In his first months back in office, U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal, suggested that the United States could take ownership of Gaza after the expulsion of two million Palestinians, and demanded that Ukraine give up territory to Russia in exchange for a cease-fire.
These acts and statements might appear to be just a handful of examples of Trump’s typical wide-ranging and hyperbolic bluster. But in fact, they all form part of a cohesive assault on a long-standing principle of international law: that states are prohibited from threatening or using military force against other states to resolve disputes.
Before the twentieth century, legal theorists believed not only that countries could wage war to seize others’ land and resources but also that in some circumstances, they should. War was considered legal, the primary way to enforce national rights and resolve disputes between states. That all changed in 1928, when nearly every country in the world at the time joined the Kellogg-Briand Pact, agreeing that wars of aggression should be illegal and territorial conquest prohibited.
The 1945 UN Charter reaffirmed and expanded that commitment, putting at its core a prohibition on the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state.” Having discovered that merely agreeing to prohibit war was not by itself enough, states then went to extraordinary lengths to design frameworks and institutions to cement this essential rule, leading to the establishment of a new legal order that elevated economic tools over military might to ensure peace.
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