Russophobia’s War Trap: How Europe’s Obsession is Pushing It to the Brink | Dr. Anthony Carty

## The War Trap: How Russophobia Pushes Europe Toward Self-Destruction A pervasive mood of moral certainty toward Russia — call it Russophobia — risks trapping European politics in a punitive spiral that makes negotiated settlement almost impossible. The recorded conversation with Dr. Anthony Carty lays out a bleak diagnosis: Europe’s current posture toward Moscow is animated more by simple binary moralism than by a sober appraisal of how international disputes operate. When policymakers insist on law-as-injunction — finger-wagging that declares one side unequivocally “aggressor” and the other morally right — they forfeit the only instruments that might stabilize a plural, conflictual international order. The result is a dangerous mixture: legal rhetoric used as political cudgel, institutions that lack coercive power, and a profession trained to recite doctrine rather than to think through messy historical and political context. ## International Law’s Limits: A Discipline in Decay The conversation repeatedly returns to a striking claim: international law, as taught and practiced, has decayed into a static, ritualized discipline. Dr. Carty’s intervention — that the subject has moved from philosophical inquiry to professional repetition — reframes common complaints about “decline” into a sharper charge of intellectual stagnation. Foundational ideas inherited from writers like Vattel — notions of sovereign equality, non-interference, and rights grounded in a liberal pluralism — became ossified when 19th- and 20th-century academics transformed a set of normative reflections into an apparently technical body of doctrine. Rather than a living discourse capable of grappling with shifting balances of power, international law too often presents as a catalogue of rules and citations, taught with the confidence of routine and defended with the complacency of habit. This matters because law, in the international realm, cannot do what domestic law does: there is no world police to enforce rulings, no uniformly accepted judicial hierarchy that compels compliance. Yet the professionalization of international law has produced a strange cognitive dissonance. Specialists deploy legal language with the same certainty as criminal prosecutors at home, even while acknowledging the absence of enforcement mechanisms. The effect is to produce moral dramas — accusations, condemnations, rebuttals — played out without the institutional backbone that makes such judgments meaningful. ## The Illusion of Legal Remedies and the Myth of International Courts One of the sharper points raised in the discussion concerns the institutional reality of global adjudication. International courts — the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other tribunals — occupy important symbolic roles, but their practical authority is constrained. Advisory opinions of UN organs are just that: advisory. The ICC’s jurisdiction is not accepted by major powers. The ICJ lacks compulsory jurisdiction in most contentious matters. As Dr. Carty notes, these courts are political creations whose personnel are chosen within political processes; their reach depends on consent and geopolitical alignment. This institutional fragility undercuts a recurrent rhetorical move in contemporary European politics: to assert a clear legal verdict about an adversary’s behavior while simultaneously refusing the universal mechanisms that would render such verdicts impartial and unresolved. When major states insist that aggression is a political, contextual category — as the permanent members of the Security Council historically did when negotiating the ICC statute — they implicitly concede that determinations of aggression are not purely legal calibrations but judgments embedded in history and politics. Thus, pronouncements that “X is an aggressor” are inevitably selective unless they rest on a genuinely global, depoliticized adjudicative apparatus — which does not exist. ## Professionalism Without Responsibility: The Intellectual Void A recurring theme is the role of the international law profession itself. The conversation criticizes a comfort with technicalism that substitutes explanation for judgment. Academics who have made the discipline their career often confine themselves to textual exegesis and case commentary rather than wrestling with the deeper normative and political puzzles that give rise to interstate conflict. The phrase “rechtsverweigerung” — the refusal of law — captures a paradox: an overreliance on legal language can become an instrument of avoidance, enabling actors to point to doctrine while sidestepping responsibility for political choices. This professional culture matters for public discourse. When political leaders invoke law in partisan conflicts, they rely on a body of experts who are hesitant to admit the limits of their tools. The result is the repeated conversion of political questions into legal absolutes. That serves rhetorical functions — mobilizing domestic audiences, shaping alliances, delegitimating opponents — but it also deepens conflict by foreclosing the kinds of interpretive deliberation that might reveal shared interests or workable compromises. ## Contradictory Principles: Territorial Integrity vs. Self-Determination The conversation foregrounds a structural contradiction at the heart of many contemporary crises: the co-existence of competing legal principles that point in opposite directions. Territorial integrity and state sovereignty sit uneasily beside self-determination and the protection of human rights. Treaties and conventions often enshrine both, without providing a credible institutional mechanism for resolving clashes between them. The Law of the Sea Convention is offered as an example: a dense, technical treaty that neatly defers the most difficult boundary problems back to political negotiation. Ukraine — and other conflicts where identity, ethnicity, and political allegiance intersect with territorial claims — brings this dilemma into sharp relief. Declaring one principle supreme inevitably disentitles the other; insisting on the inviolability of borders rejects remedial claims of self-determination, while privileging self-determination threatens to unravel established states. Without an authoritative and broadly legitimate forum for adjudication, these disputes are destined to be framed as existential moral choices rather than complex, negotiable problems. The stakes are high: an absolutist approach to principle invites escalation rather than accommodation. ## Russophobia as Intellectual Shortcut and Strategic Hazard The recorded exchange persuasively argues that Russophobia functions both as an emotional posture and an intellectual shortcut. By consolidating a moral narrative that identifies Russia as uniquely culpable, European discourse simplifies a messy constellation of grievances, history, and strategic competition into a morality play. That simplification has political utility — it creates unity among disparate actors and justifies strong measures — but it also closes off analysis that might mitigate conflict. Worse, when legal language is marshaled to support such moral narratives, it creates an illusion of legitimacy while removing incentives for negotiation. The result is a self-reinforcing loop: condemnations lead to escalatory measures, which produce defensive reactions; the defensive reactions are read as further evidence of guilt, which then justifies additional condemnation. In short, the “war trap” is partly cognitive: a pattern of thought that turns complexity into caricature and thereby makes peaceful resolution more difficult. ## Toward Intellectual Recovery: What Kind of Thinking Is Needed? If the problem is intellectual stasis and the misapplication of legal rhetoric to political dilemmas, the remedy must be a re-engagement with political and philosophical reflection. The conversation calls for a return

The War Trap of Russophobia: Europe on the Brink | Dr. Anthony Carty Why are the European's reacting like self-destructive little children when it comes to war with Russia and in talks about the "threat" emanating from China? Can we explain or even just describe conflicts—especially the conflicts in and about Ukraine—through the lens of International Law? No says my guest today, since IL is not only an inherently imperfect instrument but the conflict parties themselves have no understanding for what their fights are actually about. Today I’m very happy to talk to Dr. Anthony Carty. Dr. Carty is an Emeritus Professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology and he is currently teaching at the Law Faculty of Peking University, who awarded him as a Distinguished Foreign Lecturer. Anthony was a full professor at several western Universities, including the University of Derby, Westminster and Aberdeen. He is the author of many books on international law, including the magnificent work “The Philosophy of International Law” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r26tq) #M3 I think that most conflicts among countries are beyond the countries' own capacity to understand. I mean, if you take the hostility that Europeans feel towards Russia, what is the foundation for Russophobia? Russophobia is behind the whole conflict in Ukraine. And how does one unravel that? Well, the answer is there isn't going to be any magic Solomon-like tribunal that can resolve these questions. One simply has to engage in the kind of intellectual work that I'm calling for. One of my former Chinese students and colleagues has written an interesting article on why states do not want to resolve their differences through third-party adjudications. They can't because they don't understand what the nature of their differences is. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm happy to talk to Dr. Anthony Carty. Dr. Carty is an emeritus professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, and he's currently teaching at the Law Faculty of Peking University, which awarded him as a Distinguished Foreign Lecturer. Anthony Carty was a full professor at several Western universities, including the University of Derby, Westminster, and Aberdeen. He is the author of many books on international law, including the magnificent work, The Philosophy of International Law. Dr. Carty, welcome. #M3 Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. -- 1 of 16 -- #M2 Well, we have been in touch via email for quite a bit, and your specialty is international law and the fundamentals of it. I've talked about this on this channel before, and some people are very critical of it. Some people are saying that currently international law is in decline. How do you see that? Could you give us a little bit of an overview of what you've been engaged with, what has been most important to you in researching international law? Do you think international law, currently in this multipolar setup, is in decline, or is that just a bad way of looking at its development? #M3 Well, I have quite a strong view on that, for which I'm quite well known. I wrote a book in the middle of the 1980s called "The Decay of International Law," with a subtitle about the need for a new imagining of international society. And that came at a time just as the Berlin Wall came down and the world, for a while, decided it was in very good shape. But it has been brought out in a new reprint in 2019, and my editors want me to bring out a new edition again in 2025 or 2026. So my basic thesis is that the subject is not simply in decline, but it is thoroughly decayed and an unworkable way of thinking about international society. And I have been trying to encourage colleagues with my philosophy of international law that they really need to rethink the very foundations and turn it into a discursive reflection on the problems of international society from a normative perspective. Now, I have provided a history of this subject, which is quite well known, and it is that the framework of international law that we have, and in the first two articles of the UN Charter, Purposes and Principles, comes from a Swiss international lawyer of the 18th century, who at that time, in Neuchâtel, was a citizen or a subject of Frederick the Great. Émile de Vattel constructed a liberal model of international society based upon the English empiricism primarily of Locke, John Locke. And it was that the world consisted of a natural community of equal nations and societies that did not have a world state or a world authority hanging over it. This natural society was based upon certain basic natural principles of freedom, equality, non-interference, and mutual respect—very much the principles, the Bandung principles, that third-world countries like India and China expounded in the 1950s. However, this framework did not have an institutional foundation. There was no world state that had convened a world conference and agreed that these were legislative principles. These were constructions of an intellectual, of a thinker. But they were very attractively and accessibly presented. And by the middle of the 19th century, throughout the hundred years after this book was written, it spread like wildfire. And every textbook on international law more or less repeated the wisdom of Vattel. But Vattel himself had a philosophical foundation in a kind of materialist individualism. By the mid and late 19th century, there took place what is now well known to be the professionalization of the so-called discipline of international law. University professors decided that all the basic principles -- 2 of 16 -- of his work were now legal principles that had been accepted by the practice of states and that could be taught as legal principles, in other words, regurgitated, repeated in a robotic fashion by institutions. And any practice of countries that disregarded these principles of equality and freedom of state was simply illegal and could be ignored. And that has now astonishingly become the orthodoxy. I was in Berlin in the summer, and I checked through the big textbooks on international law that are available in German universities, all costing about 60 euros a volume, and they simply repeat these principles and cite a few cases of the International Court of Justice in which reference is made to them, and that's it. So, to my mind, this is a legal order that is accepted by the so-called profession of international lawyers who are university academics. They are not philosophers. They are not thinkers. So this is a static law, a rigid system of knowledge, which is simply repeated on the basis of thick analysis of the United Nations Charter. The Germans have contributed a 1,200- page volume analyzing the UN Charter as if it were the German civil code. And the French have done something similar, while the Americans have ignored it altogether. We can come to the Americans later in our discussion. They are somewhat maverick in this respect. And my fundamental concern about this system of thinking is that it creates what the Germans call a mood of Rechtsverweigerung. That's to say, when countries engage in the sport of accusing one another of violating these principles without going back to Vattel himself, who thought it was a fundamental principle of liberalism that each country could follow its own conscience and make its own subjective judgment about what it considered right and wrong. In a very pluralist fashion, he considered that if countries disagreed about it, there was no authority over them, and they could simply fight it out. But neither of them could claim to have the just side of the argument because, in a liberal world order, everything is subjective. So he himself was a moderate and encouraged moderation. But now we find the new foreign minister of the so-called European Union, Ms. Kallas, basically finger-wagging at Russia and China, claiming that they are aggressors violating international law. And like naughty schoolboys, they have to be punished by, I don't know who she thinks will do the punishing. But this atmosphere poisons the whole framework of international society. To my mind, philosophy has to come in, and one needs to really go back to Vattel, who is a reasonably intelligent person, and find out where we have gone wrong in regurgitating this stuff. It's well known to people outside the profession. I mean, historians have done quite a good hatchet job on the so-called professionalization of international law into a discipline in the late 19th and early 20th century. And I've taken part in these debates and discussions myself. But I would stress very much that the profession of international lawyers is an agnostic bunch of technicians who are actually quite comfortable with their little bits of knowledge. You will find professors of international law, like a colleague of mine in Brussels, who will write a 900-page book setting out the 900 occasions when the United States has violated international law by behaving aggressively towards other countries. And then he should go home and rest in peace, thinking he has sorted out the problem. And one -- 3 of 16 -- can't argue with these people. If I go around and say to them, what are you doing? What are you talking about? They say, well, you're not an international lawyer. We can't talk to you. So the situation is quite grave. #M2 This is highly fascinating. Just before we continue, I can only see part of your face. Could you lower it a little bit? This is better because people are going to want to see you making these arguments. It's a very important question, and a lot of people who watch this show are very skeptical toward the whole notion of international law. Some people, a lot of folks out there, also think that international law is like domestic law. At home, we have a law, and if you break the law, then the policeman comes and will arrest you, and you will go to a judge. We have these institutions in the international sphere: the International Criminal Court, the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, and others, and we have arbitration courts and so on and so forth. And they all have the veneer of a local court, as if international law were the same as local law. But I think you are very importantly pointing out who does the arresting. I mean, who will do the punishing? The whole problem is we don't have the same equivalent on the international level, right? So when you criticize international lawyers for being too dogmatic about the letter of the law, is that where you think they're going astray, like putting too much effort into the minute detail, losing sight of the fact that we don't have an international policeman? #M3 Well, I think that it's a mixture of all of these things. It's very difficult. I'm very much a fan of Erasmus and the notion that the world is inhabited by fools, except for myself, of course. One finds it exasperating to try to understand why people are happy with going along with a certain pattern of behavior. I mean, I can't really fathom it. I'm simply told, well, Carty, you are not an international lawyer, so basically you belong somewhere else and we don't talk with you. I mean, that is a very common attitude and it's quite often stated. One of my colleagues said to me, well, if Carty thinks international law is in a state of crisis, he seems to be the only person who thinks that. The rest of us are quite happy with it, and we are quite agnostic and we see no need to look at philosophical foundations. But if you look closely, it is a matter of projection and fantasizing. The International Court of Justice is not a world court. It is the leading judicial organ of the United Nations. And that judicial organ of the United Nations has no compulsory jurisdiction over anything other than questions to do with the budget of the General Assembly and questions like that. Questions that are referr