Transcription
Does the fact of the genocide mean the demise of international law? Not necessarily. If there's a murder on the streets of London, do we say there is no more criminal law?
I have very mixed feelings about the International Criminal Court. I'd like to ask you how effective you really think it is.
I think that, uh, it all depends. The United States has gone to enormous lengths to punish, uh, the Russians.
Oh, really? Has it?
Well, I do believe they've gone to enormous lengths. I mean, what do you want them to do? Start World War II.
[Music]
Hello everyone. Can I get a round of applause for our host Maryanne Cart and a world without morality? Thank you very much. Uh, we've got a great panel today. We've got a great audience today because you always are great. Let's talk about the theme that we're going to be discussing. So, from the Crusades to the fight against Hitler, from US intervention in Vietnam to the Iraq War, morality has often been used to validate military campaigns and foreign policy goals. Yet Trump's emphasis on America First makes little attempt to hold the moral high ground and is based on self-interest alone. Securing US mineral rights in Ukraine is not proposed as a moral strategy. Meanwhile, Sweden's foreign minister recently renounced the idea of being a moral great power, and the UK has embraced realism in foreign affairs. While many warn that discarding morality leads to a world where might is right, others point to the terrors carried out in the name of morality. From the Inquisition to the Nazis who use morality to defend their crimes. So, in world affairs, are we facing a new age where moral claims are abandoned in favor of self-interest? Given radically different national perspectives, are the universal claims of morality implausible? Or is a language of morality essential to constrain belligerent leaders and their wild and sometimes tyrannical fantasies?
So here to discuss all this, or not quite here, John Mearsheimer is in Chicago, uh, but is joining us on Zoom. He is one of the most influential political theorists of our time. He's best known for crafting the theory of offensive realism, which argues that great powers are doomed to compete for dominance in an anarchic world. Kenneth Roth, uh, an attorney, activist, and author, best known as the executive director of Human Rights Watch for nearly 30 years. And in this role, he prosecuted the worst crimes, uh, humanity has committed in recent years. And Christina Lamb is one of Britain's leading foreign correspondents and a best-selling author, best known for her reporting on what war does to women. She's the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times.
So, as usual, we're going to ask each of them to set out their views in a three-minute pitch in answer to the question, should we abandon morality in talk of international politics and world affairs? John, I'm going to go to you first.
Thank you, Maryanne. My argument in brief is that you can't abandon, uh, morality, and that you shouldn't abandon morality. The reason that you can't abandon morality is the fact is that virtually everybody on the planet is a moral being. Each of us has a moral compass in our brain as well as a strategic compass. And even when states go out and behave in ways that I think are clearly morally wrong, they nevertheless try to justify their behavior by saying that they're doing the morally correct thing. And I think the best evidence of that today is that the Israelis, who are executing a genocide in Gaza, constantly emphasize that they have the most moral army in the world. This all just highlights just how important, uh, morality is and the fact that you cannot abandon it.
Now, you might find it surprising that a realist like me says you shouldn't abandon morality, but the fact is I think you shouldn't. But at the same time, and this is where my realist viewpoint comes in, I think there are real limits to what morality can do, uh, to affect when states start wars and also how they conduct wars. And the reason is that the strategic logic that's always at play in international politics sometimes conflicts with the moral logic. And when the strategic logic and the moral logic are pointing in different directions, the strategic logic almost always dominates. The moral logic is subordinated to the strategic logic.
Nevertheless, there are cases where the moral logic and the strategic logic are pointing in the same direction. A good example of that would be, uh, in Gaza today. I think it would make strategic sense as well as moral sense for the United States and for West Europe, uh, to put great pressure on the Israelis to end the genocide immediately. So the strategic logic and the moral logic in this case are not in tension, and in fact, the moral logic reinforces the strategic logic.
Then furthermore, and this is very important, there are a number of cases in international politics where strategic logic is just not at play and moral logic can have, uh, a lot of effect. And the best example of that, in my opinion, is Rwanda. I think that from the American perspective, we had no strategic stakes, uh, in the situation that was taking place in Rwanda, uh, in the early 1990s. And I think for moral reasons, the United States should have intervened.
So my bottom line here is that there are real limits to what you can do, uh, in international politics, uh, from a moral perspective, but nevertheless, moral thinking is ever-present, and sometimes it can have a significantly positive effect on outcomes. Thank you.
Thank you. Great.
Ken.
So, this worries me. And I didn't disagree with that much of what John said. Um, but let me just first start with the straw man and whack it away, which is to say, yeah, I don't believe that governments act altruistically, you know, for the most part. Um, they, they have strategic interests, of course. Um, there are, if there's a strong strategic interest, that's going to dominate. But there are many areas in, as John suggested, where there's not a strong strategic interest, and then the possibility of moral conduct enters.
Now, we all are aware of situations where supposedly moral action ended up badly. Um, on the question of, of military intervention for humanitarian reasons, so-called humanitarian intervention. You know, the good cases are, you know, stopping the, the, the Bosnian genocide. You know, John mentions the Rwanda genocide of 1994. I wish that UNIM or the UN peacekeeping force and the French extraction force that came in to take out the Westerners would have been given the mandate to stop this low-tech genocide that killed 800,000 people. It could have been stopped like that. Bill Clinton didn't want that mandate given. Kofi Annan didn't give it. It didn't happen. So those are, you know, examples where humanitarian intervention could have done something good.
But then you have the so-called humanitarian intervention in Libya, which turned into a regime change operation and left chaos. You have George W. Bush's invasion of, of Iraq, when there were no weapons of mass destruction. He suddenly was pushing the idea of, you know, getting rid of Saddam for humanitarian purposes. Again, it left chaos. And often chaos is worse than a dictatorship.
That said, there are many cases where moral action could make an enormous difference. And, and this involves often situations where there's not a strong strategic interest one way or the other. You know, John mentions stopping the aiding and abetting of the genocide in Gaza. Absolutely. What about pushing the United Arab Emirates to stop arming the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan that are committing a genocide there? You know, why not today press Rwanda's Paul Kagame to stop his invasion of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo? You know, these are areas where there aren't huge strategic implications, but a little pressure to do the right thing could make an enormous difference.
Fantastic. Thank you, Christina.
I'm also going to agree with both of you. You're probably not very surprised. I spend most of my time covering death and destruction in bad places, that I think there should be more morality in, um, international policy and relations. Uh, I feel like this couldn't be a more timely topic, given that we, uh, this just this week have seen all the pomp and regalia, um, that the UK has at its disposal used to honor somebody who is a convicted felon, um, a serial abuser of women, and has been calling for McCarthyite measures to stifle criticism and, uh, both against top universities, um, journalists.
Then, of course, we have Gaza, which has been mentioned, where we literally feel like we're just sitting watching genocide play out in front of us. Devastation beyond anything we can imagine. I often talk to people on the ground there, as of course, we're not allowed as journalists to go in. Um, and here there are stories of having to move 15 times from one place to another as the Israelis drive them out. Then I go to Israel and talk to the IDF, and they tell me that they are prosecuting the most moral, uh, war ever, that nobody has taken more, um, concern over avoiding civilian casualties. So, uh, make of that what you will.
People talk about Gaza a lot. A thing that worries me is the things we don't talk about. And that what would, for me, include a country that is one of the places most dear to my heart, which is Afghanistan. And here we are in 2025 with a country in the world where girls cannot go to high school or university. Women cannot go to banks, parks, uh, beauty salons. They just this week banned books written by women. Uh, you're not allowed to criticize the supreme leader. Where, you know, they've been in power now four years. Where are the voices against this? Why is not more being done? My view, we should all be, I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed as a journalist, as a woman, as a mother, that this is happening. Imagine if you had a daughter who couldn't go to school.
So, I feel very strongly that we're not doing anything about some of these things. And in fact, now, because of domestic pressures over issues like immigration, we are seeing countries actually now dealing with the Taliban, one of the most reprehensible regimes on earth, because they want to send back their refugees. So, it certainly doesn't feel like we're living in a time of much morality in international relations. In fact, you know, we often hear that the international rules-based order, um, has, has been abandoned.
Um, I also report a lot on what happens to women in war. And every nation, every member nation of the United Nations passed a resolution almost 25 years ago called Resolution 1325, which was to say that we should do something to try and stop, um, rape in war and also to increase women's participation in peacemaking and as peacekeepers. Here we are almost 25 years later. Nothing has improved in any of those. Less than 5% of peacekeepers are women. Tell me any peace, um, negotiations in the world that are going on at the moment that are headed by a woman, that even have women involved in them. Yeah. Every academic study says that if you have women involved, that, uh, peace negotiations are longer-lasting and work better.
Um, and as has been said, you know, there have been attempts to have what, what Robin Cook called an ethical foreign policy in the past. Um, of course, that, you know, um, I've seen myself on the ground how that, um, hasn't worked in most places. I covered the wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and Libya, and saw how what started off as interventions supposedly to just topple, um, dictators or repressive regimes, and where the military action actually worked very quickly with it, 45 days or two months in all of those cases, but there was no plan afterwards for, for what should happen next. And they've become disasters. And recently, I heard somebody talking about Afghanistan, where, as you know, it was a total humiliation for NATO and, uh, pulling out after 20 years and the Taliban coming back. Um, and somebody talking about it, senior officials said, the problem was we didn't listen to the Afghans. I mean, really, we went into a country, um, did all those things and never listened to the, to the people on the ground whose country it was.
I'm going to stop you there. Just, sorry, that you'll have plenty more opportunity to talk about this, which is fascinating. Um, but we, we, we've talked so far about what nation-states can and should do morally, and also what they haven't done morally. But can we just go back a step and and ask, you know, is there any sort of universal morality on which we can base this anyway? And and and aren't, um, national perspectives going to be different on what, what morality actually is? Ken?
Yes, there is. This is not a matter of, you know, "Oh, the shopkeeper on High Street is sleeping with his neighbor, you know, call in the F-35," or, you know, "My my employer didn't go to church, you know, send in the Marines." I mean, this is not about personal morality. This is about, you know, how should governments treat people? And the standards there are actually codified in a bunch of treaties, you know, essentially the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. And the essence is pretty straightforward. You know, you don't summarily shoot people, you don't imprison people, you don't torture people. If you're at war, you spare civilians. You don't drop, you know, to take the Israeli example, a 2,000-pound bomb on a neighborhood killing everybody within the radius of a, you know, of two football fields. Or you don't, you know, kill, um, one Hamas fighter and say it's legitimate in the process to kill 20 civilians. So, you know, these are standards that are pretty uniformly accepted. And, and so I, I think that to hold governments to those standards is not only appropriate, it's what they've signed up for. You know, people often think, oh, you know, are you just being some naive human rights activist to think that people should abide by the Geneva Conventions? Well, guess what? I didn't write the Geneva Conventions. The western militaries and, and other governments around the world wrote them, ratified them, agreed to abide by them, incorporated them into their, them into their codes of conduct. I'm just holding them to those standards. So, this is not a matter of some, you know, personal external imposed morality. This is the morality that the governments have signed up for. They've done that because the public demands it. Because we think that if you're going to fight a war, you should take steps to spare civilians. That's appropriate. That is public morality, but it's also the law. It's entirely fair to hold governments to that.
But John, uh, these governments aren't being held accountable, are they? They might have signed up to it, but, you know, we see Russia killing all, you know, loads of civilians in Ukraine, as Ken said. We see Israel killing loads of civilians in Gaza. Is it, is there any point to these international accords?
Let me just say to start, I agree with Ken. There's actually lots of agreement on what's right and what's wrong. And we have this huge body of international law which codifies a lot of these moral principles. The Genocide Convention being the most obvious one. So the, the rules, uh, are, are quite clear. There's quite a bit of agreement. Just very important to understand that. But I think there are two logics that cut against it and make it very difficult to hold states accountable. The first logic is the realist logic, which I laid out before, which is states think that when their survival is at stake or their national interest is being challenged, they have the right to violate international law as they see fit and then hire clever lawyers to defend them.
The second logic that gets in the way is basically nationalism. Uh, the world is divided up into nation-states, and those nations, uh, tend to think, uh, that they are right, that they are the good guys, and they have lots of leeway to act any way they want against the bad guys. You, you get this sort of "my country, right or wrong" logic that is very powerful. And when you start talking about "my country, right or wrong," and you start talking about the world in terms of good guys and bad guys, where you're the good guy and the other state is the bad guy, it's very easy to end up justifying, um, violating international moral precepts on the basis of the fact that it is your nation-state that is involved in the conflict. So both nationalism and realism get in the way of putting into play that body of international law that codifies all those moral precepts that are so important and, as Ken said, were agreed upon by most states in the system.
Ken.
Yeah. I mean, if I could, on both these points. I mean, first, the, the fact that a state feels that they are in jeopardy is not a justification for ripping up the Geneva Conventions. Because if you think about it, the Geneva Conventions are designed to regulate war. By definition, you're in jeopardy when you're in an armed conflict. And so, these nonetheless are the rules that everybody agreed to that would govern these kinds of existential situations.
The fact that somebody says, "Oh, I'm the good guy." I actually welcome that. Um, that gives, that gives the human rights movement our entree. Because if they were running around and saying, "I could give a damn about this. You know, these are just like Geneva Conventions, we're going to rip them up." Um, then we have nothing to work with. But the fact that everybody pretends to respect the Geneva Conventions, they pretend to respect human rights, allows us to then document where they fall short. And it's that embarrassing discrepancy between the haughty pretense of respect for these laws and the ugly reality that gives us the pressure, you know, through shaming, through delegitimization, to push them to better behave. Because we should recognize, you know, there is no constable force that we can call in and say, you know, arrest these bad guys. Um, so we need to rely on public pressure.
But do you think Putin feels shame? Do you think Netanyahu feels shame? Is it affecting the way they're behaving? It isn't, is it? The issue actually isn't do they personally feel shame. These are evil people. You know, they're never going to be converted into nice people. But the issue is rather, does the shame that attaches to the spotlighting of their atrocities in Gaza or Ukraine affect them? And it does. In the case of Netanyahu, what he has to worry about having lost the world, he now has to worry about losing US public opinion and therefore Donald Trump, his last, you know, source of support. In the case of Ukraine, I mean, Putin is absolutely fighting a, a huge public relations battle, trying to pretend that this was a defensive war. You know, "If only NATO didn't want to expand, I wouldn't have done this." I mean, that's crap. You know, this is about, you know, shutting down Ukraine's democracy so that it no longer serves as a model for the Russian people, because he can't afford to have a Slavic Orthodox major state next door to Russia that has a democracy. So, you know, while he pretends that this is a defensive war, the fact that everybody sees that it isn't enables us to generate pressure on him to end it.
And John, don't you think there's a danger that if liberal democracies do try to act morally, uh, in, in, in the way they treat other countries, they're up against the Putins and the Netanyahus and probably many others of this world who can be described as evil. And therefore the evil guys are always going to win because they're not constrained by these moral precepts?
I think that, uh, it all depends. Uh, the United States has gone to enormous lengths to punish, uh, the Russians, and to force—
I mean, I, I said not really, has it?
Well, I do believe they've gone to enormous lengths. I mean, what do you want them to do? Start World War II. We're basically involved up to our eyeballs in the war in Ukraine. It's not like we're not supplying the Ukrainians with weapons, training them, providing them with intelligence, giving them huge amounts of money, helping them plan their operations. I mean, the Russians say, I think quite correctly, that NATO is at war with Russia. The only thing further we could do is get directly involved in the combat. I'm sure you don't think that's a good idea because then we'd be heading towards World War II, and that's certainly not in our interest. But the problem is we've lost to the Russians. The Russians have beaten us. Putin's going to win in Ukraine. Uh, with regard to Netanyahu, there's no question that the United States, if it wanted, could shut down the genocide overnight. It'd be very easy to do that. The United States has huge amounts of coercive leverage over Netanyahu. So a lot depends on the particular situation as to whether or not you can, uh, affect the behavior of the other side.
But I would make one other point on this. I think you have to be very careful when you talk about running around the world and trying to impose your moral standards, uh, on other countries that you think are not living up to your own standards, because you then end up pursuing the sorts of policies that the United States pursued during the unipolar moment in the end, and in the end, you end up in the forever wars, and you end up killing huge numbers of people. I don't think we ended up doing good in Afghanistan. I don't think we ended up doing good in Iraq. I don't think we ended up doing good in Libya. I think it would have been all for the good if we had not directly invol— not become directly involved in all those wars and tried to do social engineering. So you have to understand that there are real limits to what you can do in terms of fostering what you think is the correct moral behavior in other countries around the world.
Yeah. And Christina, you must have come, you must have come across this a lot in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah. I guess that's what I was saying at the beginning. I mean, it, it seems to me, just following on from what you've both been saying, um, yeah, again, perhaps Netanyahu and Putin don't feel shame, but surely our leaders feel shame, and they do have tools that they can use to put pressure on. They can stop arming Israel. Um, so it does seem important to me that, um, and I feel like there's a lot of gray areas now. So, for example, I guess, you know, I would think that the moral case for war generally, it's self-defense, the one thing that you can't kind of question. But what about what the US did recently in Iran, trying to destroy its nuclear program, which in theory is to help the whole world, right? Be a safer place. Is that a moral thing to do? Um, and I also, I mean, maybe we should get onto this later on, but it seems to me the nature of war has changed so much that some of these questions now become much more complicated. So I see, for example, in Ukraine, the use of drones so much, right? If you go to the front line and east in Ukraine, it looks like the First World War, it's all muddy trenches, but it's terrifying being because the most, it is the most high-tech war ever being fought. You hear the whistle of drones overhead, you, there's nothing you can do. And when you're using weapons like that, which are, are robots, right? You, where, how do you then decide the morality? Look at, uh, I always thought that this was not discussed enough under the Obama administration when the CIA set up the, um, program to to wipe out supposed terrorists in Pakistan and other places using drones, using UAVs, and had this kind of kill list. That was the world's biggest state-sponsored assassination program we've ever seen under President Obama. And yet there was seemed to me very little discussion. And I think that that is something we need to be discussing a lot more because with AI, you know, this is the future of wars. People have to make different kinds of judgments. It's not so much men on the ground or women on the ground deciding if they're, if somebody's a civilian they're going to kill them. These are people, you know, with, play, piece of sort of, um, sticks at a console, you know, wiping somebody out hundreds of miles away. Yeah.
What do you think of that, Ken?
Well, we've named a few different situations. Let me just run through them quickly. I agree with John. You know, Trump is today aiding and abetting genocide. He could stop it tomorrow by suspending the US $3.8 billion of annual assistance and the endless arms sales. I disagree with John on Ukraine. To say Putin's going to win in Ukraine, I don't know where that comes from. I mean, this is not a real estate matter, you know, despite Trump's view. You know, yes, Putin's going to hang on to some territory in eastern Ukraine. That's not what it's about. This is about trying to snuff out Ukraine's democracy. And I think it's very unlikely that that will happen. Even though so far Trump, you know, while promising, threatening so-called severe consequences, has done nothing. You know, all of the pressure on Putin is from the Biden era. Um, and at this point from Europe, nothing more from the United States.
Now, Christina, you asked about, um, Iran. I think the reason that was an illegitimate bombing is because there was a deal easily to be had. In other words, all Iran wanted was the right, like everybody else, to be able to enrich uranium. Um, it was willing to accept deeply intrusive inspections to ensure that it didn't develop a bomb. That would have been an alternative to the bombing. It just wasn't taken because Netanyahu wanted, for his personal reasons, to go to war.
On the question of drones, you know, drones are double-edged. On the one hand, they are actually super accurate. And so, you know, would I want a drone used or a 2,000-pound bomb if somebody was attacking my neighborhood? The drone, any day. But at the same time, the question is, and this is, I think, what you're driving at, Christina, you know, who are you targeting? And what we saw with the US in Yemen or in, in, um, in western Pakistan is that they were using rotten intelligence to go after, you know, a funeral or a school bus or things that they thought were suspicious but turned out not to be because they didn't have anybody on the ground.
Um, today in Ukraine, so far, we're not yet at the stage of robots fighting. You know, these are still drones that are controlled by people. Um, the real danger is when we move toward fully autonomous lethal weapons, so-called killer robots. And there is an effort in Geneva now to ban those. But the major powers are just going slowly because they all think that they can win this fight. They can develop, you know, their, their killer robots before somebody else, and they'll get an advantage. But do we really want, you know, a world in which killer robots exist? I mean, I think back to Tahrir Square, you know, why was Mubarak felled by the Tahrir Square protests? Because he couldn't order the Egyptian army to shoot the protesters. If he had killer robots, that would not have been a problem, and there would not have been an overturning of the Mubarak dictatorship.
Yeah. That's a very good point. Um, John, now we seem to have entered an era, certainly in, in the US, in which it's what Trump does is entirely dictated by national self-interest and not by morality. He doesn't even claim to have morality on his side, I don't think. How is this going to affect the world? Is it, is it, do you think that sort of behavior is going to now spread through other nations? They think, well, if America doesn't care about morality, we don't have to either.
Can I just say, is that true? I mean, he—
Well, I don't know.
He, he, he would say that he's solved seven wars, right? Most of which had no self-interest for the US, right? So I'm not sure that he's claiming that.
But he's interested in mineral rights in Ukraine. He's interested in turning Gaza into an Arab Riviera. I don't know. But tell me if I'm wrong.
I mean, I have so many reasons to criticize Trump. I mean, his authoritarianism here in the United States is categorically dangerous. But in terms of foreign policy, I think your description of how he thinks about the world, uh, is correct. And I think that he is complicit in the genocide in Gaza. And I believe that this is going to have a devastating effect, uh, on international law and on the whole question of morality's place in international politics. Uh, I mean, I think what's been happening over the past two years in Gaza, uh, is a dagger in the heart of international law and morality. Uh, and, and what's very interesting here is that if you look at what people around the world are saying, if you look at what the human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Bet'lehm, uh, what the United Nations is saying, what the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and all sorts of people are saying about what the Israelis, along with the Americans, are doing in Gaza, uh, you see that people understand that this is morally wrong, that this is a genocide. Yet Trump just ignores it. The United States just ignores it. Netanyahu and the Israelis just ignore it. And they continue to execute this genocide as if public opinion or the opinion of these human rights groups and the United Nations just doesn't matter at all. This is disastrous. What's the message that's being sent to the world? So, I'm very pessimistic about where we are today and where we're heading. I think that what Trump is doing is, uh, absolutely bad news.
So, do you think we're heading to a sort of age of impunity?
Well, certainly the Trump administration acts with impunity. They don't care what, uh, public opinion around the world says. They don't care what the International Court of Justice says. And in fact, if you look at what the Trump administration is doing, it's actually targeting the International Criminal Court. It's trying to wreck the International Criminal Court. It has its gun sights on the International Court of Justice as well. So, it's not just that, uh, the Trump administration is ignoring what's happening, uh, with regard to, uh, international law. It's actually attacking the institutions that underpin international law. I mean, what's going to be left of the Geneva Convention on Genocide after, uh, what the Israelis are doing, uh, with the help of the Americans, and truth be told, with the help of the Europeans, uh, in Gaza? This is a disaster, and it's not going to end, by the way. The Israelis are not going to turn into nice guys, uh, once the genocide in Gaza stops. They still have to ethnically cleanse, uh, the West Bank, and they're going to continue to act like a rogue state throughout the region. And the question you want to ask yourself is, what is the United States going to do? What are the Europeans going to do? What are the Germans going to do? The answer is they're going to aid and abet the Israelis as they do horrible things to the Palestinians moving forward, and probably to other countries as well.
Ken,
Let me, before I turn to Gaza, I'd like to just extend it a little bit, and I want to talk about Rwanda, Congo, because it implicates Britain as well. In 2012, Paul Kagame, the Rwanda president, invaded Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo using a group called the M23, you know, a proxy rebel force. It stopped because William Hague, remember your foreign secretary, got on the phone, as did John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, and told Kagame, "Your aid is going to end unless you withdraw the M23." And the M23 crumbled within about three days. Fast forward to today. We had eight years of no M23. Now it's back. Why is it back? Well, because Kagame has been trying to pressure himself. Remember how he was offering the last government to take your asylum seekers? You know, this is part of his effort to make himself indispensable. And so today, nobody's pressuring Kagame to leave. You know, Trump's deal was basically a mineral deal. You know, you stay there, Kagame, just stop fighting, but you can exploit the minerals that you've seized in Eastern Congo. So, there has been a, you know, a step back that is not just about Trump, it's also about this government.
Now, Trump's attacks on the International Criminal Court, to put this in perspective, because I don't want to get, you know, all, you know, doomish about this. Um, this is not the first time that a US government has tried to attack the ICC. Remember George W. Bush? He pushed through Congress something called the American Service Members Protection Act. We dubbed it the Hague Invasion Act because what it literally did was authorize military force to the Hague if an American or any allied service member was imprisoned for prosecution. So how did we get past that? Why was the Hague not invaded? Because most other governments of the world, including Britain, said this is wrong. And, and we have seen that coalitions of rights-respecting governments or rights-promoting governments are able to stand up to a lawless government in Washington. That's the situation we face again today.
Now, in terms of Gaza, um, yes, you know, Trump is continuing to aid and abet the genocide. Everybody else has pulled away. I mean, even Germany, which, you know, never says no to Israel, has stopped sending arms. Um, today, you know, Starmer is supposed to recognize a Palestinian state. So, you know, Israel is really a pariah nation today, but for Trump. And the real question is, how do we put pressure on Trump to in turn force Netanyahu to stop the genocide? That is not as impossible as it may seem because, um, Trump has already distanced himself from Netanyahu in various respects. You know, he, he lifted the sanctions on the new Syrian regime. He, um, cut a deal with the Houthi that did not involve an end to attacking Israel. He criticized Netanyahu's, um, attack on the Hamas negotiators in Qatar. He's repudiated Netanyahu's false denial of of starvation in Gaza. He's twice imposed temporary ceasefires. It is not inconceivable that as US public opinion turns against Israel, including among Republicans, that Trump, who's always foremost about himself, will say, "This is just not worth the personal cost. I'm going to cut my losses and pressure Netanyahu to stop." So that's where morality matters.
Now, does the fact of the genocide mean the demise of international law? Not necessarily. I mean, if, if you look, if there's a murder on the streets of London, do we say there is no more criminal law or that this was a violation? You know, in the case of Israel, this is a very high-profile violation, but everybody under the sun has condemned it, every international institution has condemned it, but for the United States. And so, you know, what is this? Is the US authorizing a violation of international law, or is it complicit in a violation of international law? I think the latter. I think, you know, Trump could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for aiding and abetting genocide. I'm not holding my breath on that, but, you know, I don't think we should be too, um, doomsdayish. We should recognize that this is a blatant violation, but otherwise, that law has been reaffirmed, and we need to put pressure on Netanyahu to finally live up to the requirements and end his genocide.
Just want to make a couple of points to what you said. First of all, um, the situation in DRC, um, with M23, they didn't go away. I mean, I've gotten reporting there back and forth the last since 2017, and they were still causing absolute, okay, they didn't control the whole area, but, um, they were causing huge numbers of rapes of, of women and children. They were killing a lot of people. So I don't think it's quite right to say things stopped and now Trump's let it happen. You know,
It resumed. It resumed pre-Trump, but it resumed long before Trump, I would say. Um, um, secondly, I, so I have very mixed feelings about the International Criminal Court. I'd like to ask you how effective you really think it is. Um, not justifying in any way what Trump is saying or doing about it, but, you know, when it was set up 20 odd years ago, I thought it was a good thing, right? To to be able to call these people to account. But then I saw that on the ground, it actually had a detrimental effect because in the old days, you could, states could persuade dictators to step down and go live in the South of France in villas. Um, suddenly, with the International Criminal Court, lots of really bad guys wouldn't step down because they knew that they would be prosecuted. So, for example, I covered Zimbabwe a lot. Mugabe was, who, you know, created an absolutely horrific situation for his people. Um, one of the reasons that he never stepped down was because he saw what happened to Charles Taylor, and he often referred to that and didn't want the same. So he stayed causing, you know, terrible damage to people in his country a lot longer than he might have done if we didn't have the International Criminal Court. So that made me kind of think, you know, is this such a good thing, particularly as it frankly hasn't got a great record of bringing many people to justice and seems to particularly have focused on certain parts of the world.
What do you say to that?
Well, I mean, first, Christina, where I agree with you is it's been disappointing in what it's done. So far, it has only convicted warlords. It has not convicted a single government official. It also currently is headless because Karim Khan, the British barrister, who's the chief prosecutor, is on temporary leave because of sexual assault allegations. And these need to be seriously, you know, and these need to be resolved one way or the other, because you cannot afford to have this important institution headless at this critical moment. It once was accused of only focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. We're way past that now. You know, it's charged Netanyahu and Gallant in Israel, has charged Putin and four generals and his children's rights commissioner for Ukraine. Um, it, you know, Duterte, the former Philippine, um, president is in custody in the Hague. It is now seeking charges against, you know, the Myanmar count leader, against the two Taliban leaders. So, it's moved way beyond Africa.
Now, as to this claim that the threat of justice prolongs dictatorship, I've got to say I disagree. I have never seen a dictator who steps down early. Okay, dictators, you know, by their nature, cling to power as long as they can. And once they can't, for whatever reason, because, you know, internal politics shift at that point, they are in no position to insist on an amnesty. They've just got to go. So, you know, people may say, "Oh, I would step down but for the threat of prosecution." That's just not reality. And indeed, the, the flip side of this, if you can, you know, send the message that commit all the atrocities you want, and we'll give you an amnesty when you want to step down, that's just an invitation to mass atrocities. So I, I just, you know, don't accept this idea that justice is an impediment, um, to, to, you know, ending atrocities. It's one of the tools we have to try to deter them and stop them.
Great. Thank you so much to John Mearsheimer, Christina Lamb, Ken Roth, and to all of you.
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