by
the domestic legal process. Its virtue is that it can be influenced by those who may not be in
good position to succeed in our domestic process and yet provides a putatively legal standard
to displace the results of that process. As such, the rise of international law may be part of the
rise of what has been labeled jurocracy. The political scientist, Alan Hirschl, has suggested that
political and economic elites have reacted to the greater democracy of the modern world by
constructing more powerful and wide ranging role for the judiciary over which they have
substantial influence. The use of raw international law under this conception would be an
important category of this jurocracy.

Judicial incorporation of customary international law violates fundamental

principles of democratic accountability
Trimble, 86 (Phillip, professor of law at UCLA, 33 UCLA L. Rev. 665, “A REVISIONIST VIEW OF
CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW”, February, lexis)

The story of customary international law, like that of the crows, does not fit the American
political tradition. 188 The location of law-making authority outside American institutions
cannot be reconciled with American political philosophy. The foundations of the American
political tradition are many and diverse, but its principal ideas can be traced to a  [*719]  group
of seventeenth-century libertarians and eighteenth-century figures of the Enlightenment,
notably John Locke. 189 The American colonists borrowed, elaborated, and adopted as their
distinct contribution to eighteenth-century thought a number of general principles that were
said to govern the exercise of government power: the notion of limited government absolutely
barred from interfering with natural rights, and the notion that the source of political authority
resided in the "people." 190 Originally viewed quite strictly, this philosophy held that elected
representatives could only carry out the precise instructions given them and had no
independent ability to do what they thought was good for the country. 191 These ideas shaped
the new constitutional structure of government -- limited legislative authority in the federal
government, with law making concentrated in politically accountable branches of government
through a complicated system of checks and balances -- and they have informed the rhetoric of
power ever since. 192 The authority of law-making institutions was said to rest on the consent
of the governed and to be directly responsive to the wishes of their constituencies. 193  [*720] 
Of course, as life became more complicated the reality changed -- direct instruction was
replaced by representative government. Government remained responsive to the particular
interest of the electors, however, because the power "surrendered by the people" was in the
hands of representatives elected by them and loyal to the interests of the immediate
constituency. 194 Although our society has undergone radical changes in 200 years, the power
of these central ideas remains strong. American political tradition is remarkably continuous, and
although there have indeed been sharp debates over important issues, some basic assumptions
of the system -- and much of the rhetoric used to explain it -- remain unchanged. 195 The
Supreme Court still explains decisions by reference to the intent of the framers. 196 Members of
Congress invoke the Original Plan in opposition to contemporary treaties. 197 And political
commentators invoke the Founders and eighteenth-century political philosophy to support
policy positions. 198 The American eighteenth-century tradition,  [*721]  exalting limited and
responsive representative government, lives on in today's rhetoric and political philosophy. 199
No doubt the use of this rhetoric conceals other underlying objectives and motivations. But the
fact that eighteenth-century rhetoric is still used to explain positions surely is significant. It
suggests that some basic values concerning the conditions of governmental authority remain
intact, and that popular acceptance of the particular form of judicial power discussed in this
Article is not likely. In this intellectual universe the idea of customary international law
encounters substantial problems, because at least some of the potential lawmakers, such as
foreign governments, are neither representative of the American political community nor
responsive to it. The foreign nature of these sources of legal obligation cannot be reconciled
with American political philosophy. It is one thing to delegate authority to Congress and the
President, checked and balanced by each other, and elected by different groups within the
political constituency. But if customary international law can be made by practice wholly outside
the United States it has no basis in popular sovereignty at all. Many foreign governments are not
responsive to their own people, let alone to the American people. This critique of customary
international law in terms of a domestic political tradition may be criticized as an outdated and
parochial view, inappropriate to the interdependent world of the 1980's. 200 I believe it is not
outdated because we still use traditional rhetoric, presumably because it expresses an attitude
and yields results acceptable to the American political community. It may be parochial, but that
too reflects the community. America has always had an active isolationist tendency, and even
when it became actively involved on a regular basis with other countries after the Second World
War, it did so with a parochialism that continues  [*722]  to reflect its suspicion of "foreign
ways." 201

International law destroys democratic accountability

McGinnis and Somin, 2004 (John, professor of law at Northwestern, and Ilya, professor of law at
George Mason, “Against International Law a Part of Our
law“,http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/int-law/mcginnis-somin.pdf)

Part II of the paper details the democratic deficit of international law. This deficit is inherent the
theory of international law. Since the peace of Westphalia, international law is constructed
from the actions of states, not individuals and many of the acting states are far from
democratic. This deficit is more than a theoretical problem, because many states that helped in
constructing modern international law were not only not democratic but totalitarian. This
aspect of the democratic deficit is particularly acute as applied to parts of customary
international law inferred from multilateral treaties, because nondemocratic nations have been
involved in the fabrication of such treaties. Second, nations do not explicitly agree on many
principles that are deemed customary international law. Instead they are inferred from state
actions by publicists and courts. Both kinds of agents are very unrepresentative of citizens. In
particular, there is no democratic participation in the appointment of publicists. Third,
customary international law suffers from the problem of the “dead hand.” Because of the
requirement that international law be made by consensus, our generation finds it difficult to
change past international law to meet new conditions, reducing its quality. Fourth, international
law is opaque to ordinary citizens.. Because international law is much more opaque to citizens
than domestic law, we argue that it has peculiarly high agency costs, reducing its quality and
permitting insiders to manipulate it to its advantage.

at: assumes CIL, not treaties

Wrong

McGinnis 2006, law prof, 6—Professor of Law at Northwestern (John O, Albany Law Review,
Symposium: "Outsourcing Authority?" Citation to Foreign Court Precedent in Domestic
Jurisprudence: Contemporary Foreign and International Law in Constitutional Construction,
June, 69 Alb. L. Rev. 801)

International law is different from foreign law, because international law at least purports to
claim some kind of universality, which foreign law does not. Here I address international law
that has not been ratified by our political process to create actual domestic obligations. Such
"raw" international law, includes the use of treaties the United States has not signed, customary
international law, and the decisions of the International Court of Justice as law that may be
given weight in interpretation of our Constitution. In my view, any discrepancy between
international law and our law should not cast doubt on the beneficence of our own law. The
basic reason is that international law does not purport to be democratic and thus its results do
not impeach the product of our own democratic processes. International law reflects the
consent of nation states, not the peoples of the world or global demos.

The democratic deficit of international law is not a mere theoretical problem. Take, for instance,
the many human rights treaties that are basis of modern human rights law, but that have not
been ratified by the United States. These treaties, including the rights of the Child Convention
and many treaties on civil rights and human rights, were fabricated during the time when the
Soviet Union and its allies were important actors on the international stage. I believe that
provisions of treaties that required the give and take of negotiations with totalitarian nations
cannot be presumed beneficial by virtue of the process that generated them. These provisions
may be beneficial for some other reason, but are not good simply because they are a part of
international law. Remember, my objection is only to the use of such provisions in constitutional
interpretation from the authority of international law. Some of these provisions may be good for
other reasons but it is those reasons not their status as international law that
make  [*806]  them suitable as an influence on the Constitution.

Customary international law in fact faces democratic deficits beyond the fact that
nondemocratic nations are involved at many points in influencing its fabrication. Customary
international law is not written down, and thus its principles depend on inferences about the
propositions to which nation states have consented. n8 Those responsible for inferring these
principles from the confusing welter of state practices and declarations are not democratically
chosen. These fabricators include publicists and international courts. You may wonder, what is a
publicist? You are looking at a publicist. International law professors are publicists. But we have
strong evidence that international law professors are not very representative of their fellow
citizens, at least in the United States. n9 International courts are not representative either, both
because some members are appointed by authoritarian nations and because even those
appointed by democratic government are appointed through processes that are unlikely to elicit
the consensus of their societies.

Both treaties and customary international law are anti-democratic

McGinnis and Somin, 04 (John, professor of law at Northwestern, and Ilya, professor of law at
George Mason, “Against International Law a Part of Our
law“,http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/int-law/mcginnis-somin.pdf)

As we discuss in greater detail below, the practical generation of international law belies the
plausibility of this response. Because customary law norms are nowhere committed to text,
they must be created from inferences about state practices. Those charged with making such
inferences, publicists and international courts, are very unrepresentative groups, and thus
reliance on their judgments creates a democratic deficit. Second, many treaties unratified by
the United States provide important evidence of customary international law. Because treaties
are bundles of provisions the stances of nondemocratic nations can influence the content of
these treaties and result in the inclusion of provisions to which democratic nations would not
assent on their own. Third, even democratic nations rarely give the international norms to which
they assent direct domestic effect in their own polity. Thus, such customary international law
may be cheap talk rather than norms whose credibility can be assumed by the willingness of
those espousing them to have them enforced on themselves. Finally, international law norms
cannot be changed without widespread consensus and thus customary international law
provision that have outlive their usefulness can be sustained by nondemocratic nations.
 Hegemony Tuirn

Relying on i-law destroys US hegemony—we can’t all be like Europe

Delahunty and Yoo, 05 (Robert, professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, and John,
professor of law at Berkeley, 29 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 291, “Against Foreign Law”, Fall, lexis)

Not only do their histories differ, but the United States and Europe face social and political
circumstances so different as to counsel against any attempt to transplant constitutional values
from one to the other. Europe has spent the last sixty years turning away from great power
conflict and forging a cooperative enterprise that has solved the problem of German ambition
and melded former enemies into a broad economic common market. 158 The tools for this
amazing integration have not been military power and conquest, but rather supranational
institutions, international law, and diplomacy. As Robert Kagan explains, "Europe is turning away
from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world
of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation." 159 The United States, on the
other hand, relies on power rather than international law, employs military force as much as
persuasion, and sees a world threatened by terrorist organizations, rogue nations, and the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. 160 The difference between European and
American attitudes has promoted the integration of Europe and permitted Europeans to
attempt a new experiment in political organization. 161  [*328]  The ability of European nations
to put aside their historical animosities and engage in integration may be the result of an
American security guarantee. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and heavy American
military presence in Western Europe deterred the Soviet Union and allowed European
integration to proceed. As Lord Ismay, the first secretary general of NATO, famously quipped,
the purpose of the Atlantic alliance was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the
Germans down." 162 Existing disparities in defense spending have only grown since the end of
the Cold War. In the 1990s, Europeans discussed increasing collective defense expenditures
from $ 150 billion to $ 180 billion a year while the United States was spending $ 280 billion a
year. 163 Ultimately, the Europeans could not, and had no political desire to, emulate high U.S.
defense spending. The United States has become the "indispensable nation," without which
Europe cannot handle even civil wars along its borders. Only the United States has the ability to
project power globally. 164 Without the United States's willingness to engage in power politics,
Europe would not have had the luxury to integrate. If this is correct, then European
constitutional values are inappropriate for the United States. These values were developed
because European governments enjoyed a different tradeoff between national security and
individual liberties and economic prosperity. The United States, which has greater responsibility
for keeping international peace and for guaranteeing stability in Europe, faces a different
balance between the demands of national security and constitutional liberties.
Global nuclear war
Kagan, 07 – senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Robert, “End of
Dreams, Return of History”, 7/19,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/07/end_of_dreams_return_of_histor.html) 

This is a good thing, and it should continue to be a primary goal of American foreign policy to
perpetuate this relatively benign international configuration of power. The unipolar order with
the United States as the predominant power is unavoidably riddled with flaws and
contradictions. It inspires fears and jealousies. The United States is not immune to error, like all
other nations, and because of its size and importance in the international system those errors
are magnified and take on greater significance than the errors of less powerful nations.
Compared to the ideal Kantian international order, in which all the world's powers would be
peace–loving equals, conducting themselves wisely, prudently, and in strict obeisance to
international law, the unipolar system is both dangerous and unjust. Compared to any plausible
alternative in the real world, however, it is relatively stable and less likely to produce a major
war between great powers. It is also comparatively benevolent, from a liberal perspective, for it
is more conducive to the principles of economic and political liberalism that Americans and
many others value. American predominance does not stand in the way of progress toward a
better world, therefore. It stands in the way of regression toward a more dangerous world. The
choice is not between an American–dominated order and a world that looks like the European
Union. The future international order will be shaped by those who have the power to shape it.
The leaders of a post–American world will not meet in Brussels but in Beijing, Moscow, and
Washington. The return of great powers and great gamesIf the world is marked by the
persistence of unipolarity, it is nevertheless also being shaped by the reemergence of
competitive national ambitions of the kind that have shaped human affairs from time
immemorial. During the Cold War, this historical tendency of great powers to jostle with one
another for status and influence as well as for wealth and power was largely suppressed by the
two superpowers and their rigid bipolar order. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States
has not been powerful enough, and probably could never be powerful enough, to suppress by
itself the normal ambitions of nations. This does not mean the world has returned to
multipolarity, since none of the large powers is in range of competing with the superpower for
global influence. Nevertheless, several large powers are now competing for regional
predominance, both with the United States and with each other. National ambition drives
China's foreign policy today, and although it is tempered by prudence and the desire to appear
as unthreatening as possible to the rest of the world, the Chinese are powerfully motivated to
return their nation to what they regard as its traditional position as the preeminent power in
East Asia. They do not share a European, postmodern view that power is passé; hence their now
two–decades–long military buildup and modernization. Like the Americans, they believe power,
including military power, is a good thing to have and that it is better to have more of it than less.
Perhaps more significant is the Chinese perception, also shared by Americans, that status and
honor, and not just wealth and security, are important for a nation. Japan, meanwhile, which in
the past could have been counted as an aspiring postmodern power –– with its pacifist
constitution and low defense spending –– now appears embarked on a more traditional national
course. Partly this is in reaction to the rising power of China and concerns about North Korea 's
nuclear weapons. But it is also driven by Japan's own national ambition to be a leader in East
Asia or at least not to play second fiddle or "little brother" to China. China and Japan are now in
a competitive quest with each trying to augment its own status and power and to prevent the
other 's rise to predominance, and this competition has a military and strategic as well as an
economic and political component. Their competition is such that a nation like South Korea, with
a long unhappy history as a pawn between the two powers, is once again worrying both about a
"greater China" and about the return of Japanese nationalism. As Aaron Friedberg commented,
the East Asian future looks more like Europe's past than its present. But it also looks like Asia's
past. Russian foreign policy, too, looks more like something from the nineteenth century. It is
being driven by a typical, and typically Russian, blend of national resentment and ambition. A
postmodern Russia simply seeking integration into the new European order, the Russia of Andrei
Kozyrev, would not be troubled by the eastward enlargement of the EU and NATO, would not
insist on predominant influence over its "near abroad," and would not use its natural resources
as means of gaining geopolitical leverage and enhancing Russia 's international status in an
attempt to regain the lost glories of the Soviet empire and Peter the Great. But Russia, like China
and Japan, is moved by more traditional great–power considerations, including the pursuit of
those valuable if intangible national interests: honor and respect. Although Russian leaders
complain about threats to their security from NATO and the United States, the Russian sense of
insecurity has more to do with resentment and national identity than with plausible external
military threats. 16 Russia's complaint today is not with this or that weapons system. It is the
entire post–Cold War settlement of the 1990s that Russia resents and wants to revise. But that
does not make insecurity less a factor in Russia 's relations with the world; indeed, it makes
finding compromise with the Russians all the more difficult. One could add others to this list of
great powers with traditional rather than postmodern aspirations. India 's regional ambitions
are more muted, or are focused most intently on Pakistan, but it is clearly engaged in
competition with China for dominance in the Indian Ocean and sees itself, correctly, as an
emerging great power on the world scene. In the Middle East there is Iran, which mingles
religious fervor with a historical sense of superiority and leadership in its region. 17 Its nuclear
program is as much about the desire for regional hegemony as about defending Iranian territory
from attack by the United States. Even the European Union, in its way, expresses a pan–
European national ambition to play a significant role in the world, and it has become the vehicle
for channeling German, French, and British ambitions in what Europeans regard as a safe
supranational direction. Europeans seek honor and respect, too, but of a postmodern variety.
The honor they seek is to occupy the moral high ground in the world, to exercise moral
authority, to wield political and economic influence as an antidote to militarism, to be the
keeper of the global conscience, and to be recognized and admired by others for playing this
role. Islam is not a nation, but many Muslims express a kind of religious nationalism, and the
leaders of radical Islam, including al Qaeda, do seek to establish a theocratic nation or
confederation of nations that would encompass a wide swath of the Middle East and beyond.
Like national movements elsewhere, Islamists have a yearning for respect, including self–
respect, and a desire for honor. Their national identity has been molded in defiance against
stronger and often oppressive outside powers, and also by memories of ancient superiority over
those same powers. China had its "century of humiliation." Islamists have more than a century
of humiliation to look back on, a humiliation of which Israel has become the living symbol, which
is partly why even Muslims who are neither radical nor fundamentalist proffer their sympathy
and even their support to violent extremists who can turn the tables on the dominant liberal
West, and particularly on a dominant America which implanted and still feeds the Israeli cancer
in their midst. Finally, there is the United States itself. As a matter of national policy stretching
back across numerous administrations, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative,
Americans have insisted on preserving regional predominance in East Asia; the Middle East; the
Western Hemisphere; until recently, Europe; and now, increasingly, Central Asia. This was its
goal after the Second World War, and since the end of the Cold War, beginning with the first
Bush administration and continuing through the Clinton years, the United States did not retract
but expanded its influence eastward across Europe and into the Middle East, Central Asia, and
the Caucasus. Even as it maintains its position as the predominant global power, it is also
engaged in hegemonic competitions in these regions with China in East and Central Asia, with
Iran in the Middle East and Central Asia, and with Russia in Eastern Europe,

Central Asia, and the Caucasus. The United States, too, is more of a traditional than a
postmodern power, and though Americans are loath to acknowledge it, they generally prefer
their global place as "No. 1" and are equally loath to relinquish it. Once having entered a region,
whether for practical or idealistic reasons, they are remarkably slow to withdraw from it until
they believe they have substantially transformed it in their own image. They profess indifference
to the world and claim they just want to be left alone even as they seek daily to shape the
behavior of billions of people around the globe. The jostling for status and influence among
these ambitious nations and would–be nations is a second defining feature of the new post–
Cold War international system. Nationalism in all its forms is back, if it ever went away, and so is
international competition for power, influence, honor, and status. American predominance
prevents these rivalries from intensifying –– its regional as well as its global predominance.
Were the United States to diminish its influence in the regions where it is currently the strongest
power, the other nations would settle disputes as great and lesser powers have done in the
past: sometimes through diplomacy and accommodation but often through confrontation and
wars of varying scope, intensity, and destructiveness. One novel aspect of such a multipolar
world is that most of these powers would possess nuclear weapons. That could make wars
between them less likely, or it could simply make them more catastrophic. It is easy but also
dangerous to underestimate the role the United States plays in providing a measure of stability
in the world even as it also disrupts stability. For instance, the United States is the dominant
Nval power everywhere, such that other nations cannot compete with it even in their home
waters. They either happily or grudgingly allow the United States Navy to be the guarantor of
international waterways and trade routes, of international access to markets and raw materials
such as oil. Even when the United States engages in a war, it is able to play its role as guardian of
the waterways. In a more genuinely multipolar world, however, it would not. Nations would
compete for naval dominance at least in their own regions and possibly beyond. Conflict
between nations would involve struggles on the oceans as well as on land. Armed embargos, of
the kind used in World War i and other major conflicts, would disrupt trade flows in a way that is
now impossible. Such order as exists in the world rests not merely on the goodwill of peoples
but on a foundation provided by American power. Even the European Union, that great
geopolitical miracle, owes its founding to American power, for without it the European nations
after World War ii would never have felt secure enough to reintegrate Germany. Most
Europeans recoil at the thought, but even today Europe 's stability depends on the guarantee,
however distant and one hopes unnecessary, that the United States could step in to check any
dangerous development on the continent. In a genuinely multipolar world, that would not be
possible without renewing the danger of world war. People who believe greater equality among
nations would be preferable to the present American predominance often succumb to a basic
logical fallacy. They believe the order the world enjoys today exists independently of American
power. They imagine that in a world where American power was diminished, the aspects of
international order that they like would remain in place. But that 's not the way it works.
International order does not rest on ideas and institutions. It is shaped by configurations of
power. The international order we know today reflects the distribution of power in the world
since World War ii, and especially since the end of the Cold War. A different configuration of
power, a multipolar world in which the poles were Russia, China, the United States, India, and
Europe, would produce its own kind of order, with different rules and norms reflecting the
interests of the powerful states that would have a hand in shaping it. Would that international
order be an improvement? Perhaps for Beijing and Moscow it would. But it is doubtful that it
would suit the tastes of enlightenment liberals in the United States and Europe. The current
order, of course, is not only far from perfect but also offers no guarantee against major conflict
among the world's great powers. Even under the umbrella of unipolarity, regional conflicts
involving the large powers may erupt. War could erupt between China and Taiwan and draw in
both the United States and Japan. War could erupt between Russia and Georgia, forcing the
United States and its European allies to decide whether to intervene or suffer the consequences
of a Russian victory. Conflict between India and Pakistan remains possible, as does conflict
between Iran and Israel or other Middle Eastern states. These, too, could draw in other great
powers, including the United States. Such conflicts may be unavoidable no matter what policies
the United States pursues. But they are more likely to erupt if the United States weakens or
withdraws from its positions of regional dominance. This is especially true in East Asia, where
most nations agree that a reliable American power has a stabilizing and pacific effect on the
region. That is certainly the view of most of China 's neighbors. But even China, which seeks
gradually to supplant the United States as the dominant power in the region, faces the dilemma
that an American withdrawal could unleash an ambitious, independent, nationalist Japan. In
Europe, too, the departure of the United States from the scene –– even if it remained the
world's most powerful nation –– could be destabilizing. It could tempt Russia to an even more
overbearing and potentially forceful approach to unruly nations on its periphery. Although some
realist theorists seem to imagine that the disappearance of the Soviet Union put an end to the
possibility of confrontation between Russia and the West, and therefore to the need for a
permanent American role in Europe, history suggests that conflicts in Europe involving Russia
are possible even without Soviet communism. If the United States withdrew from Europe –– if it
adopted what some call a strategy of "offshore balancing" –– this could in time increase the
likelihood of conflict involving Russia and its near neighbors, which could in turn draw the
United States back in under unfavorable circumstances. It is also optimistic to imagine that a
retrenchment of the American position in the Middle East and the assumption of a more
passive, "offshore" role would lead to greater stability there. The vital interest the United States
has in access to oil and the role it plays in keeping access open to other nations in Europe and
Asia make it unlikely that American leaders could or would stand back and hope for the best
while the powers in the region battle it out. Nor would a more "even–handed" policy toward
Israel, which some see as the magic key to unlocking peace, stability, and comity in the Middle
East, obviate the need to come to Israel 's aid if its security became threatened. That
commitment, paired with the American commitment to protect strategic oil supplies for most of
the world, practically ensures a heavy American military presence in the region, both on the
seas and on the ground.

The subtraction of American power from any region would not end conflict but would simply
change the equation. In the Middle East, competition for influence among powers both inside
and outside the region has raged for at least two centuries. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism
doesn't change this. It only adds a new and more threatening dimension to the competition,
which neither a sudden end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians nor an
immediate American withdrawal from Iraq would change. The alternative to American
predominance in the region is not balance and peace. It is further competition. The region and
the states within it remain relatively weak. A diminution of American influence would not be
followed by a diminution of other external influences. One could expect deeper involvement by
both China and Russia, if only to secure their interests. 18 And one could also expect the more
powerful states of the region, particularly Iran, to expand and fill the vacuum. It is doubtful that
any American administration would voluntarily take actions that could shift the balance of
power in the Middle East further toward Russia, China, or Iran. The world hasn 't changed that
much. An American withdrawal from Iraq will not return things to "normal" or to a new kind of
stability in the region. It will produce a new instability, one likely to draw the United States back
in again.
 Terrorism
I-law halts the war on terror
MacGinnis 2009 John O. McGinnis 9, Stanford Clinton, Sr. Professor of Law, Northwestern
University School of Law and Ilya Somin, Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University
School of Law, [84 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1739] 2009

Another method for integrating international human rights law into domestic jurisprudence is to
require that domestic legislation be interpreted consistently with international law wherever
possible. In the United States, advocates who argue this approach gain support from ancient
Supreme Court precedent, like Murray v. Schooner Charming Betsy, n38 that seeks to
harmonize, wherever possible, American  [*1751]  statutory law with the norms of the wider
world. n39 In particular, modern international human rights advocates suggest that the
statutory authority on which the President relies in military and law enforcement operations in
the War on Terror should be interpreted against the background of a complex web of
international human rights law and international humanitarian law. n40 Such interpretations
would constrain the President's authority by requiring that it be exercised in accordance with
purported international norms.

Extinction
Jerusalem Post 2004/5/12 (lexis)

In the first case, he maintained that submission only serves to encourage terrorists and their
leaders and boost their motivation, while survival would depend on nations taking all necessary
steps to reduce the risks, including international intelligence cooperation. "Dealing with
terrorism requires a broad range of responses, starting with clear and coherent policies. It is
necessary to have quality intelligence, as well as law enforcement, the military, and the means
to counter technological and cyber-terrorism," said Alexander. "We also need an educational
response because the children of today will be the terrorists of tomorrow. Unless we can defuse
the extremist ideological and theological elements and their propaganda, the measures won't
work. "We have to deal with the root causes and try to improve economic and social conditions
- a sort of global Marshall plan - but first it is necessary to deal with the terror leadership. "To
this end some innocent civilians might be harmed but, make no mistake, this is war and to fight
it nations have to pool their resources. No nation can deal with the problem unilaterally. "In the
past, terrorism was regarded as a tactical rather than a strategic threat but it has become a
permanent fixture and a challenge to the strategic interests of nations. "In fact," said Alexander,
"it represents the most threatening challenge to civilization in the 21st century. The question of
survival will depend to a great extent on how civilized society tackles this threat."

Any future attack will cause nuclear war

Ayson 10 (Robert, Professor of Strategic Studies, Director of Strategic Studies: New Zealand,
Senior Research Associate with Oxford’s Centre for International Studies. “After a Terrorist
Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue
7, July 2010, pages 571-593)
Washington's early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the
possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For
example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear
attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country's armed forces, including its
nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning
runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might
mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against
them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must
be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response. As part
of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might
decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming attack against the
leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that group. Depending on the
identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such
action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their
spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible
scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters
of the terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what
Allison claims is the “Chechen insurgents' … long-standing interest in all things nuclear.”42
American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in Moscow that
…might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself
unable or unwilling to provide.
 human rights turn

Turn: international law crushes rights—even undemocratic domestic rule is

superior.
McGinnis and Somin 2009 - *Sr. Professor of Law at Northwestern, **Assistant Professor of Law
at George Mason University School of Law (April, “Democracy and International Human Rights
Law”, Notre Dame Law Review, 84 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1739, Lexis, WEA)

Our analysis rests on both theory and example. As a matter of theory we show how domestic
democratic processes are likely to generate human rights norms superior to those embodied in
international law. International law is often enacted through the influence of nondemocratic
governments and unaccountable, unrepresentative elites from democratic states. Even the
assent of democratic governments to international human rights norms is often "cheap talk,"
because that assent does not reflect a willingness to have these norms directly enforced. We
also show that many specific international human rights norms are at best debatable and at
worse potentially harmful. One of the key structural problems is that the institutions
interpreting such norms are not democratic, but bureaucratic and oligarchic and, thus, often
hostile to basic economic and personal liberties.

We do not argue against the use of international human rights law to replace democratic
decisionmaking because democracy produces perfect results. We merely contend that even a
flawed democratic process is likely to produce better legal rules than the international
lawmaking system. The democratic process to some degree reflects the decisions of the people
either directly or, more often, through their representatives. The international law system, by
contrast, reflects the views of national governments, whether democratic [*1742] or not, and
unelected publicists, who are accountable to no one. There is no good reason to believe that
such a process will better choose appropriate human rights, including minority rights, than a
democracy will. This is particularly clear if one includes the constitution-making processes of
complex, modern democracies as part of the domestic lawmaking system.

This creates the conditions for nuclear war.

Human Rights Web 97 ("An Introduction to the Human Rights Movement," 1/25,
http://www.hrweb.org/intro.html)

Many also realized that advances in technology and changes in social structures had rendered
war a threat to the continued existence of the human race. Large numbers of people in many
countries lived under the control of tyrants, having no recourse but war to relieve often
intolerable living conditions. Unless some way was found to relieve the lot of these people, they
could revolt and become the catalyst for another wide-scale and possibly nuclear war. For
perhaps the first time, representatives from the majority of governments in the world came to
the conclusion that basic human rights must be protected, not only for the sake of the
individuals and countries involved, but to preserve the human race.