By Jon Schwarz
SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE President Donald Trump announced that John Bolton would
soon become his new national security adviser, Bolton wrote a peculiar op-ed for
The Wall Street Journal titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.”
What made Bolton’s column
odd was not his belligerence — he’s always been the embodiment of America’s
violent id in human/mustache form — but rather his invocation of “international
law.” According to Bolton, it is now legal for the U.S. to attack North Korea.
It is generally accepted
that states may engage in preemptive war if they face a so-called imminent
threat, under a classic formulation articulated by former U.S. Secretary of
State Daniel Webster in 1837. Webster wrote that a pre-emptive attack is valid
only if the “necessity of self-defense” is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no
choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” This is a high threshold,
which makes sense given that Webster was not supporting a pre-emptive war by
the U.S., but arguing that it was bogus for British soldiers to claim they had
been engaging in legitimate self-defense when they entered U.S. territory from
Canada.
But Bolton has spent his
entire career expressing his deep contempt for the entire concept of
international law. For Bolton, it’s a meaningless “theological exercise”
utilized by “the academic Left”
to prevent the U.S. from defending itself. (He does allow that international
customs may have their place in establishing “navigation protocols” for
“seafaring states.”)
Moreover, Bolton obviously
doesn’t mean what he says in his op-ed. The “threat” part of the imminent
threat to the U.S., he writes, would be North Korea possessing the capacity to
strike America with nuclear weapons via intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The “imminent” part is that they may have soon have this capacity. So it’s fine
for us to obliterate North Korea right now.
In other words, Bolton is
not arguing that North Korea is in fact about to
attack us. Rather, he contends that it is legal for a country to attack another
if the second country may soon possess the ability to
attack the former with nuclear weapons. But this would obviously mean that it’s
legitimate for Kim Jong Un to attack the nuclear-armed U.S., particularly after
Trump threatened to
“totally destroy” North Korea at the United Nations in September. Indeed, by
Bolton’s standard, it would also be okay for any country on earth to
immediately nuke the U.S.
Please continue this article here: https://theintercept.com/2018/04/03/north-korea-nuclear-trump-john-bolton/
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