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It is also why in 2002 the Bush administration instituted what became known as the "Hague Invasion Act", saying military force will be used to liberate any US or US-allied military personnel from any ICC attempt to prosecute them for war crimes. It is also why Noam Chomsky famously said that if the Nuremberg laws had continued to be applied with fairness and consistency, then every post-WWII U.S. president would have been hanged.
This is also why former US National Security Advisor John Bolton once said that the US war machine is "dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply," which "does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional."
Bolton would certainly know. In his bloodthirsty push to manufacture consent for the Iraq invasion he spearheaded the removal of the director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a crucial institution for the enforcement of international law using measures which included threatening the director-general's children.
The OPCW is now subject to the dictates of the US government, as evidenced by the organisation's coverup of a 2018 false flag incident in Syria which resulted in airstrikes by the US, UK and France during Bolton's tenure as a senior Trump advisor.
The US continually works to subvert international law enforcement institutions to advance its own interests. When the US was seeking UN authorization for the Gulf War in 1991, Yemen dared to vote against it after which a member of the US delegation told Yemen's ambassador, "That's the most expensive vote you ever cast." Yemen lost not just 70 million dollars in US foreign aid but also a valuable labor contract with Saudi Arabia and a million Yemeni immigrants were sent home by America's Gulf state allies.
Simple observation of who is subject to international law enforcement and who is not makes it clear that the very concept of international law is now functionally nothing more than a narrative construct that's used to bludgeon and undermine governments who disobey the US-centralized empire.
That's why in the lead-up to this confrontation with Russia we saw a push among empire managers to swap out the term "international law" with "rules-based international order" which can mean anything and is entirely up to the interpretation of the world's dominant power structure.
It is entirely possible that we may see Putin ousted and brought before a war crimes tribunal one day but that won't make it valid. You can argue with logical consistency that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is wrong and will have disastrous consequences far beyond the bloodshed it has already inflicted but what you can't do with any logical consistency whatsoever is claim that it is illegal. Because there is no authentically enforced framework for such a concept to apply.
As US law professor Dale Carpenter has said, "If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law." This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.
You don't get to make international law meaningless and then claim that an invasion is "illegal". That's not a legitimate thing to do.
As long as we are living in a Wild West environment created by a murderous globe-spanning empire which benefits from it - claims about the legality of foreign invasions are just empty sounds.
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