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WHERE IS AMERICA’S ‘RULES-BASED ORDER’ NOW?  
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Spencer Ackerman
April 10, 2024
New York Times
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_ When U.S. prerogatives diverge from international law, America has
no problem violating it — all while declaring its violations to
ultimately benefit global stability. _

, Andrew Kelly/Reuters

 

No sooner had a nearly unanimous United Nations Security
Council passed a resolution demanding an “immediate cease-fire”
in Gaza last month than the United States and Israel acted as if it
were a meaningless piece of paper. Israel, unwilling to accept a U.N.
mandate, continued bombing
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of Rafah and besieging Al-Shifa Hospital
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Gaza City. Shortly after the vote, Biden administration officials
called the resolution, No. 2728, “nonbinding,” in what appeared to
be an attempt
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deny its status as international law.

It was a confounding approach from an administration that allowed the
resolution to go through with an abstention after vetoing three
earlier ones. It also triggered a predictable bout of hand-wringing
over the value of international law. At the State Department press
briefing after the resolution passed, the department’s spokesman,
Matthew Miller, said the measure would neither result in an immediate
cease-fire nor affect thorny hostage-release negotiations. One
reporter asked
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“If that’s the case, what the hell is the point of the U.N. or the
U.N. Security Council?”

The question is valid, but it’s also misdirected. U.N. resolutions
that are written without enforcement measures obviously cannot force
Israel to stop what its leadership insists is a justified war
necessary to remove Hamas and prevent another Oct. 7 massacre. But
it’s just as obvious what entity can make Israel stop and isn’t
doing so: the United States.

Whatever the Biden administration might have thought it was doing by
permitting the resolution to pass and then undermining it, the
maneuver exposed the continuing damage Israel’s war in Gaza is doing
to the United States’ longstanding justification for being a
superpower: guaranteeing what U.S. administrations like to call the
international rules-based order.

The concept operates as an asterisk placed on international law by the
dominant global superpower. It makes the United States one of the
reasons international law remains weak, since a rules-based order that
exempts the United States and its allies fundamentally undermines the
concept of international law.

American policymakers tend to invoke the concept to demonstrate
the benefits
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U.S. global leadership. It sounds, on the surface, a lot like
international law: a stable global order, involving the panoply of
international aid and financial institutions, in which the rules of
acceptable behavior reflect liberal values. And when U.S. prerogatives
coincide with international law, the United States describes the two
synonymously. On the eve of Russia’s illegal 2022 invasion of
Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned
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a “moment of peril” for “the foundation of the United Nations
Charter and the rules-based international order that preserves
stability worldwide.”

But when U.S. prerogatives diverge from international law, America
apparently has no problem violating it — all while declaring its
violations to ultimately benefit global stability. The indelible
example is the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which the George W. Bush
administration cynically justified as a means of enforcing U.N.
disarmament mandates. Iraq, the supposed violator, endured military
occupation, while Washington’s unmatched military and economic power
ensured that America faced little consequence for an invasion without
U.N. authorization. Shortly before invading, the United States passed
a law vowing to use “all means
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necessary to release Americans detained by the International Criminal
Court.

A cohort of American academics and once and future U.S. officials at
Princeton later advocated what they called in a 2006 paper “a world
of liberty under law
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They framed it as addressing the weaknesses of international law,
suggesting that when international institutions didn’t produce the
outcomes favored by the “world of liberty,” there be an
“alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorize collective
action.” In practice, that forum has often been the White House.
During the 2011 Libyan uprising, the United States and its allies used
Security Council authorization of a no-fly zone
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overthrow Muammar Qaddafi — whose regime killed far fewer opponents
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Israel has killed in Gaza since Oct. 7. American troops have now
operated in eastern Syria for more than eight years, long enough for
everyone to forget that there is no basis in international law for
their presence.

That American-exceptionalist asterisk has been on display after each
U.S. veto of cease-fire resolutions at the U.N. With Gaza’s enormous
death toll and imminent famine
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people can be forgiven for wondering about the point of the United
States’ rules-based international order.

International law is unambiguously against what Israel is doing in
Gaza. Two months before resolution No. 2728, the International Court
of Justice ruled that the continuing Israeli campaign could plausibly
be considered genocidal and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent
genocide from unfolding. Ahead of 2728’s passage, the Canadian
Parliament approved a motion, however porous
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to stop new arms transfers to Israel. And the day the Security Council
approved the resolution, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for the
occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, recommended
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member states should “immediately” embargo weapon shipments to
Israel, since Israel “appears to have failed to comply with the
binding measures ordered” by the international court.

But after 2728 passed, the White House national security spokesman,
John Kirby, clarified
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U.S. weapon sales and transfers to Israel would be unaffected. To
the astonishment of some Senate Democrats
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the State Department averred
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Israel was not violating a Biden administration policy that recipients
of American weaponry comply with international law. Last week, the
White House reiterated
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it had not seen “any incidents where the Israelis have violated
international humanitarian law” after the Israel Defense
Forces repeatedly bombed
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convoy of aid workers from the World Central Kitchen who had informed
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Israelis of their movements, killing seven.

The reality is that Washington is now arming
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combatant that the United Nations Security Council has ordered to stop
fighting, an uncomfortable position that helps explain why the United
States insists 2728 isn’t binding.

And that reality isn’t lost on the rest of the world. The slaughter
in Gaza has disinclined some foreign officials and groups to listen to
U.S. officials about other issues. Annelle Sheline, a State Department
human-rights officer who recently resigned over Gaza
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told The Washington Post that some activist groups in North Africa
simply stopped meeting with her and her colleagues. “Trying to
advocate for human rights just became impossible” while the United
States aids Israel, she said.

It’s a dynamic that sounds awfully reminiscent of what happened
outside Europe when U.S. diplomats fanned out globally to rally
support for Ukraine two years ago. They encountered “a very clear
negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the global
order and forcing countries to take sides,” as Fiona Hill, a
Brookings Institution scholar, observed in a speech
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If the United States was frustrated by that negative reaction, imagine
the reaction, post-Gaza, that awaits Washington the next time it seeks
global support for the target of an adversary. The dead-on-arrival
passage of resolution 2728 may very well be remembered as an
inflection point in the decline of the rules-based international order
— which is to say the world that the United States seeks to build
and maintain.

Rising powers will be happy to cite U.S. precedent as they assert
their own exceptions to international law. For as Gaza shows in a
horrific manner, a world with exceptions to international law is one
in which the least powerful suffer the most.

_Spencer Ackerman is a foreign-policy columnist for The Nation and the
author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America
and Produced Trump.”_

 

* international law
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* United States
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* human rights violations
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* United Nations
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* Ceasefire
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