Daniel Larison brings this post by Paul Pillar. The Value of Obeying International Law.
The charter of the United Nations is very clear in prohibiting the offensive use of military force, regardless of the nature of the underlying dispute. An armed attack conducted in the name of setting back a technical program that possibly could lead in the future to development of a weapon that other states, including the one doing the attacking, already have does not even come close to constituting self-defense as also mentioned in the U.N. charter. The international norm against offensive warfare, like certain other norms that also have become codified international law, reflects a broadly held moral standard. Not even the most inventive casuistry can justify, legally or morally, the launching of an offensive war to help maintain some other state’s regional nuclear weapons monopoly.
Larison points out that the same can be said for NATO’s war against Yugoslavia, the Iraq War and the 1989 invasion of Panama. Larison concludes with this:
There’s no question that the U.S. is harming its own interests by weakening the norm against offensive warfare. At some point, this could come back to haunt the U.S. at the expense of a U.S. client, but this doesn’t seem to be the way that many interventionists see it. As Western interventionists see it, there is one set of international rules for Western states and those aligned with them and another set of rules for others. Perversely, some of these interventionists imagine that they are shoring up a “rules-based international order” by waging wars that fly in the face of that very order.
I think he may miss one point. The ” interventionists” are really interested in American hegemony – the New American Century crowd