International law is over, so how do we face injustice?

There are few things that are good in our politics today. The Trump presidency is malign; that’s as clear as it’s ever been. With Maduro’s abduction, many analysts have observed that the era of medium-commitment supranationalism—with treaties and consignment to principles that override national prerogatives when the stakes are low—is over. When the stakes have been high, like on matters of big-country security or prosperity, international law acted mainly as a place to guide conversation. To try to push for more just outcomes. But that era is over.

Today, the world is a more savage place than it appeared to be three years ago—but more honest in a way, too. The Biden people lied through a genocide. And they misrepresented their mettle to the Ukrainians—the country was never important enough to justify meaningful levels of resource commitment by the US. And they lied to themselves, about human rights, about the nature of the world order they served, and about the practical impact of America’s actions in the world.

In Trump, we observe a fundamental paradox: a person who is personally committed to lying about big and small things has uncovered a foundational truth. As he has asserted, repeatedly, “I am the only one that matters.” Decorum doesn’t matter. Traditions and the observance of a high-minded protocol are a waste of time. Alliances, a decadent indulgence after the Cold War, don’t matter either. Where rubber meets road, AWACs matter. So do nuclear warheads, and the ballistic missiles that convey them. Aircraft carriers, which project the ability to kill—the basic currency of our world order—matter a lot. China is now building them. So China matters.

The Why matters too. We live in a world dominated by capitalism, whose main logic is growth. We deploy our power to claim resources—Nigeria and Venezuela are oil rich. And we need those resources to grow. Greenland represents a new frontier, an American Lebensraum. Maybe, Canada too. The S&P and Dow Jones Industrial Index, the main US indicators of return on invested capital, just hit record highs. Maybe it’s a bubble—or maybe the growth in stock prices represents a reasonable expectation of resource accumulation and exploitation. All growth. All the time.

Not everyone is winning. Anyone whose population is below 100 million people—an arbitrary threshold, but meaningful because people are the fundamental unit of a market economy—is a loser. Europe is a loser, too. Poorer than it was twenty years ago in relative terms, with no real military power, it is an albatross for America. Trump knows that—and the Europeans do too.

And yet, there are opportunities for people who care about more than getting rich and getting richer. The truth of where things stand, the mechanistic understanding of the inputs that drive outcomes, confers its own kind of power. Yes, international law is over (for now?). Yes, capitalism has run amok, and yes the structural forces that bind us to a rapacious economic order are strong. But what’s changed in the past century is the emergence of a values-oriented civil society. The institutionalization and codification of our values in organizations that explicitly proclaim to represent them. NGOs, in other words.

Global civil society

More than a dozen years ago I sat in on a lecture by a senior US diplomat. He described the changes in the world since he’d entered the foreign service. The main one, he said, was that non-governmental actors had emerged as serious contributors to the policy discussion on a wide range of topics—everything from maternal health to animal rights and the use of landmines in war. Or as Kenneth Boulding, an economist, wrote in 1989, the rise of the NGO sector “is perhaps one of the most spectacular developments of the twentieth century.”

Activism is hard work, particularly human rights activism. The development of the human rights non-governmental sector over the course of the past century represents the professionalization of an effort to build societies that reflect good values—the professionalization of activism. Inevitably the work of the full time activists, the community organizers, tracks local contexts: electoral politics or lobbying or campaigning across borders with like-minded organizations and people. But the infrastructure exists, everywhere. We have the means to resist and reform, locally and across borders.

So yes, Israel’s genocide in Palestine is a violation of international law. And yes, Putin and Trump’s invasions of Ukraine and Venezuela violate those same laws. And yes, I, and perhaps many people, grew disillusioned through the apparent weaknesses of international law. But in becoming disillusioned I missed the point. As Naomi Klein said to me, her focus is on her values. The law is meaningful, but it can be manipulated or discarded or ignored by those with the means to manipulate, or ignore—witness the International Criminal Court. But the values we choose to live by are our own. They are inviolable, and they drive the force of our power to face injustice.