Summary
In Spencer Ackerman’s Chapter 19 of From the River to the Sea, the term for the substitution of international law with the prerogatives of American hegemony: the rules bind US adversaries, while the US and its clients can opt out (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 1465-1475).
Details
- Proponents hail international law when it serves the US, as with the ICC seeking Vladimir Putin’s arrest for Ukraine, yet the US will never submit itself to the ICC; under Bush it revoked its signature to the court’s treaty and under Trump it sanctioned the families of ICC prosecutors investigating the US war in Afghanistan (line 1469).
- Ackerman traces the order’s coalescence from Kosovo — where the US acted as if NATO wielded the UN’s imprimatur — through the 2003 Iraq invasion, Slaughter and Ikenberry’s 2006 “concert of democracies” proposal, Libya, Syria and the assassination of Qassem Soleimani (lines 1471-1473).
- Mary Ellen O’Connell, quoted in the chapter: the RBIO “cannot replace international law” but is undermining knowledge and respect for it, severely degrading the law’s capacity to support solutions to global challenges (line 1475).
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Spencer Ackerman, International Court of Justice