No One is Above the Law

Also, in our application of international law, we cannot pick and choose which parts of the law we want to apply and which parts we want to avoid. For instance, when we hail the ‘International Criminal Court’ (ICC) for issuing an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, we must recognize that we are hailing an institution or a legal mechanism which we ourselves do not recognize. There should be liability and accountability, for instance, on the part of the ICC towards the architects of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. These were wars which were essentially carried out based on a false pretext and they were offensive wars of conquest as opposed to defensive wars, and in order to avoid accountability and liability for the architects of these unjustified wars of conquest, we ourselves do not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. 

Moreover, when we recognize the whole, we must also recognize its part, and in turn, when we deny the part, we must realize that we are denying the whole to which we are bound and from which the part emanates. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, for instance, puts the United Nations Charter on a level playing field with the U.S. Constitution. Although this is a legal interpretation which many folks might deny or consider as farfetched, since the ICC is part of the whole and the whole is equal to our constitution and the part can only emanate from a whole, then our denial or lack of recognition of the part is baseless. And in the past, we have not complied with the ICC when it came to their investigations into Afghanistan and Iraq. 

We must also consider where the enmity, hatred, and hostility towards Russia comes from in certain Western circles. For one, there is an economic motive, given that Russia’s national wealth amounts to about 90 trillion dollars in value, and in turn, Russia is trying to shield that wealth away from Western control. That is not a trifling amount of national wealth, given that the amount comes close to the amount of the national wealth of America, and it exceeds the amount wielded by other Western countries considerably. Russia, along with Iran and Qatar, also possesses half of the world’s natural gas supply.

Second, and in a political and social sense, certain Western circles arguably see Russia in themselves. Russia is a mirror image of them, in the sense that Russia, along with its Western counterparts, are Europeans with a past imperial glory that is now lost due to their law breaking, and into the void and the lost glory has come anger, frustration, and self-pity. We also fail to recognize that the war in Ukraine may have never escalated to this level had there not been an influx of Western weapons into Ukraine over the course of the last eight years, all in contravention of internationally recognized agreements and thus international law in the form of the ‘Minsk Agreements.’ 

Overall, however, there is something bigger going on, in the sense that the age and era of old white men breaking laws incessantly and in defiance of everyone else in the world has now come to an end. Our age and our era now demand some sort of civility and conformity to international norms, rules, and standards, and when such norms, rules, and standards are not met, then all kinds of problems will arise. Hence, it is time for all of us to get our act together per se, knowing full well that there are norms, rules, and standards based on international law which have long been denied and neglected on our part, and in turn realize that “no one is above the law.”