When Barack Obama won the presidency, he promised to bring respect back to the United States by abandoning the supposed unilateralism of his predecessors, respecting international law, and respecting the sanctity of multilateral institutions and the consensus of nation-states. There would be no American exceptionalism; only the United States as one law-abiding nation among many.
How ironic it may be that it may very well be Obama — the Nobel Peace Prize laureate no less — who might end the modern era of agreements and treaties upon which international order has relied upon since the writings of Hugo Grotius, detailed here, if not even earlier in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.
To Obama, even more than Presidents Bush and Clinton before him, international law must conform to his own personal beliefs. A progressive worldview or outcome, therefore, trumps the letter of the law. Obama opposes the use of military force? Then forget the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. The agreement, which “welcome[d] the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon State,” committed the United States among others to assist Ukraine in the event it suffered aggression. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry bent over backward, however, to avoid fulfilling its commitment to Ukraine. Perhaps it was because, as an agreement — albeit one brokered by and entered into the United Nations record — the Budapest memorandum had no force in international law as far as the White House was concerned. In effect, the Obama team by its silence, suggested that the international community had pulled a fast one on Kiev, convincing Ukrainian leaders to forfeit their nuclear weapons for the price of ephemeral promises on a piece of paper.
More recently, the White House and State Department have been largely silent with regard to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s declaration that he considers the Oslo Accords null and void. There can certainly be mutual recrimination as to why the Oslo Accords did not fulfill their promise. The big picture, however, is that the existence of the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Accords are tied together. If Palestinian leaders walk away from their commitment at Oslo to foreswear terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist, then a strict reading of international law would send the PLO leadership back to Tunis (or anywhere that would take them). At a minimum, Israel should withhold and put in escrow any revenue it would otherwise transfer to an entity that Abbas has nullified. For the moment, however, let’s put aside the fact that Israel would be legally able to act unilaterally, as it will not take extreme action and has always put a desire for peace above any expansionist agenda, hence its willingness in 2000 and at several points since to withdraw largely to the 1949 Armistice lines (sometimes incorrectly called the pre-1967 borders) modified with land swaps. What Abbas is really suggesting is that firm, unalterable international agreements should have an expiration date of just over two decades, in effect, the same period the Budapest Memorandum was in force and respected. If the White House accepts his arguments in practice — and that is the signal they send when they have Kerry and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power boycott Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nation — then imagine the chaos if that precedent was implemented elsewhere in the world. The 1953 Korean War Armistice: It’s been more than 20 years, and so North Korea would, by precedent, be able to march into Seoul. The Camp David Accords? Let Egypt walk away; after all, they might as well have expired in 1998.
Then, again, none of this should surprise. As a state senator and then U.S. senator, Obama repeatedly condemned the 2003 Iraq war as illegal. George W. Bush, after all, had not waited for UN authorization before ordering U.S. forces to unseat Saddam Hussein. Reasonable people can debate whether or not the war was wise or necessary, but it was not illegal under international law: Bush acted under existing Chapter VII resolutions passed by the UN Security Council. To suggest that they were no longer binding would be to suggest, by precedent, a 13-year expiration date on Chapter VII Security Council resolutions, thereby undermining the entire basis of permanence in international law.
A mob mentality is not conducive to democracy. That is why democracies maintain elaborate systems of checks-and-balances. Populism can shift and, left unrestrained, lead to great violence as the world has learned repeatedly in the last century. Unfortunately, for all his rhetoric of international law, Obama increasingly wants the United States to be part of the mob and wants checks-and-balances subordinated to the fulfillment of a political agenda. That creates a perilous precedent that, when extended to the basic framework of international law — treaties and agreements — becomes increasingly corrosive. When adversaries and combatants understand that they will not be held to concession or compromise, then no country in its right mind would or should ever lay down their arms. In the Obama-era of U.S. leadership, they must understand that neither American commitments or international law matter, and that violations of these principles will be ignored, if not applauded.
