Description
This paper argues that the Western victorious powers’ criminalization of aggression after the World Wars is a continuation of their employment of a natural-law-based universal ideal differently among themselves establishing a pluralist international society for themselves but using that same ideal to impose an unjust extra-European order upon non-Europeans. It enabled the victorious European imperialists to punish the alleged aggressors against themselves while allowing them to keep colonies legitimizing their own colonial aggression against non-Europeans. It analyses the nature of Western powers’ resistance to a legally binding definition of aggression and insistence on merely a moral obligation to jointly defend states against aggression that allows them to continue to play realpolitik rendering ineffective legalist efforts to counter aggression. It examines, as regime change wars in Iraq and Libya and recent events in the Middle East demonstrate, US-led Western powers’ unilateral attempts to broaden the existing mutually recognized restrictive bases under which pre-emptive war and collective humanitarian intervention are permissible to consolidate their domination of the region. It compares their justification of aggressive wars in the Middle East with their strongest opposition to Russian aggression against Ukraine initiated on less flimsier grounds in terms of both preventive and humanitarian wars to highlight their continuation of politics of aggression.
