International law has no enforcement mechanism - it depends on willingness of countries to follow it or force others to. It does not have a proper system of courts to decide the law. Different bits of it can clash with each other.
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
International law has a number of enforcement mechanisms.
> it depends on willingness of countries to follow it or force others to.
All law depends on the willingness of its subjects to follow it, and failing that of its other subjects to force them to. This is not unique to international law.
Some systems of law (e.g., typical modern national criminal law) may have a particular group of people (usually with a formal heirarchy) who are expected to do the executive part of enforcement, and a similar (possibly the same or overlapping, but often distinct) group of people employed to do the adjudicative part of enforccement. International law has the latter (in several forms), but lacks the former. But anyone who is familiar with more than a narrow range of the most idealistic systems of national law will be aware that that that executive body can be a single point of failure—the real problem with international law isn't that it lacks such a single dedicated executive body, but that the important issues under it frequently involve significant conflicts of interest for any of the groups with the capacity to take on the executive role in the particular case, which is problematic under any system of law whether it has a single dedicated body for the executive part of enforcement or whether it relies on ad hoc case-by-case posses for that purpose.
That's rather naïve.
How do you propose to enforce the law when the offender possesses the greatest military/economic/technological might, even compared to the rest of the (law-biding) world combined?
US, for quite some time, is the international law.
Not sure what your agenda is but that's just the law *enforcement* doing the enforcing part. You can argue that it is unjust, that's a separate issue.
If you see the difference as being “in the national case, justice is expected”, you either have an extremely naive view of national law, or at a minimum of an extremely narrow and privileged one.
In the international case, it is understood that the "law enforcers" are not obliged to play by the same rule. The "enforcement" therefore only applies selectively. Then the law cannot really be said to have been being enforced, because they don't apply to the "enforcer".
That is true in the same sense for national law as it is for international law (that is, true in idealized theory, much less true in practice. Actually, its somewhat less true in many national law systems than of international law at the intermediate level between pure theory and practice of the concrete, on-the-books law, where law enforcers, especially at the apex, often enjoy on-the-books immunities from some or all of the law that they enforce.)
I think most people would not argue that “US federal criminal law has no enforcement mechanism”, they would argue that “US federal criminal law has a significant practical enforcement problem where enforcement of the law conflicts with interests of the chief executive”.
No, its factual.
> How do you propose to enforce the law when the offender possesses the greatest military/economic/technological might, even compared to the rest of the (law-biding) world combined?
Had you read the entire comment you were responding to, you would note that as well as pointing out that international law has enforcement mechanisms, that I pointed out how the executive part of those differs from what many national criminal law systems use (which is a real difference), and moreover the problem they have with conflicts of interests between any of the available executive agents with many important enforcement issues (a situation which also happens with national criminal law systems even where, unlike international law, they have a nominally-dedicated executive body for enforcement purposes rather than relying on the adjudicative/determinative body calling for an ad hoc posse the way that international law generally works.)
Was it you who wrote the lines for Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister?
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land" https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/
In the Treaty of the Danish West Indies the US will "not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland" https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-39/pdf/STATUTE-3...
The story here is that the US seems to not currently believe international law is an effective tool for projecting its power. Whether correctly or otherwise, it has believed that up until now.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/ "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land"
the difference is that the US used to pretend that international laws mattered - at least, they selectively only ignore some when it's advantageous, but pay lip service to it being relevant and claim to follow it.
Now, however, trump has blatantly disregard the norms without regards. While everyone knows that the US will get their way militarily even before trump, it used to be a negotiation with law and order at least being pretended to matter. After trump, the pretense is off. It leads to less trust, less negotiation and more hard-lining.
Within one term, trump has destroyed the trust that took more than a century to build.