Comment by xpe
3 days ago
Claim: according to any sensible definition of international law, this action was illegal. See [1] for example.
Would anyone care to offer a genuinely held counter argument? Preferably based on legal expertise.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/03/is-there-any-l...
> Vice President J. D. Vance suggested on X that this morning’s incursion is legal because “Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism.” But as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has noted, this logic would mean that the president can order an invasion of “any country where a national has an outstanding arrest warrant.”
- The Atlantic
Worse, it means that any country that the US wants to invade, it can justify it by manufacturing an indictment against the ruler.
There is no international law. Who enforces it? There are loose treaties that change all the time.
> There is no international law.
This is incredibly confused.
A reasonable person can say international law is unevenly enforced. This does not mean it does not matter. Both positive (what exists) and normative (what is ethical) considerations matter.
Communicating well matters. The above style of exaggeration is unhelpful if one cares about making sense of the world. Try to predict what happens in the future without factoring in international agreements and laws. Predictions from such models will be inferior, relatively speaking, to a version that does include paying attention to law.