Korea: What if we just left?

[Occhidiangela]

Your discussion of Kim reflects better, IMO, the crafty sort of man who knows how to acquire, use, and maintain power to stay in charge. It also suggests a mental agility that allowed him to follow his father in power, much to the surprise of some Western Observers.

As to the link, thanks for that as well, I have read a number of similar such treatments. They all stand on the rather thin premise of International Law as an absolute. We are not there yet, but there is progress, to be sure.

The prohibition of the use of force is a foundational rule of international law.

You will note that he used the looser term "international law" rather than "The UN Charter" which is the foundational document that containts that alleged prohibition. He does that to be deliberately vague, and to imply a law that does not really exist in a fundamental form.

The problem of international law, a rather murky but fascinating subject, is that it is nowhere codified with the simplicity and clarity of, say, an International Constitution. The closest anything comes to that is the U.N. Charter, but since the Charter does not provide a framework document for a de facto international government with the full power to govern, levy taxes, hold elections, etc, but rather forms a council of the wise, it lacks some of the necessary ingredients of effective law: an autonomous means of enforcement bound only to the Charter, and Courts tied explicitly via codified procedures that define the checks and balances, and limits, of jurisdiction.

What, then, is international law?

It is a series of agreements, treaties, and protocols, of varying subscription and validity, that form a body of generally agreed behaviours between the parties, the most prominent of which are those agreements governing trade, boundaries, immigration, and the common usage of the High Seas, which are the world's highways of commerce.

International law is frequently cited as though it were as succinctly codified as any nation's laws, but they are not.

Consider the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. If a nation, such as North VietNam is not a signatory, that bit of "international law" in not binding on them, and there is no legally sound method for enforcement or punishment for their breach of those accords. Also, given Iraq's signatory status on a series of non proliferation treaties, the non enforcement of their non compliance up to and including 1990, pre Kuwait, points to a fundamental weakness in international law: how is it valid if it is not enforced? The use of gas in the Iran Iraq war was no secret. Where was the enforcement of those treaties then? Both the US and the USSR, as well as France, China and UK, fell a bit short on enforcement there, don't you think?

The other feature of international law and its loopholes is that any nation may at any time, as an exercise of their sovereign power, publicly renounce or withdraw their support for any given treaty or protocol. Typically a year's notice is necessary.

What then does one do to enforce the treaty, or protocol, when a nation either renounces it or violates it?

You go back to Might Makes right, as per the enforcement of the International Law of the Sea in regards the Gulf of Sidra declarations of Muhamar Khadaffi of Lybia in the 1980's. That was an enforcement of international law, and did not require UN sanction to effect. Call it a citizen's arrest.

Well, I'd go so far as to call this Iraq War another case of "a citizen's arrest." Not sure how many nations hold that as a valid legal practice, but it sure is valid here, as well as in UK, if I remember my roots of common law correctly. (We borrowed a lot of ours from the Brits.)

International law is only as good as its enforcement. If the resolutions of the Security Council are to be held up as valid exercises of international law, they, like the laws against speeding or theft, are only as valid as their enforcement.