I’m suspicious that all it will take is one major shock for the house of cards that is international law to come tumbling down just like it did before WW2.
I’m suspicious that all it will take is one major shock for the house of cards that is international law to come tumbling down just like it did before WW2.
Essentially all of the countries that signed onto these bans either (1) did so in a moment of blinding post-cold war naivety, where they could spin downsizing their armed forces into a good thing for the world, or (2) are too small and/or uninvolved to matter. Anyone else who actually expected to need to fight a war again didn't sign, because they knew exactly how useful these weapons are. The US and SK will never accept a land mine prohibition that includes the minefields of the DMZ, since those minefields are an important speedbump against any sort of ground invasion. Likewise, a cluster munition ban is practically DoA because cluster munitions are the best weapons to attack columns of lightly/unarmored equipment and dispersed aircraft/helicopters. But until February 2022 in Ukraine, a whole bunch of countries (primarily European) had convinced themselves that the possibility of a ground invasion was a thing of the past.