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The UN charter is a bit lacking in the force of law department, as has been demonstrated all too often.. That's unfortunately been all very true. But the only

The UN charter is a bit lacking in the force of law department, as has been demonstrated all too often.. That's unfortunately been all very true. But the only written international laws are those specified "there" in the UN Charter. There are also the Nuremberg Tribunal precedents. That's where the 'there' is, not in the countries who can make up any law they care to pass. Note that all countries have ratified the UN Charter, but still prefer to breach it shamelessly whenever it suits them. But the 'rules-based order' is merely propaganda if if can't be examined closely according to what is written and World situations measured against what is plainly set forth. Because nothing is plainly set forth, countries can make up their own rules and do, whenever they want to, hence the 'rules-based order' which means anything they want it to. As in this quote from literature: “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.” ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass By not having the 'rules-based order' down in black and white, the West has maintained being the 'master' and in control by pure military power. Unfortunately, that time has gone. If the West wanted to retain control, they should have initiated a War against China back around 2020. But it's too late now. In their hubris, that moment has slipped out of the West's grasp. And the West should have bent over backwards to incorporate Russia into the West, rather than push it forcefully into the Chinese bloc. I am not optimistic about the future. I see the long-coming 'Really Big One' occurring in the next 12 months. It will affect us all.

rntn 5y ago
Yes, I agree with you about the outlook, though I am not sure of what the time line might be.. The ideal situation would of course be that the UN Charter was on the same footing as national law in all member states, though, that is clearly not the case and there is no prospect for it to ever be so.. Worse, the current situation in the Security Council is untenable and is already moving the mandate of international relations to organisations like NATO and the EU.. The West has collectively been so focused on capitalizing on their self assigned 'peace dividends' after the fall of the USSR that they actually believed that business partnership would change the CCP - and they forgot that the KGB was still very much an existential threat.. I'm not sure there ever was any chance of the UN transcending the problems of its predecessor, rather, I think it is not too early even now to look back on it as a modernized League of Nations that served a useful purpose to the sides of the Cold War and then just carried on under the ageis of the the US and its dozen aircraft carriers, so long as it didn't get in the way of our war aims, and so long as it wasn't really needed for something important like stopping the next world war (a task which it clearly can never be used for, any more than it would have been able to do anything to coordinate the business challenges of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.. ). The current problem came about because the West has come too late to the realization that the EU (and even NATO) will not survive Putin's undermining at their borders.. The looming problem is that they do not yet seem to realize that East Asia as it stands with Western aligned Japan, South Korea, etc., will not survive a similar act by China against Taiwan, or even just a Cuban missile crisis style 'quarantine'.. And, of course, each one of these potential flash points for WWIII takes time and resources to (we hope) defuse, as the window for reducing our petrochemical usage closes.. I appreciate the Lewis Caroll quote, as it is very apt; my interest, such as I can have any effect at all, is in understanding how such words are used in international information systems that make up the infrastructure of those organizations, and to shed some light wherever I am able.. Collectively, the UN and its constellation of NGOs, the EU, ASEAN and the large nascent trade organizations like RCEP and CPTPP are, semantically speaking, some of the most complex structures ever created ; here again, it would be great if all the rules in these organizations were collectively spelled out in 'black and white' as it were, but even internally, that is not the case - to say nothing of the fast emerging ad hoc relationships between these organizations.. Understanding how all these organizations and their power structure works would be great, but that is almost insurmontable complexity studded with jealousy guarded secrets.. In them, just as with other complex systems, there is a need for finding patterns that are not necessarily in 'black and white'.. Journalism has a large role in the matter, but, I think semantic analysis does too - especially for discerning patterns in the the vast oceans of open communications within and between those systems.. Hopefully, they can can be brought beyond their 20th century origins to legitimately serve some role in the imperatives of preventing conflict and coordinating our collective response to climate change to get out of all the messes we have made.. Thank you again for taking the time to think about this topic. I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss it here.
- simonblack 5y ago
  A couple of viewpoints: The West has collectively been so focused on capitalizing on their self assigned 'peace dividends' after the fall of the USSR that they actually believed that business partnership would change the CCP - and they forgot that the KGB was still very much an existential threat.. The current problem came about because the West has come too late to the realization that the EU (and even NATO) will not survive Putin's undermining at their borders.. 1. Those are West-centric viewpoints. I too used to be starry-eyed about the Stars and Stripes and had a similar West-centric viewpoint. However, I could not reconcile the contradictory values of the Iraq Invasion of 2003 and the Nuremberg/UN Charter specifications. If Nuremberg or UN Charter 'laws' were valid, how could the US, etc justify a war of aggression invading Iraq which was not an imminent threat to any other country at the time. (In fact it had been badly degraded by twelve years of heavy sanctions, including the Allbright 'worth it' sanctions which started to starve the general population and the 500,000 children which were said to have died during them.) Once my mental switch occurred, I looked at previous and later declarations of 'threats'. Around 2003 also, we started to hear how Venezuela was a 'threat to the US'. Venezuela? A threat? Now, come on!. Then I saw that any country which not say 'How high?' when commanded to jump by the US was also considered to be an adversary to be regime-changed or destroyed. That has continued for nearly two decades now of unipolarity power. Disagree with the US, and you're going to receive 'Democracy' from the bombers overhead. 2. Another point above, is that the 'peace dividends' after the fall of the USSR were non existent. That was because the Cold War was never considered to be finished by the US, otherwise NATO would have been disbanded at the same time as was the Warsaw Pact. Also the Cold War was not a victory by the US, as is commonly believed. The Cold War was a Draw, as both the US and the Soviets were bankrupted by the Cold War at around the same time. The US went from the World's biggest creditor nation in 1980 when Reagan became President to being the World's biggest debtor nation by the end of the 80s when Reagan stepped down. The US was fortunate in that they had the 'Credit Card' of the World's Reserve Currency. That allowed the US to continue on as before, seemingly victorious as it 'printed' money, whilst the National Debt continued to grow and grow and the country was de-industrialised because it couldn't really afford to improve itself. The crumbling infrastructure of today is a stark pointer to this collapse. The national Debt is now well over 30 trillion dollars, and it's an impossibility to restructure the US economy without the country collapsing completely into chaos. Meanwhile, the Soviets/Russia were fortunate in that they DID NOT have the World's Reserve Currency. That meant that they started from a lower, much more manageable level of debt when they were forced to restructure their whole economy completely during the 2000s. Yes, things were horrific in the depths of bankruptcy. Yes, it took more than ten years, but after those bad times, Russia is now a country with hefty foreign reserves, and has a very good positive balance of accounts. Thirty years after the 'end' of the Cold War, the Soviets/Russians are in better shape overall than the US. 3. EU (and even NATO) will not survive Putin's undermining at their borders.. You're looking at things with too short a look at history. Things didn't start in 2022. It was NATO that started changing borders back in the late 90s with the Wars that broke up Jugoslavia. It was NATO that split off Kosovo from Serbia. At that time, Russia said that was a bad move and it was a bad precedent for future border changes. As usual, the Russians were disregarded by the West. Now, when the boot is on the other foot, the West is screaming 'It's not fair!'. Regarding the Ukraine, it was the West, EU and NATO that provoked the Maidan Coup in 2014. It was McCain and Vicki "Fuck the EU" Nuland that bragged they'd spent five billion dollars to 'bring in democracy'. There was no 'Think of the civilians!' calls by the MSM during the whole seven years that the Ukrainian army were shelling civilians in the breakaway provinces. There was only deathly silence from the MSM regarding the 14,000 civilians killed during that time. There was no outcry in the UN about those. There were TWO(!) Minsk Agreements negotiated between Kiev and the two breakaway provinces but Kiev and the EU participants, France and Germany, refused to honor them. Note that Russia was not a party to the Minsk Agreements, and kept complaining that Kiev, France and Germany were not following through with what they had committed to. For more than seven years. Anyhow, we (mainly I) have digressed greatly from from our original 'rules-based order' discussion. I will end it here.

rntn 5y ago

Yes, I agree with you about the outlook, though I am not sure of what the time line might be.. The ideal situation would of course be that the UN Charter was on the same footing as national law in all member states, though, that is clearly not the case and there is no prospect for it to ever be so.. Worse, the current situation in the Security Council is untenable and is already moving the mandate of international relations to organisations like NATO and the EU.. The West has collectively been so focused on capitalizing on their self assigned 'peace dividends' after the fall of the USSR that they actually believed that business partnership would change the CCP - and they forgot that the KGB was still very much an existential threat.. I'm not sure there ever was any chance of the UN transcending the problems of its predecessor, rather, I think it is not too early even now to look back on it as a modernized League of Nations that served a useful purpose to the sides of the Cold War and then just carried on under the ageis of the the US and its dozen aircraft carriers, so long as it didn't get in the way of our war aims, and so long as it wasn't really needed for something important like stopping the next world war (a task which it clearly can never be used for, any more than it would have been able to do anything to coordinate the business challenges of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.. ). The current problem came about because the West has come too late to the realization that the EU (and even NATO) will not survive Putin's undermining at their borders.. The looming problem is that they do not yet seem to realize that East Asia as it stands with Western aligned Japan, South Korea, etc., will not survive a similar act by China against Taiwan, or even just a Cuban missile crisis style 'quarantine'.. And, of course, each one of these potential flash points for WWIII takes time and resources to (we hope) defuse, as the window for reducing our petrochemical usage closes.. I appreciate the Lewis Caroll quote, as it is very apt; my interest, such as I can have any effect at all, is in understanding how such words are used in international information systems that make up the infrastructure of those organizations, and to shed some light wherever I am able.. Collectively, the UN and its constellation of NGOs, the EU, ASEAN and the large nascent trade organizations like RCEP and CPTPP are, semantically speaking, some of the most complex structures ever created ; here again, it would be great if all the rules in these organizations were collectively spelled out in 'black and white' as it were, but even internally, that is not the case - to say nothing of the fast emerging ad hoc relationships between these organizations.. Understanding how all these organizations and their power structure works would be great, but that is almost insurmontable complexity studded with jealousy guarded secrets.. In them, just as with other complex systems, there is a need for finding patterns that are not necessarily in 'black and white'.. Journalism has a large role in the matter, but, I think semantic analysis does too - especially for discerning patterns in the the vast oceans of open communications within and between those systems.. Hopefully, they can can be brought beyond their 20th century origins to legitimately serve some role in the imperatives of preventing conflict and coordinating our collective response to climate change to get out of all the messes we have made.. Thank you again for taking the time to think about this topic. I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss it here.

simonblack 5y ago
A couple of viewpoints: The West has collectively been so focused on capitalizing on their self assigned 'peace dividends' after the fall of the USSR that they actually believed that business partnership would change the CCP - and they forgot that the KGB was still very much an existential threat.. The current problem came about because the West has come too late to the realization that the EU (and even NATO) will not survive Putin's undermining at their borders.. 1. Those are West-centric viewpoints. I too used to be starry-eyed about the Stars and Stripes and had a similar West-centric viewpoint. However, I could not reconcile the contradictory values of the Iraq Invasion of 2003 and the Nuremberg/UN Charter specifications. If Nuremberg or UN Charter 'laws' were valid, how could the US, etc justify a war of aggression invading Iraq which was not an imminent threat to any other country at the time. (In fact it had been badly degraded by twelve years of heavy sanctions, including the Allbright 'worth it' sanctions which started to starve the general population and the 500,000 children which were said to have died during them.) Once my mental switch occurred, I looked at previous and later declarations of 'threats'. Around 2003 also, we started to hear how Venezuela was a 'threat to the US'. Venezuela? A threat? Now, come on!. Then I saw that any country which not say 'How high?' when commanded to jump by the US was also considered to be an adversary to be regime-changed or destroyed. That has continued for nearly two decades now of unipolarity power. Disagree with the US, and you're going to receive 'Democracy' from the bombers overhead. 2. Another point above, is that the 'peace dividends' after the fall of the USSR were non existent. That was because the Cold War was never considered to be finished by the US, otherwise NATO would have been disbanded at the same time as was the Warsaw Pact. Also the Cold War was not a victory by the US, as is commonly believed. The Cold War was a Draw, as both the US and the Soviets were bankrupted by the Cold War at around the same time. The US went from the World's biggest creditor nation in 1980 when Reagan became President to being the World's biggest debtor nation by the end of the 80s when Reagan stepped down. The US was fortunate in that they had the 'Credit Card' of the World's Reserve Currency. That allowed the US to continue on as before, seemingly victorious as it 'printed' money, whilst the National Debt continued to grow and grow and the country was de-industrialised because it couldn't really afford to improve itself. The crumbling infrastructure of today is a stark pointer to this collapse. The national Debt is now well over 30 trillion dollars, and it's an impossibility to restructure the US economy without the country collapsing completely into chaos. Meanwhile, the Soviets/Russia were fortunate in that they DID NOT have the World's Reserve Currency. That meant that they started from a lower, much more manageable level of debt when they were forced to restructure their whole economy completely during the 2000s. Yes, things were horrific in the depths of bankruptcy. Yes, it took more than ten years, but after those bad times, Russia is now a country with hefty foreign reserves, and has a very good positive balance of accounts. Thirty years after the 'end' of the Cold War, the Soviets/Russians are in better shape overall than the US. 3. EU (and even NATO) will not survive Putin's undermining at their borders.. You're looking at things with too short a look at history. Things didn't start in 2022. It was NATO that started changing borders back in the late 90s with the Wars that broke up Jugoslavia. It was NATO that split off Kosovo from Serbia. At that time, Russia said that was a bad move and it was a bad precedent for future border changes. As usual, the Russians were disregarded by the West. Now, when the boot is on the other foot, the West is screaming 'It's not fair!'. Regarding the Ukraine, it was the West, EU and NATO that provoked the Maidan Coup in 2014. It was McCain and Vicki "Fuck the EU" Nuland that bragged they'd spent five billion dollars to 'bring in democracy'. There was no 'Think of the civilians!' calls by the MSM during the whole seven years that the Ukrainian army were shelling civilians in the breakaway provinces. There was only deathly silence from the MSM regarding the 14,000 civilians killed during that time. There was no outcry in the UN about those. There were TWO(!) Minsk Agreements negotiated between Kiev and the two breakaway provinces but Kiev and the EU participants, France and Germany, refused to honor them. Note that Russia was not a party to the Minsk Agreements, and kept complaining that Kiev, France and Germany were not following through with what they had committed to. For more than seven years. Anyhow, we (mainly I) have digressed greatly from from our original 'rules-based order' discussion. I will end it here.