Customer Reviews

Rule of Power or Rule of Law?

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What planet does the previous viewer come from? Virtually every international treaty proposed by the United Nations has been obstructed; watered-down; weakened, so its unenforceable for all practical purposes; simply ignored; or remains unratified, and scoffed at, by the government of the United States! The greatest economic and military power on earth!

Whether it concerns the rights of children, rights of women, World Court, international tribunals, global warming, world's oceans, militarization of outer space, landmines, underground nuclear testing, ad nauseam, our terribly misguided Federal government will do its best to put the interests of the very few before the vast majority! At what point does this become evil?

It took the last day the great Senator William Proxmire was in office, and more than a generation later, in order to simply ratify the Genocide Treaty for God's sake! What our government does, and doesn't do, in our name is simply beyond belief! It's a real shame such an important book remains so obscure! It should be required reading before a person graduates from college, and goes out into the real world!

Although "Rule of Power or Rule of Law" appears to be a comprehensive review of a number of security treaties that America has participated in, it is more propaganda than academic empirical study. While the reviews of treaties are probably useful at the undergraduate level, a careful read of the book and its footnotes reveals that there is very little empirical evidence that indicates that the United States has actively sought to work against the ratification or the development of such treaties because it simply wants to impose rules without being subject to them. The reality of world politics suggests that the risk of the use of nuclear, chemical and biological agents is not symmetric across all states; while fanatics might suggest that the U.S. is conspiring to use biological or chemical weapons proactively against other states, there are reasonable and logical fears that the United States has in supporting certain aspects of biological or chemical weapons treaties. And these reasons, for example, security and confidentiality of bio-defense, are more complex issues than the authors suggest. To the authors, the United States doesn't comply for the simple reason because it wants to set the rules but not abide by them. Of course, the issue is more complicated. I would not recommend this book for academic study as it fails to provide a more unbiased, academic and non-politically motivated understanding of the role of the United States in treaty-making.