Why are we reluctant to acknowledge this? Laughland’s argument is that we tend, like the Puritans who denounced King Charles, to see the world through Manichaean glasses as a titanic struggle between good and evil in which the forces for good have a ‘higher law’ on their side. Defeating ‘evil’ justifies tearing into shreds the old international system in which the sovereignty of states and the principle of non-interference in their internal affairs were paramount. Of course, intervention is selective, made not on moral, let alone judicial, considerations, but in accordance with national interests at stake. The Soviets knew what they were doing at Nuremberg. The global victory of the proletariat was to usher in world government, which would obliterate the distinction between international and domestic law and hence between military action and policing. So they welcomed inroads on the legitimacy of nationhood. For the Allies, especially the Americans, there was a more muddled, but also universalising, end in mind — a world order of sovereign states rooted in peace, democracy and human rights. Robert Jackson, the American chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, declared in court that the trial was the first in history for crimes against world peace. ‘The crime which comprehends all lesser crimes is the crime of making unjustifiable war.’

How Bush and Blair would have recoiled from that judgment had Iraq won the second Gulf war! In that event, there might have been a second trial for ‘crimes against peace’. But Nuremberg remains the only such trial. Crimes against human rights have become the touchstone. It may be that in the interest of protecting and extending those rights the people of the West, rejoicing heartily in the strength of their salvation (and superior arms), are willing to undermine international law and national sovereignty. Laughland’s highly readable book provides a concise, detailed, careful argument that they should think twice before doing so. It will provoke much opposition, but in laying out with admirable clarity the complex historical ground for an urgent contemporary debate it is invaluable.

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