I’ll have more to say on the military attack on Venezuela in the near future, but for now I just want to re-up this piece I wrote last March, which is freshly relevant.

There are a lot of self-styled realists sneering at those who criticize the intervention on legal grounds, rolling their eyes at the fantasy of a “rules-based international order” that clearly no longer exists. While they’re right to recognize the fiction of international law, it may be those who welcome a world without such delusions who are the naive ones. The rules that protect sovereignty and place legal limitations on war have always been aspirational, but the abandonment of that aspiration is not a trivial matter. It marks a transition into a darker world, one that has characterized most of human history, but that those of us who are alive today and living in the First World have only begun to experience.