Hobbes beckons. He famously saw the state of nature — that is, a world without governments and law — as a “war of all against all” in which our lives would necessarily be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
We find ourselves today precisely where the arc of progress promised we wouldn’t be: peering into a widening Hobbesian abyss. Israel’s bombing of Qatar — the seventh sovereign nation with which it is not at war that it has preemptively attacked since October 7 — is just the latest step in an increasingly terrifying trend.
Anyone with the faintest affiliation to the rule of law has to be aware that it is receding faster than democracy. You can draw direct lines between a wide range of acts taken by so-called civilised nations in recent times, all of which defy the basic principles of human rights that were embedded in the United Nations compact following the catastrophic world war and Holocaust.
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Israel justifies its penchant for bombing its neighbours on a notion of preemptive self-defence, something international law does not recognise and which in any event it has stretched to a point where it is now in philosophical company with Vladimir Putin.
At the same time, Israel’s own Supreme Court has just declared that its government has failed to provide Palestinian prisoners with adequate food for basic subsistence; that is, it has been deliberately starving them, just not as overtly as it set about starving the entire population of Gaza from March this year when it cut off all access to aid.
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These two constructs — extra-judicial acts of violence, and intentional cruelty as a state act — are variations on the same theme of refusal to abide by even the most basic tenets of the “international rules-based order” that supposedly governs the world and underwrites modern civilisation.
Parallels abound. Last week, the US merrily bombed a boat in international waters, killing 11 men it said were alleged drug smugglers. To the allegation that this was a war crime, Vice President JD Vance said “I don’t give a shit what you call it”. Actually, in legal terms, it was just straight murder.
Hardly surprising from the increasingly fascist Trump administration, which is fast running out of legal norms to trample and will surprise nobody if it follows through on the president’s vague threat to napalm Chicago. Its own bombing of Iran was a self-admitted contravention of international law, but one can trace America’s illegal violence way back, through Obama’s extra-judicial assassinations policy and everything Kissinger ever did, and so on.
Amid the carnage, countries like Australia can fly well under the radar, and so it is that our government’s reenactment of the Nauru human trafficking operation and bipartisan removal of some last remnant shreds of legal protections for asylum seekers can pass with no comment. In the Coalition government days, the cruelty was the point, but the point at least had to be made. Now, it’s so normalised that Labor can do it without even noticing the irony let alone having to defend it.
A short look back to earlier times is instructive. It’s been less than a decade since Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte launched his “war on drugs”, during which he directed the illegal assassinations of over 6,000 people officially but as many as 30,000 according to human rights organisations.
For his pains, Duterte was treated as an international pariah, culminating in his arrest this year on International Criminal Court charges of crimes against humanity. However, if he started the same campaign today, who would have the inclination, let alone the right, to criticise him?
Today is a different world. Russia is sending drones over Polish (that is, NATO and EU) airspace to bomb Ukraine, knowing it won’t cop more than an angry letter in response because the US can no longer be relied on to back up NATO’s threat. Israel is bombing anyone who looks sideways at it while murdering any prospect of peace, and there are no adjectives left to describe the Western world’s complicity in its manifold crimes.
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Surveying this scene, it’s a struggle to find any country who can stand up more than notionally for the rule of international law and display unbloodied hands. The EU continues making the right noises, and acting with its money at least for Ukraine. Otherwise it’s just a few, mostly ex-British empire, outliers like Canada, South Africa and New Zealand who continue to pay more than lip service to the principles of the rules-based order.
I exclude the UK and Australia, who have pretty much vacated that field in fealty to the US and its client state, and to their disgrace. The UK is locking up virtually anyone who says the word “Palestine” and wants to send refugees to Rwanda, a pale imitation of Australia’s pale imitation of a society genuinely dedicated to human rights.
The international rule of law is dead and awaiting burial. Its domestic equivalent, in too many countries to count, is on life support if not gone. These daily unprecedents like Warsaw Airport being closed due to Russian drones and Israeli bombs dropping on Doha, each less expected and more unsettling than the last, are not exceptions but now the rule.
Brutishness is on the rise. If this trend continues, life is going to get very nasty indeed, and correspondingly short once more.
Is the rules-based international order really dead?
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