We're going to breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

On a recent episode of the Daily podcast, New York Times legal expert Charlie Savage, while

discussing President Trump's capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, said this, quote,

there are two types of law, international law and

domestic law. In fact, many experts have appealed to international law in recent years and

recent days because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli retaliation to the October

7th massacre, to the American raids on Venezuela. Not only do such appeals suffer because of bad actors like Moscow, Beijing,

and Tehran, who head up many of the international bodies charged with overseeing such law,

but also because it's just difficult to explain how such morality came to be and why it should be

binding. After all, unless some kind of transcendent law exists, appealing to international

law, is just a game of smoke and mirrors. It's played by powerful nations who insist on

enforcement when convenient to them. The recent Nuremberg movie depicts the attempts after the

Second World War to prosecute the Nazis for their war crimes and attempts at genocide. Of course, had the Allies just

shot or hanged Hitler's cronies at the time of their capture, no one would have batted an eye.

However, the Allies wanted to make it clear to the world and to history that what the Nazis

did was not ordinary wartime behavior as bad as that can be. Rather, they perpetrated an extraordinary evil.

Attaining that verdict was difficult to say the least, partly because it had never been

tried before. As one character said early on in the film, quote, it can't be done. There's no legal

precedent for a trial. There's no international law to base the charges on. The whole concept of

international law is that one country can't tell another country's citizens how to conduct themselves.

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