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By Jordan Blashekr, AMERICAN THINKER

President Obama is clearly not yet finished destroying what remains of the U.S.-led international order. By allowing a harmful UN Security Council resolution to pass declaring Israeli settlements to be “a flagrant violation under International Law,” he reverses decades of U.S. policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and makes a future negotiated settlement even more difficult for the parties to achieve. More importantly, the move strikes a devastating blow to the credibility of the UN and international law.

Eight years of Obama’s foreign policy have left the world on fire. Now, with his final foray into geopolitics, he has attacked the last remaining vestiges of a rules-based order.

For a president who prides himself on the long-game, this was an incredibly short-sighted and selfish move.

While the bi-partisan backlash has so far focused on the damage to Israel and the peace process, the longer-term casualty will be the international legal order itself. Why? Because going forward, the three major global powers — the U.S., Russia, and China — will concurrently disregard international law as they pursue their own interests. While we expect this from Russia and China, President Obama just all but guaranteed that the Trump Administration will follow suit.

International law only functions properly and effectively when the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K — unanimously agree to uphold its sanctity. Since World War II, international law progressed slowly and unevenly because the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China each exercised their veto powers in pursuit of geopolitical interests. Nevertheless, the United States unswervingly lent its power and legitimacy to the United Nations because we believed that it enshrined our values. We accepted the short-term limitations imposed by international law because of the long-term benefits offered by a rules-based liberal order.

Today, however, the international order is neither rules-based nor liberal.

Russia and China are revisionist powers who seek to reshape the global order in their image. They have consistently violated international law to promote their own interests, while using their Security Council vetoes to hamstring the United States from taking actions that would uphold the global order. In just the past 4 years, Russia has annexed Crimea, sold advanced missiles to Iran, and bombed civilians in Syria on behalf of Bashir al-Assad. China has similarly waged covert cyber war against the U.S., constructed fake islands to claim new exclusive economic zone rights, and continued their ethnic cleansing of Tibet. At the same time, the two countries have systematically prevented the U.N. from taking any action regarding Syria, including the referral of Bashir al-Assad to the ICC for his use of chemical weapons against civilians.

For his part, President Obama has fecklessly used the UN Security Council to circumvent our own system of checks-and-balances. In 2011, President Obama justified his military intervention in Libya through the U.N. Security …read more

Source:: Israpundit

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