Hungry Hungry Hypocrites

When it comes to international affairs, the opinionated world’s favorite game to play is “Who’s the Hypocrite?” Whether it is the United States invading a country on false pretences or Russia gobbling up Sevastopol, editorial pages and politicians alike are quick to point out an action’s duplicitous nature.

Moments after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s condemnations of the United States last year over the possibility of U.S. intervention in Syria, most memorably made in a New York Times op-ed, accusations about his hypocrisy were flung like primate feces at the Moscow Zoo. Americans vehemently charged: “How dare he invoke international law when the human rights record of Russia is so dismal that it makes North Korea look like Knott’s Berry Farm?”

Now, with Putin’s recent Crimean meddling presents a new, if predictable, meta-twist to this endless barrage. Not only have these anti-Russian polemics resurged, but Putin has also blasted the West‘s hypocrisy in their denunciation of him.

Virtually 100 percent of the time, these allegations of hypocrisy are factually correct.

Certainly when it comes to the United States’s condemnations of Russia and Putin’s fightin’ words, it is true that both are afflicted by terribly timely cases of selective amnesia. In fact it isn’t farfetched to posit that any significant global action from either of these former superpowers would be hypocritical. Even if Russia were to try to rectify past ills through something like increased foreign aid, U.S. pundits and politicians would pounce, declaring the move somehow disingenuous and self-serving. And as for the United States, even if the country has bettered the world in innumerable ways, a history of dispossession and subjugation this thick will never be unstuck.

Though these accusations of hypocrisy are bountiful and true, upon inspection, this nose-thumbing is about as valuable as the lies politicians make to defend hypocritical claims in the first place.

Declaring that a country’s actions are hypocritical ought to carry as much argumentative weight as pointing out a grammatical error in a 200-page thesis or catching a slip-of-the-tongue during a debate opponent’s speech. It is a cheap trick that riles up readers and crowds, but considering that hypocrisy is not just common but also unavoidable in foreign affairs, it is the pointless, bedizened version of clickbait.

Perhaps today’s aspirant Émile Zolas think that the charge of hypocrisy is valuable because hypocritical agents deserve punishment. This logic makes sense when thinking about how to deal with people under a system of laws. The law is erected to prevent hypocrisy—hypocrites aren’t to be trusted, their actions ought to be stopped.

But what makes this logic sound in the first place is twofold. First, we operate under the premise that people are able to not be hypocrites. Second, we rely on the law to have the force to stop hypocrisy. When we zoom out to the level of countries and their drunken, testosterone-driven displays, we see that neither of these premises exists anymore.

The reasoning against the first has already been explained, but as for the second, the world’s obsession with the phantasm that is international law fuels the gotcha, finger pointing, “I-told-you-so” elements behind claims of hypocrisy in the first place. International law is supposedly the thing that makes something like Putin’s annexation of Crimea condemnable. And Putin’s main charge against the United States is that it is a just-as-frequent violator of international law as Russia is.

It is not even mildly conspiratorial to say that international law is a sham, both in the sense that it can be meaningfully violated and in the sense that it can be meaningfully enforced. Maybe this is because the U.N. has the political and military prowess of a flaccid piece of French toast, or maybe it’s because powerful countries emasculate the body in the first place, or maybe it’s because the world isn’t properly represented in its hallowed, ear-pieced, bouncy-castle halls. Regardless of what the answer is, the fact that international law is not taken seriously by the agents it is supposed to operate on (countries), saps it of value and renders it limp.

In this limpness, international law loses its ability to determine right and wrong. The wrongness of any given action cannot be determined by the degree to which it defies a non-existent entity.

When Russia annexes sovereign land it is wrong. Yes, it also violates “international law,” and, yes, this action is hypocritical: The sky is also blue and candy tastes sweet. The obsession with pointing out hypocrisy avoids important questions about the wrongness of any given action. It is a tempting distraction, but it is a hollow one when indicting countries that are forced to be hypocritical, and are governed by no one.

Vivek A. Banerjee ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House.