Latest in use of force
On Friday, the Lawfare Podcast hosted a conversation on the wide-ranging policy implications of the U.S. strike that killed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ leader Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, deputy commander of Iraq’s quasi-official Popular Mobilization Forces and leader of the Iraqi militia and PMF Keta’ib Hezbollah.
Editor's Note: This piece is crossposted on Lawfare and EJIL:Talk!
States frequently take actions and make statements that implicate international law. But because they do not—and, indeed, could not—express a view on each such act or statement by all other states at all times, silence seems to be the norm, rather than the exception, in international relations.
A recent post on the New York Times’s At War blog begins with this hypothetical scenario:
The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law (edited by the highly distinguished Cambridge University international law scholar Marc Weller) labors under two handicaps before ever reaching the book's content.
Daniel Bethlehem says that my claim that the Obama administration has embraced the Bush doctrine of preemption for anticipatory self-defense “misses an essential element.” The essential element I missed was that the 2002 National Security Strategy that first announced the preemption doctrine “invented new language and, in doing so, suggested that the United States was moving away, with deliberate thought and careful