by Nathan Smith

The problem with trying to explain the world without understanding how it works is that everyone gets angry in the wrong direction. They start blaming things that aren’t and missing things that are. Not good.

My favourite example is when people call any war “illegal.” This is a non-starter and totally obfuscates the issue of what war is. Solving international disputes falls into two categories: either a country does not go to war, or it goes to war with overwhelming force. But to think any war is “illegal” based on Articles 39, 42, 46, and 51 of the United Nations Charter is to suggest the UN is some kind of international body that has legal weight. It doesn’t. That’s ridiculous.

Repeat after me – there is no such thing as international law. There are no international enforcement agencies other than the UN, and the UN cannot enforce anything unless the US military says it can. The UN cannot make law and if two sovereign nations in a dispute agree to appear before the UN and have their dispute resolved that does not imply they are obligated to do so, or that failure to do so would be illegal. Just because the UN passes a resolution, does not mean it has the force of law, and governments are free to ignore it. A UN resolution isn’t illegal to ignore because things can only be illegal if a law prohibits them, and the UN does not have the power to make law.

UN resolutions aren’t worth the paper they are printed on, including nuclear arms control treaties, human rights treaties and climate change decisions. They are all worth less than nothing. Nations care about their own laws. A government is concerned about human rights treaties to the extent some subsection of its own code describes how its soldiers can and cannot treat enemy combatants. If a government doesn’t act in accordance with that code, they will have to go to their own country’s courts to defend themselves. Individuals who break that code can go to prison if they are convicted. But they wouldn’t be convicted of violating the Geneva Convention or UN resolutions, only of violating their country’s military code and its domestic laws. The only reason any government abides by an international treaty is when it becomes part of national law through enacting legislation. The moment that legislation is repealed, the treaty is broken, and there is no international recourse.

The UN is a tool of power, not real power. There is only one power in the world today: Washington. And it is important that everyone understands how it operates.

Washington’s goal is to uphold the status quo of democratic world peace as defined by American liberal values and Wilsonian foreign policy (I’ll explain this shortly). Every member of the so-called “international community” wants the same thing: what Washington wants. In other words, to transform all nations into American-style liberal democracies. If the State Department can’t convince a country to convert, then its domestic political rival – the Pentagon – will deliver a compelling argument at the tip of a JDAM or team of US Navy SEALs. This was the story of the 20^th century, and, so far, the 21^st as well.

Both the State Department and the Pentagon are on the same side, but they compete viciously in all sorts of devious ways for control over Washington. While they are too cowardly to fight each other directly, these two factions instead use the squabbles between other nations to gain the political upper hand back in Washington.

A fine example of this sick dynamic is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Israel and Palestine are fighting over the same thing – real estate. But they do not fight alone. The State Department and the Pentagon are tied like pretzels into the dispute. The Pentagon supports Israel with its strong, but weakening, Zionist lobby, while the State Department’s hordes of humanitarian civil servants and diplomats support Palestine. When a Republican president is in the White House, the Pentagon, and therefore Israel, get more influence over the issue. When a Democrat president is in office, the State Department, and therefore Palestine, has more influence. But neither Israel nor Palestine are ever allowed to fully control their own affairs.

The US delivers billions of dollars to both Israel and Palestine every year, and it has done so for decades. If that’s not support, what is? Without this support, Palestinians and Israelis would have to settle their land dispute bilaterally. Israel has its own weapons industries, while Palestinians have rocks. So, if such a direct clash were to occur, the stronger will obviously be the victor.

However, over the past 50 years or so arguments between Israel and Palestine have usually ended with Israeli concessions. This is weird, since the strong generally are not overridden by the weak. The result is that the US opposes Israel while also supporting Israel. The same is true for Palestine. This support/opposition dyad reflects the rivalry between the State Department and the Pentagon. It has very little to do with Israel and Palestine. It is a classic proxy war.

This would seem strange, unless you understand how the US sees the world. Under classical Westphalian international law, Israel is a sovereign nation state and as such, it has full rights to defend itself however it sees fit – for instance, by destroying every rocket launcher in Palestine and rounding up all Palestinians who refuse to stop fighting. With the weapons available to Israel and the stone-age tactics of the Palestinians, Israel could do this in a matter of months. But have not lived in a Westphalian world since the end of WWII, and arguably since 1890.

At the Nuremberg trials, the US forcibly removed the rights of every sovereign nation to conduct respectable warfare and transferred those rights onto itself. Now, only Washington gets to act as judge, arbitrator, enforcer and governor of the planet in one neat package. No one, except the US, is has the right to conduct war. The mathematics of this framework is simple: the US “guarantees” the security of its allies in exchange for their ability to secure themselves. What eventually became the Nuremberg regime was actually set in motion by former US president Woodrow Wilson.

Here is part of a speech Wilson gave on 4 July, 1914 titled “The Meaning of Liberty”:

“My dream is that as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.”

Note the particularly charming phrase “unless it feels that it is engaged in…” Also note that this speech was given just three weeks before the outbreak of WWI. A few years later in 1917, Wilson built on this speech to justify the US entrance into WWI by saying it was “making the world safe for democracy.” Are you starting to get the picture? The US didn’t quite get the job done in 1918, so it prepared for Round Two in 1941 where it planned to conquer Europe. Washington has been spreading “democracy” by the muzzle of a gun ever since. Iran is just the latest target.

Wilsonian foreign policy means there are only two types of nation states: American-style democracies or countries that will soon be American-style democracies. This mindset means that no government should ever fear the US unless the US feels that a government is engaged in some action which violates the rights of humanity. In other words, the US will judge the world, which is the same as dominating it. Since Washington is always honest (being democratic, of course) it will know if a government is “violating the rights of humanity.” Therefore, Washington is always right.

The same “logic” has justified every war America has fought and applies neatly to whatever the US is doing to Iran simply because Iran is most certainly not an American-style democratic country (yet). Iran maintains the façade of being a nation state, which is probably what has kept it alive for so long. But it was only a matter of time before the US decided that Iran was “violating the rights of humanity” and it was time to convert it to the truth.

One of my maxims is that no one is doing evil, everyone thinks they are doing the right thing. The same is true for Wilsonian foreign policy. Say what you will about the goal of “making the world safe for democracy,” but it rests on the assumption that American-style liberal democracies do not go to war with each other. Since 1945, this prediction has proven somewhat accurate, so adding the last few countries to the pile can’t be all that bad. After all, if everyone thinks the same, peace will be achieved. Since the 1890s, the world has been slowly transformed into Washington’s own image in its pursuit of world peace.

But it’s important to ask, was it worth all the blood? Will it be worth more blood to maintain? History will be the judge, not America.

Originally posted on The Good Oil.