The crime of aggression is treated seriously in international law. Political leaders have a moral and legal obligation to do likewise. There can’t be room for political hypocrisy if international law is to mean anything.
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Tag: International institutions
After Ukraine a fractured and unravelling global order will confront governments
Putin’s forces might not progress far beyond the Dnieper River. And yet the invasion will reshape the world in which the next Australian government operates.
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Strategic capitalism, geoeconomics and Australia’s choices
As market-based economic globalisation gives way to a system of state relations based largely on strategic capitalism, the Australian government seems to be using an outdated operating system. The demise of the multi-lateral, rules-based and open world will pose problems that demand imagination, innovation and deft and agile policy and diplomacy. In this environment Australia has a difficult course to chart.
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IMF’s WEO 2020 on climate mitigation: important, impractical, and naive
The fact that the International Monetary Fund recognises the urgency of addressing anthropogenic induced climate change and the importance of reducing carbon emissions from human activity by 2050 must be seen as a welcome step. But the report is impractical and naïve in some respects. The next step needs to go beyond the high level of abstraction that smooths over the diversity of economic, political and climate impacts in local situations.
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The UN at 75: a real declaration of intent, or multilateral virtue signalling?
An atmosphere of unreality is building in advance of the virtual meeting of world leaders on 21 September 2020 to mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UN). Nothing demonstrates this more than the proposed draft declaration. Rather than reaffirming the UN’s centrality, the draft declaration’s faux earnestness jars amid the current international reality. Additionally, it ignores the biggest challenge to multilateralism.
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Australia’s foreign policy: Resurgent realism or the survival of multilateralism?
Conceptual confusion is evident in the speechmaking of leading Australian political figures as the post World War II era’s structured international arrangements of durable institutions and agreed norms – designed to facilitate peaceful dispute resolution and cooperation on security, economic and social matters between nations – are challenged by the United States and others.
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The Trumping of international law and democratic institutions
Past US presidents used the potency of the American liberal democratic ideal to rally like-minded nations and to rein in and chasten the world’s miscreants. But under President Trump, the important institutions of constitutional democracy and international law have suffered serious damage, and the long-term prospects for peace and stability have been undercut as a result.
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