The flag of the US flying in front of the Capitol building.
Credit: iStock Photo
By Marc Champion
Welcome to the new multipolar world, in which everybody gets to behave like the US at its worst. It is not a safer place.
Over the last week, Iran has conducted missile strikes against targets in three sovereign countries — Iraq, Pakistan and Syria. Jordan also fired into Syria. The US (again) hit the Houthi militia in charge of Western Yemen, who have for weeks been launching attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Russia, of course, continues its murderous war in Ukraine to assert Moscow’s belief in its right to an empire. Israel is bombing Gaza to dust in defiance of US appeals and exchanging fire daily with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu rebuffed — point blank and in public — the Biden administration’s core demand to put a future Palestinian state at the heart any post-Gaza war settlement. His refusal promises indefinite Israeli occupation and instability in the Middle East.
If there’s any good news, it’s that China shows no sign — yet — of extending its belligerent claims in the South China Sea to attacking or blockading Taiwan. Yet that’s about current Chinese economic weakness, combined with a helpfully ambiguous election result in Taiwan, rather than any American influence or strength.
We’re used to the US throwing its weight around. It has conducted drone strikes against al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist groups wherever it finds them since the 1990s. In 1999, to Moscow’s fury, it bombed Serbia to prevent its ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, then a Serb province. It invaded Iraq in 2003, based on fake news about the presence of weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda terrorists.
It’s no coincidence that much of the international customary law governing when you can and can’t attack targets on territory that isn’t yours is based on historical incidents that involve America.
That started in 1837, long before the US was a global power, when it played host to rebels against British rule in Canada. British soldiers crossed into the US to punish the rebels, burned their ship, the Caroline, and floated it over Niagara Falls. By 1916, the boot was on the US foot. General John Pershing crossed uninvited into Mexico on a (failed) hunt for Pancho Villa, who had just killed 18 Americans in a cross-border raid. Then, of course, there was the devastating 1970 expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, to suppress North Vietnamese troops over the border, and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, aimed at rooting out al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. The US found and killed him a decade later, in Pakistan. The US global war on terror spawned a new generation of precedents.
The US was never unique. Israel conducted multiple raids and assassinations in other countries over the years, as did the former Soviet Union. Apartheid South Africa pursued the African National Congress, which it (and the US) considered a terrorist organization, into Angola in the 1970s. Yet for the brief, so-called unipolar moment that followed the end of the Cold War, the US was largely alone in routinely exercising what amounted to extra-territorial diktat by force, from the Balkans to Africa and the Middle East — mostly because it was the only one that had the drone technology, aircraft carriers, and reach to be capable.
That’s over. Many states and non-state actors now have attack drones, a game changer according to Michael Schmitt, who teaches international law at Reading University in the UK, is a distinguished scholar at West Point in the US and has advised both governments on the issue. “The other big game changer is cyber,’’ Schmitt told me. “If you are being struck by non-state actors sitting in haven countries, as they usually are, what do you do? We haven’t seen a lot of very destructive or lethal cyberattacks yet, but certainly we will in the future.”
Some cross-border actions are allowed under international law, which makes exceptions for those authorised by the United Nations Security Council and for self-defense. But even then, there’s no carte blanche. A government needs to have exhausted reasonable possibilities for the host state to deal with the problem. The actions need to be proportionate to the threat, which should be either imminent or continuing. Some countries pay attention and are meticulous about the law, Schmitt says, others not at all.
Exceptions are needed so the world can be policed and states can protect their populations. But American reach and overreach infuriated other would-be regional hegemons, in particular Russia, China and Iran. Its transgressions also undermined appeals for the so-called Global South to help defend the largely US-built “rules-based international order” its rivals want to destroy. More countries are now using force abroad, in some cases outdoing US excesses.
So Vladimir Putin’s Russia is once again using exotic weapons to assassinate opponents in exile — famously in the UK — a state practice impossible to justify as self-defense. Turkey routinely makes unsanctioned incursions into Iraq and Syria, in pursuit of Kurdish fighters and terrorists. Tehran uses proxies to attack its rivals across the region.
Self-defense is an elastic concept that when applied to cross-border strikes risks misinterpretation and unintended consequences, even if it’s legitimate. More and more states and terrorist organizations have access to attack drones. Some quasi-state groups, like the Houthis and Hezbollah, also have precision-guided missiles. Increasingly, these US-designated terrorist organizations have the power to force other governments into potentially escalatory strikes they would otherwise avoid. The reluctant decision by the US and UK to retaliate against Houthi missile installations is an obvious case in point.
The US proved a very flawed global policeman, but the world has begun to normalise and multiply the very worst of its behaviors. It’s difficult to imagine a way to put this genie back in its bottle. There is, according to Schmitt, no prospect of a new, enforceable international treaty being agreed to impose restraint.
Yet governments can and should spell out, in public and in detail, what they think the laws governing cross-border military action are, creating some basis for constraint and deterrence. They should be ready to call out and oppose obvious cases of abuse — like Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, or Israel’s disproportionate response in Gaza — based on self-evident facts and accepted legal principles. The US remains the world’s only global superpower, but its brief semi-monopoly on the power to unleash chaos is over.
In the brave new multipolar world, which so much of the planet wanted and the redistribution of technology and economic power made inevitable, we now have multiple agents of chaos. It’s time to recognise that and to deal with bad actors on their own demerits, rather than go on imagining there is an all-powerful puppet master in Washington that first needs to be cut to size.