JFK and international law
Tuesday, 22 November 2011 00:00
On every November 22nd, people around the world still remember and mourn the death of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963. His violent and untimely death in combination with the promise for a better world that he embodied ensured his place in history and in the hearts and minds of generations that followed him. President Kennedy was by choice and circumstance, a foreign policy president, as he confronted the most serious challenge to world peace in the course of the Cold War. Many leaders around the world have sought to frame their era as their nation’s and the world’s hour of maximum danger, but few have actually experienced and faced a crisis similar to the times in which John F. Kennedy was president. In a period of less than three years, he experienced the pinnacle of Cold War brinkmanship and paved the way for détente as a result of it.
A substantial library can be filled with books on JFK, particularly regarding his assassination and the accompanying conspiracy theories, and a recent book by an admitted admirer of JFK, Chris Matthews, claims that JFK intended at one point to specialize in international law when he got to law school. As a foreign policy president, the issues he faced had a clear legal side to them. In the disastrous Bay of Pigs affair, the entire involvement of the United States of course stood on shaky legal grounds. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world stood on the brink of the first and most probably last nuclear exchange between the two rivals, JFK ordered a ´quarantine´ of Cuba to stop more offensive nuclear weapons reaching the island. It was called a “quarantine”, because a blockade, which it was in fact, constitutes an act of war. The gradual escalation of American involvement in Vietnam was according to some a violation of the basic rules on the use of force in international relations, and was conducted contrary to the laws of war in some instances.
At the same time, however, JFK spoke of the United Nations as the world´s ´last best hope´ and pledged ´to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.´ His speech at the American University on June 10, 1963, outlined a strategy for ‘a more practical, more attainable peace – based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a sudden revolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.’ On an idealistic note, he claimed to:
‘seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system – a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished’.
It is a speech that is relevant today, not only because its promise has not been fulfilled, but also because it recognizes that sustainable peace was more than the absence of war, balance of power, a zero sum game or a static situation. Moreover, contrary to his and present times, he believed that ‘[n]o government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.’ Realizing ahead of his contemporaries the absurdity and futility of the nuclear arms race and the specter of a nuclear exchange, he pushed for and achieved the conclusion of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the first nuclear disarmament treaty less than a month after the American University speech.
During his short presidency, the Kennedy Administration violated and advanced international law, for the cause of freedom and peace around the world with a combination of bellicose as well as idealistic rhetoric. He was the ultimate Cold Warrior and world peace idealist, albeit a pragmatic one.