Trump openly defies rules-based international order

Spotlight

DOES US President Donald Trump consider the rules-based international order worth preserving? That is probably one of the most vexing questions in international relations today.

The US show of force against Syria recently, when it launched 53 Tomahawk missiles at a military air base, suggests that the US feels in no way constrained by the international order which it has upheld since the end of World War II. This approach would seem to be a serious threat to international peace and security.

Military aggression against another sovereign state is only allowed in international relations following a resolution passed by the UN Security Council, or as an act of self defence according to Article 51 of the UN Charter.

When the US attacked Syria on April 7, it had neither a UN mandate to do so nor was it an act of self-defence. It also did not have the approval of the US Congress.

Its attack on a Syrian air base has thus been deemed by many international legal experts as an act of naked aggression.

The fact that children were writhing in pain and dying a slow death from chemical weapons on April 4 called for a robust international response, but it needed to be a collective multilateral response that fully and independently investigated where culpability lay for the chemical attack.

Russia repeatedly called for such an independent investigation, which would have examined traces of chemicals remaining in the area, as well as scoured the government air base from which the US claimed the chemical weapons were stored.

To have rushed into a military show of force without first establishing recent US bombing of Mosul.

Precision strikes against a Syrian government air base in the aftermath of heart wrenching coverage of civilians suffering from a chemical attack certainly captured the headlines and diverted attention.

US military interventions have always initially rallied Americans.

A number of possibilities could explain what happened and do not directly implicate the Syrian government in wrongdoing.

One would be that the Syrian military bombed a secret depot where chemical weapons were being stored by Islamic State or other opposition forces.

Ample evidence has emerged that opposition forces have used chemical weapons on a number of occasions.

In Idlib, opposition forces produced toxic landmines, and used chemical weapons in Aleppo. IS has also used chemical weapons in Iraq against the international coalition and the Iraqi army.

One should remember that the Syrian government allowed the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to destroy its chemical arsenal, and inspectors verified the elimination of the government’s chemical weapons.

If the authorities had used chemical weapons, there would have been traces of the powder on weapons in the area.

Even if the Syrian regime did still have some hidden chemical weapons, there was no strategic value in President Bashar al-assad deploying such weapons against civilians and opposition forces in Khan Sheikh, knowing that it would provoke a robust reaction from the US and the international community.

It would also lead to increased calls within the US administration for Assad’s overthrow, and an insistence that Assad play no part in the country’s long-term future.

That raises the question as to whether the chemical attack was a provocation, as the Russians have asserted, and the international community should take note of Russian warnings that further provocations by opposition forces could be planned in the southern suburbs of Damascus.

The other factor worth considering is whether the US missile attack on the Syrian base was planned in advance of the chemical attack. Whether the US preplanned the attack or had a kneejerk reaction, to project its power, the end-result has been a slide in Us-russian relations.

Trump has done a U-turn on Nato as he has on so many other issues, now claiming the alliance is no longer obsolete, and approving Nato’s expansion to include Montenegro, provoking fury in Moscow.

Russia continues to insist both at the UN and in The Hague on an independent investigation by the international community of what really happened in Khan Sheikh.

It may be too late for such an investigation, so long after the event. But what is worrying is that there are likely to be more chemical attacks against civilians in Syria, and the US is likely to continue to play judge, jury and executioner.

If the US believes it can act outside the confines of international law and the UN Charter in Syria, it is likely to do so in other theatres, which is destabilising for us all.