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Comment by only-one1701 | Hacker News Reader

I contend my net worth is actually 9 figures

Case in point : if you had the biggest military in the world, and no one to credibly oppose you, you'd have a lot of arguments to convince everyone that your bank account is actually full.

Lesson 1 of W.Spaniel course on international relationship is that "international order" is the longest running form of anarchy.

Pray you stay on the good side of the Emperor closest to your home.

It's a good thing the current emperor is old - at least we have patience and trusting biology as an option. Successions are often messy, and I don't see Emperor Trump as the kind to cautiously pick his heir.

That's easily written if you're in the country that benefits most from that situation, not so easily in other countries.

The entire post-WWII system with the UN and international law was an attempt to change this.

That is a misunderstanding. The stated and actual purposes of the UN are different. The actual purpose was to give great powers a place to negotiate with each other, so that we wouldn't get a third world war.

That is why the 5 most powerful countries were permanently put on the security council with complete veto powers.

I imagine this is the difference between how it's taught in Europe and in the US.

You imagine wrong. It was a point that I first remember seeing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Dyer. Who is not from the US, but is an expert on the subject.

It was in his documentary series War, but I don't remember which episode.

There was a brief period, from the fall of the Soviet Union to Bush's invasion of Iraq, where "rules-based international order" was not a joke, and in fact was taken pretty seriously by quite a lot of people.

Democracy, free trade, free speech and freedom of religion had "won" over the soviet union. International treaties were reducing stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons. The WTO had just started resolving trade disputes through negotiation rather than trade wars. International peacekeeping forces were preventing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though there wasn't anything like oil motivating the peacekeeping forces. Planners of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were being prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal.

Then-UK-Prime-Minister Tony Blair believed in this stuff pretty earnestly - in fact he wanted to get a UN resolution authorising the Iraq invasion so badly he was happy to submit fabricated WMD evidence to get it.

Of course, even at the height of the "rules-based international order" there were always some stark inconsistencies - especially in the middle east, for example.

I wrote

> Pray you stay on the good side of the Emperor closest to your home.

I think we painfully agree, here :/

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