The right of force will not replace diplomacy. And here's why
On January 3, the United States conducted a military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas in violation of all possible norms of international law. After that, threats against Cuba and the escalation of the situation around the country forced political scientists to speculate about whether Washington would decide on the "Venezuelan scenario" in Havana. About what international law is and what its substitution with the right of the strong will lead to is in the analysis of Izvestia.
Features of international law
• International law is commonly understood as the legal relationship between States and international organizations. It includes norms and standards that individual States consider themselves obligated to observe and build relationships in accordance with them. The sources of international law are treaties, legal customs, and judicial decisions. In cases where the law regulates relations purely between States, it is called public international law. This separates it from private international law, which is essentially a national law complicated by foreign entities.
• The peculiarity of international law is that it operates on the basis of the voluntary consent of its participants, rather than their coercion. So, while individual States have their own judicial system and law enforcement apparatus that ensure compliance with national laws, there is no such clear authority at the international level. As a result, individual States may refuse to comply with international norms or interpret them at their discretion. Actions applied in response, whether it is an attempt at coercion or economic sanctions, will provoke resistance and be interpreted as retaliatory violations of international law, without leading to a final decision.
Since Antiquity, individual countries have conducted diplomacy among themselves, formed alliances, established agreements, and waged wars in case of non-compliance. The emergence of international law in its modern understanding is attributed to the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. At that time, following the results of the Thirty Years' War, the European states established a legal order among themselves for the first time, recognized each other's sovereignty, refused to interfere in internal affairs, especially religious ones, and agreed to legal equality, regardless of the size and power of the countries. The principle was approved that someone's rightness in the past did not become proof of rightness in the present and the right to determine the future of another state.
• The UN Security Council has the right to decide on the use of force against one of the countries, but in practice this is hardly feasible. All decisions are made by a majority vote of the member states of the Security Council and on condition that none of the five permanent members veto. This already precludes the possibility of any coercion by the United Nations in relation to the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France and China.
• In addition to the fact that the existing world arbitration bodies have limited functionality and limited powers, they also do not have a permanent and guaranteed source of security. Any international organization exists due to the financial contribution of its members, but if they suddenly abandon their obligations, the work of the body is paralyzed. Sovereign states cannot but maintain their own judicial system and security apparatus, otherwise they will simply lose their support and cease to exist. The refusal of payments in favor of international organizations will not cease the existence of their members. Even the United Nations may be under attack, as its Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently admitted.
• Supranational law is singled out separately in the system of international law. It defines the relationship between several States that have just limited some of their sovereign rights, transferring them to a supranational governing body that has the authority to make judicial decisions in accordance with the agreements reached. An example of supranational law is the law of the European Union. The decisions made within it apply to the EU countries, even if national governments disagree with them.
What does the violation of international law lead to?
• The history of the 20th and early 21st centuries shows the consequences of countries' attempts to revise the Westphalian system. In the last century, Germany twice tried to replace legal norms with force, and both times it was defeated. At the beginning of this century, NATO countries, contrary to existing non-proliferation agreements, went further and further in attempts to "contain" Russia, even deciding on a coup in Ukraine. The consequences in all these three cases fell on the shoulders of the citizens.
• The operation in Venezuela is dangerous as a precedent. For several decades, the United States has been trying to change power in a Latin American country and, failing to achieve results, decided to use force. In this case, it was not even justified by "good intentions," as the United States usually does when launching a foreign military operation. For example, the pretext for launching an operation in Iraq was a test tube with white powder, which the United States presented as alleged proof of Baghdad's production of chemical weapons (read more about US foreign operations here). The violation of Venezuela's sovereignty was not justified by its external aggression, humanitarian goals, or even historical grievances. In his subsequent comments, US President Donald Trump justified the invasion with the intention to control the country's oil industry, and also stated that he sees his own morality, not international law, as the limit of his external powers.
The development of the concept of human rights and their increasing importance also began to undermine the Westphalian system to some extent.
• After the abduction of President Maduro, global stability has been shaken, and US threats against Cuba have further increased tensions. It is significant that, despite the fact that the UN annually passes a resolution demanding that the United States end the blockade of the island, none of the Western countries noted the unacceptability of the statements. But in the case of Danish Greenland, both the European Union and Canada tirelessly tried to protect the Arctic island.
• The incident has become a reference example of the application of the right of the strong, which the world community has been rejecting for centuries in favor of creating any, even fragile and partially fulfilling international institutions of deterrence. The events in Venezuela can serve as a point of record for the destruction of the latest principles that restrain states from forcibly satisfying their interests, and the consequences of this may be the same as those that once prompted the world to create the Westphalian system and the United Nations.
• World leaders are already saying that international law may be replaced by the right of the strong, assessing this scenario as highly undesirable. The consequences of this development can already be seen in the Middle East region today: we read weekly news that Israel has attacked a neighbor, and this usually does not cause condemnation from the West.
This does not mean that the current world order will necessarily be broken. History shows that the right of the strong can give immediate results to those who intend to use it. However, there was no example yet that this right could be used forever. Any of the most powerful states of its era was bound to yield leadership to another. No matter how attractive the hegemony was, there was not a single successful hegemon in the world that had passed the test of time. It is this circumstance, which makes the right of the strong ultimately ineffective, that is a deterrent to maintaining order. International law, on the other hand, serves to delay the moment when another unsuccessful attempt will be made to impose domination for all time.
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