At the core of these efforts is a frontal assault on sovereignty as the organizing principle of the international system. Proponents of the new order are not shy about saying so. We are looking at how the nation-state functions in a totally different way than people did at the beginning of this century. Although the Clinton administration has been generally supportive of the new international law, its key tenets create problems of the highest order for the United States. First, as a philosophical matter, any attack upon the principle of sovereignty threatens the very foundation of American democracy.
Sovereignty is the necessary predicate of self-government.
To the extent that international law allows supranational, or extra-national, institutions to determine whether the actions of the United States are lawful, ultimate authority will no longer be vested in the American people, but in these institutions. Thus, for all of its humanitarian and democracy-building rhetoric, the new international law is profoundly undemocratic at its core. If the aspirations of today's international law proponents were ever to prevail, the resulting international system would not remotely resemble a community of democratic nations. Second, as a practical matter, the new international law has the potential to undermine American leadership in the post-Cold War global system. Even more fundamentally, international law may well make the world safe for aggression, by imposing undue constraints on those countries that are willing to use force to deter and punish it.