The great unravelling has begun

As the most powerful states disregard limits on the lawful use of force, we may be slipping into a world of frequent war.

- Oona Hathaway

US President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a secretive predawn military operation in Venezuela to grab President Nicolas Maduro is a blatant assault on the international legal order.

The action threatens to end an era of historic peace and return us to a world in which might makes right. The cost will be paid in human lives.

Last year marked the 80th anniversary of the 1945 UN Charter, a document signed by 51 nations at the close of World War II. The signatories pledged to act “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. The great powers have not gone to war with one another since, and no UN member state has disappeared as a result of conquest.

But over the past decade, that peace has begun to unravel. Today, it is on the precipice of collapsing altogether. If that happens, the consequences will be catastrophic.

We can already see the cost: From 1989 to 2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged less than 15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a year. As states increasingly disregard limits on the lawful use of force, this may be just the beginning of a deadly new era of conflict.

The relative peace of the last eight decades should not be taken for granted. For centuries, war was perfectly legal. It was, in fact, the main way in which states resolved their disputes.

Countries could force one another into treaties at the point of a gun and then enforce those very same treaties with war if they were broken. States that won wars had the legal right to keep what they took — land, goods, people. States rose and fell, took land and lost it, and the people living in the territory over which they fought suffered the consequences.