Suchergebnisse

In a legal perspective-and the words war and peace are legal terms, so a legal perspective is appropriate-"violent peace" characterizes the present state of world politics far more accurately than "cold war'' or ''armed truce." During this century the relatively tranquil peace of the Victorian Age has disintegrated into an increasingly violent and anarchic condition. For compelling reasons of policy, however, it is a condition we should still define as one of peace, that is, of general peace punctuated by episodes of limited war.

Should the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 be characterized as an "international enforcement action" of the United Nations Security Council or as a campaign of collective self-defense approved, encouraged, and blessed by the Security Council?This is not simply a nice and rather metaphysical legal issue, but an extremely practical one. The question it presents is whether the control and direction of hostilities in the gulf, their termination, and the substance of the settlement they produce were handled by the Council as the Korean War was handled, that is, as a campaign of collective self-defense, or as the United Nations' first "international enforcement action." According to some international lawyers, characterizing the gulf war as a Security Council "enforcement action" under the untried procedures of Articles 42-50 of the Charter would in effect eviscerate Article 51, make the exercise of each state's "inherent" right of self-defense subject to the permission of the Security Council, threaten the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council, and thus lead to extremely grave and perhaps insoluble political difficulty. It could even destroy the United Nations.

In the making and conduct of foreign policy, Congress and the President have been rivalrous partners for 200 years. It is not hyperbole to call the current round of that relationship a crisis—the most serious constitutional crisis since President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. Roosevelt's court-packing initiative was highly visible and the reaction to it was violent and widespread. It came to an abrupt and dramatic end, some said as the result of divine intervention, when Senator Joseph T. Robinson, the Senate Majority Leader, dropped dead on the floor of the Senate while defending the President's bill. Everyone knew that Robinson hated the proposal, and was speaking for it only as a matter of political duty. The bill was discreetly buried shortly thereafter, the Court having meanwhile adjusted some of its doctrine to the prevailing winds. One Justice resigned.