I’m heading off for some R&R. Posting may not resume before the new year. Best wishes to each of you for a peaceful and safe holiday.

I’ve been doing some end of the year housecleaning here at Opposed Systems Design. I’m sifting through a slew of draft posts that have accumulated over the past 12 months. Most of them have been either overcome by events or are simply not worth posting. I’m dusting off the few that remain and tossing them out here, partly to be able to start the new year with a clean slate.

I originally wrote the following material, for example, back in April.

In a post tying together many of the themes I’ve been examining here, Wretchard examines a recent speech by UK Secretary of State for Defense John Reid.

Wretchard argues that Reid’s speech challenges three of basic pillars of international law: the Geneva Convention, the legitimacy of pre-emptive military action, and the principle of territorial soverignty. Reid sees the need for change in each of these interdependent rule sets due to the “new environment in which we operate.” Much of what we’ve been discussing here at OSD revolves around the nature of this new environment and appropriate responses to that new environment.

Read Wretchard’s post in its entirety for the rest of his analysis. I’ll focus on some of my own thoughts regarding these 20th Century rule sets.

Regarding the respect for territorial sovereignty, we ought to begin with a recognition that this rule set was used in writing the fundamental operating system of the UN. In reaction against the destruction of great power wars, the UN was chartered as a body whose highest priority would be to respect and defend the sovereignty of every nation. If no one ever impinges upon any else’s sovereignty, then there will never again be a great power war.

And this has been true - we haven’t seen a conflict like WWII since, well, WWII. Which is something to be thankful for.

Over the past sixty years, however, we have witnessed first hand that widespread violence, death, and misery can still haunt us - even as the sovereignty of every nation is being assiduously defended by the UN. In fact, some of the most traumatic memories of our collective consciousness come from moments when the assumptions of sovereignty collapsed. In order to respect the sovereignty of a nation, we have to assume that there is actually a nation there in the first place that has sovereignty over itself. In places like Somalia, Rwanda and Afghanistan Haiti we have confronted the reality that in many parts of the world, there is no state that can be treated as opaque. And treating sovereign states as opaque is the whole appeal of sovereignty - instead of dealing with a network of 6 billion +, we deal with a network of <300.

In other cases, we have confronted the reality that there are some states whose sovereignty we don’t want to respect. We have been witnessing the costs of pretending we were indifferent to the internal “sovereign” behavior of states like North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq. In the latter case, we were confronted with perhaps the most straightforward case of sovereignty enforcement imaginable. Iraq violated the sovereignty of Kuwait and, after an appropriately deliberate and diplomatic pace, the UN gave its blessing for a global coalition to rectify the violation. In order to ensure that Iraq would continue to respect the sovereignty of its neighbors, the UN placed sanctions upon it and inspectors in it - an intentional curtailment of Iraq’s sovereignty. Yet for more than a decade Saddam managed to blunt the effects of these measures upon himself (while the population of Iraq suffered) - often by appealing to the principle of Iraq’s sovereignty.

Many of these regions never had a modern state system but this detail was papered over by colonialism and the Cold War.