reply to post by pollovonfollo
International law is a joke to everyone who's given it enough thought. But, firstly, those people from the Balkans who are at the Hague couldn't
have been there without American-led NATO intervention. That's the fact of the matter.
But beyond that, international law and the UN are failures. Collective security was seen to be a failure nearly a century ago, because it demands
that all nations respond to what's deemed a threat in the same way, with the same measure of response. That assumes that all nations share the same
risk, and that obviously isn't true. So there is breaks down and never recovers. It happened in Greece in 1923, and, more stunningly, it happened in
Ethiopia in 1935. The UN is, at this point, entirely a tautological structure. When strong nations want to listen to it and use it, it's important.
When they don't, it's not. Pointless. The UN has no job, it has no purpose; it just asks for money sometimes and wants a ride- like that cousin we
all have. And that's the authority behind international law? You think a a system like that can work?
And ya know, it makes me partly ashamed to be an American. Why? The saddest part is this dumb**** Wilsonianism spread from the US to Europe, when we
could've been spreading normal looking jeans or female armpit shaving. Disraeli, Metternich, Bismark- they all must be rolling in their graves. If
you would've told a 19th century European statesman that in the future, they and their constituents would view war as an engagement where one side
was "right" and the other was "wrong" they would've looked at you in disbelief. So would your average educated Englishman or Frenchman. War was
seen as a natural result of competing and clashing national interests. But that ****ing Wilson. Worst ***hole ever, now everyone is an armchair
moralist.
But you don't really want to talk about IR, do you? You just want a soapbox.

