No. of Recommendations: 6
Aha, so you *don't* mind nation-states taking care of business. So much for "the rules".
I think you miss the point. Going after Bin Laden in Pakistan wasn't against "the rules" - because certain types of military actions are generally permissible. The Maduro thing was not within "the rules" on military force....which is why the U.S. has gone to such great lengths to try to characterize it as a law enforcement action rather than a military action. You might have noticed that no one tried to pretend that the Bin Laden attack was an exercise in law enforcement, because it was permissible within "the rules" in a way that the Maduro seizure was not.
Clausewitz's most famous quote is that "war is the continuation of politics by other means" and it tends to be viewed as an endorsement of the substitution of the former for the latter. It isn't. Instead it's a realization that nation-states interact with one another across several different boundaries and using different tools but always across the same continuum.
It wasn't an endorsement, but it was a recognition that international norms at the time regarded the use of warfare to achieve other aims separate from national security was a permissible and acceptable use of armed forces. Not endorsing the substitution of the former for the latter, but acknowleding that everyone did substitute the former for the latter and that this wasn't regarded as the attacking country doing anything particularly wrong. In other words, in Clausewitz' day if your neighbor had resources or territory that you wanted, seizing them by open warfare was not qualitatively different from trying to pursue those resources by other means.
That changed with the adoption of the UN Charter and other various international norms and rules after WWII. It is now considered a violation of international law to just invade another country because you want to achieve some purpose for your own benefit that would normally be in the realm of politics, not national defense. That's why Gulf War I played out so much differently than it would have in Clausewitz' time - because Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was such an egregious violation of a near-universally accepted norm of international law, it was roundly condemned and reversed.
We've all benefited from the widespread acceptance of the idea that it's a wrongful violation of international law to use your military to invade your neighbor to achieve goals outside a very limited set of national security matters, mostly relating to responses to a physical attack using force. Taking actions to weaken those norms benefits strong countries at the cost of that global stability. And since China's a strong country, it helps them.
