Posted by Joseph Klingler – November 11, 2013 @ 01:13.<\/p>\n
Responding to the August 21, 2013, use of chemical weapons in Syria\u2014what the United Nations Secretary-General stated clearly amounted to a war crime<\/a>\u2014the United States came to the brink of violating a norm no less sacrosanct than that embodied in the Chemical Weapons Convention<\/a>\u00a0itself: the prohibition on the use of force<\/a>.<\/p>\n As U.S. forces prepared to strike, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon added his voice<\/a>\u00a0to those insisting that the use of force is prohibited absent Security Council approval or a valid exercise of the right to self-defense.\u00a0 The eventual U.S. about-face on military intervention<\/a>\u00a0was undoubtedly grounded more in politics than law. Nonetheless, the administration\u2019s restraint helped insulate the norm of non-use of force from those who might have pointed to a military intervention in Syria as further support for the argument that <\/a>article 2(4) is dead<\/a>.<\/p>\n Article 2(4) is not dead, and such claims would have remained premature<\/a>\u00a0even had the U.S. moved forward with illegal military strikes.\u00a0 But the focus on the use <\/i>of force can obscure a larger point: that article 2(4) prohibits the threat<\/i> of force no less than its use.\u00a0 How, it is reasonable to ask, should one reconcile this fact with Secretary of State Kerry\u2019s own open and continued insistence that the \u201cthreat of force remains\u201d<\/a>?\u00a0 Applying the doctrine of desuetude<\/a>,\u00a0one could argue that developing custom has eclipsed the Charter\u2019s prohibition of threats, leaving intact only its prohibition of actual uses of force.\u00a0 A better conclusion may be that while the prohibition remains intact, in many cases the political costs of violating it are low enough to be outweighed or overlooked by decisionmakers.\u00a0 In either case, the message to unilateralists may well be that states can often get away with threatening force all they want\u2014so long as they don\u2019t use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Posted by Joseph Klingler – November 11, 2013 @ 01:13. Responding to the August 21, 2013, use of chemical weapons 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