Daniel Immerwahr

It's a story of

drugs going up, crime going up, and just repeated sovereignty clashes involving the U.S.

power, the extension of U.S.

power into Panama.

In my lifetime, every time something like this has happened, two objections are raised among others.

One is international law.

These things are called a violation of international law.

And then there's the hue and cry of,

uh about congressional approval what is international law in this case and what power if any does it have yeah i mean okay so it doesn't seem to have a lot of binding force but the idea is that you know as the steward of the system the united states has had some obligation to make some case that it is acting in concert with international law and it has done that in the past

And that's been a way of reassuring everyone that, OK, yes, we're invading Iraq.

And, you know, yes, it doesn't look great, but like we have a case to make why this is OK and why this doesn't mean that China can take Taiwan.

And so in some ways, you know, we're all still good, right?

We're all still invested in generally countries shouldn't be invading each other.

When you see something like what Trump is doing, which is sort of openly flouting international law, seems completely lack of interest in it, those expectations, norms, taboos, which are important in international affairs, start to break down.

And then other countries think, well, is international law gonna be binding on me?

Is it gonna be enforced on me?

Could I maybe get away with just breaking it?

If I am Xi Jinping,

or his successors, or Vladimir Putin, who's not going to be succeeded, by the way, by liberal internationalists.

They are pleased about this.