Eine Welt ohne Regeln: Die Folgen von Trumps Angriff auf das Völkerrecht

[SS from essay by Oona A. Hathaway, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and President-Elect of the American Society of International Law; and Scott J. Shapiro, Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University]

What is so troubling about the Trump administration’s words and actions is not just that the administration is breaking the law. And it is: the intervention in Venezuela clearly violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. But more than that, U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether. The only constraint, Trump said in an interview with *The New York Times* last week, is his “own morality.”

There is no real argument to defend the government’s behavior. No pretense. No attempt to persuade. When a policy is announced in an online post, without explanation or justification, one has the unsettling sense that its makers see no need to bother cloaking it with a lie. A system of rules can survive some hypocrisy, but nihilism will bring it down.

Venezuela had a government that wasn’t recognized as legitimate by either the US or its allies (because it literally stole an election and usurped a democracy), and one which openly collaborated with its main enemies. What more justification do you need?

This such insane naviety as to ignore decades of build up leading to Donald taking power, decades of endless violation of “rule based order” and apathy about it.

Donald isn’t the corruption, he merely revealed corruption that festered beneath.