Peace through international law

International law is in a bad way these days. This is the conclusion reached by Margaret MacMillan, emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University. Canada seems to be one of the few remaining democracies that still believes in the international rule of law. However, its prime minister Mark Carney, in his speech at this year’s Davos conference in Switzerland, spoke of the many failures of international law this year.

According to him, superpowers have been hypocrites when they use the invocation of the rule of law as an excuse for power politics.

A White House official last January told The New York Times that the real world is governed by strength, by force and by power. President Donald Trump has said that the only limits to his power are “my own morality” and “my own mind.”

Trump is not the only example of a leader that has decided to ignore international law. George Bush of the United States accused Saddam Hussein of building weapons of mass destruction, which he used as an example to invade Iraq. However, they never found any evidence of these weapons.

Vladimir Putin claimed he was justified in invading Ukraine and has claimed that this was part of Russia. China has claimed ownership of the whole South China Sea and then forcibly occupied even the West Philippine Sea, in defiance of international law as promulgated by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which decided that the West Philippine Sea belonged to the Philippines.

The use of force is as old as human history. According to Professor MacMillan, “What is worrying today is the willingness of the powerful to dispense with even cursory attempts to put a legal gloss on their actions. The open contempt for the law is shown not just in words, but also in action.”

History seems to just repeat itself. Before the Second World War, Prime Minister Chamberlain of the UK allowed Hitler to legitimize his invasion and acquisition of Czechoslovakia. He called this as “appeasement.” Some historians believe that this act of appeasement emboldened Hitler to invade Poland and began what is now called the Second World War.

In 2014, Putin forcibly took Crimea from Ukraine and was allowed by European powers and the United States to keep this illegal acquisition. On hindsight, it is now believed that this is what emboldened Putin to eventually invade Ukraine.

Israel has ignored the Geneva Conference on the treatment of civilians in wartime in Gaza. Under Netanyahu, Israel is now in the process of annexing the Palestine state on the West Bank and has recently invaded Lebanon.

Trump was able to kidnap President Maduro of Venezuela successfully and is now threatening to invade Cuba.

These are all examples of appeasement that have led not to peace, but to wider and bloodier conflicts. Is this the kind of world that we are willing to accept, where the strong can do what they choose?

Prime Minister Carney of Canada has continued to urge that coalitions should be organized to enable nations to live and work together peacefully and for mutual benefit. MacMillan wrote: “The greatest goal of international law is the prevention of war and crimes against humanity, whether by using arbitration to settle disputes among nations, collective actions such as sanctions against an aggressor or, in the last resort, military force.”

This leads us to ask ourselves whether war is the inevitable destiny of mankind. Military historians believe that it is war that has shaped world history. Political boundaries are the result of military victories, rather than diplomatic negotiations. The United States remains united because the North won a bloody civil war against the Confederate states.

Was Plato right when he wrote: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

For some people, wars are actually romantic subjects. There are actually poems, songs, plays, paintings, novels and films romanticizing warfare. The war hero is often regarded as a national hero.

My own personal belief is that mankind’s yearning for peace is much, much stronger than the tendency towards violence. It is true that people throughout history have admired military commanders like Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Rommel, Eisenhower and MacArthur.

History has also shown us that the people who have most influenced our lives throughout the ages were those who preached peace and harmony like Jesus Christ, Aristotle, Buddha, Confucius, St. Francis of Assisi, Newton and Gandhi. Even Dante Alighieri of the Divine Comedy wrote, “I am searching for that which every man seeks – peace and rest.”

International law, with all its defects, remains indispensable and worth striving for.