The Post-Westphalian World: Reflections on Trump 2.0's Military Adventurism

The weak are meat, and the strong do eat

(Cloud Atlas)

The international rules based order sets normative expectations, deters transgressions, and manages conflicts. It does so via a host of treaties and institutions mostly introduced soon after WWII, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN and its many affiliated organisations and treaties (WTO, UNLCOS, ICJ, World Bank, NPT, etc) to private members' clubs like the G7, EU, OECD, and NATO. 

Like all institutional orders, it is maintained by and for the powerful actors in whose interests it was designed, especially the USA, the most powerful of all. This obvious fact is often willfully misinterpreted. 

First, an order instituted by the powerful to protect and advance their own interests need not come at the expense of the less powerful, when compared to a situation without any such order. To the contrary, by constraining all it is often of even more value to the weak - who have no other source of protection - than it is to the strong. Merely because an international order can be judged as lacking compared to some hypothetical ideal ('fairness') does not mean that any rational state would prefer a world without it. 

Only Human Rights Are Worth Killing For

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” John Kerry challenged Congress about the Vietnam war in 1971. There in a nutshell is the standard test by which democratic republics assess their military adventures: Is this cause worth dying for? 

The idea of such a test is a good one. War is a question of politics, indeed the oldest question of political power: ‘Who's in charge here?' Specifically, governments contest each other's sovereignty – their ability to get their own way – by employing or threatening the means of extraordinary violence. Since war is defined by its terrible means, it can only be justified by some extraordinary purpose. Ordinary political goals will not do. Hence the need to find some measure that will be immune from the merely personal or factional interests of politicians or their hubris.

Nevertheless, Kerry's test is not quite right. The most ethically significant thing about war is not that our soldiers are ordered to risk their lives to further the interests of our state – or perhaps just our politicians – but that they are ordered to kill for it. The real ethical test of a war is whether our cause is worth killing for. If that is not satisfied then our soldiers are mere murderers and we are the ones who made them so.

This test turns out to be much harder to meet.

The Human Rights Case for Migration

Migration is a meta-human right: a right that other human rights depend upon. Since some governments are malevolent or simply incapable of protecting human rights, a commitment to human rights requires a commitment to the freedom of individuals to move to countries where they can live a decent life. Refugees - homeless, futureless - present an international moral emergency that trumps the usual considerations of national statecraft such as fiscal implications and political risk for governing parties.

Why Not Polygamy Too?

The argument that made gay marriage law in America was about marriage equality: not special rights for gay people but the right to the same treatment. There may be something to regret in the smallness of this ambition (previously), but the argument is sound. 

Denying people the right to marry requires a public justification -one that would be in principle convincing to all concerned - and this demands more than the expression of the private moral beliefs of a politically dominant group like fundamentalist Christians. What this comes down to is the moral and political significance of the challenge Why not? for public reasoning in a liberal society, for identifying and overturning unjust laws and policies. 

In the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision it is therefore rather disconcerting to find various gay marriage advocates, most notably, Jonathan Rauch, arguing so badly - basically sneering - against polygamy. One has the impression of a drawbridge being raised up. As far as I can tell, polygamy presents as good a case as gay marriage for legal recognition and regulation by the state, as Justice Roberts' Supreme Court dissent pointed out.

Human rights, the rule of law, and British parliamentary sovereignty: Prisoners' right to vote

7 years ago the UK was found in breach of its legal obligations to uphold the European Convention on Human Rights for its blanket ban on prisoners voting (Ruling of the European Court of Human Rights).Yet the British parliament has still not managed to pass legislation to address the fundamentally arbitrary and discriminatory character of this ban, by providing a justification of disenfranchisement that relates to the nature of particular crimes and making it an explicit part of sentencing. Rather, parliament is now in open revolt against the very principle of a supra national court telling it what to do.