The International Law Joke

 

Let's just all agree international law does not exist, should not exist, and cannot exist. 

Law is a matter for sovereign powers, and there are no sovereign powers with global legitimacy, only powers that claim it and can back it up with force. Sovereignty does not exist beyond the nation-state. Everything beyond that is simply arrogation of power. 

So crying international law is meaningless. By international law every US president since WW2 would be in trouble. None are, because they just say, nope, don't agree. Because international law is a fiction. 

International law is what major powers use against weaker powers or losing powers. That's it. No more. 

Really, there is only power, and submission to a higher power. 

And Trump, and his government, do not believe in powers higher than their authority. Neither have previous US governments for decades, they just didn't make it so obvious. 

Now, that it is clear that international law was always a joke, a bad joke, a silly joke. Then we can start to face this world as it really is: major powers do what they want. Minor powers try to stay useful and out of their way...if they are smart. But our leaders have not been smart for some time. 

I hope Australia learns this lesson quickly. In a world where major powers don't pretend to follow any rules, we are foolish as a nation to try and dictate to larger powers (which our leaders bang on about too much), and we are doubly foolish to try and hold to international agreements that limit our ability to build stuff, make stuff, and dig up stuff.

It's time our government looked to serving the interests of Australians. The world did not just change, it changed a while ago. But our leaders act like we live in the old pretend rules based order. That order died with Bush jnr, Trump just put an exclamation mark on it. Really, it never really existed, powers just took advantage of other nations with it, while they could. 

Aussies need to adapt to this new more honest/brazen power dynamic. Cancel the crazy expensive social systems and put that money into making this country strong enough to face the new world, or risk being another Venezuela. If Venezuela had have focused on being strong rather than squandering their wealth on socialist programs, maybe they could have resisted what just happened, successfully. 

When you cut through all the propaganda, Venezuela's real mistake was being a resource rich country near an aggressive world power...and acting like that wasn't a big deal. It was. We'll see more stuff like this happen in coming years. The return of great power politics is here. And the great powers of the past saw weak lands with resources and took them before another did. And we have a lot of resources. And no amount of welcome to countries will stop a major power doing to us what just happened if they feel the need. Only strength will.