Enforcement and Accountability in International Law♦ Online

The Abandonment of the Ban on the Use of Force and the Case for Revival: Why the Monroe Doctrine Cannot Serve as a Foundation for a New International Legal Order

Patrick C.R. Terry

Recent developments—most notably Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine and the United States’ repeated threats of force against numerous states alongside its strikes against Venezuela and Iran—have highlighted the precarious state of the prohibition on the use of force enshrined in the United Nations Charter. This Essay advances the thesis that the erosion of this foundational norm originated in the late 1990s, when Western states began conducting military interventions in violation of Article 2(4). This proved consequential: other states, Russia foremost among them, subsequently felt emboldened to openly repudiate any meaningful legal constraints against the resort to force.