The Warring Visions of American Power

What is the foundation upon which a new more moral, more just American foreign policy can be built? Particularly after the devastation Donald Trump has wrought on international norms and rules. One answer I'm watching a lot of people come to, and particularly on the left, is that international law, which has fallen into such disrepair, can possibly be a source of renewal. That if America simply followed the rules that it helped write, then a much better world is possible. And I've wondered, can international law, which has both been so weak at times and also been so inspiring at others, can it actually bear that weight? Linda Kintzler is a fellow at Harvard. She's a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and the author of Come to This Court and Cry, How the Holocaust Ends. She's done some incredible writing and reporting on whether or not what we're watching is the death or the renewal of international law. She joins me now. Linda Kintzler, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So I want to begin with this video that Mayor Zoran Mamdani released not that long ago, arguing for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu. There is a reason the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest. As human beings, we have spent generations building a shared understanding that there are crimes so grave they offend all of humanity. Anyone, with their eyes, with their heart, with their conscience, should recognize the devastation he has wrought and understand that he belongs before a court of law. It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does. And I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear. Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. What did you make of that? Not just the decision to release it, which has been, controversial, but the focus in it on the relationship between America and the International Criminal Court. Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, that was an immensely rhetorically powerful thing to do, even in enunciating the crimes in Gaza. That, I think, we cannot underestimate. Just the kind of moral force of enunciating what those crimes were and articulating them precisely at the moment when they have been negated and denied in so many different, you know, places around the world, especially in the United States. I think, you know, what that did was call attention to the fact that international law is not separate from politics, that it is something that we need politicians to speak about as a force that exists and can be used if we choose to use it. Of course, while he, you know, he was calling attention to the fact that he doesn't have the authority to execute the ICC arrest warrant. And America is not a signatory. Exactly. So there is, you know, but. And the secretary of state in America wants to destroy the court. Halfway across the world, there's an institution that calls itself the International Criminal Court. Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe you haven't. But chances are, you don't know the names of its judges, of its prosecutors or its president. And you shouldn't have to. But as we speak, the ICC and its friends are waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes and compacts and the force of so-called international law. Right. No, there's all these reasons. It's like completely not actionable. It's a double-edged sword because on the one hand, you're calling attention to the fact that the ICC does exist, perhaps alerting people to the fact that there is an arrest warrant. And on the other hand, there's a danger because you're also calling attention to the paucity of international law, of its inability to work. And this disjuncture between this idea of arresting the imagery captured of Netanyahu being arrested in New York City versus the reality, which is that that's never going to happen. I think that disjuncture is kind of dangerous for the perpetuation of international law. I think before we go further on this, when we talk about international law, when you talk about international law, what are you talking about? When many people think of international law, I think they often are actually just thinking about criminal law, international criminal law, which is how we get the arrest warrant for Netanyahu or for Putin, for example. And they're maybe not thinking about international law writ large, where we have things that govern like aviation law across the oceans, international transactions, things like that. So formally speaking, you're talking about the institutions that compose international law. You could say the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the kind of many, many webs of treaties and conventions, the United Nations. These make up the edifice of international law, when we refer to it. But there's also a kind of more theoretical way of thinking about it as a kind of grammar, as a language. And I think there is this kind of romantic idea of international law as dispassionate. If you look to its origins, it came about when we no longer had the divine right of kings and we needed some kind of order to fill the void, to order a world without God and without divine right. And so now this system was created to kind of guide us through the moral void of the world and the inevitability of conflict. And when it fails to do that, as it so often does, we are left questioning its viability, its ability to persist in a fallen world. I think we're in a really strange moment in the foreign policy politics of the Democratic Party. I think they're in rupture. And one thing that I think is interesting about the way they have ruptured is that you have Joe Biden. Joe Biden coming to the presidency in 2021. And he promises to restore the rules-based international order. - I speak today as president of the United States at the very start of my administration, and I'm sending a clear message to the world. America is back. The transatlantic alliance is back. And we are not looking backward. We are looking forward together. - And he believes in international institutions and international laws. He believes in international alliances, but the force may be that no other modern president really does. And then Ukraine happens on his watch, and then Gaza happens on his watch. And now what I see many on the left saying is, well, what did you all believe in? If your rules-based international order allowed this, if you protected Israel at the UN over this, if you gave the arms for this, if you are not a signatory, if you want to protect Netanyahu from this, then what was this order? - Mm-hmm, yeah, I mean, I think, and you can almost see the move away from that commitment in the reluctance to use that phrase as the administration progressed, right? We get fewer and fewer invocations of the rules-based international order. We get extreme reluctance to use words like war crimes and things of that nature. I think there's also, you know, this nostalgia, I suppose, that for the very fleeting moment of liberal peace that came after the quarter. The Cold War, you know, this moment of U.S. hegemony when you did have the ICC created, you had this real feeling that international law could be upheld by American strength alone. And of course, you know, we now live in the ruins of that vision. - Let me give voice to the discomfort I've heard from it on the other side, which is a lot of, you know, Jews I know, supporters of Israel I know, one thing I hear them ask a lot is why is Israel and Gaza the center of all this? There is this sense that Israel has become the locus of all this ferment. I mean, you've written pieces, you know, reviewing books about how Israel, its assault on Gaza, its war in Gaza after October 7th, will now sit in historical memory the way the Holocaust does, that it'll be another moment of sort of a historical turn. - Right. - And, you know, what I hear people say is why Israel not, not Sudan, not Syria, not even Russia. Why is there this much focus on this country and its particular conflicts and wars? - Mm-hmm. Well, the apparent answer to that is that Israel is the closest to United States ally and Russia is not, for example. But I don't think it's fair to say that these same questions don't come up when we think about, you know, Vladimir Putin is also wanted by the ICC. And I think we see similar behavior of, you know, the United States as opposed to the United States. I mean, I think that the United States is influenced by friendly nations that don't want to arrest him, if he comes onto their territory, you know? And one legal scholar said, it's all very well to say that you uphold the values of international law, but that doesn't mean you have to invite Putin to come shopping in Paris. You know, there is this kind of doublespeak when it comes to these evinced values. And I think, you know, but I think what the war in Gaza, the United States is implicated in that in a different way. It's a response of foreign policy. And here, I don't mean the Democratic Socialist Left. I mean, like the broad tent of the Democratic Socialist Left. party, including moderates, leftists, all these folks. I think what comes next is very unsettled after the failures of the Biden era or what are perceived as the failures of the Biden era, what I perceive to be the failures of the Biden era. And of course, then the just wanton corruption and aggression and unilateralism of the Trump era, where it's like, if we want Maduro, we just go in and take him. And one thing I see people trying to explore is could the next move just be follow the rules? So Abdullah Syed, who's now the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, he was asked in a newspaper kind of editorial board interview how he would make decisions about military aid and getting in conflicts. And his answer was, quote, international law. I believe we ought to be first among equals to enforce international law. We worked really hard after the worst world war in human history to build all these institutions, to build all these frameworks. And then we became the chief violator of all the frameworks. So the thing I see sort of happening more on the left side of the party, but not only is sort of saying the structure is already there. We just need to follow it and believe in it. And I guess my question for you as somebody who has really been covering the debate inside international law of what it can and can't do is, does it have that strength in it? Can it be enough of an answer? To these problems, not in and of itself, you know, and I think the key phrase in his response is first among equals, right? I think at this point, the ship has sailed and it's it's the extent of the destruction of United States participation in these international courts and institutions has been so grave. You know, of course, the rest of the world is now on notice that we can't be relied upon to uphold any commitments that would result. And that's always been the case, you know, to say that your policy is going to be international law. That can mean any number of things, right? As we were just discussing, it can also sanction crimes. Of course, that's not what he means. But I think this idea that you can return to a world in which the United States is leading the charge to strengthen the rule of law on the global stage, given the situation we're in is perhaps far-fetched. However, I think there's no question that the field is in need of regeneration, and a lot of people are calling for that. What form that will take, I think, is the crux of the problem. Well, let me make the argument for the rules for a minute to see how you respond to it. One argument that I've heard people like Robert Wright make and others is that America would be much better off over its past 20-some years if it had just followed the rules. If when it couldn't get U.N. authorization to enter Iraq, it didn't. That, I mean, for that matter, there would not have been U.N. authorization to enter Iran. And I think, frankly, the Trump administration would be better off if it had accepted that. Right. And so one argument that I take fairly seriously is, I just did a big piece on the Odyssey, and that one value of international law to a superpower is actually that it ties it to the mast, that that is not a drawback, that in fact, it is one we think we can do anything and should. And I think that's a very important argument. And I think that's a very important that we make our worst mistakes and international law and procedures and institutions, and for that matter, Congress, impose a restraint that it would otherwise be easy to forget. And more of our recent terrible errors seem like they have come from the absence of restraint rather than an excess of it. Yeah. No, I think that's very fair and perhaps true. Although, of course, we don't know what the counterfactual would be. I guess I would say that the kind of legislative power of Congress is indeed really powerful and should be used as a mechanism of restraint. And I think we would not be better off in a world in which these international laws did not exist. Like, I think what you could call the cynical argument that they have only made the world worse is unjust. And I think that's kind of not borne out in what we see. And I think people are better off for being able to name a genocide when it occurs. Even in the breach, right, even when they're not enforced. I guess what I'm saying is that it's not going to be sufficient just to say, oh, let's go back to that, right, because that world has gone. And we need to kind of confront the new political reality in which these things have been weakened. Because he talks about himself as a sort of direct descendant of Gandhian and Kingian nonviolence and that movement. I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there's nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But also that there is no peace without America's ability to enforce that peace, that treaties are not what ended World War II, that force was what ended World War II. As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history. And he really gives his defense of America as like the indispensable superpower that is needed. Yeah. To make any of these ideals real. But then you're sort of back in this like endless. Totally. Run around of what happens if, you know, you can't get the U.N. Security Council to bless your military intervention and, you know, against Russian aggression in Ukraine. Yeah, totally. And I think in that speech, he also, if I'm recalling correctly, he speaks of the necessity of being both an idealist and a realist and of not committing to either one of those ideologies and letting it blind you, perhaps. And the. The idea of the kind of self-enlightened state hegemon who, you know, follows international law. Of course, there's the question if, you know, he was making the argument, we can't pretend that this edifice hasn't been upheld for the past 60 years without American strength and power. And then, of course, now we are confronting a world in which we are no longer self-enlightened in that way, perhaps, and explicitly destroying all of these commitments or saying, you know, perhaps they're not irrelevant anymore. In Iran, we are seeing the. The implications of that abnegation. And you did this big piece for Guardian Longreads. Are we witnessing the death of international law? Yeah. Tell me why. Well, I think that was brought about by the Trump administration's explicit rejection and withdrawal from these conventions and treaties and hostility towards all of these institutions that are the physical embodiments of international law as we think of them. Yeah. And with Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing this campaign to dismantle the ICC, that has led people to say, oh, is international law a dead man walking? Can the U.S. actually take this down? And the answer is it's not up to the United States to dismantle it. We are not a party to the ICC and we haven't been for some time. But what's happening is we're making it very, very difficult for it to operate through sanctions on the sitting judges. They can't use their credit cards. They can't use American technology. They've spoken about this at length. It's worth saying this for a minute that we are treating the judges of the International Criminal Court like they are top members of Vladimir Putin's government. Yeah. We are using punitive tools to harm them. For what? What is our description of why we were sanctioning dully appointed judges of the ICC? Because of this perceived threat. The language that the State Department has used in its messaging has been. It's been about this perceived threat to American personnel and allies, right? So we can think of the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Gallant. But I think it's also important to note that this isn't the first time that this has happened. Under Bush, the United States nullified its signature to the Rome Charter, which is what established the ICC. And John Bolton at the time said that the United States would make the ICC wither and collapse. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. And we certainly will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us. Rubio might have said we're going to take apart the ICC brick by brick. And they might very well be committed. They're doing so. But this is not a kind of anomaly. But what's sort of odd about it is that at the same time that we have this intense hostility towards it, you will also see them flip at weird moments. Like Lindsey Graham was very excited about the judgments rendered against Putin. Senator Lindsey Graham says Russian President Vladimir Putin should be investigated for war crimes. And he is urging the Senate to pass a resolution supporting an international criminal court. Investigation into Putin and his regime's, quote, war crimes against humanity and war crimes against the people of Ukraine and others, close quote. I think it is in Americans' interest to make sure that Putin, who is now has an arrest warrant issued by the ICC for his war crimes, that we do not forgive and forget as a nation and we help the international community. And Graham was no friend of the ICC. He was not saying America should become a signatory to it. But then he was saying, well, if we can arrest Putin for it, we should. And you sometimes get this movement, even inside the Republican Party, where there can be this remarkable hostility to the ICC, that, well, when they like a ruling or they see it as useful. And by the way, from other countries, too, nothing Putin loves accusing America of, like violations of international law, that there is this constant, what is it, hypocrisy is the tribute, vice-face to virtue that happens in the way people talk about this. Yeah. And that. That is a way of using international law to serve the ends of power. Right. Of course, when it's being used against our enemies, we can say, yeah, great issue the arrest warrant. And it's a different thing when in the history of U.S. policy, it's been wielded against our own allies and personnel. And, you know, famously, we have what's called the Hague Invasion Act that allows us the authority or that Congress has given the authority for the U.S. to literally invade the Hague to extract U.S. personnel who. Hypothetically would have been arrested by the court. You read a great piece about what gets called flexible realism. Yeah. The Trump administration's flexible realism, which I think in practice is a license to do whatever you want. Mm hmm. Well, there's a German word you have in that piece. Machtpolitik. What is Machtpolitik? Could you define that for a second? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so so that comes from the scholar Patrick Porter, who says this is the corrupt cousin of realism. Right. It's when it's precisely when the restraints have been blown away, when a power is. No longer cognizant of its own limits. And that's when it really starts to make mistakes. And so everyone quotes Thucydides, the strong will do what they will and the weak will suffer what they must as this kind of creed of realism. And actually, that's a warning that unrestrained power leads to the demise of a nation. And so I think that's what he's saying, is there's this kind of idea that if you have a form of politics that's purely driven by strength and the will to power, that is a quick way to reach your own demise. Right. So you have that on the one side, which I think is a little bit of what we're seeing play out in Trump's foreign policy. I don't think it has ended up being enhancing for American power, but certainly their belief in it. What they have articulated to me personally about their belief is that America had all of this surplus power that it was not using because it was tied up in all these international forums and agreements. And they were going to use that power and America was going to exercise its will. Mm hmm. In a way that these weak-kneed liberals and leftists were not allowing it to do. And so then you see emerging on the other side, something that would much more subordinate America's power, even beyond where it was in, you know, the Obama or Biden or Clinton conceptions of foreign policy, which is we should really follow international law. We should follow the rules. If we want to do something, even we think it is moral or right or good, and we cannot get the U.N. to say yes to it, or we can not get NATO to say no. Or we cannot get Congress, for that matter, to say yes to it. We should not do it, even if we find that frustrating. Mm hmm. And so it actually seems to me like the foreign policy visions that are emerging are actually much more polarized about how American power should be used than at other times, at least in my time covering foreign policy. Yeah, I mean, I think there is a debate about whether what you call subordination to international law is a limitation of power rather than an expression of it. Right. I think, you know, this is some realists express this view that international law can be a tool of power and that we are weakening ourselves when we do not subscribe to it and we do not play the game. You know, you see China expressing power by trying to actually influence how international law is conducted and what definitions it uses. For example, one of the things that they're guarding is this principle of sovereignty. That's very, very important to them. And so by strengthening the international commitment to sovereignty, which, of course, has implications. For their own policy, you kind of see them establishing themselves as the leader in the field in the way that the United States used to be. They're kind of demonstrating how you can flex muscle by participation and not by absence. But to push on that, China, to the extent they are stepping into the breach left by America, is pushing a vision of the rules that is less about the application of values or morality and more about. the strength of territorial borders. But do they believe in that with Tibet? Do they believe in that with Taiwan? Have they been all that critical of Xi's dear friend Vladimir Putin entering Ukraine? Certainly they say that. Right. But when I look at China's behavior, at the very least, it seems there's a large loophole for if you say those are not real borders, that's ours. Well, who's going to stop you? Yeah, totally. And I think what that's getting to is this perception that international law is not completest, right? Like it's full of loopholes. It is full of hypocrisies. When I spoke to John Mearsheimer, who's one of the most prominent realists in the country, he said, of course, you know, we subscribe to international law when it suits us. And I think China is showing that also. And that gets back to this question about international law as an expression of power and as a vehicle of power. I want to stay for a second on this question of perhaps sovereignty as a principle, because one thing that I was thinking about as you began talking about China is that, yes, you can say that the way China frames its relationship to international law, whether or not they really believe in sovereignty as maybe it looks to me is questionable. Fair enough. On the other hand, some interesting convergence here. So Sam Moyne and Azabali, who are two scholars I have great respect for, Azabali's been on the show, they wrote a piece in The Guardian about what the post-American world order should look like. You tweeted it out very approvingly. And as I read that, it was a much more parsimonious, much thinner conception of like what the agreements should be that were really based on sovereignty. It was a sort of. So can you maybe explain what their vision looked like and what you found interesting in it? What I took them to be saying is that we should almost kind of return to brass tacks and kind of not discount international law as a meaningful force in the world. What I am concerned about is that when people see it not working, for example, in Gaza or in Ukraine and its conspicuous failure to hold back these terrible atrocities that they will discount it entirely. And in my conversations with particularly American lawyers, sometimes they say, oh, international law is a joke. It doesn't exist. And that is coming from the position of the hegemon, right? The position of strength and power. It's not something that you hear in other parts of the world, generally speaking. And I think what they were saying is, no, it absolutely does exist and it should be preserved, but it can't we can't return to this kind of fantastical vision of a liberal internationalism that has proven quite destructive in many ways. So. You should go back not to where you have maybe criminal courts and all these different treaties, but just saying, and this is me characterizing what I thought I was reading, but I'm not an international lawyer, that the agreement should be we don't invade each other. Yeah. And returning to the taboo against the crime of aggression and of conquest, right, which has been totally blown out of the water in recent years. But then I think you immediately get into this question, which I take as maybe one of the fundamental questions of foreign policy of international law. What do you do when it is. Violated. What is law without the police? What is law without enforcement? I think there is a particular challenge that people of a liberal persuasion face right now. And here I mean, like broadly liberal liberal in a way that, you know, unites left and moderates and just kind of people who believe in both domestic and international rules, which is all these systems from our courts to the UN, the ICC. We have these kind of beautiful values. That then need to be made real in the world through flawed institutions run by human beings. Yeah. And because the broad left has become the party that is in the institutions, people become human rights lawyers and international law experts. They fundamentally believe in it. And so their friends are in these institutions. You get really caught in the questions of proceduralism. Yeah. But let me drop us like a level beneath. What are the values at the base of all this? When people were building this system, you've written beautifully about the history here, maybe in a way that like almost now sounds naive. Like what were they trying to achieve? They were trying to realize a liberal order in which violence would no longer be the way that states would settle disputes. Right. There was this notion of peace through law, very romantic ideal. And, you know, the philosopher Judith Schlar writes about how this idea of law above all legalism became inseparable from liberalism. And I think what you were speaking about, about this kind of turn to proceduralism and this emphasis on bureaucracy that often, you know, law gets so caught up in this. And it also makes it hard to understand from the outside that that is actually where precisely these like moral values that undergirded. The project in the first place get lost and get drowned out. And, you know, I think often about the fundamental problem of all law, not just international law, is how do you make moral wrongs, wrongs that exceed our capacity really to understand and certainly punish? How do you nevertheless make them legible in this extremely brittle and perfect system that we have? You know, and there's this wonderful scholar at Yosal Rogat who many years ago about the Eichmann trial wrote that we've never escaped the problem of the Oresteia of the Aeschylus play, that the submission of moral wrongs to a legal order. And that's where we're constantly fighting this battle to end the cycle of vengeance. And our legal systems are constantly showing themselves to be inadequate, but also to hold this strange power that we don't always. And our legal systems are constantly. And our legal systems are constantly showing themselves to be inadequate, but also to hold this strange power that we don't always know how to use. Maybe entirely, or at least for the most part. That what Israel plausibly believed it was doing was destroying Hamas, which was embedded in civilian populations. And so what they did is the same either way, but it cannot be proven as genocide. So one, I don't think any of the people believe it's genocide would say after that, well, never mind. We went to the international courts. The courts ruled, you know, without fear or favor. And we're willing to say maybe that went too far, but it's not a genocide. But on the other side, what people really wanted, I think, was not law, but leadership, that international law is not preventive in this way. And I think so much of the fury that is actually splitting apart the Democratic Party right now is, you know, it's such a strange thing. It's like Joe Biden had few bigger supporters, particularly at the end, than Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and the left. And yet it was, you know, Biden's administration. That as much as anyone did allow this to happen, abetted this happening. And I think that what is sort of operating, but without people having exactly the way to say what it means in policy, is they want to see leadership that would not accept that again. And that it's not that it's bound by any one rule or any one law, but that it is. But like, how do you see if there is agreement on morality? Because I think some of the split in Democratic parties, it turned out there wasn't. It turned out what some people thought was unimaginable and what other people thought was just part of war were different. Yeah, I think there is this unquestionable desire for leadership. And, you know, I was even thinking about this. I think most people go about their lives and they're not aware of the ICJ and they don't think about it or the ICC for that matter. But there were a few weeks when those proceedings were not only on the front page of The New York Times, but also people were waiting outside the Peace Palace in The Hague, watching a kind of live stream, waiting for a moral verdict that wasn't going to come, at least certainly not on that day. And as you say, certainly not soon. It's not going to be salvific, right? Whatever judgment comes and whatever political resolution, right, whatever policy changes I think the Democrats need to make and will make come of this will not undo. Do the harm done. I think this is when we start thinking about international law as a kind of tragic field and the kind of void of leadership that we are experiencing now is almost reflective of this inability to kind of articulate the tragic nature of it in politics, because that's anathema to how we normally think about the messaging that we want our politicians to event. I think it goes to something you were saying earlier about why. In American politics, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel's reprisal in Gaza feel different. Yeah. Because we were not able to stop Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We have certainly hindered it. But the difference is there isn't a feeling of complicity in it. And to some degree, I think that means a lot in politics, right? People have this question like, well, what is America? You know, I don't know. I'm not 100 percent sure this is true because I think there is something about and has for a long time. It's something about Israel that attracts attention and interest. And, you know, I know people would say it's anti-Semitism. I think it can be that. But I think it's also much more complicated than that. It has to do with ties and affinities. It's also comes in positive attention, right, where people have like a deep relationship to Israel in America that they don't have to other countries. But nevertheless, that there is like a question of. What does it say about who we are? And what does it say about what our foreign policy is? And that feels like the deeply unanswered question. I think, you know, we're kind of seeing that play out, particularly if you look at Ukraine right now, where you have what, you know, is a war of self-defense trying to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty that will certainly end if it does. And if we can speak of an end in an unjust peace. Right. It will be a kind of negotiated settlement. We're already seeing that the terms are likely to be favorable to Russia. And, you know, in Gaza, the terms with which the Trump administration has spoken about bringing an end to that conflict have similarly kind of almost completely discounted the sovereignty of the Palestinian people. And, you know, I've long been fascinated by this question of endings and how we now live in this era of of wars with no discernment. I think, you know, well, and I have written about how ceasefires have become a replacement for lasting peace settlements. And I was really struck by this when, as part of the protests against the war in Gaza, the kind of prevailing slogan was ceasefire now and ceasefire now. That's very powerful. That stops the violence. You need a ceasefire first and foremost. But that's not the same as saying we are going to put a stop to this conflict. That is essentially saying we are going to stop it for now. And ceasefires almost always break down and it almost kind of serves as an excuse for sidestepping the more difficult political questions and moral questions that always come to light in these events. Why do you think that there's been this turn in international relations away from? Actual settlements and towards ceasefires and interim deals and kind of periods of quiet rather than big negotiated finality? There are many explanations, right? There's it's a matter of political will. It's also a matter of the fact that we are no longer in a unipolar world. There are many competing factors, right? You're more likely to have a lasting settlement when you have multiple states who are signing on to solving the problem, which increasingly is extremely. How much does it also just reflect a loss of belief in the possible? I mean, on Israel and the Palestinians, for one, there was a long period of attempts at peace deals and, you know, the days when it felt like America had the power to convene and force a real discussion, even if it didn't work at the end. Those days were they've been gone for a long time over the past. Many decades. There's this feeling that international law has lost its power of moral imagination. And the politicians who subscribe to it have kind of lost any tie with these kind of, you know, lofty ideals that kind of have historically driven the field forward and replace them with essentially managerialism. And I think precisely as the Democratic Party confronts the problem of like, what is its foreign policy going to be? It would be very well served. To try to recapture an affirmative vision of that moral daringness, I suppose, to not just say we're going to revert to the rules and let that be that, but to actually if you're if you're going to say that, that's that's all very well and fine. But say why say that these things have left us after Gaza in particular, having to confront the ruins of a kind of liberal internationalism. Some of you are saying to me recently that they were fascinated by how naive, widely held ideals of the fairly recent past now feel that there was a time, you know, the 60s and 70s where people believe that maybe you could have a world without war, where people believed that they were, you know, into the 80s engaged effort to have a world without nuclear weapons and that there's very little of that kind of. And so I guess I'm curious when in your reporting and your attending of these conferences, do you find that there are pockets of people dreaming about things that seem like a little fantastical now, but could be a source of at least the regeneration of values? We feel so trapped by a realism about our institutions and that it's hard sometimes to know if there are places. Where people are less trapped by that. of what international law can do in the world, right? And whether that is going to be preventive or protective, if it's going to be reparative. I think this is a really interesting question. You know, people think of the ICC as just the court that's delivering criminal convictions. In fact, it's also the Trust Fund for Victims, which is giving out payments often in advance of and in parallel to criminal investigations. After the Trump era, I mean, let's say you do have a Democratic president in 2029 and they want to come in and show that the era of international law, of America being a participant in the rules, participant in the international order is back. What would they have to do to signal something real there? Yeah, I think this is the question of moral imagination. You know, where do we want to go? Like I said, I don't think it's enough to just say we're reverting to the rules. I think you could imagine, and you know, Mamdani explicitly called for this, for the United States to join the ICC. Frankly, it's hard to imagine any administration doing that. But I think what you could do is meaningfully lend American support to these institutions, you know, whether it's, for example, by giving a lot of money to the Trust Fund for Victims, for example, to signal kind of material support. There's a, you know, there's a lot of money to the Trust Fund for Victims, for example, to kind of register of damages for Ukraine that has been logging everything that people have lost throughout that conflict. And right now, you know, that is just a list of claims that may never be fulfilled. And we have the power to kind of make that real. I think like my interest is in how do we make international law material, right? How do we make these moral values actually have a difference on people's lives? And that's the kind of reclaiming this reparative idea of international law or a reparative politics that kind of can fill in the breach. That's where I've found myself gravitating towards. So I think that's a good place to end. So always on our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? The first book I would recommend is it's called The Divided City by Nicolas Rowe, who was a kind of French scholar, just a gorgeous writer. And it's this book that talks about the inherent division of politics and how you can overcome it. And historically, it takes us back to the classics, to ancient Athens, that is the titular divided city, and speaks about the difficulty of coming together after moments of profound rupture. So that's the first one. The second book is coming out in September. It's called Crossing the Red Line by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, which is about the Biden administration's shifts in policy towards Gaza and precisely how that played out. And, you know, I was just reading it on the train here. And, you know, I was just reading it It is a very in-depth reportage about how the kind of red line was ignored and how they kind of said this being red lines that Biden said, he would say to Netanyahu, like, that's a red line. And then, yeah, I mean, you could specifically the discussion around the invasion of Rafah. So I would recommend that. And then the third book is by it's a novel called Underwater by Tara Menon that just came out, which is a kind of it's, gorgeously written. And it's this response to Amitav Ghosh's prompt that fiction has not figured out a way to describe the immensity of climate change and to capture the kind of tectonic losses and shifts that it will bring about. And that is what Tara is attempting to do in this book. And it's kind of just beautifully executed. Lindy Kintzer, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me.