Destroying the rule of law

Russia’s “big concession is they stop fighting, and they don’t take any more land,” U.S. President Donald Trump said last Tuesday, when asked what Russia was conceding in the thinly disguised surrender document he was trying to shove down Ukrainian throats. He truly is a 19th-century man at heart.

Those were the good old days, when anything you could conquer, you could keep. France took North Africa and Indo-China, Britain took South Africa and India, the United States took the Philippines and half of Mexico and Russia took a big chunk of China (but then lost it to Japan).

Actually, it was always like that. Every little human hunter-gatherer band fought to defend or expand its territories — and nobody changed the rules when they developed civilizations a few thousand years ago. War still delivered satisfactory results for the winners, so why would they change anything?

When the social and technological environment changes, human beings adapt — but they change as little as they have to. At least six different human mass civilizations emerged between 3,000 BC and 1,000 BC, and all of them retained the ancient institution of warfare. Indeed, we arrived in the 20th century with all that cultural baggage still intact.

Then we had the First World War, the Second World War and Hiroshima all in the space of three decades: somewhere between 50 million and 100 million dead. Of course people noticed, and of course they realized the technology of destruction has become so cheap and efficient that we have to stop fighting wars. People aren’t stupid.

So it was the imperial powers themselves, built on conquest, who created the League of Nations in 1919 to end wars between them. They didn’t worry about “hearts and minds.” They just tried to outlaw war by turning themselves into enforcers of the law.

That didn’t work very well, obviously, so after 1945 they founded the United Nations on a considerably more realistic basis. The great powers would still be the ultimate enforcers, but henceforward the basic rule would be that no borders can be changed by force ever again.

This was monstrously unfair to some countries that had recently lost chunks of territory and wanted them back, but it was enforceable at the time because all the surviving great powers were on the same side. Most wars are over borders, so to stop war you have to ban any more border changes achieved by violence. Surprisingly, it sort of worked.

Here we are 80 years later, and none of the great powers has gone to war directly with any other great power since 1945. They have backed proxies in other countries, and many smaller countries have fought each other, but the basic rule has been observed: no border changes by force.

Territories sometimes change hands in these smaller wars, but the international community treats these changes as only temporary, until rolling them back becomes possible or the dispute is finally settled by peaceful negotiations. This is what they really mean by the “international rule of law.”

Even at the second peak of the Cold War in 1985, you could go into the Foreign Ministry in Moscow or the State Department in Washington and get an essentially identical lecture about the need to uphold the international rule of law. That faith was fading fast by the 21st century, because generational turnover makes institutions forgetful, but few people actively defied it.

Now powerful people are deliberately trying to destroy the rule. Putin knows the rule, but ignores it. Trump doesn’t even know it. “Russia’s big concession is that they stop fighting, and they don’t take any more land,” said the accomplice-in-chief. In other words, changing borders by force will be legal again, at least for Russia and America.

So is it back to the 19th century, when the strong did whatever they wanted and the weak suffered what they must? And then forward to nuclear war at some time in the future?

The game’s not over yet, because the European Union, the countries of East Asia (probably including China), the Anglosphere (all the English-speaking countries except the United States) and at least half the developing countries will still defend the law. But it will be a close-run thing.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.