Opinion | The Rule of Lawlessness

When President Donald Trump announced his plan for Gaza in February, critics immediately pointed out that it was immoral (put forward without consulting those affected by it), criminal (ethnic cleansing) and undoable (neither Egypt, Jordan nor the Palestinians want any part of it, nor is anyone willing to finance it). Fewer bothered to focus on the plan’s fundamental illegality. Apparently, it was no concern of Trump’s that it is legally impossible simply to change the status of a territory by fiat.

This was not an oversight: The plans Trump has floated to take over Greenland, Panama or Canada also lack any legal basis.

This might seem unimportant, since they, like the Gaza plan, are utterly undoable. Still, it’s hardly reassuring that the country that until recently was the leader of the free world did not massively break international law only because its intentions could not be put into practice. Especially as the “free world” itself, based as it is on democracy and rule of law, is increasingly coming under threat.

Another Trump proposal—the still developing deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine—shares all the features of these other initiatives except, unfortunately, for the undoability. Although for now the Trump administration is engaging in what look like pragmatic attempts to negotiate a Russia-Ukraine agreement, it would be perfectly doable for Moscow and Washington to impose capitulation on the embattled country, since without U.S. support Ukraine would go under anyway.

To be sure, European support, already greater than America’s, could gradually fill in the gap.

But even if the EU is willing, this will take time.

More important, however—and more pressing to those of us here in Poland and the Baltic states—is the U.S. choice to disregard the main transatlantic lesson of the 20th century, which is that if the United States does not counter aggression in Europe as soon as it happens, it will have to repel it later, at much greater expense of treasure and blood. The Trump administration’s initial moves on Ukraine suggested that it has drawn the opposite lesson. In all its actions toward Ukraine, starting with its vote against a UN resolution confirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the United States sends the message that it can live with lawlessness—by others and possibly itself.

The dire message to all Europeans: You’re on your own.

This sends a dire message to all Europeans: You’re on your own. To be sure, the United States has no intrinsic obligation to defend Europe—but withdrawing the support freely offered by Washington for the last 80 years, at a time when Russia is already fighting a war of aggression, not only betrays the victim but encourages further lawlessness. It is a green light to future Russian imperialist designs. And Putin has made his goal explicit: to roll back NATO to where it stood in 1989 and make Central and Eastern Europe again a Soviet sphere of influence. This need not necessarily mean war—but Poland has a border with Russia in Kaliningrad, and Russia has a military presence in Belarus, as it will in whatever is left of Ukraine.

With the United States out of the picture, no Polish government would be able to, say, refuse to grant Russia an extraterritorial corridor connecting Kaliningrad and Belarus, fight against a reoccupation of the Baltics, or resist a Russian takeover of Poland’s petrochemical industry—to name only the most obvious future Russian moves. Our only alternative is to have our cities become new versions of Bucha, complete with war crimes, and still lose in the end.

As we painfully learned in the last century, the best way to counter aggression is to build a legal system that deters it and, crucially, is endorsed by a strong and supportive international coalition.

This is what the United States did, quite effectively, in the post-World War II era. As a bonus, this system helped to bring about the demise of communism. The main factor, of course, was the system’s own unredeemable ineffectiveness and the resistance of peoples to its evil. But had there not been a shining alternative present, what sense would that resistance have made?

The Trump administration’s policies are directed not at this or that default of international law, but at the rule of law itself, as seen in such seemingly minor examples as its sanctions against the International Criminal Court, adopted as Trump was putting forward his illegal Gaza plan. True, the court’s warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant were fatally flawed, but the U.S. sanctions targeted the court itself, not any flaws in its performance. This disregard seems also consistent with how the administration treats U.S. law—the attack on birthright citizenship is a flagrant example.

Such a stance implies the active rejection of both lessons of 20th-century resistance to the triumph of violence—the pragmatic and the ideological one. The bottom line is that the United States can no longer be regarded as a standard-bearer of the rule of law. It’s true that U.S. democracy, however weakened, still remains an incomparably preferable option to the alternative, exemplified by Russia, China and Iran, their proxies and associates. But can we accept that the best thing to be said for the city on the hill is that it is not a slum?

Konstanty Gebert is a journalist in Warsaw, Poland.