The perspective is not isolationist: the United States should be a constructive world citizen. Nor does it arise from pacifism, although sometimes it may be wise not to seek to win wars, but to end them. Given war aversion and the essential absence of threat, military spending is hugely excessive. However, even if the US should substantially disarm, it is probably wise to keep some military forces to carry out limited missions, to hedge a bit against the highly unlikely rise of an effective adversary, and to develop a capacity to rebuild. There would be risk if military forces were very substantially reduced, but experiences in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that there is risk as well in maintaining large forces-in-being that can be deployed in an under-reflective manner. It also facilitates misguided militarized assertiveness, fatuous political rhetoric, and arrogance. The American public has not become newly isolationist or militaristic. It has long been willing to engage internationally, but not to expend American lives in costly and questionable foreign adventures: the 9/11 wars are not indicators of change in this. Indeed, an Iraq Syndrome has taken hold, and military intervention, particularly with ground troops does not seem to have much of a future.

The Advisory Opinion rendered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 case1 constitutes a further piece of a complex jigsaw which we will refer to broadly as the Chagos case. It relates to a group of small islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean (the Chagos Archipelago); its former inhabitants (the Chagossians); the United Kingdom, which today administers the Archipelago under the designation ‘British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)’; Mauritius, which claims the Archipelago as part of its own territory; the United States, which operates a military basis in Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Archipelago; and a number of other actors, including states like the Seychelles and the Maldives, and the African Union (AU).

The considerable normative value of General Assembly resolutions has been recognised in authoritative reports on the formation and identification of customary international law produced by the International Law Association (ILA) and the International Law Commission (ILC) in recent years.1 In his contribution to this volume (Chapter 2), James Summers draws our attention to the various ways in which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its Chagos Advisory Opinion sought to harness the growing importance of General Assembly resolutions in relation to the formation of customary international law,2 not least through the ways in which it has enhanced the application of the criteria enumerated in its Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion.3 This short chapter offers further reflections on this phenomenon.

Almost a century after its ruling on Eastern Carelia,1 in Chagos the International Court of Justice (ICJ) faced once more the delicate relationship between its advisory jurisdiction and the principle of consent.2 This chapter examines the reasoning followed by the Court on this specific relationship, in particular with a view to similar cases that could occur in the future.3

How should the International Court of Justice (ICJ) address UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions? Outside internal organisational matters, these resolutions are formally non-binding, soft law instruments. However, they have played an important role in the Court’s decisions, especially those concerning the self-determination of peoples. The contribution of resolutions to this right was first recognised in Namibia in 1971.1 In Western Sahara in 1975, the Court used three resolutions to effectively define the legal context.2 The Chagos Advisory Opinion of 25 February 2019,3 though, has taken this reliance even further. In this opinion, a single resolution, the Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960,4 was central in establishing the applicable law. Moreover, it assumed this pivotal role despite multilateral treaty obligations under the UN Charter that were both relevant and binding on all states concerned.

Some worry that international peace may some day be punctured either by the rise of China as a challenger country or by excessive assertiveness by Russia backed by its large nuclear arsenal. Each wants to play a greater role on the world stage, but they are both trading states and do not seem to be territorially expansive (except for China on Taiwan), and do not have the wherewithal or, it seems, the ambition, to “run the world.” Indeed, there is a danger of making China into a threat by treating it as such. The dispute between Russia and neighboring Ukraine in 2014 was a unique and opportunistic escapade that proved to be costly to the perpetrators. Russian cybergeek interference in the 2016 US presidential election scarcely constituted a security threat: election fake news simply became higher and deeper. China, Russia, and Iran may present some “challenges” to U.S. policy, but none really presents a palpable security threat requiring large standing forces. Indeed, all three seem to be descending into stagnation. The current “new Cold War,” then, is quite a bit like the old one: an expensive, substantially militarized, and often hysterical campaign to deal with threats that do not exist or are likely to self-destruct.