From this brief list, you might conclude that Bobbitt is an authoritarian, bored by the rule of law and civil liberties. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is, first and foremost, the work of a jurist, passionately insistent that the law not be vandalised or ignored in the difficult times ahead. To ensure this, however, he is no less insistent that the law must adapt and that international lawyers, in particular, must not allow the global corpus iuris to ossify: ‘International rules must bear a closer resemblance to the actual practices of international actors or these rules will be ignored and a separate set of customs will take the place of law.’ We must be less like Blackstone, defending a sacred common law inheritance, and more like Mansfield, who based his legal judgment on practical observation and marketplace reality. This is the path back to the legitimacy that has been squandered by Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the international trauma over the legality of the Iraq War.

With this in mind, Bobbitt offers his own 12-point inventory of proposals, including a new international convention on the trade in biological or fissile stocks for weapons; a new jurisprudence on what constitutes a threat to international security under Article 7 of the UN Charter; an amendment to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on the creation of highly enriched uranium or weapons grade plutonium; and the creation of a standing international Terror Court.

Further, he proposes a new global structure, with fresh criteria for intervention:

An alliance of democracies that includes the United States and Great Britain will intervene in three circumstances: when substantial strategic interests and substantial humanitarian concerns intersect; or when absent a vital strategic interest, humanitarian concerns are extremely high owing to an acute crisis — famine, civil war, disease, genocide — and risks are apparently low; or when truly vital strategic interests are in truly imminent danger.

If your response to any of this is ‘Yes, but’, then we’re getting somewhere. Though his prose is often lapidary in its beauty, Bobbitt is not handing down tablets of stone — how could he, at this stage in the conflict? — but proposing a new agenda for considered reflection. The Cold War had a dazzling pantheon of theorists (Kennan, Viner, Schlesinger) to explain and influence its course, but the War on Terror has conspicuously failed to generate such scholarship — until now. Let us hope that, in this masterpiece and manual for our times, Philip Bobbitt is leading where others will follow.

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