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Teaching international law has always required disciplined idealism. For those of us in the academy who reject the conceit of a benign American imperial order, it is an exercise in professional candour. One must teach rules while explaining, without euphemism, that the most powerful states do not feel bound by them and no longer bother to conceal it.
Consider the present moment. The President of the United States can announce designs on foreign territory such as Greenland not through treaty, referendum, or any lawful process, but by blunt invocation of “US interests,” accompanied by the warning that force remains available if persuasion fails. He can order the seizure of a sitting foreign head of state, Nicolás Maduro, from Venezuelan territory and then publicly boast that Venezuela’s oil will be redirected for American benefit. This has long been the practice of the United States in substance, but no previous president has been so candid about the premise. Donald Trump has stated openly that he does not consider himself bound by international law, that the only constraint on American power is his own sense of morality, a position he articulated on January 8 in an interview with the New York Times. What earlier administrations cloaked in the language of norms, necessity, or exceptionalism, he dispenses with altogether.
