It’s not hard to imagine the spittle-flecked outrage that would erupt if Vladimir Putin personally landed a jet Kiev airport and emerged to triumphantly declare, “Mission accomplished!”
Yet, that is exactly what US president George W. Bush did in 2003, after illegally invading a foreign nation and overthrowing its internationally-recognised government. Sure, you could argue (rightly) that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. But there are plenty of brutal dictators in the world, some of whom we happily do business with. You could argue that Putin’s invasion was made under the thinnest of pretexts, if not outright lies — how is that any different to Bush and Blair’s invasion?
We didn’t just fail to punish Bush and Blair: we rewarded them. We re-elected them. We knighted them.
As writer Caitlyn Johnstone says, If we don’t hold our own leaders to account, we can’t hold other leaders to account. Russia’s ambassador to Australia made much the same point: who are we to judge? We only just extricated ourselves from two decades of war: war that was difficult, if not impossible to square with a supposed commitment to the “rules-based international order”. Libya is still a festering sore of a failed state, entirely thanks to meddling of the supposed custodian of the the “rules-based international order”, the United Nations.
As far as I can tell this point is logically unassailable. International law is a meaningless concept when it only applies to people the US power alliance doesn’t like […]
Neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair are in prison cells at The Hague where international law says they ought to be. Bush is still painting away from the comfort of his home, issuing proclamations comparing Putin to Hitler and platforming arguments for more interventionism in Ukraine. Blair is still merily warmongering his charred little heart out, saying NATO should not rule out directly attacking Russian forces in what amounts to a call for a thermonuclear world war.
They are free as birds, singing their same old demonic songs from the rooftops.
This is not a “whataboutism”: a whataboutism would try and hand-wave away Putin’s invasion on the basis that others have done the same. Putin must bear responsibility for pulling the war trigger. But that’s a responsibility that our own leaders never have owned up to, either.
As I’ve written before, it seems that the real reason Putin’s invasion has provoked such bluster and outrage from the West is not because of any high-minded morality, but because he is holding up a bloodstained mirror — and a great many people don’t like what they see.
What Putin has shown with brutal clarity is that the “rules-based international order” is a convenient fiction, observed more in the breach. Hard-headed Realism in international relations never went away, it just put on a friendly mask and played by the rules when it suited the powerful.
Everyone is a hypocrite when it comes to international relations. But the worst hypocrites are those who pretend to the highest virtue.
That includes, it must be said, critics like Johnstone. Johnstone praises the likes of New Zealand and the United Nations and routinely pillories the U.S. — but is that any less logically inconsistent than those who revile Putin while excusing Bush?
Johnstone cites, for instance, U.S. opposition to and refusal to join the International Criminal Court (ICC). But, as has been rightly pointed out, should it do so, it would mean that for the first time since 1776, Americans would be subject to a foreign power. That is a powerful argument, which exposes the U.N.’s own hypocrisy on national sovereignty.
As Johnstone rightly otherwise points out, the ICC overwhelmingly targets weaker, usually African, nations. Partly, of course, that’s because of the dire state of human rights in Africa. But it’s also an indictment of the non-American Western nations which hold all the power in the ICC.
International relations is rife with hypocrisy and it’s no less hypocritical to heap all the odium for that on the US than it is to damn Putin for doing pretty much as our own nations have done.
To damn him with faint praise, Putin has at least made it obvious for those who wish to see that the “New World Order” is a sham, from top to bottom.
It is entirely possible that we may see Putin ousted and brought before a war crimes tribunal one day, but that won’t make it valid. You can argue with logical consistency that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong and will have disastrous consequences far beyond the bloodshed it has already inflicted, but what you can’t do with any logical consistency whatsoever is claim that it is illegal. Because there is no authentically enforced framework for such a concept to apply.
Caitlyn Johnstone
And therein lies the rub. The “rules-based international order” creaked along through the Cold War, but post-Cold War it has become increasingly clear that it is simply not fit for purpose. Putin, Bush and Blair have made that clear.
That leaves us with two choices: either scrap the whole project and accept that naked Realism is the true state of the world, or set about building a genuine rules-based international order that doesn’t require constant lies and hypocrisy to grease its wheels.