Guidelines Puffed Up as Law: Should under the Subterfuge of Must

During the coronavirus pandemic (2020-2022), Arizona’s Ducey administration allowed bus and light-rail employees to go maskless even though they were in close contact with the public. Bus drivers were even getting sick. The “rationale” of the Phoenix transit authority was that the federal regulation is “just a mandate.” Because the word mandate means “an authoritative command,” the rationale that being a mandate renders a law or government regulation as optional can only be spurious at best; this is a case of arrogant ignorance that can’t possibly be wrong about itself in the member-state that ranked 49^th out of 50 on public education. As an authoritative command, a law, even as implemented in regulations, has what Kant called necessity in that law itself cannot be bent; it stands firm in itself as law. In contrast, a guideline connotes flexibility rather than necessity. It follows that enforcement must pertain to laws (including regulations) but not to guidelines. I contend that what are commonly referred to as international laws are actually international guidelines. Such “laws” lack viable enforcement mechanisms and thus are actually guidelines for governments engaged in international relations.

Calls that governments need to respect international law even though no enforcement mechanism exists are actually expressions of a moral desire that such “laws” should be respected in the international arena. That what is actually a should is typically expressed in terms of must by government officials around the world only adds to the mistaken belief that a viable world order exists and thus that aggressors such as Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu, and America’s Trump—all of whom have wantonly disregarded international law—pose no threat. A law without a credible means of enforcement—and not just by volunteer “enforcers”—is not a law; as in Hobbes’ state of nature, such a “law” can be said to have the force of an ideological moral desire against opponents.

In the wake of the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuela’s sitting President Maduro, E.U. foreign minister Kallas issued a statement, which reads in part: “The E.U. recalls, that under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be upheld.”[1] The word must implies at the very least that penalties apply if the must is dismissed by a state that violates the law or Charter. As had been clear for decades, even countries in the UN could easily ignore the Charter with impunity within the UN, and the veto-powers in the Security Council need only veto a proposal to see to it that it cannot be violated because it has not passed. So, what Kallas really meant is that governments around the world should uphold the principles of international law and the UN Charter. Notice that she used the word principles, which do not constitute law, so she contradicts herself in applying the word must. For someone to say, you must follow that principle, is not the same as saying, you must follow the law. Only the latter connotes or implies that violations will be punished—not even that there might be penalties. Those exist even if law enforcement does not catch a particular culprit.

Kallas’s statement can be critiqued on moral grounds, which is certainly ironic because her foreign-policy stance is laudable; I submit that militaristic heads of government should be restrained internationally, lest the world falls back into the dark ages. In using the word must, the E.U.’s foreign minister was doing exactly what Nietzsche calls attention to in his critique of modern morality, in which “Thou shalt not” is used as a club of sorts to beguile the self-confident strong into unilaterally not acting on their strength. Were he alive, Nietzsche would probably council the sitting U.S. president not to feel shamed or guilty from Kallas’s infliction of must, which can only mean should in referring to international law and anything to do with the United Nations given the utter lack of enforcement. Without that, the world is left with international guidelines rather than laws, and the UN is left standing on the sideline utterly impotent from the self-inflicted initial wounds of the veto-mechanism in the Security Council and the lack of any UN armed forces or police adequately empowered as force to enforce UN resolutions. The same goes for the International Criminal Court, the ICC, whose arrest warrants for Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu were being either ignored around the world or even actively fought against (by the Trump administration). An arrest warrant that depends on voluntary enforcement by third parties (i.e., governments around the world) is not a warrant in any sense of that word. Again, a misleading use of words.

A problem with using words that are bear on a global order misleadingly is that the appearance of there actually being an order internationally, as distinct from “might makes right” as the de facto default, is illusionary. In actuality, when Putin invaded Ukraine, Netanyahu inflicted an inhumane holocaustic genocide on the people of Gaza, and Trump captured the sitting president Venezuela, the status of international law was epitomized by the word should rather than must. The moral desire for international constraints on raw militaristic aggression is of course laudable, but that desire itself does not constitute recognition of there being international law. To portray the former as the latter is dishonest. 

It is also counter-productive from the standpoint of what would be needed for the family of nations, or more practically a coalition of “the willing” among the political unions and sovereign states of the world, to design, approve, and activate institutions, including possibility a global federation along the times described by Kant, that are capable of instituting and enforcing law internationally. Officials of such institutions as have enough governmental sovereignty to enforce international law even with boots on the ground if necessary could indeed say must without merely expressing a moral desire. Out of such self-confident strength at the global level, albeit with institutional checks on tyranny at that level from a qualified majority of countries, which would all be semi-sovereign, the precedents being incurred in favor of “might makes right” by Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump could potentially be reversed and once again set as outliers internationally. Such rogue nations could be relegated and effectively expelled from the family of nations both economically and politically. 

That a holocaustic—yes, holocaustic—severity of suffering was unleashed by a genocidal government in the Middle East for years in the so-called modern era (after the Enlightenment!) is itself testimony enough that the post-World War II global order’s international organizations, including the International Criminal Court and the UN, including its top court, was by 2023 utterly impotent. Out of this power vacuum, militaristic aggressors on the world stage could easily sense that low-hanging fruit could be easily plucked with utter impunity. It is precisely at such a point that the ground is fertile for a new world order to be promulgated and enacted so as to constrain angry men who are bathed in power. Human nature itself is the root cause behind the cycle of world orders through history punctuated by intervals of unimpeded military aggression, such as by the three blind men, driving drunk with power, in the mid-2020s.

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1. Maria Tadeo, “EU Calls for Respect of International Law as Trump Remains Vague on Venezuelan Transition Plan,” Euronews.com, 4 January 2026.

On International Multilateralism: A Harsh Verdict on the UN by a Former Undersecretary

Speaking at Harvard in late September, 2024, Noeleen Heyzer, a former undersecretary of the UN, related the need for multilateral governance internationally to the need for the UN to evolve. The UN Charter created a system in which both large and small nations would be held accountable to international law: a rule-based order. This would protect the weak from the strong. Yet the Security Council has been unable to end wars. The UN is, according to Heyzer, “severely weakened,” so “(t)he strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Peaceful coexistence that rectifies power imbalances was at the time sorely lacking in Ukraine and Gaza. National vetoes in the Security Council were inflicting much damage on the UN's ability to respond. The implications for the UN, she admitted to me after her talk, are not at all good even concerning whether the international organization can reform itself sufficiently to rise out of abject failure.

Four global problems demonstrate the weakness of the United Nations as a multilateral institution by which countries can be held accountable. The UN’s response to the Covid virus pandemic was slow, and entirely in effective in getting China to share vital information with the world as the disease spread. China’s national interest—and the “face-saving” cultural reflex—was a threat to the interests of the global commons—the public health of the species, which should outweigh national interests even if not every national government is convinced. The climate crisis has demonstrated that binding multilateral governance has become necessary in part because of the growing power of MNCs, which are oriented to short-term profit and pushing costs to society (i.e., externalities.[1] Cybersecurity against hackers from abroad also demonstrates that the rule of law is needed internationally. Lastly, international security, which was severely compromised by the 55 conflicts going on in 2024, demonstrates just how damaging the national vetoes in the Security Council can be to international peace. The US invasion of Iraq, Russia of Ukraine, and Israel in Gaza leave us with the unhappy conclusion that no enforcement mechanism for international law exists. Impunity has been blatant, such that international law itself risks being utterly discredited. Ignoring international law and the use of national vetoes by allies of belligerent countries preempt international law, resulting in a heightened sense of unfairness globally.

Put in place in 1945, “(t)he current international system is out of date," she said. "We face a breakdown or breakthrough. Collective rethinking to make anther historical pivot is needed," she added. Diffusion of power has occurred since the UN’s founding. Fifty-one countries were initially in the UN. By 2024, the figure had reached 193 countries as members of the international organization. “The UN needs to evolve to reflect the shift in global power from the unipolar world of the US to a multipolar world,” she said. Global stakeholders include non-state actors; they should be included, she advocated streneously. “Solidarity is an act of enlightened self-interest,” she said. 

She reported that the UN was fundamentally rethinking how it could evolve to fit the reality of the twenty-first century.  A shift from a state-centric approach to one that engages diverse actors outside of the UN was needed, she argued, to protect our global commons. Economic inequality and social injustice undercut global stability, and thus should be emphasized more in the UN, she argued, as it evolves in the future. She emphasized throughout her talk that the UN should assume more of a role in rectifying economic inequality and patriarchy in countries that are members of the UN.

Thus far, I have briefly sketched Heyzer’s argument. I turn now to critiquing it. Although addressing economic inequality was a leitmotif in her talk, she said nothing of the impact of the UN’s humanitarian work around the world in alleviating economic inequality. To be sure, that humanitarian work has been a benefit to the species, especially in terms of food and disease, and the organization’s ideals too are of value, but I contend that neither saves the organization from the verdict, which I share with Heyzer, that the UN has failed overall.

Most significantly, a vague reference to the General Assembly working on how the UN could evolve does not reflect the severity of the impotence of the Security Council and the General Assembly in regard to restraining national interests that compromise or even eviscerate collective action on the four major problems discussed above. The countries having vetoes in the Security Council cannot be expected to willingly give up their respective vetoes. Political realism says as much. So, it is difficult to see how the major problem in the UN could be solved short of the non-veto members forming a new international organization—a substitute for the UN sans vetoes.

Even such a solution leaves the impotence in enforcement untouched. Putin in Russia and Netanyahu in Israel beginning in 2023 highlight the need for international law to “have teeth” (i.e., have credible enforcement mechanisms). By this I mean something more than mere embargoes, as those of the E.U. and U.S. against Russia in 2024 demonstrate just how difficult it is for embargoes to have sufficient economic impact to result in political/militaristic change in the embargoed country. I submit that vesting UN troops with more authority in using force to stop countries like Israel and Russia within their respective sovereignties geographically would be necessary for international law to be able to live up to the name of law. Theoretically, if international law is indeed law, then political realism should include the strategic interests not just of countries, but also whatever international organization(s) promulgate and presumably enforce international law.  

After her talk, I spoke with Heyzer to present my critique, which I said I would publish. She agreed with me that the veto powers on the Security Council would not agree to unilaterally give up their respective vetoes, so the non-veto countries of the UN would have to form another international organization sans vetoes, which the veto-holding countries of the UN could join. By implication, the discussions then underway in the General Assembly to reform the UN can be viewed as superficial rather than as serious attempts to reform the UN out of its paralysis in promulgating international law. She also agreed with me that without going further to address the impotence in enforcing the UN resolutions on the UN’s willful countries that violate UN resolutions doubtless with a sense of impunity, even a non-veto substitute organization would not be a viable solution unless viable enforcement mechanisms “with teeth” could be formulated and implemented. I suggested to Heyzer that in addition to not permitting the most powerful countries to wield veto-power in the Security Council, which would not improve enforcement, the UN troops would need additional authority to literally push back or arrest countries that violate UN resolutions or verdicts of the UN’s court by invading other members other than in self-defense. She did not reply to my suggestion itself, which likely means that she did not agree with it. Instead, she said, “creative thinking is needed.” I agreed wholeheartedly, and pointed out that even though our species has developed technology and economically both in terms of fiscal and monetary policy, having learned lessons from the Great Depression so another would not occur in the financial crisis of 2008, there has not been much in the way of political development since the Enlightenment. Heyzer agreed with me on this point, and that a burst of thinking was needed in 2024 due to the four emergent threats to our collective interests internationally discussed above. As I have already stated, she said the following crucial sentence during her talk: “Collective rethinking to make another historical pivot is needed.” I submit that such a pivot would go beyond, though be related to, merely voiding the vetoes and creating a mechanism of enforcement at the extant UN. Deep political principles are reexamined and shifted around for there to be a fundamental change sufficient to constitute a historical pivot.  

Climate change alone demonstrates that continuing with the principle of absolutist national sovereignty at the expense of multilateral international governance is nothing short of foolish. Continuing to rely on the UN to address the four pressing and dire problems impinging on international relations even though the consensus is surely that the UN itself has failed in its principal missions reflects very badly on humanity in its cognitive functioning. The lack of any significant public discourse on the need for a replacement for the UN is itself a red flag, or indication that our species is akin to race horses wearing blinders. Unlike the horses, we can take ours off. I don’t believe the problem is that we have hit the ceiling of the human brain’s ability to think; rather, too many people, even among the political and economic elites, have been giving things exogenous to thinking, such as ideology, stubbornness, and sheer complacency, too much weight in being able to distort or even displace reason.  

I submit that it is telling that a former undersecretary of the UN admitted that a substitute organization would be necessary—that a former high-ranking UN official has come to the unhappy conclusion that the UN is not able to adequately reform itself, given the hegemony of the veto-wielding member-countries (which are not member-states, as some reporters erroneously claim, since the UN is an international organization rather than a federal government). The implications are indeed dire for the UN.

Simply put, unless or until another international organization or government is established for multilateral international relations funneled by an institutional structure and procedures, the international arena will continue to instantiate the state of nature. Ultimately, the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty must give way for multilateral international relations to rise from the barbaric state of nature. Although the UN’s ideals were still of value as late as 2024, it can be argued that the UN itself had dropped to the status of a dead corps still twitching, as evinced by the sheer dismissive impunity of Russia and Israel as they both ravaged exogenous territories not permitted by the UN, which also had no ability to constrain countries violating the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions. If the UN had become impotent in preventing or stopping war and in literally saving the species from possible extinction (not to mention saving coastal cities around the world), is this not a stark indication that the international organization had failed and thus that a substitute or alternative was already warranted?

That an organization that was so clearly failing would continue nonetheless to function as if it were viable and be treated as such by national leaders points to a basic flaw in the human brain. To act as if and not even cognitively recognize that the route is futile goes beyond cognitive dissidence as a mental error. The lack of any public discourse on replacing the UN after Putin and Netanyahu had so easily dismissed strictures set by the UN is itself problematic. If someone tells people not to cross a line in the sand and yet they do anyway, and with impunity, to treat the teller as at all credible is nothing short of pathological.

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1. In the case of democracies, governments have an electoral interest in increasing GNP even by refusing to constrain fossil fuel extraction, refining, and consumption. Autocracies have a cash-flow interest in maximizing exports, which may include oil and conventional vehicles. During its invasion of Ukraine, Russia sent its embargoed oil through Saudi Arabia and India, which were then able to sell the oil to the West without disclosing the source.

On the Arrogance of Self-Entitlement during a Pandemic

In the midst of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, libertarians in San Francisco, California objected to wearing face masks. Other people there were simply fed up with wearing masks by late 1918. The libertarians, who objected on the basis of rights, actually prevented the Board of Health from renewing a mandate to wear masks.[1] In early 1919, another spike in influenza cases there led the board to put a mandate in place. So in March of 2020, the failure of mass transits and retail stores to enforce physical distancing and the failures a few months later to enforce mandates on wearing face masks to reduce the spread of the coronavirus can be seen as recklessness (and fecklessness) that could have been prevented by looking back a hundred years. But could the willful disregard of store policies and local law both by customers and store managers have been prevented had business had heeded history? I contend that human nature, which had not changed in such a short time by evolutionary standards, played the heavy, or anchor.
The selfishness of business managers can be regarded as the obstacle to historical progress in dealing with pandemics. As against history and even “organizational learning,” the current profit-motive wins over managers. God forbid that a customer be offended by being confronted by a store employee for not wearing a mask even though mask-wearing was “required” not only by store policy, but also by local law! Of course, a store or business policy barring enforcement of a requirement nullifies it, even if managers could not grasp this simple point. Also, allowing customers to break a local law is itself criminal, even if managers could not grasp this simple point. Ignoring a company policy and even local law could somehow be justified by the interests of profit-seeking.  
The selfishness and inconsiderateness of customers came with a presumptiveness or sense of entitlement to break not only store policies but local law as well. The mantra by the individual that that individual is above store requirements and the law rings with a shallow arrogance. The presumptuousness of the weak of being self-justified brings with it a bad odor, Nietzsche would say. This pathology was especially prevalent in places such as Arizona in the United States.
According to Jeremy Brown, an expert on the 2020 pandemic, it showed how strident selfishness can be. Such selfishness, joined by the related lack of consideration and empathy for other people, was perhaps greater than expected among American business managers and customers. “I think that the message we’ve seen is that people are selfish to a remarkable degree that I don’t think we’ve seen before,” Brown said.[2] That is, the refusal of retail managers to enforce a company requirement because doing so might turn some customers away, and thus their money, is steeped in short-sighted selfishness that recognizes no business responsibility in society. Similarly, the refusal of customers to wear masks, which put other people at risk, can show us just how much of a force selfishness can have in certain people. “The selfishness of people and their inability to have empathy for others who aren’t like themselves is one of the very, very worrying aspects that the disease has highlighted, Brown suggests. “I think this is a deeply rooted part of American society.”[3]
I submit that it is a gross overgeneralization to gloss American society, as there are many, just as many exist in Europe. In having lived in several of those in America, I was stunned in 2020 by just how much aggressive selfishness and stubborn weakness I witnessed in Arizona by how people reacted to the pandemic. Many bus drivers, for instance, refused to wear masks even though they were required by company policy and the local law. Many retail stores had policies forbidding employees from even approaching customers who were not wearing masks. Many light rail, bus passengers, and store customers went maskless with impunity. Light rail security guards were not allowed even to ask passengers to put masks on, and bus drivers rarely did even though they could have at least informed violators of the company policy mandating the wearing of masks. The local police department managers unilaterally decided not to go after organizations allowing customers or riders to break the law. Apparently some laws, especially if they are important to public health, are not worth enforcing.
In short, in some places more than others, just as the extent and depth of selfishness became more apparent with the coronavirus pandemic, so too did human weakness and the related organizational corruption. That these defects had the gall to defend themselves aggressively rather than recognize themselves are faults is perhaps another stunning realization that was made possible by the coronavirus pandemic. This can easily account for the fact that lessons learned in 1918 were so easily dismissed in 2020.

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1. Kristen Rogers, “What the 1918 Flu Pandemic Can Teach Us about Coronavirus,” CNN.com, September 25, 2020.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Deforestation in Brazil: Exacerbating Climate Change

On July 17, 2020, satellite data from Brazil's space agency showed that deforestation in Brazil's Amazon was accelerating. "Nearly 3,000 square miles of tree coverage were lost in the 11 months that ended June 30 .That is a 64% increase from the year-earlier period, when 1,772 square miles of forest were destroyed."[1] The deforestation in 2020 was "likely to exceed 2019's total of 3,900 square miles by a 'wide margin," according to a senior scientist at the space agency.[2] Under normal circumstances, which the Wall Street assumed, we would consider the government's claim that not enough troops were available to patrol enough of Brazil's massive Amazon jungle to even slow the acceleration. According to Ricardo Salles, the environment minister, the government wanted to "attract foreign investors to fund sustainable economic development in the jungle."[3] That is to say, the matter boils down to (international) political economy. 

However, the circumstances were not normal. I am not referring to the coronavirus pandemic still ravaging globally, though the refusals of a significant proportion of people to wear masks indoors and on public transportation coupled with the lack of will, competence, knowledge, or ideological inclination to even to enforce the relevant laws, especially in Arizona, reflect the same mindset as that which does not take climate change seriously by electorates and governments around the world. 

Just a week earlier, the World Meteorological Organization had announced that the global temperature-increase threshold set in the Paris Accord of 1.5C (2.7F) over preindustrial levels could occur before 2024.[4]  At this level, the impact of the accelerating deforestation means less CO2 being absorbed by vegetation such as trees, and thus more of the gas being left in the atmosphere. Just as the case of governments of Florida, Texas, and Arizona lifting economic restrictions too early in May, 2020 only to have skyrocketing cases of coronavirus in June and July, governments were also failing in not only not reducing carbon emissions, but also permitting them to continue to increase such that the threshold global temperature could come sooner rather than latter. Given the priorities given the lack of political will over economic and political expediency, we could expect other, more dangerous, thresholds whether in terms of pandemics or climate. 

Perhaps it is precisely because of the mentality that heads in the opposite direction from that which leads to the species' viability that Nature's own instruments for constraining and even eliminating such a species were really beginning to kick in by 2020. Whether the Brazilian government was quietly looking the other way as illegal deforestation was occurring or that government could not supply enough military troops to protect the massive jungle is a question that pales in comparison to the observation that the deforestation itself came at the expense of reduced carbon in the atmosphere. The fact that continued deforestation rather than increasing forestation was happening--that humans living in Brazil (or the world) werte not up to the task of stopping the trend--evinces a weakness in our species that may finally render us extinct by Nature's means, which we cannot necessarily control. As with any overpopulated species, Nature's tools are disease, starvation, and war, according to Malthius. It seems that the refusal of humans to adequately protect ourselves (and societies) even in the midst of a raging pandemic and increasingly urgent climate change may have already doomed our species. It is also possible, though not probably, that the species' ineptitude in protecting itself will be countered by technological innovation. Yet even so, making things worse rather than better does not render our species particularly attractive, at least to Nature. 

1. Paulo Thevisani, "Brazil's Forest Losses Quicken," The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2020.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Associated Press, "UN Report Predicts the World Could Surpass Dangerous Warming Theshold by 2024," NY Post, July 9, 2020.