Can we have a rules-based international order when the biggest players ignore the rules?

International law is like God – it restricts your moral actions only if you actually believe in it.

Despite his many public protestations to the contrary, a man like Vladimir Putin apparently believes in neither. Hence, he can act illegally in attacking Ukraine with both a clear religious, and a clear legal, conscience.

Inversely, other world leaders believe in both God and international law, hence the Pope never having invaded Poland. Not even the last one did, and he was German.

Yet there is a third, and far more curious, form of statesman upon today’s global geopolitical chessboard: the man who does not believe in God, but does believe in international law, and so treats the latter as if it is really an earthly manifestation of the former.

A classic example is Lord Richard Hermer, a leading British human rights lawyer and either atheist Jew or “deeply cynical agnostic”, depending upon what mood he’s in with his Creator when you ask him, currently serving as Attorney-General for the UK’s governing left-wing Labour Party. An old chum of Britain’s new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Hermer is essentially the British Government’s chief legal compliance officer, telling them which of their proposed policies are likely to be legal, and which are not. Unfortunately, he seems to err excessively upon the side of caution in such matters, to say the least.

Last week, Hermer was accused by frustrated Labour Party Ministers of instituting an effective “freeze on government” due to his alleged “computer says no” manner of nixing all manner of policy proposals on subjects as disparate as the deportation of illegal immigrants, to necessary housing leasehold reform. For human rights-worshipping High Priest Hermer, it seems the law is a golden ass – at least when said false idol is manufactured and then gold-plated abroad rather than at home.

Playing it by the textbook

Last October, the Good Lord delivered a scholarly speech as the annual Bingham Lecture, entitled “International Law in an Age of Populism”.

The Bingham Lectures are named after the late Baron Thomas Henry Bingham, a former leading British judge and Lord Chief Justice, whose prizewinning 2010 book, The Rule of Law, is described by its publishers thus: “‘The Rule of Law' is a phrase much used but little examined. The idea of the rule of law as the foundation of modern states and civilisations has recently become even more talismanic than that of democracy, but what does it actually consist of? In this brilliant short book, Britain's former senior Law Lord, and one of the world's most acute legal minds, examines what the idea actually means.”

So, what does “The Rule of Law” actually mean, then? According to Lord Hermer, in its truest sense it means the rule of international law, of the kind represented by the European Court of Human Rights, United Nations, and other such chisellers out of divine and allegedly mandatory transnational Commandments from their modern-day Mount Sinais in true Holy Lands like Brussels and New York.

As Hermer explained in his 2024 Bingham Speech, international law is nothing less than “the rule of law writ large”, superseding as it does all known subordinate national laws in each and every case, like the writ of King Zeus outranking that of his subordinate water-deity, Poseidon, even beneath Poseidon’s own directly-governed ocean waves. As such, when sensibly obeyed by all, international law should by rights act as the supreme guarantor of global peace and stability, in a sort of sempiternal Pax Davos.

As a conclusive illustration of how his idol Bingham’s book proved this was really the case, Lord Hermer asked his audience the following inadvertently amusing question: “What better illustration of the enduring contribution of that book could there be than the sight, earlier this year, of its Ukrainian translation being launched in Kyiv, on the frontline of the ongoing struggle for democratic, rules-based values?”

Yes, what better illustration could there possibly ever have been of the utility, practicality, and utter enforceability of international law than a new edition of Baron Bingham’s book being launched in a country that had just been subjected to a massive illegal invasion by an external, nuclear-armed, imperialist military power, leading to the unnecessary deaths and injury of hundreds of thousands of innocent people? Somewhat awkwardly for the delusions of such over-smooth silks, Vladimir Putin appears to worship different gods than the likes of Hermer and Bingham do. Mars, Wotan, Ares and Thanatos, for instance. Turns out the legal quill isn’t always mightier than the military sword after all.

 

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The law of the bungle

How did Hermer propose to counter Putin’s illegal aggression, and blatant disregard for the newly-translated Ukrainian edition of his own personal favourite legal textbook? The UK Attorney-General’s best suggestion was to embark upon “the rebuilding our [i.e. Britain’s] reputation as a leader in the field of international law and the international rules-based order”, as to do otherwise would “send out precisely the wrong message at a time when the rule of [international] law is under threat in so many places”, like in Ukraine.

In other words, Lord Hermer wanted Britain to throw away its old Boris Johnson-era habits of exploiting certain limited loopholes in international law to her own rational self-interest and instead begin obeying every dotted i and crossed t of the stuff, even where this demonstrably did the nation down or even actively imperilled it.

And why? So as to set a fine moral example for renegade foreign despots like Vladimir Putin to follow, thereby shaming him and his fellow non-law-abiding kind into following all the right regulations themselves in future, even when filling in their tax-returns. That’s the theory, anyway. But what kind of “example” would we actually provide for Tsar Putin to observe and learn from by doing so in practice? Only the alarmingly naïve example of an extremely stupid man repeatedly slicing off his nose to spite his own face.

According to Lord Hermer: “Lord Bingham’s conception of the rule of law also recognises that … States must comply with their international obligations, just as they must comply with domestic law … International law is not simply some kind of optional add-on, with which States can pick or choose whether to comply. It is central to ensuring our prosperity and security, and that of all global citizens.”

Again, I don’t think Mad Vlad has been reading this particular legal textbook, Lord Hermer.

Laws unto themselves

I don’t think President Xi of China has been reading very much of his Lord Bingham of late, either. A shame, as one of the key foreign policy decisions Lord Hermer has recently helped decide for his friend Sir Keir’s Labour Government directly relates to sensitive military matters involving the demonstrably expansionist Chinese State.

According to reports, Hermer appears to have been directly involved with the absurd, and since thankfully derailed, decision that the UK legally had to hand back sovereignty of her final remaining Indian Ocean possessions, the Chagos Islands, to the African nation of Mauritius, a distant country which never actually owned said islands in the first place.

Well, I call this a “decision”, and a matter of foreign “policy”, but in fact, according to Lord Hermer’s implicit interpretation, there aren’t really any such options of discretional agency open to a truly responsible and enlightened national government at all these days, any more than a motorist has a genuine personal “policy option” not to obey the speed limit without being subsequently arrested.

International law (in Hermer’s own personal opinion, anyhow – others disagree) reputedly instructs and obliges the United Kingdom to give the Chagos Islands back [sic] to Mauritius, and so there is no possible option available for London but to do so. After all, if we Brits failed to uphold our alleged international obligations on this matter, then how could our halo-polishing diplomats possibly stand up before the Court of Heavenly World-Emperor Xi and lecture him to keep his greedy Commie mitts off Taiwan, otherwise?

A foreign policy realist might say that the only genuine credible way to ward Chairman Xi off from snatching Taiwan would be for free Allied nations like the US, UK, Australia and Japan to set a fine military example by steadily building up their navies and threatening to use them against China’s own if Xi ever does send troops to seize the island. A foreign “policy” (if he would ever stoop to use such an outdated term) fantasist like Lord Hermer, on the other hand, would prefer for us to set a fine moral example for Xi to follow instead, by becoming obsessive sticklers to some made-up rules written down on little pieces of paper by utopian-brained dreamers.

This path would seem particularly deluded and dangerous because the Chagos Islands famously host a US military base allowed to operate there by the UK, providing Washington with a vital military listening-post and naval and air-base in the Indo-Pacific region. This allows actual adults in the West to continue fending off enemy warships with other warships of our own, rather than merely copies of Lord Bingham’s The Rule of Law textbook bulk-printed in Mandarin Chinese.

Mauritius is currently being groomed with investment-cash to become a close international partner of China, meaning the grateful Africans may well allow Beijing to establish naval facilities of its own on the Islands, following any eventual repatriation from the UK. Although the terms of Keir Starmer’s proposed treaty of return do provide provision for the US base to remain in situ for the next 99 years, if said base ends up being encircled by Chinese submarines, radars and ballistic missiles, that’s about as much use as the Eskimo Army being allowed to maintain a single igloo in Hell with Satan placed in direct control of the refrigeration plug.  

Why can’t people all just do as they are tort?

Contrary to what Mr Hermer may have read in a book, I’m not entirely sure such an entity as “international law” even truly exists in our world today at all. If any two given nations happen to be civilised enough to obey such a fiction (as all laws other than the Laws of Nature ultimately are) in their bilateral dealings between one another, then great. But such friendly states are essentially acting by virtue of their own shared individual consent, not under compulsion by plausible external authority, per se.

With no genuine all-powerful global policeman to enforce compliance, what happens when any given nation decides to act in breach of such terms, as Putin and Xi do for a regular hobby? Financial and diplomatic sanctions are often imposed, but equally often prove ineffective. You can’t “arrest” Russia or China, can you? You can’t “prosecute” countries, as such, no matter how many pretend warrants for the arrest of their leaders are issued by the International Criminal Court. And staging a legally punitive invasion of such nuclear powers as Moscow or Beijing is also a complete non-starter – quite apart from starting WWIII, such measures would probably also turn out to be illegal under international law anyway.

In the truest sense, compliant nations are not obeying externally enforced international “laws” when agreeing to abide by the terms of the particular international treaties they ratify, merely the terms of such treaties themselves, which are internally signed up to by the consent of (theoretically) sovereign national parliaments. Compliant nations agree to voluntarily restrain themselves and act as if these treaties were writs of fully enforceable international law, rather than them actually being so, which they are not. Other, less scrupulous countries, like Russia and China, simply operate by different rules, with apparent broad impunity.

No matter how admirable in principle, all that law-loving nations like Britain are doing here, in actual praxis, is fruitlessly volunteering to fight opponents with one hand tied behind their backs. How does piously forcing one fading colonial power, Britain, to peacefully give up the Chagos Islands, only to thereby help potentially facilitate another rising colonial power, China, to forcibly take possession of Taiwan, help facilitate a future world of peace and territorial permanency, as learned left-wing lawyers fondly imagine? 

In such self-defeating cases, the law as idealised by the likes of Lord Hermer really does become a golden ass, a false god being worshipped to no good end at all by its misguided pagan disciples. 


Is the rules-based international order really a polite fiction?  


Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

Image credit: Bigstock


 

Showing 3 reactions

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  • Anon Emouse
    commented 2025-02-04 01:24:00 +1100
    I wonder if the republicans in Congress threaten to sanction the ICC for wanting to bring charges against Netanyahu qualifies as “ignoring the rules”
  • mrscracker
    I’m possibly missing something but what does being an “atheistic Jew” signify in all this?
  • Steven Tucker
    published this page in The Latest 2025-02-03 10:58:47 +1100