Samizdat #1: The Betrayal of the Rules-Based Order
How international law became a language of selective enforcement
We're delighted to bring you the first edition of Restoring the West: Samizdat. "The Betrayal of the Rules-Based Order" is an unsparing account of the failures of the post-WWII international order as embodied in the United Nations. Our pseudonymous author, John Raskin, argues that the veto power undermined the U.N.’s promises of collective security from the start. As a result, no major power is ever meaningfully constrained, which has had predictable results: lesser powers have banded together to form political blocs, and vulnerable states have been hung out to dry.
The U.N. purports to be a collaborative and neutral peacekeeper when it is anything but. Raskin focuses on Israel as the paradigmatic case of the U.N.’s failures, and argues that the rules-based international order has served to provide a disinterested cover for powers that only act to protect the vulnerable when doing so aligns with their own self-interest.
