Trump’s dangerous disregard for international justice

FMT:

Trump’s dangerous disregard for international justice


13 hours ago
Ruti Teitel


Donald Trump’s naked hostility to promoting the rule of law abroad, and the soft power that comes with it, is a radical break from the central role that the US has long played in establishing multilateral dispute-resolution institutions.

Since returning to the White House, US president Donald Trump has set his sights on slashing foreign aid. His administration has dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), cutting the number of programmes from more than 6,000 to fewer than 900.

In late August, Trump renewed his assault on foreign assistance, announcing the cancellation of US$4.9 billion in congressionally approved aid through a seldom-used mechanism that the Government Accountability Office deemed illegal in 2018.


The abrupt cuts to humanitarian assistance have been devastating, leaving millions of people in the developing world at risk of dying from starvation or preventable illness. Less visible, but no less significant, is the withdrawal of support for peacebuilding and rule-of-law and human-rights promotion, including accountability for atrocities.

Only a handful of USAID programmes that focus on these issues remain, while Trump’s latest effort to claw back funds includes rescinding US$837 million from peacekeeping measures.


The Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy emphasises “peace through strength” and defines “strength” only in terms of hard power. This will impede transitional justice in countries like Ukraine, when the war there ends, and Ethiopia, which is still grappling with the aftereffects of civil war.

As my book Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice shows, Trump’s foreign policy also makes him an outlier among US presidents. Since its founding, the US has been a consistent supporter of post-conflict justice, which was a powerful tool in the diplomatic arsenal of presidents of all political stripes, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.


From the War of Independence to the Spanish-American War, US presidents actively promoted dispute resolution through negotiation and adjudication processes, including arbitration. After World War II, the US played a leading role in creating the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg to prosecute Nazi war criminals.

The Nuremberg trials marked the first time that the leaders of a defeated country were held legally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The verdicts established the principle of individual criminal accountability for human-rights violations in wartime – a milestone in international law.


The lead American prosecutor at Nuremberg, then-US Supreme Court judge Robert Jackson, framed the trials in near-existential terms. “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish,” he proclaimed in his powerful opening statement, “have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated”.


The practice of establishing special tribunals to implement transitional justice continued after the Cold War. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the US played a crucial role in convening the United Nations tribunals tasked with trying those responsible for the atrocities committed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the 1994 Rwandan genocide. As it did at Nuremberg, the US provided financing and know-how, with American judges and lawyers being seconded from the federal judiciary to the Hague.

America’s historical role as an exporter of justice was in demand following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The US was instrumental in Eastern Europe’s transition from socialism to capitalist democracy, assisting with transitional justice and promoting the rule of law.

At the same time, the US rarely regarded justice as a two-way street, eschewing accountability for its foreign interventions and tactics. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the post-9/11 war on terror, and the resulting invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of torture, indefinite detention, and targeted drone strikes undermined international human-rights law.


While president Barack Obama continued the war on terror, he also acknowledged these tensions and embarked on a political project of transitional justice – albeit by trying to draw a line under the Cold War.

During his final year in office, he went on a whirlwind tour of the Americas and Asia, during which he expressed remorse for the pain and deaths caused by twentieth-century US interventions and introduced a new formula for peace and prosperity. As Obama explained in Argentina, the US has a responsibility “to confront the past with honesty and transparency”.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump mocked Obama’s “apology tour,” painting his efforts to take accountability and create more conciliatory relations as weakness.

Once in office, Trump showed his disdain for the principles of justice by attacking the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established in 2002 to investigate and prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. The ICC is independent of the UN Security Council, meaning that the US cannot control what cases are brought before it.

As a result, the US is not a party to the ICC and has kept its distance. Instead of maintaining this posture, Trump went on the offensive after the ICC opened an investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. In 2020, his administration sanctioned ICC officials, freezing their assets and barring them and their families from traveling to the US.

His successor, Joe Biden, dropped these unprecedented sanctions and, while not supporting the ICC, resumed America’s efforts to export justice, including advising Ethiopia on its transitional-justice process.

Now that Trump is back in the White House, his disdain for international justice has only grown. This is evident not only in his assault on USAID, but also in his failure to recognise the need for justice in a Ukraine-Russia peace deal, his related attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and his new draconian sanctions on ICC officials.

Trump’s naked hostility to promoting the rule of law abroad, and the soft power that comes with it, is a radical break from the central role that the US has long played in establishing multilateral dispute-resolution institutions. But from Ukraine to Gaza and beyond, Trump may soon learn, the hard way, that peace without justice cannot be sustained.




Ruti Teitel is professor of comparative law at New York Law School.