The Hague Group’s September gathering at UN headquarters operates under a rhetorical frame that, taken literally, contradicts its own diagnosis. Varsha Gandikota, the group’s executive secretary and the article’s author, opens by declaring that “The international legal order is in shambles.” She closes by calling for “collective action” from forty states to “enforce accountability.” The two propositions — broken order, enforcers-as-restore — sit comfortably in advocacy. Held up to analytical pressure, they disclose a different operation.
The substrate the article supplies undermines the proposition that what is being defended can be defended as it presently stands. Gandikota reports that the UN General Assembly’s twelve-month deadline for Israel to end the occupation “passed a year ago”; that the International Court of Justice’s finding of unlawfulness has produced no compliance; that the United States has drawn up sanctions against the International Criminal Court targeting “its bank accounts, software, insurers and staff”; that more than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, “including the court’s president, already live under US sanctions”; and that a Palestinian delegation cannot travel to the body convened to consider their situation because “Palestinian officials were denied travel visas by the United States.” A legal order in which the court can be cut off from banking, the enforcer can be sanctioned, and the affected party can be denied access to its deliberative assembly is not an order under pressure from outside. On the matter at hand, the operative capacities the substrate documents have ceased to function.
The anti-apartheid citation Gandikota supplies sharpens this observation. She writes that the 1962 General Assembly special committee was followed by the 1977 Security Council mandatory embargo — a fifteen-year interval during which states assembled the tools and the coalition to act. The lesson she draws is that “states acting together” can “raise the cost” of identified crimes to render an offending regime unsustainable. The Hague Group’s “Forty can” framing treats the bloc as the operative variable. The fifteen-year interval Gandikota herself describes, however, points to a different operative variable: the patron configuration — the alignment of major powers that, by 1977, made a mandatory Security Council embargo possible. The article’s prescription — “halt arms and dual-use transfers, deny port access to military cargo, review public contracts and investments” — is a catalogue of unilateral sovereign measures, all of them applicable without a Security Council resolution.
The catalogue identifies a structural fact. The forty states being convened will be exercising pre-existing sovereign prerogatives to enforce a legal order whose authoritative interpreters include a principal author identified in the same document as drafting sanctions against that order’s court. The Hague Group’s tools — arms embargoes, port denial, contract review, asset freezing — are drawn from the sovereign toolkit of the very states that built the post-war architecture, an architecture the substrate documents being deployed both to enforce legal rulings and to shield one of its principal beneficiaries from those same rulings.
The structural fact the substrate discloses is irreducibility in the sense Rittel and Webber formalized as “wicked problems” (Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, 1973): the enforcement architecture being invoked against Israeli occupation is itself embedded in the configuration whose compliance is being sought. Conventional toolkits — arms embargoes, port denial, contract review — target a single offending party but do not reach the configuration that sustains the offending party. The Hague Group’s prescription, in the form the article supplies, applies the post-war toolkit to one of its principal beneficiaries without engaging the configuration that produces the beneficiary’s posture.
Keohane’s liberal-institutionalist framework (After Hegemony, 1984) reads the substrate differently. On Keohane’s reading, international institutions persist and constrain state behavior even absent a hegemonic sponsor, because iterated cooperation produces self-enforcing regimes; in this frame, Gandikota’s argument is internally coherent — law is being eroded by hegemonic defection, law-abiding states can coordinate, and the anti-apartheid precedent shows that coordination can work without Security Council unanimity.
Mearsheimer’s structural-realist framework (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001) reads the same substrate differently. On Mearsheimer’s reading, institutions are epiphenomenal to distributions of power; “international legal order” describes a mobilization resource rather than a constraint on power. The substrate’s US sanctions on ICC judges, the visa revocation of the Colombian president, and the aid termination after South Africa’s ICJ filing are, on this reading, exercises of structural financial and political leverage whose resolution depends on distributions of force the document tracks.
The substrate contains items that pull in both directions. The ICJ’s finding of unlawfulness, the UNGA twelve-month deadline, and the ICC warrants are authoritative rulings whose non-compliance the document treats as a defect of enforcement. The US sanctions on the ICC, the visa revocation of Colombia’s president for speaking about Gaza in New York, the aid termination after South Africa’s ICJ filing, and the United Arab Emirates’ reported financing of mass atrocities in Sudan — per the Hague Group’s own regional catalogue — are exercises of leverage whose enforcement potential is the substrate’s actual mechanism. Each catalogue item Gandikota supplies supports both readings; the substrate does not, by itself, choose between them.
Symmetric application requires the same scrutiny on the other side. The US posture the article describes — ICC sanctions, visa denial to Palestinian officials, aid termination after South Africa’s ICJ filing, public threats to Iran with annihilation, and the reported promise that Netanyahu will not be arrested on US soil “in any way, shape, or form” — can be read, on Mearsheimer’s frame, as a coherent posture of structural financial and military leverage by a hegemonic patron whose client is under ICC and ICJ scrutiny. On Keohane’s frame, the same conduct reads as hegemonic defection from a regime the hegemon authored, with downstream costs to the regime’s long-term self-enforcement. The substrate again supplies items for both readings without choosing between them.
On a dialectical reading of the substrate, the thesis the article supplies is defense of an operative international legal order; the antithesis the same document supplies is that the order’s operative capacities have ceased to function (deadline passed a year ago, court sanctioned, judges sanctioned, visas denied); the synthesis the substrate supports is that the Hague Group is constructing an order in the act of defending one. “International law” in the document’s usage is being assembled in the act of defending it. Whether forty states can sustain such an assembly against a configuration of financial and political power able to revoke a Colombian president’s visa for speaking about Gaza or terminate South African aid after a Genocide Convention filing is an open question. It is the question the Friday meeting will begin to answer.
The substrate includes both the article’s invocation of “international legal order” as the threatened object and the documentation of financial-leverage instruments wielded against the order’s own enforcers by a principal author of the architecture now invoked. The article’s frame treats the first item as object and does not name the second as operative mechanism.
Analytical techniques used in this piece
This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.
- Dialectical Analysis
- Holds thesis against antithesis and works toward a higher synthesis.
- Wicked Problems
- Treats a problem as wicked — no stopping rule, no clean test of success, every attempt consequential.
- Worldview Cartography
- Maps the clashing worldviews underlying a dispute.
- Brinkmanship
- Manufacturing shared risk at the edge of catastrophe to force the other side to blink.