This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

The price for committing war crimes is less often paid

when those crimes originate from a powerful country.

Cato's John Glazer detailed some of the accountability issues

surrounding war crimes in the September

edition of Cato Unbound, we discuss the anarchic nature of relations among countries and

what that means when war crimes are committed.

When we're trying to evaluate what are war crimes and how we ought to hold war criminals accountable, it seems to be a perpetually difficult task. And in some cases it seems like at least from the US administration that it's a bit of a moving target depending on how they view the particular situation.

Is that fair?

Sure.

You know, most war crimes and crimes against humanity

are detailed in international law, particularly the UN charter to start with, prosecuting them is where

it gets tricky.

And you know, I'm not an international law scholar.

I'm not a legal scholar of any kind.

So I come at this issue in the context of international relations.

And what realists in particular have talked about is the structural problem at the center of

the international system. There's no world government, no sovereign above states to impose

law equally among them.

And so what you get is a legal system

that is aspirational at times.

Sometimes it's able to be enforced as it's intended to, but typically that happens to weak and small states.

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