Book Report

On War

Clausewitz Was Right. The World Didn’t Get Kinder. International Law is Irrelevant.

The cameras flicker on. At the United Nations, delegates speak gravely of sovereignty, stability, and international law while quietly absorbing the news that Nicolás Maduro has been bundled into a plane — no emergency session, no sanctions cascade, no real serious anguished op-eds about the sanctity of borders (but mostly tacitly condoning commentary). A shrug passes for consensus. Elsewhere, the same institutions recoil in theatrical alarm when an American president jokes — half crudely, half sincerely — about Greenland. Panic erupts. Statements are drafted. Norms are invoked. Editorial boards rediscover the Westphalian system overnight. What was the difference, I wonder?

The pattern is familiar. Outrage follows power, not principle. Silence tracks advantage. Law blooms where enforcement aligns with corporate-capitalist-technofeudalist interest and withers where it does not. The performance remains immaculate; the choreography never changes. Only the targets do.

This is the world liberal internationalism insists is governed by rules.

The so-called rule-based world order, the system that eventually, apparently, was supposed to render war redundant, for it to become a vestigial artefact of juvenile humanity’s developmental…