Once the UN Security Council passed a resolution almost unanimously demanding an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza last month, the United States and Israel acted as if it were a meaningless piece of paper. Israel, unwilling to accept a UN mandate, continued bombing the overpopulated southern the city of Rafah and laid siege to Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip. Shortly after the vote, Biden administration officials called Resolution 2728 “non-binding,” in what appeared to be an attempt to deny its status as international law.
It was a baffling approach by the administration, which allowed the resolution to pass with abstention after vetoing three previous ones. It also prompted a predictable bout of hand-wringing over the value of international law. At a State Department press briefing after the resolution, department spokesman Matthew Miller said the measure would neither lead to an immediate ceasefire nor affect the complex negotiations for the release of the hostages. One reporter asked: “If that’s the case, what the hell is the point of the UN or the UN Security Council?”
The question is fair, but it is also directed in the wrong direction. UN resolutions that are passed without enforcement apparently cannot force Israel to stop what its leadership claims is a justifiable war needed to eliminate Hamas and prevent another massacre on October 7. But it is equally clear what organization can force Israel to stop but does not: the United States.
Whatever the Biden administration thinks it is doing by allowing the resolution to pass and then undermining it, the maneuver has exposed the ongoing damage that Israel’s war in Gaza is doing to the long-standing justification that the United States is a superpower: guaranteeing what US administrations like to call a rules-based international order.
The concept works like an asterisk placed into international law by the world’s dominant superpower. This makes the United States one of the reasons why international law remains weak, since a rules-based order that makes exceptions for the United States and its allies fundamentally undermines the concept of international law .
American politicians tend to invoke this concept to demonstrate the benefits of US global leadership. On the surface, this sounds a lot like international law: a stable world order, including an arsenal of international aid and financial institutions, in which rules of acceptable behavior reflect liberal values. And when US prerogatives coincide with international law, the United States calls the two synonymous. On the eve of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned of a “moment of danger” for “the foundations of the Charter of the United Nations and the rules-based international order that preserves stability around the world.”
But when U.S. prerogatives conflict with international law, America apparently has no problem violating it—all while claiming that those violations ultimately benefit global stability. An indelible example is the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which the George W. Bush Administration cynically justified as a way to enforce UN disarmament mandates. Iraq, as the intended intruder, endured military occupation, while Washington’s unrivaled military and economic power ensured that an invasion without UN authorization would have few consequences for America. Shortly before the invasion, the United States passed a law requiring it to use “all means” necessary to free Americans detained by the International Criminal Court.
A group of American scholars and former and future US officials at Princeton later advocated what they called in a 2006 article “ A World of Freedom Under Law .” They framed this as addressing the shortcomings of international law, suggesting that when international institutions do not produce outcomes favored by the “world of freedom,” there is “an alternative forum for liberal democracies to sanction collective action.” In practice, this forum was often the White House. During the 2011 Libyan uprising, the United States and its allies used Security Council authorization of a no-fly zone to help overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, whose regime has killed far fewer opponents than Israel has killed in Gaza since October 7. American troops have been operating in eastern Syria for more than eight years, long enough for everyone to forget that they have no basis under international law to be there.
This “star” of American exceptionalism appeared after every US veto of a UN ceasefire resolution. Given the huge death toll in Gaza and the imminent famine, people could be forgiven for wondering about the meaning of an international order based on the rules of the United States.
International law clearly does not accept what Israel is doing in Gaza. Two months before the adoption of Resolution 2728, the International Court of Justice ruled that the ongoing Israeli campaign could legitimately be considered genocide and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent the unfolding of genocide. In anticipation of the adoption of Resolution 2728, the Canadian Parliament approved a proposal, albeit transparent, to stop new arms sales to Israel. And on the day the Security Council approved the resolution, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese recommended that member states “immediately” impose an arms embargo on Israel because Israel “appears to have failed to comply with the mandatory measures ordered” by the international court.
But after the adoption of resolution No. 2728, White House national security spokesman John Kirby clarified that the sale and transfer of weapons to Israel from the United States would not be affected. To the surprise of some Senate Democrats, the State Department said Israel was not violating the Biden administration’s policy that recipients of American weapons comply with international law. Last week, the White House confirmed that it had seen “no incidents of Israelis violating international humanitarian law” after the IDF repeatedly bombed a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers who had informed the Israelis of their movements, killing seven Human.
The reality is that Washington is now arming a combatant who has been ordered to stop fighting by the UN Security Council — an uncomfortable position that helps explain why the United States insists that Resolution 2728 is non-binding.
And this reality has not escaped the attention of the rest of the world. The Gaza massacre has made some foreign officials and groups less willing to listen to U.S. officials on other issues. Annelle Schelin, a State Department human rights official who recently resigned over Gaza, told The Washington Post that some activist groups in North Africa have simply stopped meeting with her and her colleagues. “Trying to stand up for human rights has simply become impossible” while the United States is helping Israel, she said.
This dynamic is eerily reminiscent of what happened outside Europe when American diplomats fanned out around the world to drum up support for Ukraine two years ago. They have faced “a clear backlash against the American propensity to shape the world order and force countries to take sides,” as Fiona Hill, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted in a speech last year.
If the United States was disappointed by this backlash, imagine the post-Gaza reaction that awaits Washington the next time it seeks global support for an adversary target. The passage of Resolution 2728, which did not immediately take effect, may well be remembered as a turning point in the decline of the rules-based international order that the United States seeks to build and maintain.
Rising powers will be happy to cite US precedent as they assert their own exceptions to international law. For, as Gaza horrifyingly shows, a world with exceptions to international law is a world in which the least powerful suffer the most.
Spencer Ackerman is a foreign policy columnist for The Nation and the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Created Trump.
Well, now we establish our own order, based on our rules. On the rights of equal and on the rights of the strong.
What’s wrong with the face, Pindos — is the ass fogged up?
The moralizing and moralizing of a bloody maniac executioner is no longer interesting to anyone.
Der Friedensstifter 