The Ezra Klein Show - What if America Followed the Rules?

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

We’re in a really strange moment in the foreign policy politics of the Democratic Party. People are looking for an alternative vision — an approach to American power in the world that would feel more moral and just, after the failures of President Biden, and the wrecking ball President Trump has taken to international rules and norms. The answer many on the left are coming to is powerfully simple: international law. America could just start following the rules that we helped write. Is that possible? Is that enough? What would that even look like? To talk through these questions, I invited Linda Kinstler on the show. She’s a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends.” She’s done some incredible writing and reporting on whether what we’re watching is the death of international law. In this conversation, we talk about the Biden administration’s failures to live up to the principles it set for itself, the Trump administration’s campaign to destroy the International Criminal Court and what it would take to reinvigorate international law. Mentioned: “Are we witnessing the death of international law?” by Linda Kinstler “Abdul El-Sayed, U.S. Senate candidate, on AIPAC and Israel” by Detroit Free Press Opinion Staff Book Recommendations: The Divided City by Nicole Loraux Crossing the Red Line by Akbar Shahid Ahmed Under Water by Tara Menon Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Kelsey Lannin, with Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Steph Khoury and Arpita Aneja. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is the foundation upon which a new, more moral, more just American foreign policy can be built, particularly after the devastation Donald Trump has wrought on international norms and rules? One answer I'm watching a lot of people come to, and particularly on the left, is that international law, which has fallen into such disrepair, can possibly be a source of renewal, that if America simply followed the rules that it helped write, that a much better world is possible. And I've ordered Can International Law, which has both been so weak at times

and also been so inspiring at others, can it actually bear that weight? Linda Kinsler is a fellow at Harvard. She's a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, and the author of, Come to This Court and Cry, How the Holocaust Ends. She's done some incredible writing and reporting on whether or not what we're watching is the death or the renewal of international law.

She joins me now. Linda Kinsler, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So I want to begin with this video that Mayors are on Mammani released not that long ago, arguing for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu. There is a reason the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest. As human beings, we have spent generations building a shared understanding that there are crimes so grave, they offend all of humanity. Anyone, with their eyes, with their heart, with their conscience,

should recognize the devastation he has wrought and understand that he belongs before a court of law. It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear, Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. What did you make of that? Not just the decision to release it, which has been controversial, but the focus in it on the relationship between America and the international criminal court. Yeah. I mean, I think, first of all, that was an immensely rhetorically powerful thing to do, even in enunciating the crimes in Gaza, that I think we cannot

underestimate just the kind of moral force of enunciating what those crimes were and articulating them precisely at the moment when they have been negated and denied in so many different places around the world, especially in the United States. I think, you know, what that did was call attention to the fact that international law is not separate from politics, that it is something that we need politicians to speak about as a force that exists and can be used if we choose to use it. Of course, while he was, you know, he was calling attention to the fact that he doesn't have the authority to execute the ICC arrest warrant. And America is not a signatory. Exactly. So there is, you know, but... And the Secretary of State in America wants to destroy the

court. Halfway across the world, there's an institution that calls itself the international criminal court. Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe you haven't. But chances are you don't know the names of its judges, of its prosecutors or its president. And you shouldn't have to. But as we speak, the ICC and its friends are waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes and compacts and the force of so-called international law. Right, no, there's all these reasons. It's like completely not actionable. It's a double-edgedged sword because on the one hand, you're calling attention to the fact that

the ICC does exist, perhaps alerting people to the fact that there is an arrest warrant. And on the other hand, there's a danger because you're also calling attention to the posity of international law, of its inability to work, and this disjuncture between this idea of arresting the imagery captured of Netanyahu being arrested in York City versus the reality, which is that that's never going to happen. I think that disjuncture is kind of dangerous for the perpetuation of international law. I think before we go further on this, when we talk about international law, when you talk about international law, what are you talking about? When many people think of international law, I think they often are actually just

thinking about criminal law, international criminal law, which is how we get the arrest warrant for a Netanyahu or for Putin, for example. And they're maybe not thinking about international law writ large, where we have things that govern like, you know, aviation law across the oceans, international transactions, things like that. So formally speaking, you're talking about the institutions that compose international law. You could say, the International Court of Justice, the international criminal court, the kind of many, many webs of treaties and conventions, the United Nations, these make up the edifice of international law when we refer to it. But there's also a kind of more theoretical way of thinking about it as a kind

of grammar as a language. And I think, you know, there is this kind of romantic idea of international law is dispassionate. If you look to its origins, it came about when we no longer had the divine right of kings, and we needed some kind of order to fill the void, to order a world without God and without divine right. And so now this system was created to kind of guide us through the moral void of the world and the inevitability of conflict. And when it fails to do that, as it so often does, we are left questioning its viability, its ability to persist in a fallen world. I think we're in a really strange moment in the foreign policy politics of the Democratic Party. I think they're in rupture.

And one thing that I think is interesting about the way they have ruptured is that you have Joe Biden coming to the presidency in 2021. And he promises to restore the rules-based international order. I speak today as president of the United States at the very start of my administration. And I'm sending a clear message to the world. America is back. The transatlantic alliance is back. And we are not looking backward. We are looking forward together.

And he believes in international institutions and international alliances, but the force may be that no other modern president really does. And then Ukraine happens on his watch, and then Gaza happens on his watch. And now what I see many on the left saying is well, what did you all believe in? If your rules-based international order allowed this,

if you protected Israel at the UN over this, if you gave the arms for this, if you are not a signatory, if you want to protect Netanyahu from this, then what was this order? Yeah, I mean, I think, and you can almost see the move away from that commitment in the reluctance to use that phrase

as the administration progressed, right? We get fewer and fewer invocations. of the rules-based international order, we get extreme reluctance to use words like war crimes and things of that nature. I think there's also, you know, this nostalgia, I suppose, that for the very fleeting moment of liberal peace that came after the Cold War, you know, this moment of U.S. hegemony, when you did have the ICC created, you had this real feeling that international law could be upheld by American strength, hello. And of course, we know we now live in the ruins of that vision.

Let me give voice to the discomfort I've heard from it on the other side, which is a lot of, you know, Jews I know, supporters of Israel, I know. One thing I hear them ask a lot is why is Israel and Gaza the center of all this? There is this sense that Israel has become the locusts of all this firm. I mean, you've written pieces, you know, reviewing books about how Israel, it's assault on Gaza, it's war in Gaza after October 7th, when I was sit in historical memory the way the Holocaust does, that it'll be another moment of sort of a historical turn. Right. And, you know, what I hear people say is, why Israel not Sudan, not Syria, not even Russia, why is there this much focus on this country and its particular conflicts in wars? Well, the apparent answer to that is that Israel is the closest United States ally and Russia is not, for example. But I don't think it's fair to say that these same questions don't come up when we think about, you know, Vladimir Putin is also wanted by the ICC. And I think we see similar behavior evinced by friendly nations that don't want to arrest him if he comes onto their territory, you know. And one legal scholar said it's all very well to say that you. uphold the values of international law, but that doesn't mean you have to invite Putin to come shopping in Paris.

You know, there is this kind of double speak when it comes to these evinced values. And I think, you know, but I think what the war in Gaza, the United States is implicated in that in a different way. I think foreign policy on the left, the response of foreign policy. And here I don't mean the Democratic Socialist. I mean like the broad tent of the Democratic Party, including, you know, moderates, leftists, all these folks. I think what kind of the government. I think what kind of comes next is very unsettled after the failures of the Biden era or what are perceived as the failures of the Biden era, what I perceive to be the failures of the Biden era, and of course then the just wanton corruption and aggression and unilateralism of the Trump era, where it's like

if we want Maduro, we just go in and take him. And one thing I see people trying to explore is could the next move just be follow the rules? So Abdullah Sayyad, who's now the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, he was asked in a newspaper kind of editorial board interview how he would make decisions about military aid and getting into conflicts. And his answer was, quote, international law. I believe we ought to be first among equals to enforce international law. We worked really hard after the worst world war in human history to build all these institutions, to build all these frameworks. And then we became the chief violator of all the frameworks. So the thing I see sort of happening more on the left side of the party, but not only, is sort of saying the structure is already there. We just need to follow it and believe in it.

And I guess my question for you is somebody who has really been covering the debate inside international law of what it can and can't do is, does it have that strength in it? Can it be enough of an answer to these problems? Not in and of itself. And I think the key phrase in his response is first among equals, right? I think at this point the ship has sailed, and it's the extent of the destruction of United States participation in these international courts and institutions has been so grave. You know, of course, the rest of the world is now on notice that we can't be relied upon to uphold any commitments that would result. And that's always been the case. You know, to say that your policy is going to be international law, that can mean any number of things, right?

As we were just discussing, it can also sanction crime. Of course, that's not what he means. But I think this idea that you can return to a world in which the United States is leading the charge to strengthen the rule of law on the global stage, given the situation we're in is perhaps far-fetched. However, I think there's no question that the field is in need of regeneration, and a lot of people are calling for that. What form that will take, I think, is the crux of the problem. Well, let me make the argument for the rules for a minute to see how you respond to it. One argument that I've heard people like Robert Wright, make, and others is that America would be much better off over its past 20-some years if it had just followed the rules. If when it couldn't get UN authorization to enter Iraq, it didn't.

That, I mean, for that matter, there would not have been UN authorization to enter Iran. I think, frankly, the Trump administration would be better off if it had accepted that. Right. And so one argument that I take fairly seriously is I just did a big piece on The Odyssey. Yeah. And that one value of international law to a superpower is actually that it ties it to the mast, that that is not a drawback. That, in fact, it is when we think we can do anything and should that we make our worst mistakes. and international law and procedures and institutions, and for that matter, Congress, impose a restraint

that it would otherwise be easy to forget. And more of our recent terrible errors seem like they have come from the absence of restraint rather than in excess of it. Yeah. No, I think that's very fair and perhaps true, although, of course, we don't know what the counterfactual would be. I guess I would say that the kind of legislative power of Congress is indeed really powerful and should be used as a mechanism of restraint. And I think we would not be better off in a world in which these international laws did not exist. Like I think what you could call the cynical argument that they have only made the world worse is unjust. And I think that's kind of not borne out in what we see. And I think people are better off for being able to name a genocide when it occurs and to claim human rights.

even in the breach, right, even when they're not enforced. I guess what I'm saying is that it's not going to be sufficient just to say, oh, let's go back to that, right, because that world has gone. And we need to kind of confront the new political reality in which these things have been weakened. One of the things that has been on my mind is, I don't know, I've become old enough now to have lived through a couple of cycles in foreign policy history. And I moved to Washington in 2005. And so obviously it's the post-9-11 period.

Yeah. But one memory that is occurring in that period, and certainly the years before 9-11, is the 90s. Mm-hmm. When in some ways this is like the apex of the world, quote unquote, respecting international law. Mm-hmm. And the big critique is that the UN and these systems were not able to move fast enough or clearly enough to prevent terrible massacres in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. and that, you know, I recently read George Packers really fascinating. I really recommend this book to people biography of Richard Holbrook called Arman.

And it's all about sort of him like trying to work around this to stop massacres. And so I remember a period when the people who understood themselves as humanitarian, their big critique was that the rules just didn't work. There was too easy to tie things up and process and security counsel vetoes. Yeah. And sort of now the people are humanitarian. are sort of taking refuge in at least what international law is supposed to do. So how do you balance that? Yeah, well, I think you're pointing to this moment also when we started to see the split in the field between this perception of international law

as something that indeed can prevent and punish the worst atrocities and something that actually provides license to states to commit those crimes by essentially codifying how they can. can do it within the realm of quote-unquote legality. And I think, you know, in the 90s, you have a Kosovo crisis. United States forces acting with our NATO allies have commenced airstrikes against Serbian military targets in the former Yugoslavia. The first time in its 50-year history that the military action would be an offensive action

and against a sovereign country. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan it, while saying this may be a legitimate use of force, questioned NATO's decision not to seek security council approval. Under the Chartero, the Security Council has primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. Therefore, the council should be involved in any decision to resort to force. The ICJ judge, Hillary Charles,

where talks about this moment as kind of formative for the perception of international law, as this heroic endeavor and international lawyers coming to save the world, right? And that draws a lot of people to the discipline even after, then it becomes very clear that that was a kind of extra legal operation. And so you constantly have these moments of international law responding to crisis and then kind of confronting its own ruin and that you see that throughout the 20th century. Tell me more about what is something you just kind of touched quickly.

which is the way in which these structures of legality have also created ways to open legal space maybe for things people consider atrocious. I mean, I think the most evident place you see this, and perhaps the listeners would be familiar with is the standard of intent for proving genocide. And if it falls short of that standard, then you don't have the grounds for conviction on that criminal. Right. If their intent is to destroy Hamas, even if what they do, you know, is genocidal from one perspective. In theory, the ICJ would not rule a genocide. Exactly. And so another example of this is, you know, if it's a legitimate military target,

you can explain it away if you're attacking it and avoid legal accountability in that way. And we've seen that qualification exploited all around the world and continue to see that happening. And so it's these very bureaucratic legalistic terms that when you hear them explained of as like, this is why this doesn't qualify as genocide, for example. To people on the street, that just seems like a moral abrogation oftentimes. When we were prepping for this episode, my producer, Jack McCordock, had me reread the speech Barack Obama gave when he was somewhat wildly given the Nobel Peace Prize, like upon taking office. And it gives us very strange, like, particularly in retrospect, very playing both sides of the argument speech, where he talks

about himself as a sort of direct descendant of Gandhian and Kingian nonviolence and that movement. I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there's nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But also that there is no peace without America's ability to enforce that peace, that treaties are not what ended World War II, that force was what ended World War II. As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is

and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force, may sometimes be necessary, is not a call to cynicism. It is a recognition of history. And he really gives his defense of America as like the indispensable superpower that is needed to make any of these ideals real. But then you're sort of back in this like endless run around of what happens if, you know, you can't get the UN Security Council to bless your military intervention and, you know, against Russian or

aggression in Ukraine. Yeah, totally. And I think in that speech, he also, if I'm recalling correctly, he speaks of the necessity of being both an idealist and a realist and of not committing to either one of those ideologies and letting it blind you, perhaps. And this idea of the kind of self-enlightened state, hegemon, who follows international law, of course, there's the question, if, you know, he was making the argument, we can't pretend that this edifice hasn't been upheld for the past 60 years without American strength and power. And that, And of course, now we are confronting a world in which we are no longer self-inlightened in that way, perhaps, and explicitly destroying all of these commitments. Or saying, you know, perhaps they're not irrelevant anymore.

In Iran, we are seeing the implications of that abnegation. And you did this big piece for Guardian Longreeds. Are we witnessing the death of international law? Yeah. Tell me why. Well, I think that was brought about by the Trump administration's explicit. rejection and withdrawal from these conventions and treaties and hostility towards all of these institutions that are the physical embodiments of international law as we think of them. And I think

with Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing this campaign to dismantle the ICC, that has led people to say, oh, is international law a dead man walking? Can the U.S. actually take this down? And the answer is it's not up to the United States to dismantle it. We are not a party to the ICC, and we haven't been for some time. But what's happening is we're making it very, very difficult for it to operate through sanctions on the sitting judges. They can't use their credit cards. They can't use American technology. They've spoken about this at length.

It's worth to stand this for a minute that we are treating the judges of the international criminal court like they are top members of Vladimir Putin's government. We are using punitive tools to harm them for what? What is our description of why we were sanctioning dolly appointed judges of the ICC? Because of this perceived threat. The language that the State Department has used in its messaging has been about this perceived threat to American personnel and allies, right? So we could think of the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Galant. But I think it's also important to note that this isn't the first time that this has happened. Under Bush, the United States nullified its signature to the Rome Charter, which is what established the ICC.

And John Bolton at the time said that the United States would make the ICC whither and collapse. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. And we certainly will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all, for our, all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us. Rubio might have said we're going to take apart the ICC brick by brick, and they might very well be committed to doing so, but this is not a kind of anomaly. But what's sort of odd about it is that at the same time that we have this intense hostility

towards it, you will also see them flip at weird moments. Like Lindsay Graham was very excited about the judgments rendered against Putin. Lindsey Graham says Russian President Vladimir Putin should be investigated for war crimes, and he is urging the Senate to pass a resolution supporting an international criminal court investigation into Putin and his regimes, quote, crimes against humanity and war crimes against the people of Ukraine and others, close quote. I think it is an American's interest to make sure that Putin, who has an arrest warrant issued by the ICC for his war crimes, that we do not forgive and forget as a nation, and we help the international community.

And Graham was no friend of the ICC. He was not saying America should become a signatory to it. But then he was saying, well, if we can't arrest Putin for it, we should. And you sometimes get this movement, even inside the Republican Party, where there can be this remarkable hostility to the ICC, that, well, when they like a ruling or they see it as useful. And by the way, from other countries, too, nothing Putin loves accusing America of, like violations of international law, that there is

this constant, what is it, hypocrisy is the tribute, like, piece to virtue that happens in the way people talk about this? Yeah. And that is a way of using international law to serve the ends of power, right? Of course, when it's being used against our enemies, we can say, yeah, great, issue the arrest warrant. And it's a different thing when in the history of U.S. policy, it's been wielded against our own allies and personnel. And, you know, famously, we have what's called the Hague Invasion Act that allows us the authority or that Congress has given the authority for the U.S. to literally invade the Hague to extract U.S. personnel who hypothetically would have been arrested by the court. You read a great piece about what gets called

flexible realism, the Trump administration's flexible realism, which I think in practice is a license to do whatever you want. There's a German word you had in that piece. Machetechpolitik. What is Machetechpolitik? Could you define that for a second? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that comes from the scholar Patrick Porter, who says this is the corrupt cousin of realism, right?

It's precisely when the restraints have been blown away, when a power is no longer cognizant of its own limits. And that's when it really starts to make mistakes. And so everyone quotes Thucydides, the strong will do what they will and the weak will suffer what they must as this kind of creed of realism. and actually that's a warning that unrestrained power leads to the demise of a nation. And so I think that's what he's saying is there's this kind of idea that if you have a form of politics that's purely driven by strength and the will to power, that is a quick way to reach your own demise. And so you have that on the one side, which I think is a little bit of what we're seeing play out in Trump's foreign policy. I don't think it has ended up being enhancing for American power. But certainly their belief in it, what they have articulated to me personally about their belief, is that America had all of this surplus power that it was not using because it was tied up in all these international forums and agreements.

And they were going to use that power. And America was going to exercise its will upon the world in a way that these weak need liberals and leftists were not allowing it to do. And so then you see emerging on the other side, something that would. much more subordinate America's power, even beyond where it was in, you know, the Obama or Biden or Clinton conceptions of foreign policy, which is we should really follow international law. We should follow the rules. If we want to do something, even we think it is moral or right or good, and we cannot get the UN to say yes to it, or we can not get NATO to say yes to it, or we cannot get Congress for that matter to say yes to it, we should not do it even if we find that frustrating. And so it actually seems to me like the foreign policy visions that are emerging are actually much more polarized about how American power should be used than in other times, at least in my time covering foreign policy.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a debate about whether what you call subordination to international law is a limitation of power rather than an expression of it, right? I think, you know, this is some realists express this view that international law can be a tool of power and that we are weakening ourselves when we're, we do not subscribe to it and we do not play the game. You know, you see China expressing power by trying to actually influence how international law is conducted and what definitions it uses. For example, one of the things that they're guarding is this principle of sovereignty. That's very, very important to them. And so by strengthening the international commitment to sovereignty, which of course has implications for their own policy, you kind of see them establishing themselves as the leader and the field in the way that the United States used to be. They're kind of demonstrating how you can flex muscle

by participation and not by absence. But to push on that, China, to the extent they are stepping into the breach left by America, is pushing a vision of the rules that is less about the application of values or morality and more about the strength of territorial borders. But do they believe in that with Tibet? Do they believe in that with Taiwan? Have they been all that critical of Xi's dear friend Vladimir Putin entering Ukraine? Certainly they say that. But when I look at China's behavior, at the very least it seems there's a large loophole for if you say those are not real borders, that's ours. But who's going to stop you? Yeah, totally. And I think what that's getting to is this perception that international law is not completest, right? Like it's full of loopholes. It is full of

hypocrisies. What I spoke to John Meersheimer, who's one of the most prominent realists in the country, said, of course, you know, we subscribe to international law when it suits us. And I think China is showing that also. And that gets back to this question about international law as an expression of power and as a vehicle of power. I want to stay for a second though on this question of perhaps sovereignty as a principle, because one thing that I was thinking about as you began talking about China, Is it yes, you can say that the way China frames its relationship to international law, whether or not they really believe in sovereignty, as maybe it looks to me, is questionable, fair enough. On the other hand, some interesting convergence here.

So Sam Moyne and Azebole, who are two scholars, I have great respect for, Osabali's been on the show. They're a piece in The Guardian about what the post-American World Order should look like. You tweeted it out very approvingly. And as I read that, it was a much more parsimonious, much thinner conception of what the agreements should be that were really based on sovereignty. It was a sort of anti-war pact. So can you maybe explain what their vision looked like and what you found interesting in it? What I took them to be saying is that we should almost kind of return to brass tax and kind of not discount international law as a meaningful force of the world. what I am concerned about is that when people see it not working, for example, in Gaza or in Ukraine,

in its conspicuous failure to hold back these terrible atrocities, that they will discount it entirely. And in my conversations with particularly American lawyers, sometimes they say, oh, international law is a joke. It doesn't exist. And that is coming from the position of the hegemon, right? The position of strength and power. It's not something that you hear in other parts of the world, generally speaking. And I think what they were saying is, no, it absolutely does exist and it should be preserved, but we can't return to this kind of fantastical vision of a liberal internationalism that has proven quite destructive in many ways. So you should go back not to where you have maybe criminal courts and all these different treaties, but just saying, and this is me characterizing what I thought I was reading, but I'm not a international lawyer, that the agreement should be we don't invade each other.

Yeah. And returning to the taboo against the crime of aggression and of conquest, right, which has been totally blown out of the water in recent years. But then I think you immediately get into this question, which I take as maybe one of the fundamental questions of foreign policy of international help. What do you do when it is violated? What is law without the police? What is law without enforcement? I think there is a particular challenge that people have a liberal persuasion face right now. And here I mean like broadly liberal, liberal in a way that, you know, unites left and moderates and just kind of people who believe in both domestic and international rules, which is all these systems from our courts to the UN, the ICC.

We have these kind of beautiful values that then need to be made real in the world through flawed institutions run by human beings. Yeah. And because the broad left has become the party that is in the institutions, people become human rights lawyers and international law experts. They fundamentally believe in it. And so their friends are in these institutions. You get really caught in the questions of proceduralism. But let me drop us like a level beneath. What are the values at the base of all this?

When people were building this system, you've written beautiful. about the history here, maybe in a way that almost now sounds naive. Like, what were they trying to achieve? They were trying to realize a liberal order in which violence would no longer be the way that states would settle disputes, right? There was this notion of peace through law, very romantic ideal. And, you know, the philosopher Judith Schlaher writes about how this idea of law above all legalism became inseparable from liberalism. And I think what you were speaking about, about this kind of turn to proceduralism and this emphasis on bureaucracy that often, you know, law gets so caught up in this. And it also makes it hard to understand from the outside that that is actually where precisely these like moral values that undergirded the project in the first place get lost and get drowned out. And, you know, I think often about the fundamental problem of all law, not just. international law is how do you make moral wrongs, wrongs that exceed our capacity really to

understand and certainly punish, how do you nevertheless make them legible in this extremely brittle and perfect system that we have created? You know, and there's this wonderful scholar at Yossal Rogat, who many years ago about the Eichmann trial wrote that we've never escaped the problem of the orostaya of the Escalist play, that the submission of moral wrongs to a legal order. And that's where we're constantly fighting this battle to end the cycle of vengeance. And our legal systems are constantly showing themselves to be inadequate, but also to hold this strange power that we don't always and our legal systems are constantly showing themselves to be inadequate, but also to hold

this strange power that we don't always know how to use. I want to stay on this idea of the moral wrongs and what are we really trying to do with them. Yeah. I think that there is a deep ambiguity about whether the underlying values here were about a system in which certain things could not happen, a system in which there was redress for those things, or is what we're really in the end arguing about the historical memory of them. And those are all different kinds of operations. And maybe the way I put this to put it in the terms, I think, that we're really arguing. And now, there's a question of, you know, Hamas attacks on October 7th.

There's obviously deep history in that conflict, right? You know, there's occupation. There's a lot of legal rulings there. But within international law, like Israel was able to respond. I think the view is they've gone way too far into a kind of barbarism in Gaza. But what would, like, redress mean? But then I think there's also this question that is operating the particular force there of what is the meaning of it all. And I think genocide in particular, the reason that has been such a white-hot debate is because if genocide is proven, it changes the meaning of Israel, right?

It changes what it exists in as historical memory, right? The real punishment is what you mean. going forward, right? If Israel is a country formed out of genocide and then also one of the very few proven guilty of it, then what is Israel? But it's really in a way, I feel like so much of the fights right now are like, can you use international law to impose a meaning on things that have happened,

such that it exists as a warning to others? Absolutely. And I think, you know, the symbolic value of a genocide ruling in the ICJ cases about Gaza cannot be underestimated what that would do for everyone involved. And, you know, the legal scholar Leila Siddot, who's really pushing for a convention for crimes against humanity to make them legible before the ICJ to be able to bring suits before them that would correct this, you know, elevation of genocide as the kind of crime of crimes. But she argues that the genocide convention has become a memorial to the Holocaust

precisely because it hasn't been able to be used. and we only have one decision from the ICJ in the Bosnia v. Serbia case that some people have pointed to as a precedent for what might happen in the litigation against Israel. These are all questions about historical memory. And with this question of prevention, one of the sitting judges on the ICJ and one of his rulings at the very end, he said, And after describing all of the crimes that had been commissioned and all of the violations, and he ended and he said the court is just a court. You know, there is a limit to its power.

And I think we have to think about what happens outside the court of law, right? You know, if we talk about only what international law can and cannot do, then we get right back into legalism, right? Well, this to me is one of the places where maybe this conversation is bearing more weight than it can hold. You know, you imagine a world where the ICJ rules that maybe entirely or at least for the most part, that what Israel plausibly believed it was doing was destroying Hamas, which was embedded in civilian populations. And so what they did is the same either way, but it cannot be proven as genocide. So one, I don't think any of the people believe it's genocide would say after that, well, never mind. We went to the international courts.

The courts ruled, you know, without fear or favor. And we're willing to say maybe that went too far, but it's not a genocide. But on the other side, what people really wanted, I think, was not law but leadership. That international law is not preventive in this way. And I think so much of the fury that is actually splitting apart the Democratic Party right now is, you know, You know, it's such a strange thing. It's like Joe Biden had few bigger supporters, particularly at the end than Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and that, the left. And yet it was, you know, Biden's administration that as much as anyone did

allow this to happen, abetted this happening. And I think that what is sort of operating, but without people having exactly the way to say what it means in policy is they want to see leadership that would not accept that again. And that it's not that it's not that it's bound by any one rule or any one law, but that it is, but like how do you see if there is agreement on morality? Because I think some of the split in Democratic parties, it turned out there wasn't. It turned out what some people thought was unimaginable. And what other people thought was just part of war were different. Yeah, I think there is this unquestionable desire for leadership. And, you know, I was even thinking about this. I think most people go about their

lives and they're not aware of the ICJ. They don't think about it or the ICC for that matter. But there were a few weeks when those proceedings were not only on the front page of the New York Times, but also people were waiting outside the Peace Palace and the Hague, watching a kind of live stream waiting for a moral verdict that wasn't going to come, at least certainly not on that day. And as you say, certainly not soon. It's not going to be salvific, right? Whatever judgment comes, And whatever political resolution, right, whatever policy changes I think the Democrats need to make and will make come of this will not undo the harm done. I think this is when we start thinking about international law as a kind of tragic field. And the kind of void of leadership that we are experiencing now is almost reflective of this inability to kind of articulate the tragic nature of it in politics. because that's anathema to how we normally think about the messaging that we want our politicians to events. I think it goes to something you were saying earlier about why in American politics, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel's reprisal in Gaza feel different. Yeah. Because we were not able to stop Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

We have certainly hindered it. But the difference is there isn't a feeling of complicity. And to some degree, I think that means a lot in politics, right? People have this question like, well, what is America? Now, I don't know. I'm not 100% sure this is true because I think there is something about and has for a long time, it's something about Israel that attracts attention and interest. And I know people would say it's anti-Semitism.

I think it can be that, but I think it's also much more complicated in that. It has to do with ties and affinities. It also comes in positive attention, right, where people, people have like a deep relationship to Israel in America that they don't have to other countries. But nevertheless, that there is like a question of what does it say about who we are? And what does it say about what our foreign policy is? And that feels like the deeply unanswered question. I think, you know, we're kind of seeing that play out, particularly if you look at Ukraine right now,

where you have what, you know, is a war of self-executive. defense, trying to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty that will certainly end if it does end, if we can speak of an end in an unjust peace, right? It will be kind of negotiated settlement. We're already seeing that the terms are likely to be favorable to Russia. And, you know, in Gaza, the terms with which the Trump administration has spoken about bringing an end to that conflict have similarly kind of almost completely discounted the sovereignty of the Palestinian people. And, you know, I've long been fascinated by this question of endings and how we now live in this era of wars with no discernible end, that making these moral judgments in categories very difficult. What do you mean we live in an era of wars with no discernible? And how is this era different than what's come before it?

I think, you know, well, and I have written about how ceasefires have become a replacement for lasting peace settlements. And I was really struck by this when, as part of the protests against the war in Gaza, the kind of prevailing slogan was ceasefire now. And ceasefire now, that's very powerful, that stops the violence. You need a ceasefire first and foremost. But that's not the same as saying we are going to put a stop to this conflict. That is essentially saying we are going to stop it for now. And ceasefires almost always break down. And it almost kind of serves as an excuse for sidestepping, the more difficult political questions and moral questions that always come to light in these events.

Why do you think that there's been this turn in international relations away from actual settlements and towards ceasefires and interim deals and kind of periods of quiet rather than big negotiated finality? There are many explanations, right? There's, it's a matter of political will. It's also a matter of the fact that we are no longer in a unipolar world. There are many competing factors, right? You're more likely to have a lasting settlement when you have multiple states who are signing on to solving the problem, which increasingly is extremely rare. How much does it also just reflect a loss of belief in the possible? I mean, on Israel and the Palestinians, for one, there was a long period of attempts at peace deals.

And, you know, the days when it felt like America had the power to convene and force a real discussion, even if it didn't work at the end, those days were, they've been gone for a long time. Over the past many decades, there's this feeling that international law has lost its power of moral imagination. and the politicians who subscribe to it have kind of lost any tie with these kind of, you know, lofty ideals that kind of have historically driven the field forward and replace them with essentially managerialism. And I think precisely as the Democratic Party confronts the problem of like what is its foreign policy going to be, it would be very well served to try to recapture an affirmative vision of that moral daringness. I suppose, to not just say we're going to revert to the rules and let that be that. But to actually, if you're going to say that, that's all very well and fine. But say why. Say that these things have left us after Gaza, in particular, having to confront the ruins of a kind of liberal internationalist order.

Somebody was saying to me recently that they were fascinated by how, naive, widely held ideals of the fairly recent past now feel. Yeah. That there was a time, you know, the 60s and 70s, where people believe that maybe you could have a world without war, where people believed that they were, you know, into the 80s, engaged in effort to have a world without nuclear weapons. And that there's very little of that kind of fantastical ambition. And so I guess I'm curious when in your reporting and your attending of these conferences,

Do you find that there are pockets of people dreaming about things? It seemed like a little fantastical now, but could be a source of at least the regeneration of values. We feel so trapped by a realism about our institutions. And that it's hard sometimes to know if there are places where people are less trapped by that. No, I mean, I think, well, I don't know if there is a place where people feel less trapped. But I do think that many practitioners and scholars are trying to actively think about what a new international law would look like. There is a clear recognition in the field that something has to change. And we had these moments historically, right?

You could look to any, like, you know, the Hague peace conferences of the late 19th century that were then followed almost immediately by World War I. Or the fact that the Nuremberg charter was signed just before the bomb was driving. dropped on Nagasaki. These moments of real progress in international law are often followed by profound crises or, you know, things that kind of immediately would seem to invalidate the ideals for which they are, or that they espouse. I think, you know, my imagination is that we should have a reappraisal of what international law can do in the world, right? And whether that is going to be preventive or protective, if it's going to be reparative. I think this is a really interesting question. You know, people think of

the ICC as just the court that's delivering criminal convictions. In fact, it's also the trust fund for victims, which is giving out payments often in advance of and in parallel to criminal investigations. After the Trump era, I mean, let's say you do have a Democratic president in 2029, and they want to come in and show that the era of international law of America being a participant, in the rules, participant in the international order is back, what would they have to do to signal something real there? Yeah, I think this is the question of moral imagination, you know, where do we want to go? Like I said, I don't think it's enough to just say we're reverting to the rules.

I think you could imagine, and, you know, Mamdani explicitly called for this for the United States to join the ICC. frankly, it's hard to imagine any administration doing that. But I think what you could do is meaningfully lend American support to these institutions, you know, whether it's, for example, by giving a lot of money to the trust fund for victims, for example, to signal kind of material support. there's a kind of register of damages for Ukraine that has been logging everything that people have lost throughout that conflict. And right now, you know, that is just a list of claims that may never be fulfilled. And we have the power to kind of make that real. I think like my interest is in how do we make international law material, right? How do we make these moral values actually have a difference on people's lives? And that's the kind of reclaiming this reparative idea of international law or a repart of politics that kind of can fill in the breach. That's where I've found myself gravitating towards. So I think that's a good place to end.

So always that our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? The first book I would recommend is it's called The Divided City by Nicola Rowe, who was a kind of French scholar, just a gorgeous writer. And it's this book that talks about the inherent division of politics and how you can overcome it. And historically, it takes us back to the classics, to ancient Athens, that is the titular divided city, and speaks about the difficulty of coming together after moments of profound rupture. So that's the first one. The second book is coming out in September. It's called

Crossing the Red Line by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, which is about the Biden administration's shifts in policy towards Gaza and precisely how that played out. And, you know, I was just reading, on the train here and it is a very in-depth reportage about how the kind of red line was ignored and how they kind of set this being red lines that Biden set yes yes it in at nahu like that's a red line and then yeah I mean you could specifically the discussion around the invasion of rafa so I would recommend that and then the third book is by it's a novel called underwater by taramanon that just came out which which is a kind of, it's gorgeously written, and it's this response to Amitav Ghosh's prompt

that fiction has not figured out a way to describe the immensity of climate change and to capture the kind of tectonic losses and shifts that it will bring about. And that is what Tara is attempting to do in this book, and it's kind of just beautifully executed. Lindy Kinsler, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you.