美“基于规则的秩序”实为霸权工具
2024-04-17 22:06阅读：
正如加沙战争以一种骇人的方式所表明的那样，有人可以不遵守国际法的世界就是弱肉强食的世界。
Where Is America's 'Rules-Based Order'
Now?
By Spencer Ackerman
Mr. Ackerman is a foreign-policy columnist for The Nation and the
author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America
and Produced Trump.”
No sooner had a nearly unanimous United Nations Security Council
passed a resolution demanding an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza
last month than the United States and Israel acted as if it were a
meaningless piece of paper. Israel, unwilling to accept a U.N.
mandate, continued bombing the overcrowded southern city of Rafah
and besieging Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Shortly after the
vote, Biden administration officials called the resolution, No.
2728
, “nonbinding,” in what appeared to be an attempt to deny its
status as international law.
It was a confounding approach from an administration that allowed
the resolution to go through with an abstention after vetoing three
earlier ones. It also triggered a predictable bout of hand-wringing
over the value of international law. At the State Department press
briefing after the resolution passed, the department’s spokesman,
Matthew Miller, said the measure would neither result in an
immediate cease-fire nor affect thorny hostage-release
negotiations. One reporter asked, “If that’s the case, what the
hell is the point of the U.N. or the U.N. Security Council?”
The question is valid, but it’s also misdirected. U.N. resolutions
that are written without enforcement measures obviously cannot
force Israel to stop what its leadership insists is a justified war
necessary to remove Hamas and prevent another Oct. 7 massacre. But
it’s just as obvious what entity can make Israel stop and isn’t
doing so: the United States.
Whatever the Biden administration might have thought it was doing
by permitting the resolution to pass and then undermining it, the
maneuver exposed the continuing damage Israel’s war in Gaza is
doing to the United States’ longstanding justification for being a
superpower: guaranteeing what U.S. administrations like to call the
international rules-based order.
The concept operates as an asterisk placed on international law by
the dominant global superpower. It makes the United States one of
the reasons international law remains weak, since a rules-based
order that exempts the United States and its allies fundamentally
undermines the concept of international law.
American policymakers tend to invoke the concept to demonstrate the
benefits of U.S. global leadership. It sounds, on the surface, a
lot like international law: a stable global order, involving the
panoply of international aid and financial institutions, in which
the rules of acceptable behavior reflect liberal values. And when
U.S. prerogatives coincide with international law, the United
States describes the two synonymously. On the eve of Russia’s
illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken
warned of a “moment of peril” for “the foundation of the United
Nations Charter and the rules-based international order that
preserves stability worldwide.”
But when U.S. prerogatives diverge from international law, America
apparently has no problem violating it — all while declaring its
violations to ultimately benefit global stability. The indelible
example is the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which the George W. Bush
administration cynically justified as a means of enforcing U.N.
disarmament mandates. Iraq, the supposed violator, endured military
occupation, while Washington’s unmatched military and economic
power ensured that America faced little consequence for an invasion
without U.N. authorization. Shortly before invading, the United
States passed a law vowing to use “all means” necessary to release
Americans detained by the International Criminal Court.
A cohort of American academics and once and future U.S. officials
at Princeton later advocated what they called in a 2006 paper “a
world of liberty under law.” They framed it as addressing the
weaknesses of international law, suggesting that when international
institutions didn’t produce the outcomes favored by the “world of
liberty,” there be an “alternative forum for liberal democracies to
authorize collective action.” In practice, that forum has often
been 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 Qaddafi — whose regime killed
far fewer opponents than Israel has killed in Gaza since Oct. 7.
American troops have now operated in eastern Syria for more than
eight years, long enough for everyone to forget that there is no
basis in international law for their presence.
That American-exceptionalist asterisk has been on display after
each U.S. veto of cease-fire resolutions at the U.N. With Gaza’s
enormous death toll and imminent famine, people can be forgiven for
wondering about the point of the United States’ rules-based
international order.
International law is unambiguously against what Israel is doing in
Gaza. Two months before resolution No. 2728, the International
Court of Justice ruled that the continuing Israeli campaign could
plausibly be considered genocidal and ordered Israel to take
measures to prevent genocide from unfolding. Ahead of 2728’s
passage, the Canadian Parliament approved a motion, however porous,
to stop new arms transfers to Israel. And the day the Security
Council approved the resolution, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for
the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, recommended that
member states should “immediately” embargo weapon shipments to
Israel, since Israel “appears to have failed to comply with the
binding measures ordered” by the international court.
But after 2728 passed, the White House national security spokesman,
John Kirby, clarified that U.S. weapon sales and transfers to
Israel would be unaffected. To the astonishment of some Senate
Democrats, the State Department averred that Israel was not
violating a Biden administration policy that recipients of American
weaponry comply with international law. Last week, the White House
reiterated that it had not seen “any incidents where the Israelis
have violated international humanitarian law” after the Israel
Defense Forces repeatedly bombed a convoy of aid workers from the
World Central Kitchen who had informed the Israelis of their
movements, killing seven.
The reality is that Washington is now arming a combatant that the
United Nations Security Council has ordered to stop fighting, an
uncomfortable position that helps explain why the United States
insists 2728 isn’t binding.
And that reality isn’t lost on the rest of the world. The slaughter
in Gaza has disinclined some foreign officials and groups to listen
to U.S. officials about other issues. Annelle Sheline, a State
Department human-rights officer who recently resigned over Gaza,
told The Washington Post that some activist groups in North Africa
simply stopped meeting with her and her colleagues. “Trying to
advocate for human rights just became impossible” while the United
States aids Israel, she said.
It’s a dynamic that sounds awfully reminiscent of what happened
outside Europe when U.S. diplomats fanned out globally to rally
support for Ukraine two years ago. They encountered “a very clear
negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the
global order and forcing countries to take sides,” as Fiona Hill, a
Brookings Institution scholar, observed in a speech last
year.
If the United States was frustrated by that negative reaction,
imagine the reaction, post-Gaza, that awaits Washington the next
time it seeks global support for the target of an adversary. The
dead-on-arrival passage of resolution 2728 may very well be
remembered as an inflection point in the decline of the rules-based
international order — which is to say the world that the United
States seeks to build and maintain.
Rising powers will be happy to cite U.S. precedent as they assert
their own exceptions to international law. For as Gaza shows in a
horrific manner, a world with exceptions to international law is
one in which the least powerful suffer the most.
