commondreams | International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President
Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by
accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.” Secretary of State
John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is “in direct, overt
violation of international law.”
Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done
more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with
rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further
normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the
antithesis of international law.
Fifty years ago, another former law professor, Senator Wayne Morse,
condemned such arrogance of power. “I don’t know why we think, just
because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might
for right,” Morse said on national TV in 1964. “And that’s the American
policy in Southeast Asia—just as unsound when we do it as when Russia
does it.”
Today, Uncle Sam continues to preen as the globe’s big sheriff on the
side of international law even while functioning as the world’s biggest
outlaw.
Rather than striving for an evenhanded assessment of how
“international law” has become so much coin of the hypocrisy realm,
mainline U.S. media are now transfixed with Kremlin villainy.
On Sunday night, the top of the New York Times
home page reported: “Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has pursued
his strategy with subterfuge, propaganda and brazen military threat,
taking aim as much at the United States and Europe as Ukraine itself.”
That was news coverage.
Following close behind, a Times editorial appeared in print Monday
morning, headlined “Russia’s Aggression,” condemning “Putin’s cynical
and outrageous exploitation of the Ukrainian crisis to seize control of
Crimea.” The liberal newspaper’s editorial board said that the United
States and the European Union “must make clear to him that he has
stepped far outside the bounds of civilized behavior.”
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