Stop appealing to international law—there’s no such thing

There are important exceptions. Some international obligations become part of domestic law when states choose to incorporate them. In the United States, portions of the Geneva Conventions were adopted into federal statute and are therefore binding on American courts and officials as domestic law. Those rules function not because they are international, but because Americans made them their own. That distinction matters. The only international law that consistently constrains behaviour is the law that sovereign states voluntarily import into their own legal systems. Outside of that narrow channel, the force of international law depends almost entirely on whether other powerful states are willing to incur the cost of enforcing it. Sovereignty is the brute fact that someone, somewhere, has the last word. This is why authoritarian regimes that routinely violate human rights or territorial integrity do so with relative impunity, especially powerful ones. The cold reality is that rules only truly exist if a superior authority exists to impose them. The International Court of Justice can issue meaningful judgments only when states consent to being under its jurisdiction. The United Nations Security Council can authorize enforcement only when the veto powers permit it. In practice, these mechanisms function inside the boundaries of power geopolitics, not above them. The same is true of the laws of the sea. They matter because navies enforce them. Without major maritime powers willing to patrol shipping lanes, the legal framework governing oceans would collapse into suggestion. For much of the past 70 years, people convinced themselves that international law was real because it appeared to work. Sea lanes stayed open and trade flowed, while borders were mostly respected. But this was the byproduct of Pax Americana, not the triumph of a global or international legal structure. The rules held because the United States had the reach, the fleets, and the will to make them hold. What people mistook for a legal order was, in truth, an order backed by American power. This is why the reaction to Venezuela feels so panicked. When critics say the United States is violating international law, what they are really mourning is the idea of America as a neutral custodian of the system it built. They fear power-based partiality and the possibility that the world’s most powerful country no longer sees itself as the steward of a common order. That is a serious anxiety. But it is a moral and geopolitical one, rather than a legal one. You may oppose what the United States has done in Venezuela. You may applaud it. But you cannot pretend that there exists some global authority capable of compelling the superpower into compliance in the way domestic law does to ordinary citizens. Broader notions of international law are about power. And this week, power did what it always does: It acted in what it perceived to be its own self-interest.