When you go to law school, you learn very quickly that there are fashionable subjects—and then there are the boring ones. Administrative law is boring. Tax law is boring. Torts and contracts are boring. Anything procedural is widely regarded as a form of mental torture. At least by the majority. These courses test your ability to stay awake, not your capacity for cocktail-party conversation.
When I went to law school, I knew exactly what I was signing up for. I knew those subjects would strain my attention span—but I also knew they would give me a solid foundation for whatever I might want to do later. They dealt with how power actually works, how rules are enforced, how systems grind forward day after day. Unsexy, indispensable things.
On the other side of the spectrum sits anything with the word international in it. International law. International relations. International institutions. This is the very pinnacle of cool and sexy in legal education. Aspirational. Prestigious. The stuff of conferences, panels, and carefully curated LinkedIn bios.
But is it deserved? Or are people simply chasing what looks impressive rather than what actually works?
I asked myself a very simple question early on: if someone breaks international law, who exactly shows up to enforce it? Who applies the power of the executive branch? No matter how many obligations countries saddle themselves with, international law always depends on cooperation. Voluntary compliance. Good faith. Polite agreement.
If a country decides not to play ball, there is remarkably little an international body can do about it.
In theory—at least under the democratic pretense—law is supposed to be an expression of the will of the people. Legislators create laws. The executive enforces them. The judiciary controls and interprets them. Everyone is bound by the same rules, backed by actual power. That feedback loop is what gives law its teeth.
None of this exists in international law.
You can simply ignore it and act as if everything is fine—and, surprisingly, this works most of the time. Or you can openly ditch large parts of it, as Donald Trump has just done. To be fair, the wild proliferation of agencies, treaties, and organizations—each with its own mandate, budget, and moral mission—had to be cut back eventually. Organizations have a natural tendency to inflate until the parasite kills the host. That is not ideology. That is biology.
Any other country can do the same. And frankly, it’s the most honest thing one can do. Instead of remaining formally inside a system while openly flouting every rule ever written, it is far better to admit that the arrangement no longer works and walk away.
International law is a fluke. Its aura of sophistication and moral authority is thin, brittle, and temporary. Its sheen of cool is as ephemeral as morning dew on a dog turd.
Law works best when it is closest to the people it governs. Small scale. Clear accountability. Real enforcement. International organizations are the very antipode of that closeness. The further law drifts from the people, the more it becomes theater—and theater, no matter how well funded, does not govern reality.