We really need laws removing the power from the President to unilaterally declare organizations terrorists. At least not long term without their ability to fight the designation in court.
(Same for tariffs. There is no case where one needs emergency power to tariff or sanction anything. If you need to conduct urgent police action, court-ordered asset freezes are plenty.)
Only then will you have the moral altitude you profess to have with the rest of the world, and not until then.
"Terrorist" is just this centurys' n-word - a phrase which racists cannot overtly use any more so they invented a new term to supplant it.
American here. This is a non-starter. Nobody does it. And war is a domain where leading on moral authority requires firepower to back it.
We don’t agree on what does and doesn’t constitute a war crime, the term seems to cover almost all war as well as actions taken by every global and regional power in almost every military action they’ve each taken.
We need reform. But pretending we can legally ban war is silly.
The USA is the worlds #1 funder of terrorism and its #1 fighter of illegal, criminal wars. Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible, we are all going down the drain with the USA and its war criminals.
You can’t do this when nobody else does, and particularly not when pretty much every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists. In practice, all war appears to be illegal under international law. That makes the law untenable, which may be part of why it’s being ignored.
> Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible
I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law. But someone needs to propose something realistic.
If you're going to dance around pretending to be the only world power, you have to set the example you want to see of the other 'lesser nations' which are subject to your war criminals' purposes.
>every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists.
So what you're really saying is that warriors should always be senior to activists.
This problem runs deep.
>I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law.
No, I'm saying that the U.S. needs to stop being a criminal nation beholden only unto itself.
We’re in a globalized world with aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The fallacy of thinking a major economy (or significant nation) can decouple from any expansionist regime is a lesson I thought we learned from the first half of the last century.
The Russian weapons (at various points) were missing critical components, maintenance, fuel, etc.
The US weapons appear to have functioned as specified, but the commander-in-chief appears to know marginally less about the Iranian strategic situation than I personally do. And this is not a boast, I have zero military training and only follow the occasional commentator like Anders Puck Nielsen and read the odd Wikipedia page when something surprising comes up in the news or a comment, and pay enough attention to the news and comments to be capable of surprise, it's just that I asked someone around 20 years ago if the War On Terror would go to Iran given all the obvious threads leading there, and they told me it would go down basically as we saw it going down this year: very expensive, no real progress, strategic failure no matter what military victories happen.
At invading or achieving any geopolitical objective, yes (though I wouldn’t compare the American military-industrial base to Russia’s). At causing at least as much chaos as sanctions, no.