Internatial law is weak
Jack L. Hiken & Eric A. Posner 5, Jack Goldsmith is Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, from October 2003 through July 2004, and Special Counsel to the General Counsel to the Department of Defense from September 2002 through June 2003. Goldsmith taught at the University of Chicago Law School from 1997-2002, and at the University of Virginia Law School from 1994-1997. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Washington & Lee University. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, and Judge George Aldrich on the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal - Eric Posner is the Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago. His research interests include antitrust law, financial regulation, international law, and constitutional law. Professor Posner is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Law, 4-x-2005, “The Limits of International Law”, AEI, https://www.angelfire.com/jazz/sugimoto/law.pdf // shaka
The role of international law in international relations and American foreign policy has received a great deal of attention since the end of the Cold War, and even more attention since 9/11. The end of the Cold War generated extraordinary optimism about the ability of international law to prevent war, preserve peace, and regulate economic and cultural relations among states. The UN Security Council became much more active and, notably, authorized the use of force against Iraq in the first Gulf War. Nations entered new, ambitious treaties governing the environment, human rights, and economic relations, including the creation of the World Trade Organization. These treaties created the first major international criminal tribunals since World War II, including tribunals to resolve cases arising out of civil war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda; and, then, a permanent International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over a broad range of international crimes. Europe made great strides toward integration, thanks in part to the successful operation of its European Court of Justice. As the twentieth century ended, optimism about international law was as high as it had ever been—as high as it was at the end of World War I and World War II, for example. We can conveniently use 9/11 as the date on which this optimism ended, but there were undercurrents of pessimism even earlier. The UN played a relatively minor role in bringing the conflicts in the Balkans to the end. Members of the Security Council could not agree on the use of force in Kosovo, and the NATO intervention was thus a violation of international law. The various international criminal tribunals turned out to be cumbersome and expensive institutions, they brought relatively few people to justice, and they stirred up the ethnic tensions they were meant to quell. Aggressive international trade integration produced a violent backlash in many countries. Treaty mechanisms seemed too weak to solve the most serious global problems, including environmental degradation and human rights abuses.