I am a subscriber to Peter Beinart’s Notebook. I find him a generous and engaging interviewer of his very well-informed and insightful guests. This morning, March 7th, I decided to listen to the interview that I feature in this post. As I listened to Aslı Ü. Bâli’s initial remarks, I was immediately astounded by the clarity of her analysis and depth of her knowledge. To the point: I urge you to watch and listen to this interview. I am no fan of the superlatives so common in this Trumpian age. That said, I assert that this interview is a “must-watch” for anyone seeking to understand this extraordinary moment of geostrategic violence. Bio: Aslı Ü. Bâli is Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Bâli’s teaching and research interests include public international law — particularly human rights law and the law of the international security order — and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. [Below the link to the interview, I have copied the intro to a post I began to draft a few days ago. I entitled it: The U.N. Security Council Might As Well Close Shop: The UNSC was dying even before the Israel - US War on Iran. I include it in this post because I think it is relevant to what Aslı Ü. Bâli speaks to, though I am now, with regret, more pessimistic than I think she might be of the potential of present supranational institutions such as the U.N.] 2 days ago · 124 likes · 22 comments · Peter Beinart Intro to draft post by Charles Knight: The U.N. Security Council Might As Well Close Shop: The UNSC was dying even before the Israel - US War on Iran I was born in 1946, a child of the nuclear age, of the post-war construction of U.S. global primacy, and of the Cold War. In varied ways, all three were foregrounded in my childhood, student years, and professional life. I clearly remember the U.N. flag that stood next to the U.S.A. flag in my elementary school. It was also on flag poles in town. The evening news included short segments on developments at the U.N. General Assembly. [above, Melania Trump speaks at the UNSC while U.S. bombers kill children in Iran.]That (now frequently delinquent) child of the “West”, the U.S.A., invented the United Nations and its mission of peace among nations. The U.N. was sold to the world’s nations and their people as an institution that would embody legal processes (security council deliberations, etc.) to rein in the too frequent violent inclinations of nations and thus reduce the frequency and severity of wars. Soon after the Soviet Union conveniently collapsed, the USA began an intentional, performatively disguised, exit from the very global institutional legal commitments it had once championed. Now, with the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, we can plainly see that the U.S. elites in Washington are fully committed to exercising their notions of global leadership outside of any effective international legal constraints. This is not new! It has been developing since at least 1990. We should also consider dating this officially sanctioned move toward international lawlessness to the establishment of the CIA’s covert action wing, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), in 1948. This earlier date suggests that the institutional episode of creating the United Nations (as well as the routine (even ritualized) references to “international law,” “peaceful intentions,” and, most recently, “a rules-based order”) was a performative distraction from the true intentions of Washington’s foreign policy establishment. This comports with my experience in the 1980s of being told by a cold warrior that the U.S. could not effectively work within the U.N. to advance a peaceful world because of the intransigence of the Soviet Union and its frequent vetoes of Security Council resolutions. After the Soviets were gone, the U.S. became the most frequent vetoer of Security Council resolutions. The Vulnerable Advocate is free to all. There is an option to become a paid subscriber, which supports guest authors.
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