Chuck DarwinBefore countries renounced the right to war
-- first in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and then again in the UN Charter in 1945
-- waging war was perfectly legal and legitimate.
It was the main way in which countries resolved their disputes with one another.
💥But even during this time, war was constrained by law.
War, in its lawful conception, was understood as a last resort
undertaken to enforce or defend a state’s rights.
♦️Killing, seizure of property, and destruction were permitted only if the entire endeavor was justified by law.
🔥At the beginning of the twentieth century -- and for centuries before that,
-- a country could not simply say it wanted another’s land.
According to customary international law,
as interpreted and popularized by the
so-called father of international law, #Hugo #Grotius,
in the early seventeenth century,
⭐️a state had to offer a legal justification before it could go to war.
Violence was acceptable,
but only if it was necessary to vindicate a legal right.
Sovereigns had to argue that another country had failed to pay a debt, unacceptably interfered with trade relations,
violated a treaty obligation, or committed some other wrong that was considered an acceptable cause for war.
This practice received formal legal sanction by the states that signed the "Peace of Westphalia" in 1648,
when they recognized that those who would go to war must make
“a lawful Cognizance of the Cause.”
Sovereigns took this obligation seriously, always issuing war manifestos to explain their reasons for entering a conflict as fighting began.
They did this with the understanding that without such a claim, violence is not war.
It is crime: murder, assault, kidnapping, and theft.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/world-without-rules
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