Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

not allow for more fine-grained assessments. The hard question for Koh is why Trump has been able to bring as much change as he has to international law and institutions in such a short period.28 Trump has announced that the United States will withdraw from at least six international agreements, including a major arms control agreement and Obama’s two signature agreements (Paris and Iran). He has refused to conclude, or stopped negotiating over, two important international trade agreements. He has upended the international trade system and publicly trashed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the G7, the G20, the United Nations, and most of the United States’ traditional allies. He has withdrawn from two important human rights bodies, reversed the United States’ historic position on human rights leadership, taken an aggressive initiative against the International Criminal Court, stopped cooperating with human rights rapporteurs, and possibly violated international law with his travel ban. Perhaps, as Koh hopes, the Resistance will eventually reverse these initiatives. Its success will depend on the identity and attitude of the next administration, the depth and rigidity of the new international relations paths Trump charted during his years in office, and the impact of the actions Trump took (and did not take) on U.S relationships with nations and international institutions. It will also depend on larger structural trends in international relations that were operating before and independent of Trump, but which Trump might have accelerated. These trends include the rise of China as a global power; the many failures of “liberal internationalism,”which have contributed to a global populist and nationalist backlash; and the blowback and exhaustion from American military and financial overstretch during almost two decades of global war. The future is hard to predict. But any way one looks at it, Trump has brought enormous change to international law and institutions in just two years even though he is generally incompetent at wielding executive power. His actions to date attest to the fact that we live in an era of unprecedented presidential dominance over international law.29