No. of Recommendations: 10
Because it's the legal underpinning of placing him in custody, that's why.
No it's not. We didn't place him in custody because he lost an election. We placed him in custody, ostensibly, because he was engaged in criminal activity. It doesn't matter that he's not a head of state - almost every criminal on earth isn't a head of state.
Are we harboring terrorists, laundering money, shipping oil in violation of all these rules you keep citing and running drugs into the country that's invading?
Nope, but none of those things are relevant to the rules. You don't get to invade another country because they're doing money laundering. You don't get to invade another country because they're violating your country's rules on oil shipments. You don't get to invade another country because they're engaged in illegal drug supplying, any more than they get to invade you because you're engaged in illegal drug buying. Etc.
You don't get to use military action to promote other political or criminal justice objectives. The most important "rules" of the rules-based order are severe limitations on the acceptable circumstances under which you can engage in a violation of another country's territorial sovereignty with military forces. It's worked astonishingly well for the last seventy years or so - we've never seen a time period in human history that was so free from war and military conflict, even though the wars and conflicts that do exist are still terrible. That works because the strong countries have been willing to be constrained - to accept limits on their own use of military force far beyond what they could practically get away with, because a more peaceful world was something they valued more than the short-term results that they could achieve by just using force.
1. China doens't give a crap about "rules"
Of course they do, or they would have just invaded a bunch of their neighbors a long time ago. As you pointed out above, they care an awful lot about trade, and they care about what other countries will do if they were to invade a neighbor. And both of those things are heavily shaped by the "rules" that other countries will follow. If invading Laos would result in a massive trade embargo and military response by other nations, it becomes a pretty easy call to not invade Laos. If it doesn't - if the rest of the world would recognize a "Han-roe Doctrine" and allow China to exercise dominion via military force in their own backyard - then they would use military invasion, rather than "Belt and Road," in a heartbeat.
