Author Description

There currently exists a gap between America's professed support for international law and its pursuit of a geopolitical mission that is essentially lawless. This book traces the roots of America's dilemma about international law-its conflicted sense of itself as an uplifting inspiration to other nations, but also, at the same time, expansionist, superior and violent. The US's international role, marked by the tension between adherence to law and the lawless pursuit of strategic interests and at times isolationism, has given it a double role: effectively initiating major international law reforms, and then remaining aloof from the legal framework negotiated after years of painstaking diplomacy. From human rights to the oceans and the International Courts for Justice, the extent of the gap between law and geopolitics can serve as a guide for how international law works and how it fails. Falk argues that the US is in process of crossing the Rubicon, moving from an essentially republican heritage to an essentially imperial posture. It is not too late, however, to reverse the course, nor to move onto the safer ground of seeking to establish a global rule of law that can benefit Americans as well as others. The promotion of global democracy, which is itself dependent on an expanded vision of what citizenship should mean in the 21st century, Falk concludes, can help move America back to a more stable relationship with international law and with its brethren states generally.